Monday, February 28, 2005

 
AMERICA'S BLACK DINOSAURS

The death of 13-year-old Devin Brown at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department has generated a wide array of complicated emotions in the black community, including shock and anguish, confusion and introspection. Why, people wondered, was this boy killed? .... But while the community searched for real answers to complex questions in the days after the shooting, the traditional black leadership of the city did no such thing. Instead, our leaders reacted in ways that were all too predictable.

The Urban League's John Mack immediately jumped in - before the investigation had even been opened, much less completed - saying, "Some police officers don't value the lives of young African American males." The ever-pugnacious Rep. Maxine Waters beseeched the community to "demand justice." The NAACP's Geraldine Washington said police were supposed to " protect and serve, and they've got it wrong."

Not only were these responses predictable, but they were inflammatory, offering new reasons to question the health of America's civil rights advocacy groups, not just in Los Angeles but across the country. The leaders of these groups say they represent the interests of black Americans, yet it seems increasingly clear that their lives rarely touch the lives of those they claim to speak for and, in many cases, that they never move outside their own cloistered, out-of-touch activist circles....

In a desperate search to maintain their own relevancy, these groups have insisted on making white racism their nearly singular focus. This has not served them well.... With rare exceptions, the quest by civil rights groups to recapture the vibrancy and relevancy of a bygone era often leads to the advocacy of issues that cause a great deal of head-scratching. This tendency was exposed by the recent shameful episode involving Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, where Rep. Waters (backed by a host of community activists and other leadership figures) led a series of protests and demonstrations in an attempt to "save our hospital" - even though the hospital teeters on the brink of closure because of irregularities that resulted in the deaths of patients. It was stunning to watch leaders arguing that efforts to close a hospital that was killing its black and brown patients was somehow the result of a conspiratorial racial animus toward the black-run institution.

More here

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Voting fraud in Britain too: "The general election is wide open to fraud, thanks to the headlong rush into postal voting, the Government was told yesterday. Ministers have been urged for years to introduce safeguards against cheating but have refused to change the law, according to John Owen, Birmingham's elections officer and one of the country's leading experts on the subject. He was giving evidence to a special election court convened to hear allegations of widespread fraud and vote-rigging in the June local elections last year.... Voters described how they were persuaded to hand their completed ballots to Labour canvassers to be delivered to the election office. The votes appeared to have been opened and changed, using correction fluid, in favour of Labour before being counted in the poll. An election manager testified that the office received phone calls during the campaign asking whether votes altered with correction fluid would count even if they arrived in sealed envelopes that had been slit open. Callers were assured that they would be valid" (!!).

How ironic that far-Leftists are implementing Milton Friedman's ideas about traffic congestion. Under "Red Ken", the system works like a charm in London -- by keeping the poor out -- and San Francisco is leaning that way too: "San Francisco would become the first city in the nation to charge drivers just for driving in its chronically congested downtown under a sure-to-be controversial proposal being aired today. Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, chair of the San Francisco Transportation Authority, will ask the agency to study a downtown toll zone -- whereby drivers would need to purchase a daily pass to drive in The City's most congested streets -- as a potential solution to the Municipal Transportation Agency's woeful budget problems."

America's own terrorists: "A pipe bomb was found and safely dismantled at a Department of Motor Vehicles office Tuesday - the latest in what is being investigated as a string of possible ecoterrorist incidents in communities east of Sacramento. In the same community of Auburn, a different type of homemade explosive was found and dismantled Sunday outside the Placer County Courthouse. No one claimed responsibility for either incident, the FBI said"

Californian terrorist caught: "In what federal agents consider a huge break in their probe of five attempted firebombings that have plagued the region since December, a 21-year-old Newcastle man was indicted Thursday on charges that he took part in three of the incidents. Ryan Daniel Lewis, who has been in federal custody since Feb. 8, was indicted on charges tied to attempted arsons in Lincoln on Dec. 27 and Auburn on Jan. 12, as well as the Feb. 7 firebombing of a Sutter Creek apartment complex that was under construction".

Feds protecting illegals: "Arizona prison officials say taxpayers are paying more than $28,000 a day to incarcerate hundreds of undocumented immigrants because the federal government hasn't filed the paperwork necessary to deport them to Mexico. Arizona Department of Corrections Director Dora Schriro said deporting such criminals should be a 'no-brainer' given the money that could be saved and the beds that could be freed in the state's overcrowded prison system. Formal deportation orders for 46 of the 526 eligible inmates have been on file for several months, but state prison officials can't get Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pick them up, Schriro said. 'I don't know why it's not getting done anymore, but it's not getting done,' she said."

A lot of Left-leaning churches are moving to "divest" from Israel -- i.e. sell shares in companies that make profits from dealings in Israel. Ten O'Clock Scholar has some good comments on it but misses the main point: The shares will be bought by someone else so the action will have no effect on anything in the real world.

Myth illogical : "The AARP claims to represent us seniors, but more often it just lectures us relentlessly. One such sermon in the AARP Bulletin, opposing any addition of choice and ownership to Social Security, boasted 'groups like AARP that oppose [privatization] will spend millions of dollars to sway opinion.' Apparently, it plans to waste thousands of words, too, and without much concern about accuracy."

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Engels despised democracy and believed in violence. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at "the true religion"

There is a good article today on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS about the towering hypocrisy of the Leftist media in the Gannon affair.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/28/2005 10:04:00 PM

Sunday, February 27, 2005

 
SOME ECONOMICS

The worriers about America's foreign debt are answered systematically here. A small excerpt: "The U.S. economy, according to doubters, rests on an unsustainable accumulation of foreign debt. Fueled by government profligacy and low private savings rates, the current account deficit -- the difference between what U.S. residents spend abroad and what they earn abroad in a year -- now stands at almost six percent of GDP; total net foreign liabilities are approaching a quarter of GDP. Sudden unwillingness by investors abroad to continue adding to their already large dollar assets, in this scenario, would set off a panic, causing the dollar to tank, interest rates to skyrocket, and the U.S. economy to descend into crisis, dragging the rest of the world down with it. Despite the persistence and pervasiveness of this doomsday prophecy, U.S. hegemony is in reality solidly grounded: it rests on an economy that is continually extending its lead in the innovation and application of new technology, ensuring its continued appeal for foreign central banks and private investors. The dollar's role as the global monetary standard is not threatened, and the risk to U.S. financial stability posed by large foreign liabilities has been exaggerated".

Outsourcing CREATES jobs: "The fact of the matter is, the most successful companies are outsourcers. And a Dartmouth study found that outsourcers are the bigger job creators. Since 1992, America has lost 361 million jobs, but during that same time, it also gained 380 million jobs - millions more than it lost. "Oh, I love my job now!" That's Shirley Bernard talking - the outsourcing "victim" the AFL-CIO wanted me to interview. At her old job at Levi's, the work was hot, noisy and physically difficult. Now, she's a secretary. She's paid more, too. She worries about the long term, and she's still an opponent of outsourcing, but she admits that many of her co-workers have moved on to better jobs. "Some of them have got, really got excellent jobs that they would never have even left Levi's for if the plant hadn't closed," she says. "This kind of forced them to ... to make a decision what they wanted to do and ... and they're really happy at what they do.""

From this article it looks like Latin America is continuing its policy of shooting itself in the foot -- attacking private enterprise and thus cutting off investment. They seem to be instinctively socialistic. Great way to stay poor! Excerpt: "Even less certain is how she and 130 million other Latin Americans will get clean water anytime soon in a region where providing basic services remains among the most pressing public health and political issues. Governments like Bolivia's tried the task themselves before, abandoned it as too costly, and turned to private companies in the 1990's. Today as privatization is rejected, foreign investment is plummeting across the region and the challenge is being returned to states perhaps less equipped than a decade ago. The trend is not unique to Bolivia, where a lack of clean water contributes to the death of every tenth child before the age of 5, and it has presented Latin American leaders with a nettlesome question: what now?"

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The Federalist have just used the notorious "Berkeley study" of conservative psychology as a jumping-off point for a good rant about leftist psychology. Excerpt: "Liberals are almost uniformly defined by their hypocrisy and dissociation from reality. For example, the wealthiest U.S. senators -- among them Kerry, Kennedy, Corzine, Kohl, Rockefeller, Feinstein, and Rhode Island RINO Lincoln Chaffee -- fancy themselves as defenders of the poor, but they have no idea of what it's like to live without a bloated trust fund. Liberals speak of unity, but they appeal to the worst in human nature by dividing Americans into dependent constituencies. Just who are these liberal constituencies? They support freedom of thought, unless your thoughts don't comport with theirs. They feign tolerance while practicing intolerance. They resist open discussion and debate of their views, yet seek to silence dissenters. They insist that they care more about protecting habitat than those who hunt and fish. They protest for nature conservation while advocating homosexuality. They denounce capital punishment for the most heinous of criminals, while ardently supporting the killing of the most innocent among us -- children prior to birth."

The Federalist does however seem to have missed my systematic demolition of the "Berkeley" study. Academics define expertise on any given subject by the number of articles the person has had published about that subject in the academic journals. By that criterion I am actually the most expert person there is on the matters raised by the "Berkeley study".

There is a VERY disturbing article here about the American Federal justice system that makes me glad I am an Australian and not an American. Australia still has some of the protections against injustice that America has lost. American Federal trials do seem to be remarkably like Stalin's show trials -- particularly in their use of coerced testimony.

No connection, of course: "Rape attacks are increasing rapidly in England and Wales, but the number of cases that end in a successful prosecution has fallen to a record low. According to government figures published yesterday,only one in eighteen rapes reported to police ends with the suspect being punished, although government ministers have pledged to increase the number of convictions.... According to a study by the Home Office, groups of predatory men are now targeting drunken women to rape and sexually assault. Jo Lovett, one of the authors, said: "There are people who are undoubtedly targeting women who are drunk." The report, published by the Home Office yesterday, disclosed the latest rape figures and that some men are now trawling bars looking for drunk women to rape. It also estimated that the actual number of rapes in England and Wales is more than four times higher than the 11,700 reported to the police in 2002."

A pretty good bias study: "Applying a novel approach based on frequently used ratings of the liberal or conservative leaning of politicians, a researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia discovered that most mainstream media outlets do exhibit a strong liberal bias. "We found that most of the mainstream media view events through a 'lens' that is very similar to that used by Democrats in Congress," said Jeff Milyo, MU associate professor of economics and public affairs. "That is, most major media outlets and Democrats cite similar sources of expertise, such as particular think tanks and advocacy groups. This suggests that popular complaints about a liberal bias in the media are well-founded. To determine the bias of media outlets, Milyo and colleague Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at UCLA, applied the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scoring system. ADA scores are used widely in political science to describe the placement of an individual member of Congress on an ideological scale"

I have just transferred here Chris Brand's latest batch of exceedingly incorrect posts about race and such matters.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx saw all capitalists as "Jews". My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at 1 Corinthians 15 and the spiritual nature of the resurrection again.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/27/2005 08:30:00 PM

Saturday, February 26, 2005

 
ANTHROPOLOGY: FRAUD-PRONE

I spent my entire academic career teaching in university departments that offered anthropology courses so I think I have gained some impression of what it is all about. And the No. 1 impression I gained is that it is intensely ideological -- with many (but by no means all) anthropologists being on the far Left. It is anything but a dispassionate tabulation of kin networks and the like.

And the political nature of anthropology is very clearly shown by the saga of Margaret Mead -- still probably the best-known and most revered anthropologist. The fact that she was a dedicated liar seems to faze almost no-one in anthropology. What she said SHOULD have been right, apparently. Her work is seen as "fake but accurate", to use a recently famous phrase.

Her most famous book was Coming of Age in Samoa, in which she described the Polynesian Samoans as sexually libertine -- which was just about the opposite of the truth. But the book was written at a time when Western sexual morality was still fairly strict and the misrepresentations of the book helped the Left to ridicule that sort of morality. The man who exposed Mead's frauds, Derek Freeman, was not at all thanked for his work -- as he would have been if anthropology had been a true science. He was treated as a pariah, in fact.

And Franz Boas, Margaret Mead's teacher and the man often seen as the "father" of modern anthropology, was a fraud in the Leftist cause too. See here and here and here

So with that background the following recent news item should be no surprise:

"A flamboyant anthropology professor, whose work had been cited as evidence Neanderthal man once lived in Northern Europe, has resigned after a German university panel ruled he fabricated data and plagiarized the works of his colleagues. Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a Frankfurt university panel ruled, lied about the age of human skulls, dating them tens of thousands of years old, even though they were much younger, reports Deutsche Welle. "The commission finds that Prof. Protsch has forged and manipulated scientific facts over the past 30 years," the university said of the widely recognized expert in carbon data in a prepared statement...... The fallout from Protsch's false dating of northern European bone finds is only beginning. Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory." ..... Frankfurt University's president, Rudolf Steinberg, apologized for the university's failure to curb Protsch's misconduct for decades. "A lot of people looked the other way," he said."

I think anthropology is a very important discipline that has much to teach us about the nature of man but, regrettably, you have to beware of anthropologists in studying it. You have to try to get at the facts behind the ideology -- not easy. But occasionally the truth gets out -- as here and here and here

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That "Cowboy capitalism" again: "The economy grew at a solid 3.8 percent annual rate in the final quarter of 2004 - stronger than previously estimated_ an encouraging sign that the business expansion was firmly entrenched at the start of the new year."

Dick McDonald is chortling over the $18 billion loss just posted by Viacom -- parent company of CBS and MTV. I suspect he is not alone.

Buy Hershey today: "This Valentine's Day, Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, encouraged the romantic sweethearts in his party not to buy chocolates from three of the nation's biggest chocolate producers: Hershey, Nestle and Mars. After all, he warned, all three are "red" companies - purportedly supporters of President Bush and his policies".

There is a new Australian site here that looks like it could be interesting to anybody who thinks that genetics has something to do with human behaviour and human differences.

Mark Steyn has a good summary of the playwright Arthur Miller -- showing what a determined Leftist and anti-American propagandist he was. Excerpt: "Miller was the most useful of the useful idiots. It was a marvelous inspiration to recast the communist "hysteria" of the 1950s as the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. Many people have pointed out the obvious flaw with "The Crucible" - that there were no witches, whereas there were certainly communists. For one thing, they were gobbling up a lot of real estate: they seized Poland in 1945, Bulgaria in '46, Hungary and Romania in '47, Czechoslovakia in '48, China in '49... As it is, Miller's play is an early example of the distinguishing characteristic of the modern Western left: its hermetically sealed parochialism. His genius was to give his fellow lefties what's become their most cherished article of faith - that any kind of urgent national defense is, by definition, paranoid and hysterical. It was untrue in the '50s and it's untrue today. "The Crucible" will survive because it's the modular furniture of left-wing agitprop: whatever the cause du jour, you can attach it to and it functions no better or worse than to anything else, mainly because it's perfectly pitched to the narcissism of the left".

EU Jews moving Rightwards: "The Belgian example is extreme, but it represents the sharpest edge of a much broader political shift by European Jews - away from the left, particularly the far left, and toward the center and right, in the face of rising displays of anti-Semitism and the European left's embrace of the Palestinian cause.... Of course, the shift is not monolithic and some of it is also associated with a rise in Jews' social and economic status. In the vast majority of cases it represents a move toward tolerant parties of the center or center-right rather than a leap to the far end of the spectrum - where many xenophobic parties remain unfriendly to Jews as well as to Arabs. So the number of Jews on the far right remains a very slim minority. But the fact that there are any at all is a measure of the degree to which many of Europe's 2.4 million Jews feel abandoned by the left and are still searching for a comfortable place in European politics".

Wicked Thoughts has just put up a post that debunks the "Snopes" fact-checking service.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx did not understand the economics of his day. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at whether Christ died on a cross or not.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/26/2005 07:58:00 PM

Friday, February 25, 2005

 
ONE AMERICAN LEFTIST FINALLY GETS IT (MORE OR LESS)

Martin Peretz, a moderate American Leftist, has some remarkably perceptive comments on the state of his "liberal" brethren. Just a few excerpts:

"It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying..... Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really....

even in the morally self-satisfied Scandinavian and Low Countries, the assuring left-wing bromides are no longer believed.....

Sharpton is an inciter of racial conflict. To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman......

virtually nothing has been done to make sure that children of color--and other children, too, since the crisis in our educational system cuts across race and class--are receiving a different and better type of schooling, in science and in literacy, than those now coming into our colleges. This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning. The conservatives have their ideas, and many of them are good, such as charter schools and even vouchers. But give me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can't.....

This will not curb the liberal complaint. That complaint is not a matter of circumstance. It is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind. It is not a symptom; it is a condition. And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength....."

Belmont Club has a fuller commentary on the Peretz article and makes this excellent point:

"Paradoxically, dogmatism is rooted in relativism more than in the belief that real truth is discoverable. For as long as the truth is believed to be "out there"; it will be sought. When its existence is doubted none will venture into the dark. Under those conditions, we get exactly what Peretz describes: an illogical attachment to old formulations of the 1960s, which can be uttered only because they are hallowed."

In other words, the Leftist intellectual sickness is so great that it is the very believers in there being no such thing as right and wrong who are most fanatical in enforcing particular ideas of right and wrong -- under the banner of "political correctness". Fierce censorship is practiced in the name of "tolerance". It is the relativists who are most dogmatic. It is the supposed opponents of the "status quo" who are themselves stuck in a rut. Orwell would understand.

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A victory for free speech: Under the threat of legal action, the University of Nevada has blinked in its year-long confrontation with Prof. Hoppe. It was a close-run thing, though. Prof. Hoppe is not letting them off the hook, though, and is seeking compensation for their campaign against him: "UNLV President Carol Harter tried to end the standoff between professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe and administrators Friday by removing a critical letter from his personnel file. "Professor Hoppe does not assert that materials he presents are the opinions of UNLV, nor has he ever purported to speak for UNLV. Whether anyone in the university agrees or disagrees with Professor Hoppe's theories or his opinions is not ultimately relevant," Harter wrote in a statement sent to students and media. "Teaching is of its nature and origin provocative." But Hoppe and his attorneys weren't satisfied with the proposed resolution. They said they also want an apology and a year-long sabbatical for the professor".

The racist "Far Right" give me a lot of laughs. They have been doing so for a long time, in fact. One thing that they absolutely HATE is the term "Judeo-Christian". Why? because they see Jews as the racial enemy and Christianity as "us". So you can't have the two together, you see. I therefore posted on one of the sites they frequent this extract from an excellent conservative article by Dennis Prager -- who is a Jew. I did it in the full knowledge that seeing anything by a Jew there -- no matter how sensible -- would evoke an outpouring of rage. I was not disappointed -- as you will see if you read the comments. Being a totally incorrigible tease, therefore, I also added in the following as a comment on the comments: "The objections above to the notion "Judeo-Christian" amuse me. Has anyone noticed who the guys were who wrote BOTH parts of our holy book? And I guess that Christ guy was an Anglo-Saxon? Christianity IS Jewish! It's the evangelical sect of Judaism". I can imagine the spluttering at that comment!

Good news for Boeing: "Top European discount airline Ryanair ordered new planes worth more than $4 billion from Boeing Co. on Thursday as part of an ambitious plan to double its passenger numbers by 2012. Dublin-based Ryanair, which aims to become Europe's largest airline in seven years, said it had ordered 70 Boeing 737-800 aircraft and had taken options to buy a further 70".

Tristram Hunt is a pathetic British academic who hates America's large homes. He fears that Britain might go down the same path. Large homes are only for the rich apparently. Excerpt: "What hits one first about exurbia is its ugliness. Laid out by competing developers, disparate 'cookie-cutter' housing developments (often christened with faux Wild West prefixes such as Vale, Ranch or Stable) wander into the distance, devoid of any master-plan. Self-contained behind electronic gates, each house seamlessly resembles the others in a conveyor belt of McMansions".

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with much good reading.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx despised poor people. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Revelations 20 and the lake of fire.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/25/2005 07:27:00 PM

Thursday, February 24, 2005

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

The New York Times economic midget - and he is a conservative America's true national debt owed outside of government is just over $4.5 trillion, not $7.6 trillion.
Profits, wages and jobs Unfortunately the kind of nonsense Megalogenis wrote about wages, jobs and women is about par for the media
Economic costs of the greens' energy tax The real costs of the greens' energy tax is frightening
Stop Iran's mullahs Iran's mullahs have a long history of plotting suicide attacks, funding terrorism, waging war and silencing opponents
Fidel Castro: An outpost of tyranny next door Kim Jong-il and Iran's mullahs sign up with Fidel Castro
In America poverty is absolutely relative Has America wiped out poverty?
Uniting against radicalism The fact that the 9/11 attacks are widely believed to have been carried out in the name of Islam resulted in a great deal of prejudice against Muslims and misunderstanding of Islam

Details here

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Social Security reality: "Considerable public discussion and debate now rages over Social Security and how to reform it. As the system currently stands, as early as 2018, it will be necessary to finance a growing portion of its outlays to retirees by means of outside sources of funds, since at that point the sums paid into the system in the form of payroll taxes will begin to fall short of the sums it is obligated to pay out. What will bring this about is a substantial increase in the number of retirees, who draw from the system, relative to the number of workers, who pay into it. Some observers believe that the difficulties faced by the system will not begin until later, in 2042 or 2052. Between 2018 and that time, they believe, the system can draw down its vast accumulations of United States Government securities, which it has acquired over the many years in which it took in more in payroll taxes than it has had to pay out. I believe that 2018 is in fact the time when the difficulties will begin. The reason is that the government securities held by the Social Security system are not any kind of actual asset. They are a claim against the US Government to pay money that it does not possess and which it cannot obtain in any way other than by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or inflating the money supply.

Details of how GWB's social security proposals would affect individuals here. The Democrat "calculator" is of course the deceptive propaganda one would expect.

Another cost that needs more privatization: "Within a decade, the public sector will be paying nearly half the cost of U.S. health care, which is also swallowing an ever-larger chunk of the nation's resources, government economists reported on Wednesday".

Everybody pays for this: "During the Great Depression, the federal government started subsidizing family farmers who faced ruin because of unpredictable weather and dips in crop prices. Seven decades after the dust bowl years, the subsidy program has morphed into a gigantic giveaway for mega-farms, wealthy investors who may never set foot on their land and even dead farmers, whose estates exist only to collect the subsidies".

Scrappleface has an excellent satirical comment on the Larry Summers/Ward Churchill controversies.

Why do criminals break the law?: "Criminals are as much a victim as those they have victimized, right? After all, they do what they do because of poverty, or bad parenting, or lousy peers, mental illness or the availability of a gun, right? Well, no, says clinical psychologist Stanton Samenow, author of the book Inside the Criminal Mind. He says criminals are the way they are because that is what they choose to do."

GWB's basic doctrine: "A close reading of the President's second Inaugural Address reveals it is an effort to break down the dividing wall that has sometimes separated American interests and American idealism. The President's speech argues that pursuing our core principles will promote our national security - and that what happens within the borders of other nations is often of intense interest to our own..... The core of this doctrine rests on the President's belief that stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty - and as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation and resentment, a cauldron of anti-Western hatred and violence..... Our Administration is not without its critics - but it is worth noting, I think, that our critics have offered no competing theory on how to address the generator of global terrorism. They may take issue with our execution of policy - but they have no conceptual theory to offer in its place. And that is itself revealing."

Leftism is feelings-based: "With the ascendancy of leftist values that has followed the decline of Judeo-Christian religion, personal feelings have supplanted universal standards. In fact, feelings are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal positions. Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that "War is not the answer"? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war -- from slavery in America to the Holocaust in Europe. Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers making war, not by pacifists who would have allowed the Nazis to murder every Jew in Europe.... The "self-esteem movement" -- now conceded to have been a great producer of mediocrity and narcissism -- was entirely a liberal invention based on feelings for kids. The liberal preoccupation with whether America is loved or hated is also entirely feelings-based. The Left wants to be loved; the conservative wants to do what is right and deems world opinion fickle at best and immoral at worst."

There was recently a much publicized study saying that medical costs are a major cause of bankruptcies in the USA. Mike Tremoglie exposes the authors of the "report" concerned for the Leftist liars they are. They even deny the existence of the huge waiting lists that are such a feature of the Canadian system! With typical Leftist arrogance they seem to think reality is whatever they say it is.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx wanted moderate Leftists eliminated. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at different usages of the word "spirit".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/24/2005 06:49:00 PM

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

 
THE "GANNON" BEAT-UP

Another good comment on the disgusting Left from Powerline: "The American left has been guilty of many contemptible actions over the past twenty years, but few are so deeply offensive as its treatment of Jim Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon (His real name is Guckert, but he adopted Gannon as a pen name). Gannon is, apparently, a homosexual with a rather sordid past, including stints working as a gay escort. He is now trying to make a career for himself as a reporter; until a week or two ago, he worked for the online Talon News Service. He was able to get one-day-at-a-time passes to attend White House press briefings, where he committed the unpardonable sin of asking questions that had a pro-Bush administration twist. (Sort of like Helen Thomas, only in reverse, and nowhere near as one-sided.)

The presence of a Bush-friendly journalist in the White House press corps was taken by the left as a deep affront. A study conducted a few years ago found that the White House press corps is 90% Democratic; apparently the left won't be satisfied until the figure is 100%. So liberals began "investigating" Gannon. They found that he was a homosexual and started posting photos of him on their web sites, along with vicious personal attacks. Gannon, stunned by the virulence of the left's attack on him, quit his job at Talon. Subsequently, a low-life named John Aravosis who is a gay activist and has a web site, found nude photos of Gannon and posted them online.....

There is, I guess, a story here. But it has nothing to do with Jeff Gannon, a poor guy who thought he could put his past behind him and pursue a career as a reporter. No, the story has to do with the depth to which the Democratic Party and the American left have fallen. Desperate to change the subject in the wake of the Eason Jordan debacle, they seized on poor Mr. Gannon, made silly, baseless accusations against him, denounced him for being a homosexual, and, in the ultimate indignity, tracked down and published nude photographs of him. All to distract attention from Jordan, and to punish Mr. Gannon for the "sin" of being a Republican. Rarely have I seen such deeply contemptible conduct".

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ELSEWHERE

John Howard's smart move: "Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has welcomed Australia's decision to dispatch 450 more soldiers to Iraq to protect Japanese troops and keep order in Muthana Province. ''We welcome and laud the decision,'' Mr Koizumi said at his office. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda and Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura made similar remarks earlier in the day. ''The Japanese Government greatly appreciates, welcomes, and rates highly [the Australian deployment]," Mr Hosoda said. The Australian troops will be based mainly in the provincial capital of Samawah, where nearly 600 Japanese troops are stationed for humanitarian and reconstruction work".

There is an amazing NYT article here. More Africans have now come to America voluntarily than came as slaves. And, as we all know, immigrant blacks (Colin Powell, anyone?) do much better than American-born blacks. Present-day American blacks have been spoiled by welfare and the Democrat-sponsored culture of grievance. Immigrant blacks haven't.

Harvard professors still trying to destroy their own reputation as scholars: "In a rare second faculty meeting in a week, set for Tuesday afternoon, critics of Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers are expected to excoriate him again for his leadership style and recent remarks about women in science and engineering". Interesting that it seems to be the students who strongly support Summers. They KNOW the ideological rigidity in what is taught and don't like it

Democrat racism: "The most powerful African-American member of the House of Representatives is calling on Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean to apologize for a racially insensitive joke he told Friday during an address to the Congressional Black Caucus. Asked on Tuesday if Dean should apologize for suggesting during his address that minorities usually work as servants, Rep. Charles Rangel told ABC Radio's Sean Hannity, "If he offended anybody, he certainly should." Critics say Dean crossed the line when he told the CBC, "You think the Republicans could get this many people of color in a single room? Only if they had the hotel staff in here." .... Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is Maryland's first black to hold that office, joined with former Rep. J.C. Watts yesterday to demand that Dean apologize, and expanded on his complaint last night. "I think it is rather presumptive [for Dean] to presume that the staff in the hotel is African-American," Steele told Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes." Steele said the DNC chairman's remark was further evidence that the Democratic Party takes the black vote for granted. "If I or another Republican had made a statement like that, it would be all over the place," Steele added. "And so the reality is for me, when I read that and hear it, it's offensive, because what it says is you don't see me in any other role.""

Dick McDonald comments: "Doug Wead, part of Bush I's administration, has released tapes he secretly made of George W. Bush before he became President. Forgetting that he is selling a book, betraying a friend, and "not doing it for money", Wead has released a tape that the leftwing MSM has jumped all over that proves George W. Bush tried marijuana. This leaves the MSM in a quandary. By criticizing Bush, they criticise Gore, Clinton and the deliriously high editorial room at the NYT. By publishing the story, the author's book will reach a greater audience and that means the author's evaluation of Bush as a very important historical figure will be advanced. Dems won't like that".

Anti-democratic Democrats nabbed: "On 24 January 2005 five Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers were arrested for slashing the tires of 25 rental vans hired by the Republican Party to shuttle voters to the polls. If convicted, the suspects face a possible three-and-a-half years and $10,000 fine on each count of criminal damage to property. Those charged include Michael Pratt, 32, Sowande A. Omokunde, 25, Lewis G. Caldwell, 28, and Lavelle Mohammad, 35, all of Milwaukee; and Justin Howell, 20, of Racine. Among the Black defendants are the sons of prominent local politicians. Michael Pratt is the son of Marvin Pratt, who became acting mayor of Milwaukee when Mayor John Norquist stepped down in January 2004. Pratt lost the spring mayoral election under allegations of financial shenanigans, denying him the opportunity to be Milwaukee's first elected Black mayor. Pratt's wife famously blamed the loss on "White racism," calling Milwaukee "redneck America citifed." Sowande Omokunde is the son of Gwen Moore, a former state senator who last November became the first Black elected to the U.S. Congress from Wisconsin. The tire-slashing spree took place in the heart of her district - U.S. House District 4. At the foundation of Moore's campaign was a promise to prevent "voting rights violations." Yet she had 'no comment' when asked to explain her son's apparent desire to prevent elderly and handicapped Republicans from reaching the polls - a civil rights violation".

My latest posting on MarxWords shows what a feminist Marx wasn't. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Romans 1 & 2 and the Day of Judgment.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/23/2005 08:33:00 PM

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I pick out what I think are my best posts for the week:

On Dissecting Leftism I question the "gay gene" theory

On Greenie Watch I report on a Greenie faith-healing meeting.

On Political Correctness Watch I report on the incorrect sandwich issue at Rutgers

On Education Watch I note a movie about Communism with lessons for American academe

On Socialized Medicine I note how to kill a healthy baby and get away with it

On Gun Watch I note that Australia has a rising crime rate despite sweeping gun control

On A scripture blog I note that the immortal soul is a pagan idea rather than a scriptural idea

On Leftists as Elitists I note that socialism is inherently elitist

On MarxWords I note that Marx saw Jewish facial features as repulsive

On Majority Rights I note that Jews have now given up controlling the world!

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ELSEWHERE

Bush-hating Jonathan Chait has come up with another lulu: "Liberalism's aversion to dogma makes it superior as a practical governing philosophy". Aversion to dogma?! There could be few things more dogmatic than the many dictates of Leftist political correctness! Political correctness is in fact more than a dogma: It is a whole catechism of things you are not allowed to say, think, do or discuss. It is the n commandments of Leftism. It's a wonder there's no Index expurgatorius to go with it but I guess they don't need one judging by how seldom bookshops display conservative books. But "liberalism" has its saints, of course: St. Sharpton, St. Jackson, St. Clinton, St. Roosevelt, St. Derrida, St. Foucault, St. Castro, St. Lenin, etc. -- all of whom are as near to sinless and faultless as you can get.

Troubling events in South Africa: ""We will kill the whites, all of them; Afrikaans and English," rioting Pasma students and their leaders at the university's Mamelodi campus chanted on Friday. Students barricaded gates with burning tyres in an effort to prevent police from gaining access and dispersing the crowds. Screaming "revolution is the only solution" and "kill the police, burn their cars", more than 200 students charged around the campus tearing up the university's flag, burning tyres and damaging trees..... Mahlangu, deputy secretary of the Gauteng Pasma regional office, promised that blood would flow at the university's main campus in Hatfield. "We have had enough of racist students and their lecturers who profess to have our interests at heart. We are tired of being discriminated against because we cannot pay the fees and because we are not passing".

There is another stupid attempt here to portray the Bush administration and its Christian supporters as "Fascist". One wonders if these galoots ever read history. Fascist regimes ensure that both the schools and the press are under tight government control and say only those things which support the government line. The USA is so far away from that that GWB cannot even get all the schools to use phonics in teaching kids how to read! And if you think that the New York Times and CBS and all of the rest of them support the Bush administration, you live in a parallel universe! I have commented on this brain-dead accusation at greater length before. See here and here

Using their usual "projective" propaganda technique (accusing others of what are in fact your own faults) Leftists very often accuse conservatives of rigging the vote when they in fact are great practitioners of bogus voter registrations and "voting early and voting often" themselves. Powerline notes a case of voter fraud on behalf of the NAACP which has now actually resulted in a conviction.

Newspeak anyone? "In Western political history the big breakthrough came when classical liberals identified the human individual as having the right to liberty. This took centuries of development, but with John Locke and other such liberals it emerged as a solid, coherent idea. Every adult is sovereign, self-ruling, not a subject of others' will, be these others neighbors, family, bureaucrats, a monarch, the majority, or whoever. Professor Fisher, however, wants to assimilate all these often mutually exclusive ideas of liberty and freedom, so that every tradition -- including those actually quite antithetical to individual liberty -- in which the words have appeared is pacified."

My latest posting on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS records the words of a Leftist newspaper editor who resigned his job in disgust because the newspaper's readers made it too hard for him to inject his biases into what he published! These arrogant swine actually think it is their RIGHT to decide what the public will be allowed to know!

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx greatly admired a pro-German racist. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at the nature of the Holy Ghost.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/22/2005 07:55:00 PM

Monday, February 21, 2005

 
REGULATION ROBBERY

What would you do with an extra $8,000 this year? Pay off your credit card debt? Fully fund your 2004 and 2005 I.R.A.? Make a down payment on a new car? On the other hand, if the government announced plans to increase your taxes by the same amount, you'd certainly raise a ruckus. That's probably why the government keeps quiet about exactly how much its regulations cost.

Economists Mark Crain and Thomas Hopkins did a study for the Small Business Administration and found that in the year 2000, federal regulations cost us $843 billion. That's $8,000 per household -- almost half the amount collected in federal taxes that year. In other words, Washington didn't overtly increase your tax burden last year. However, its policies cost each American household more than $8,000 in hidden regulatory expenses.

That's unfortunate, because while some federal regulations are justified, even critical, many aren't necessary. And Congress needs to identify which are which. ... The Bush administration can help out, too. The president should let all federal agencies know that reining in regulations is a priority. He also ought to continue strengthening the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at the Office of Management and Budget. Again, before a new regulation is put into place, the government should have to explain what it will accomplish and how much it will cost.....

Things have only gotten worse in recent years. Because of the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform law, businesses spend more than ever to comply with federal regulations. In fact, some firms have gone so far as to buy back their stock and retreat from public markets. That won't help the United States remain the world leader in capital markets. Simply put, our economy is over-regulated. There's a saying, "Thank goodness we're not getting all the government we're paying for." Well, if we reduce the burden of unnecessary regulations, we'll have less government -- and pay less for it.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Good comment from Bill Vallicella: "It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements because there is a tendency to think that the Commies had good intentions, while the Nazis did not. But this is false: both had good intentions. Both wanted to build a better world by eliminating the evil elements that made progress impossible. Both thought they had located the root of evil, and that the eradication of this root would usher in a perfect world. It is just that they located the root of evil in different places. Nazis really believed that Judentum ist Verbrechertum, as one of their slogans had it, that Jewry is criminality. They saw the extermination of Jews and other Untermenschen as an awful, but necessary, task on the road to a better world. Similarly with the Commie extermination of class enemies".

There is pretty accurate article here that says the Left can be divided into the stupid Left versus the Satanic Left. Excerpt: "The Stupid Left says it favors equality. The Satanic Left favors transferring power to itself so that it can oppress others. The Stupid Left supports Marxist groups all over the world because it thinks these are non-violent and favor pluralism. The Satanic Left supports them because they know these are violent and totalitarian. The Stupid Left thinks animals should be treated like humans. The Satanic Left thinks humans should be treated like animals".

The Fascism of the prewar Left: "Paterson was appalled by the love for state planning that ruled the literary intellectuals of the '30s. Many were fascists, many communists, but hardly any believed that individuals or markets should be left to run freely. The standard opinion of the time was that markets required technocratic planning. The political themes fully expressed in The God of the Machine began showing up in Paterson's columns (which were never strictly about reviewing books) in the '30s and early '40s. These ideological intimations led Edmund Wilson to dismiss her as irrelevant, declaring her 'the last surviving person to believe in those quaint old notions on which the republic was founded.'"

Yucky Africa: Many Africans are beginning to think that probably we chased the Europeans out too early. Some Africans are so disillusioned that they are nostalgic about those days when the Europeans were in absolute control. Africans have joined the rest of the outside world to refer to their homeland as a lost cause. An African man after a recent visit called his homeland "bush" and swore never to step in there again. He had thrown in the towel and turned his back permanently. Other Africans, who still care, do so reluctantly. Some are just waiting for their parents to die off before they finally slam the door on Africa. For the rest, it is a constant prayer that the immigration office will one day let them bring out their loved ones. Once that is accomplished, it is goodbye Africa.... An African-American kid was reported to have been asked by his teacher what he thought about Africa and he responded, "yucky, yucky". The same expression he uses when his mother asks him to taste broccoli or uncooked tomatoes".

Values matter: "About a decade ago, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco wrote an elegant book, The Death of Satan, in which he argued that America had lost the ability to speak in terms of evil. He called it a 'tragedy of the imagination,' and he was right. For decades, a therapeutic culture of 'understanding' was on the rise. Except for acts of racism and so-called homophobia, there was a mad rush to 'understand' evil people. Were they victims of a racist culture? Were they abused themselves? Were they expressing their natural frustration with the patriarchal capitalist system? Blah, blah, blah. The tragedy of the imagination was that we couldn't appreciate that evil is real and it exists."

Kinsey: "Kinsey was known as the great scientist of sex, the man who fearlessly and dispassionately sorted out the true nature of our sexuality from the false, unscientific beliefs that have for so long hidden the truth from us. The standard picture of Kinsey depicted during his lifetime was the dour scientist dressed in a lab coat, patiently sorting through reams of data with his equally reputable and objective coworkers. That picture of Kinsey does not reveal who Kinsey really was, however. In fact, such pictures were carefully staged by Kinsey and his "research" team as part of their ongoing propaganda campaign. Behind the scenes, we find the real Kinsey: a homosexual and a sado-masochist, bent on using the trappings of science to force his perversions upon society."

This is a rather encouraging article. Psychiatrists are actually beginning to recognize some criminals as "evil". Since psychiatrists normally belong to the "no such thing as right and wrong" brigade, it is a hopeful sign of sanity dawning.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Engels was a sponger too. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Matthew 25:46 -- "And they will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/21/2005 07:27:00 PM

Sunday, February 20, 2005

 
GAY GENE OR GAY VIRUS?

There's a VERY interesting interview with an expert in population biology, Gregory Cochran, here on the subject of the so-called "gay gene" -- a gene nobody has been able to find. I didn't realize that the rate of discordance among indentical twins was so high. Identical twins are normally identical in just about EVERYTHING so the fact that only one of a pair of identical twins tends to be homosexual is most telling. It is just about as good a proof of NON-genetic causation as you can get. The idea that homosexuality is caused by such environmental influences as poor social skills or a female-dominated home would seem to be ruled out by the twin studies too as identical twins also tend to have a very similar environment as well as identical genes. There is another article by Cochran here setting out his thinking on the matter. Basically, he says that if genes and upbringing don't make you homosexual, viruses probably do. You can actually "catch" homosexuality. If ever his theories become widely known, I think his life will be in danger. At the least there would be attempts to lock him up for "hate speech".

I think, however, that he overlooks an important third possibility -- inadequate nutrition in utero. And, strangely, that could also explain the discordant findings among monozygotic twins -- via intra-uterine competition. Intra-uterine competition? Sometimes identical twins will come out looking very different because some accident of placenta placement has caused one twin to get a far better supply of blood and its nutrients than the other twin got. And if homosexuality is caused by an abnormality of fetal brain development -- as has often been suggested -- poor fetal nutrition generally (including that caused by intra-uterine competition) could be the cause of it. So I wouldn't start dodging all contact with homosexuals yet.

I disagree partly with Cochran's explanation for Jewish intelligence too. He seems to think that the Askenazim have been heavily endogamous. Endogamy is certainly their law but it is much belied by appearances. Many Askenazis are of a distinctly Mediterranean appearance but there are also lots who are distinctly Nordic in appearance. I have known several Jews of Lithuanian origin and they look an awful lot like other Lithuanians (very fair) to me. So I think one of Cochran's basic assumptions is almost certainly wrong -- though I can think of several ways out of the problem -- saying that the exogamy predated the selective pressures on IQ, for instance.

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ELSEWHERE

This report by Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California -- saying that the recent small rise in the earth's temperature can only be explained by man-made gas emissions -- has got an amazing amount of publicity. But the report has yet to be subjected to peer review, let alone be published in an academic journal. It shows how desperate the global warmers have got for any shred of comfort. The language of the author of the report -- that "rational" people could not doubt his conclusions -- has certainly got more to do with Barnum than science. I suppose the amusing part is that the warmers have finally found some real-world data that their models fit. Most real-world data does not. I guess they had to get lucky eventually.

But is that enough? "Television is responsible for the deaths of 20,000 Germans a year, according to a professor of psychiatry".

I noted yesterday a letter from Susan Estrich complaining that the L.A. Times did not print enough stuff written by women -- but only HER sort of woman counted, of course. A reader has forwarded me a picture of Ms Estrich which I have posted here (or here). It seems to tell us all we need to know about that particular lady. One should feel sorry for her, I guess.

FDR's failed "New Deal": "In 1939, after seven years of massive government intervention into the marketplace from a phalanx of ABC bureaucracies invented by Roosevelt's planners and a convoluted array of opportunist economic programs, we were as firmly and as deeply mired in the Depression as before. "In his first two full terms of eight years," writes biographer John T. Flynn, "President Roosevelt never produced any recovery whatever. When he was elected there were 11,586,000 persons unemployed. In 1939 -- seven years later -- when the war struck in Europe, there were still 11,369,000 persons unemployed. These figures are supplied by the American Federation of Labor. In 1932 when he was elected there were 4,155,000 households with 16,620,000 persons on relief. In 1939, seven years later, there were 4,327,000 households with 19,648,000 persons on relief. In the presence of these undisputed facts how can any sober-minded citizen suppose that Mr. Roosevelt brought recovery to the United States?"

Howard Dean, leader of the bikepath Left: "The essential characteristic of the Bike Path Left is its passion for lifestyle issues. Dean was famously the governor of Vermont, where lifestyle has become a religion for its urbane yet fashionably rustic citizenry. The flinty old Vermont of yore has given way to the Vermont of Architectural Digest and wealthy transplants from New York and Boston. Dean represented this transformation perfectly.... Simply because the BPL cherishes lifestyle politics doesn't mean it is always laid-back. Dean is, famously, a man of considerable rage. Just this week he remarked that he "hates Republicans." (Presumably all of those bumper stickers in Burlington proclaiming that "Hate is not a family value" will have to be scraped off.) And as the original bike path fight demonstrates, his passion about the importance of lifestyle trumps his faith in more traditional arrangements. Dean signed the first same-sex partnership law and is now a vocal advocate for gay marriage. This isn't a petty issue like a bike path"

A question for the Left: on what basis do you judge that Hitler was bad? : "After all, the left does not believe in Judeo-Christian morality, but rather embraces moral relativism. Moral relativism is a philosophy that holds there are no fixed values, that all value judgments on behavior have to be considered within the context of the culture of the times and the society in which they occur. No absolutes for them, as they ridicule George Bush and Ronald Reagan for using the simplistic and embarrassing term "evil" to describe foes. "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is a typical leftist mantra reflecting this mindset. So, what moral or philosophical basis does the left have to prove that Hitler's storm troopers and Stuka bomber pilots who overran Europe were not "freedom fighters"? Wasn't Germany the victim of the Versailles Accords that ended WWI, with humiliating and punitive penalties placed on them just for losing the war?"

There seems to be a fair bit of discussion lately about advertising and blog ethics -- e.g. here. All I can say is that I will never put up any advertising on any site of mine nor will I take money to promote anything. I live simply and already have all the money I want. I do however use various "free" hosting services to make some of my files accessible on the net and those services put up advertising to pay their way. What they put up, however, is their business, not mine. I neither notice nor care. When new bloggers ask me to help them promote their blogs, however, I do often oblige them with a link. But the payment I get for that is described in Ecclesiastes 11:1.

Wicked Thoughts has just put up some hilarious stuff -- particularly good if you get Jewish humour.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx put his writing before his family. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" shows that the immortal soul is not a Biblical idea.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/20/2005 08:24:00 PM

Saturday, February 19, 2005

 
EXHIBITIONISTS GET MORE THAN THEY BARGAIN FOR

Lots of people like this news item:

"When 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail. What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement. "We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs," one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. "I've never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view." Another said: "I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot." Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: "Sod off, Swampy."

Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. "The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims," a spokesman said. Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. "The violence was instant," Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said. "They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us." When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.

Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others. They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts "open outcry" trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading. But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. "They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately," a photographer said. "It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back." Mr Beresford said: "They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Greenie restrictions on new housing come home to roost "A new report Wednesday fueled concerns that the high cost of doing business in Los Angeles and much of California puts the region at a serious disadvantage in trying to compete for high-tech businesses against less-expensive Western and Midwestern cities.... "The harsh reality is your state is suffering today not only from a corporate exodus but intellectual capacity (too). Some of your best and brightest college graduates cannot afford to live here; that's a huge problem," said John Boyd, whose company's report is based on information from corporate executives."

Islamic gratitude to GWB? "The Islamic Prophet Muhammad's original choice of a successor, Ali, was a Shiia whose claims were never recognized by the early leaders of the Islam. Ironically, it is the "infidel" Bush who had made it possible to restore legitimate Shiite rule to Iraq. And it is the "evangelical" Bush who has finally made more legitimate the incoherent war at home and abroad by pushing for democratic reforms in Iraq even when the silent goals of the war remain geo-strategic"

Israel betrayed by its own politicians: "As a courageous refusenik in the Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky became a hero to free people everywhere - nowhere more so than in Israel, the country to which he yearned to emigrate. His fight for human rights cost him nine years in the KGB's dungeons, and when, in February 1986, he finally arrived in the land of his forefathers, it was to an ecstatic welcome by thousands of cheering Israelis.... But if Sharansky's thinking carries great weight in America, in his adopted homeland it carries none at all. ``I understand that in the Soviet Union your ideas were important,'' Israel's current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, told him last year, ``but unfortunately they have no place in the Middle East.'' No place, in other words, for the idea that peace between Israel and the Palestinians depends not on unilateral Israeli concessions but on the transformation of the Palestinian Authority. No place for the idea that freedom and democracy can have the same power in the West Bank and Gaza that they had in Japan and Germany after World War II. No place for the idea that Palestinian terror and violence will never cease until Palestinian dictatorship and repression cease".

Farmed robbery: "In his newly-released federal budget President George W. Bush promises to reduce farm subsidies. Predictably, on the day the budget was made public there were well-choreographed 'protests' by all the usual suspects, mostly millionaire corporate farmers camped out at the Mayflower or Four Seasons hotels in Washington, D.C. for a few days. The 'protesters' made it on to the evening news in their latest attempt to dupe the American public into believing that they were not really the millionaire owners of large corporate farms, but lowly dust bowl families just trying to make ends meet and feed their families."

EU arrogance faltering: "Probably it's a bit too much to say, on the eve of President George W. Bush's fence-mending trip to Europe next week, that a specter is haunting Europe, but let's say it anyway: A specter is haunting Europe and it is the possibility, after the elections in Iraq, that perhaps Bush is less of a dangerous bungler than so many Europeans previously believed him to be.... Certainly there has been no seismic alteration of the European view. Yet there are at least some strong anecdotal signs that Europeans are struggling with the difficult proposition that there might even be in the Bush doctrine of messianic democracy a dollop of what the other President Bush famously called "the vision thing.".... . ."The pictures of the people voting, even though it's hard to say it was worth two years of war, psychologically it was a turning point," Hassner said.... "

Tim Worstall spells out well the inconvenient fact (for Leftists) that the bigger the government gets the more they have to tax the poor. There are just not enough taxable rich people to go around once the State gets beyond a certain size.

An amusing email from a feminist moonbat accusing the Los Angeles Times of not printing enough stuff written by women. But what got her really charged was one particular story they DID print -- you guessed it -- by a woman! -- as the L.A. Times editor subsequently pointed out.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that he thought Jews looked ugly. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Isaiah 9:6 -- "And his name will be called "Wonderful Counseller, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/19/2005 07:01:00 PM

Friday, February 18, 2005

 
CONSERVATIVE PHILOSOPHER SCRUTON ON THE BRITISH LAW AGAINST HUNTING

The hunting Act vindictive in its aim and discriminatory in its effect. It takes away liberties from law-abiding people, destroys a deeply-rooted way of life and confers no benefit on any person or animal. It permits the dogs of Labour voters to pursue their favourite quarry, and forbids the dogs of Tories to go after theirs. It reflects no understanding either of hunting or of wildlife, and was passed in defiance of the conclusions of the Government's own official inquiry..... When, why and how is it right to disobey the law? If it is never right to disobey, then tyrants have carte blanche. The racist laws of Nuremberg, the Hindu law of suttee, sharia that condemns adulterers to stoning and a thousand other cruelties become obligatory on those who are commanded to obey them.

So what should we do? It was in answer to that question that Gandhi developed the strategy of "civil disobedience", directed against the authorities in British India. Civil disobedience does not mean breaking the law and then trying to evade it. It means breaking the law overtly and peacefully, while surrendering yourself for punishment. In this way, Gandhi thought, you put a spotlight on the law, draw attention to its injustice, and emphasise that you yourself are no criminal, either by nature or by intention, but simply labelled as such by a sovereign power that has overstepped the bounds of legitimate government....

It seems to me that the crucial point is not the grandeur of the cause but the social impact of the injustice and the lack of an alternative remedy. In our society rules and regulations can be altered, and majority opinion will eventually have its way with them. However, minorities do not enjoy the benefit of majority opinion. Consider what a Muslim should do, when faced with a law that bans halal butchery. Majority opinion will never rescue him, for it is only the Muslim minority that is affected. A strategy of civil disobedience would make it obvious, even to the majority opposed to halal butchery, that you cannot go on sending law-abiding butchers to prison simply to satisfy your beliefs about a matter that does not affect you.

More here. For news on the law see here

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ELSEWHERE

Good to hear: "Contending that Americans benefit from free trade, President Bush said Thursday he would keep pursuing liberalization agreements around the world, even as critics say his policies have resulted in record trade deficits and millions of lost jobs. Bush's pledge came in his annual economic report to Congress, a 438-page document which argued that his economic policies, ranging from making his first-term tax cuts permanent to overhauling Social Security, will lead to greater prosperity. "I believe that Americans benefit from open markets and free and fair trade and I am working to open up markets around the world and make sure that the playing field is level for our workers, farmers, manufacturers and other job creators," Bush said in his message to Congress".

A teeth-grinder for Leftists: "The two largest U.S. retailers, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. reported higher fourth-quarter profits on Thursday on double-digit sales growth. Wal-Mart, the world's No. 1 retailer, said quarterly earnings rose 16 percent as sales gained from store expansion, beating Wall Street expectations".

Futile but good for attention-seekers: "Perhaps no company has come under as fierce an attack as Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer. A 22-page report last year by Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, echoed what many critics have said for years: Because nonunionized Wal-Mart pays lower salaries and health benefits, its employees must use subsidized medical care, free school lunches and other taxpayer- supported welfare services. Wal-Mart will be the target of a fresh campaign in the next couple of months, when the Organic Consumers Association will band together with labor and environmental groups to promote a "buy local" crusade".

Another setback for the food fascists: "Drinking coffee regularly can reduce the risk of liver cancer by more than one half, according to a study carried out in Japan on more than 90,000 people and published in the United States by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Taking into account anti-cancer properties of caffeine on lab animals, a team of Japanese researchers analyzed a public health report spanning a decade which allowed them to track a large number of patients, many with liver cancer, and their coffee consumption habits".

The future of the U.S. Supreme Court too? "The [Australian] High Court has been remade in John Howard's image. It is now so legally conservative that Michael Kirby [a Left-leaning homosexual] has become the biggest outsider in the court's history".

The wicked John Stossel has some good examples of where sharing is bad and selfishness is good.

Nathan Tabor has a comprehensive debunking of the "gay gene" theory. It is so typically Leftist that the one claim of hereditary influence that they accept is scientifically unfounded. Reality just does not suit Leftists at all. No wonder they have taken so fervently to calling themselves "reality-based" lately. Denial is a well-known psychological defence-mechanism.

Absurd demands on Israel: "There's lots of land in the Middle East. Most of it is populated sparsely by Arabic-speaking people, culturally, linguistically, religiously and ethnically at one with the so-called 'Palestinians,' a people who have never had a country of their own in the history of the world. Why then is it Israel's obligation to carve itself up to create this Palestinian state? The tiny sliver of land that represents the current state of Israel is only about one-tenth the size of the original United Nations mandate that created the Jewish state in 1947. Now, I'm not a Jew. I'm a Christian Arab-American journalist who believes in freedom first, peace second. And I've got to tell you that the demands on Israel right now are demands for the nation to commit political, military and cultural suicide."

A good email: "Paradoxically, the same (white) liberals who blame the "imperialist western countries" for the hatred some other peoples and religions have towards us, are the very main cause of such hatred: they themselves produced the culture of drugs, free sexuality and abomination which more traditional cultures of Asia and Africa deeply despise. How ironic".

There is another appalling news report on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and some VERY interesting media quotations on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS today.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows what a parasite and a cheat Marx was. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at the concept of the afterlife in the OT and the NT.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/18/2005 07:12:00 PM

Thursday, February 17, 2005

 
NATIONAL SOCIALISM (NAZISM) REBORN IN SOUTH AMERICA

While President Bush's sweeping vision of worldwide democracy was never more vividly conveyed than in his recent inaugural speech, he has thus far failed to acknowledge an alarming anti-democratic movement festering within America's own hemisphere: the increased radicalization of Indians in South America's Andean region and their assumption of anti-democratic, reactionary and strikingly fascistic attitudes. This trend is increasingly powerful in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru and, if not dealt with quickly, will lead to the region's collapse into a political, economic and social Stone Age, posing a danger to the entire world.

In addition to their vocal opposition to capitalism, the United States and democracy-all characteristics that explain their close ties to the Left in their countries as well as to the Chavez regime in Venezuela and to Castro's Cuba-these movements are also openly racist. Indeed, they advocate a return to the pre-Columbian Inca state, with the European cultural and ethnic (i.e. "white") additions removed-by force. In any other circumstance, the combination of racism and historic nostalgia would instantly produce cries of fascism from the politically correct Left. But, not surprisingly, it views the situation in South America far differently-after all, to the Left, the "oppressed" races cannot be racist, only the white "oppressors" can and are.

More here

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Is Rupert Murdoch sheltering his own Eason Jordan? Peter Wilson, foreign correspondent for Murdoch's Australian, has also accused the American military of targeting journalists
Social security: how the Dems will cost you $3 million If you are under 55 years of age and don't read and understand this essay you will only have yourself to blame for not acting now and saving yourself and your family $3 million
The Democrats' drug-running links Rangel and other black Congressmen were told of Castro's drug running. Rangel's response was to blame it on the CIA
Chinese economy and savings The Chinese tend to have a low rate of time preference - and it is this rate that can quickly propel the Chinese economy. But how to do it?
More on immigration myths and wages So long as there is real economic growth, i.e., capital accumulation, then the means to support a growing suburbia will be generated

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

I am sorry to hear that Sam Francis has just passed away after heart surgery. I did not agree with everything he wrote but he was a great campaigner for conservative causes.

Great news: "Coming soon: a non-stop, 19-hour flight from London to Sydney. For the first time in civil aviation history, a long-haul passenger jet was being unveiled last night that is capable of flying virtually halfway across the globe, making it possible in theory to link any two important world cities. The new Boeing 777-200LR rolled off the US company's assembly line in Washington state for the first time and is scheduled for delivery in the first three months of next year. It is expected to carry 300 passengers and cost up to $225 million (119 million pounds). It promises travellers the holy grail of air travel - no more layovers. Ever. The launch came less than a month after Boeing's bitter rival, the European company Airbus, revealed its very different vision of the future of air travel - the A380 "superjumbo" which can carry up to 850 passengers over just 9,000 miles"

Janet Albrechtsen: "Note to self: Wednesday: celebrate the right of women to be treated as equal to men; Thursday: cheer for the right for women to be treated differently; Friday: sort through conflicting messages scattered about by modern feminists on what women want."

Marginalizing unions aids prosperity: "Twenty years ago, workplace deregulation in Australia was a new and largely untested phenomenon that opponents characterised as bad and unfair for employees. The past decade, marked by historic levels of prosperity, has shown these claims to be unfounded. Far from leading to a "race to the bottom" in terms of wages, employment conditions or lower living standards, workplace reforms have underpinned strong productivity, real income growth, job creation, low unemployment, low inflation and rising wealth per capita".

There is a libertarian version here of the Mommy/Daddy account of politics -- much pushed by nutty Leftist linguist George Lakoff. It's a popular story but if it were true most women would be Leftists and most men would be Rightists -- but "it just aint so". In the last U.S. Presidential election the female vote split roughly 50/50 for and against GWB.

Leftists hate one-another too. They all want to be king: "While Republicans have been marching the family through precise formations and drilling them on party catechism, the Democrats are still chasing each other around the coffee table. They seem almost hopeless, really, unable to get themselves organized into a cohesive unit that can confidently articulate, and consistently follow, its shared values."

Good comment from India: "Nepal's Maoists may believe that power flows from the barrel of a gun. However, prosperity and happiness do not. Democracy is not a magic wand, but neither is Maoism a miracle-cure. Communism is an ideological tool for non-industrious people who want the state to take care of their needs. It will not make the Nepalese any better off. Incidentally, historical experience is not in favour of the communists. They often end up in Gulags (of Stalin) or killing fields (of Pol Pot), without any share of the chimera they were chasing. The Indian communists should be aware of this."

Pat Buchanan has an interesting history of how the arrogant Leftist monopoly of the MSM has gradually been eroded -- a process that started in the Nixon era.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a wide range of blogospheric reading.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx was a social Darwinist -- something modern leftists say is "Rightist". My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Luke 16: 22-25 -- "The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment.... "

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/17/2005 08:44:00 PM

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

 
THE SOCIAL SECURITY DEBATE

Australia has long had what GWB is advocating and it is uncontroversial here. I have said nothing on the U.S. debate so far because Dick McDonald does such a good job on it but here are some recent interesting excerpts anyway:

Leftists: Do as I say, not as I do "In the Democratic response to President Bush's call to make Social Security a better deal for younger workers through voluntary personal retirement accounts, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid likened the plan to a risky game of 'roulette.' New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it a 'system in which workers engage in speculation that no financial advisor would recommend.' In opposing personal accounts, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) launched national ads stating: 'Winners and losers are stock market terms. Do you really want them to become retirement terms?' Given the way the Democrats and some commentators are talking about stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, you would assume that none of them invest any of their own money, and instead keep sacks of cash in their mattresses."

Pension funds invest in the stockmarket anyhow: "The debate over allowing younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts has become increasingly politicized, with some groups charging that the plan will amount to "gambling" in the stock market and giving billions in Social Security dollars to Wall Street pension fund managers. For example a recent series of television ads sponsored by the AARP depict a middle-aged man and woman saying, "If we feel like gambling, we'll play the slots... According to the Federal Reserve Board, public employee pension plans alone had nearly $2 trillion in assets as of September 2004. Overall, 54.8 percent of these assets were invested in corporate equities"

That wicked cigar fancier: "Perhaps hoping to win over undecided Democrats to President Bush's Social Security reform proposal, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told FOX News on Wednesday that former President Bill Clinton did 'a courageous thing' by pointing out the retirement program's problems. 'President Clinton did a courageous thing when he pointed out the looming insolvency of Social Security,' Rove said, adding that the current program is facing 'a demographic time bomb that's going to go off with certainty.' Social Security currently is taking in more money than it pays out, and is expected to do so for the next 13 to 15 years. But after that, the program will be paying out more money than it collects and is likely to go bankrupt by 2042 or 2052, depending on whose calculations are used."

Social security reform is anti-black? "Milloy contradicts himself. He lays out all the ways that we blacks are killing ourselves: cigarettes, unprotected sex, obesity and high salt intake. Then he indicates that somehow these self-inflicted wounds are about a "slave health deficit," and that some researchers say they have found links between hypertension and racism. He then concludes that somehow the president not only does not care but is a cheerleader for this black dance of death -- all because he wants privatization of Social Security so badly that he wants blacks to die early to make a case for it."

Jeff Jacoby: "You don't have to be a financial wizard to know that Social Security is a lousy investment. Unlike the money you deposit in a bank or salt away in an IRA, you don't own the money you pay into Social Security. You have no legal right to get those dollars back, and when you die you can't pass them on to your heirs. Nor can you use your Social Security account before you retire -- you can't borrow against it and you can't cash it in. You aren't allowed to put the money into a balanced portfolio. You can't even watch as the interest accumulates, since your Social Security nest egg doesn't earn any interest".

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ELSEWHERE

PETA doesn't care about evidence. They KNOW! "Somebody pass the butter. A recent Norwegian study reports that lobsters and crabs don't have the capacity to feel pain. And the animal rights nuts at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ... must be steaming. Animal rights wackos have a long history of pursuing 'lobster liberation.' PETA's own website offers helpful 'tips' on liberating lobsters from restaurants and supermarkets. ... The Guardian helps explain why lobsters and crabs can't feel pain, pointing out that they have only 100,000 neurons, whereas many vertebrates have upwards of 100 billion. Meanwhile, continuing its long tradition of ignoring inconvenient facts, PETA turns to supposed scientific evidence from the Coalition to End Animal Suffering and Exploitation to 'prove' that lobsters feel pain anyway."

Fighting fire with bureaucracy: "Firefighting is a dangerous occupation. Firefighters face an occupational fatality rate two to four times the rate of average Americans. In an attempt to mitigate the risks faced by firefighters, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires the use of protective equipment such as self-contained breathing devices and fire retardant clothing, and there the troubles begin. To achieve OSHA compliance, firefighters must carry the 30 pound breathing device and another 30 pounds of protective clothing for the duration of interior firefighting activities. Those 60 pounds increase the excessive physical stress a firefighter experiences and likely contribute to the leading killer of firefighters, cardiac arrest."

Competition undermines tobacco/government alliance: "Big tobacco was supposed to come under harsh punishment for decades of deception when it acceded to a tort settlement seven years ago. Philip Morris, R.J.Reynolds, Lorillard and Brown & Williamson agreed to pay 46 states $206 billion over 25 years. This was their punishment for burying evidence of cigarettes' health risks. But the much-maligned tobacco giants have subtly and shrewdly turned their penance into a windfall. Using that tort settlement, the big brands have hampered tiny cut-rate rivals and raised prices with near impunity. Since the case was settled, the big four have nearly doubled wholesale cigarette prices from a national average of $1.25 a pack (not counting excise taxes) in 1998 to $2.10 now. And they have a potent partner in this scheme: state governments, which have become addicted to tort-settlement payments, now running at $6 billion a year. A key feature of the Big Tobacco-and-state-government cartel: rules that levy tort-settlement costs on upstart cigarette companies, companies that were not even in existence when the tort was being committed. The 1998 scheme came under legal attack almost from the start. While the cartel has fought off most of these challenges, it has just taken a palpable hit. A federal court in New York tossed out a key antidiscounter rule, and the entire settlement could yet crumble. This is due to the doggedness of one Jeffrey Uvezian, who sells cheapie cigs under such brands as Cobra, Boston and Tough Guy, through his company, International Tobacco Partners".

Arlene Peck: "Not that they would notice, but illiteracy in the Arab world is at an all-time high and rising rapidly, with the out-of-control rise in population. It is possible when you're allowed four wives and have an average of ten children with each. Since they keep their women pregnant, barefoot and out of schools, over half of them are not even able to read or write. At the pace they're going in the Arab world now, it will take roughly 30 years to wipe out basic literacy".

On SOCIALIZED MEDICINE I have just put up a story that will make you pray that you never have to rely on socialized medicine. And there is a pretty amazing power-grab reported on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes what a sponger Marx was. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Matthew 25:41 and "The eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels ..."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/16/2005 08:44:00 PM

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I pick out what I think are my best posts for the week:

On Dissecting Leftism I demolish an anti-American rant by N.Y. journalist Tony Judt.

On Political Correctness Watch I note that racial segregation is now correct again in Canadian schools.

On Greenie Watch I note the latest craze for diaper recycling and show how stupid it is.

On A scripture blog I note that the Church of England has now become the Church of the Environment.

On Socialized Medicine I note evidence that half of America's spending on health care is wasted

On Education Watch I put up a big lot of personal reports about home schooling.

On Gun Watch I note that concealed carry is now regarded as a proven policy in Texas

On MarxWords I note that Engels believed Germans to be a superior race

On Leftists as Elitists I note that the Democrats are now billionaire-oriented rather than people-oriented.

On Majority Rights I note the decline of civility in London.

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ELSEWHERE

Brookes News says Australia has its own Eason Jordan making scurrilous accusations against American troops.

There is a disgusting report here of a Leftist university professor showing a pornographic film to devout Mormon students and mocking them generally -- all in the name of teaching them how to write good English!

Trying to grok has a good example of why there is such high unemployment in Germany

Oppressive Leftist law defied: "About 50,000 people are to defy the ban on hunting which comes into force this week by taking part in choreographed trail hunts at the weekend using foxes that were killed earlier....Although all those taking part will ostensibly be setting off on legal trail hunts, with packs of hounds chasing the scent of a dead fox that has been dragged across the countryside... Mr Worsley warned that there was a higher risk of bad practice than ever before because the new sport would no longer be regulated by the Masters of Foxhounds Association. "The red book is out the window now," he said....With such large numbers of people engaged in the hunts, the expectation is that the police will find it difficult in the extreme to identify the perpetrators of any law-breaking that does take place....However, in its guidance to assistant chief constables, the Association of Chief Police Officers makes clear that the priority is to protect people, not animals."

Amusing conflict of obsessions: "The director of a German zoo has defended her campaign to mate a group of homosexual male penguins with females, arguing that it is the only way to preserve a dying breed from extinction. Heike Kueck said that she had been inundated with criticism by the gay lobby after making public her plan. "We're simply trying to help save a threatened species," she said of the Humboldt penguin"

What a brilliant way of discouraging Muslim immigration! "The photograph of Muslim teenagers playing by an advertising hoarding emblazoned with a Nazi swastika and National Front logo could be straight out of a documentary on inner city decay. It is, in fact, just one of a series of grim portrayals being used by the British Council to promote the nation's image overseas. Other photographs in the exhibition include a picture of a smashed-up telephone box and the fenced-off entrance to the Channel tunnel. The council, which is now led by the former Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, and which spends tens of million pounds a year on promoting Britain's cultural and artistic achievements, has included the photographs in an exhibition that it claims depict the reality of life in Britain's Muslim community.... Some of the photographs in the exhibition, which is called Common Ground, are accompanied by text depicting British Muslims as the victims of racial hatred and economic oppression".

An email about feminists getting it back to front: "I have always regarded feminism as perverse because it seems to be more about disempowerment than empowerment of women. The whole "fish without a bicycle" line about how much a woman needs a man overlooks the fact that the control some women are able to influence over some men is a very considerable form of power: the capability of getting more done than one could do on one's own."

Most readers of this blog will know that my online book about Leftism is available here or here. In 1974, however, I also had a book published, called Conservatism as Heresy. About half of it I wrote myself and the other half consisted of chapers contributed by various other authors. I got all my own chapters from it online about a year ago but I have been very slack about the other chapters. I have however had a bit of a burst of energy lately and put a few of them up. You can see the result here or here. There is a chapter here (or here) that is particularly good for showing that Leftist hypocrisy and anti-Americanism was alive and well during the Vietnam era.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx believed in a "Jewish" look. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Matthew 13:37-43 and the "wailing and gnashing of teeth".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/15/2005 09:12:00 PM

Monday, February 14, 2005

 
SOME ECONOMICS

There is a big article here spelling out how conservative policies are much better for the poor than Leftist policies are.

Enter the protectionist dragon: "America's rapidly expanding trade with China is awakening a dragon -- the dragon of protectionism. As trade has grown between the two giant economies, so too have trade tensions. Legislation sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) would impose a draconian 27.5 percent tariff on imports from China?s because of its allegedly unfair exchange rate. Meanwhile, a recent study sponsored by a federal commission claims that trade with China destroyed 1.5 million jobs in the United States from 1989 through 2003. The study, performed by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, did not actually count real people who lost their jobs, but instead applied a simplistic formula based on the shaky assumption that exports create jobs and imports destroy jobs. As usual, reality is more complicated -- and more positive -- than the critics of trade portray."

A free market in workplace regulations: "In a free economy, under what conditions may employees be hired and fired? And should discrimination be tolerated in the workplace? The answer to these questions depends upon who is the source of the discrimination. From a free market perspective, the only factor that matters is whether or not the government is involved in the discrimination. If the government is the entity that forces a company to hire or fire somebody based on whatever criteria it sets forth as official policy, then that is an imposition, a violation of the rights of private property holders, an infraction against the freedom of association."

A new way to make it harder for women to get jobs: "The union that pioneered extra time off work for women suffering painful periods yesterday argued it was time menstrual leave became common in Australian workplaces. The National Tertiary Education Union was the first to negotiate an extra 12 paid days off a year for women at four universities. Eight years later the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union has lodged a log of claims with car manufacturer Toyota including menstrual leave".

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ELSEWHERE

A priceless statement from the UNLV about the Hoppe affair: ""The purpose of keeping these proceedings confidential is to protect both the complainant and the faculty member involved," Grey said. "It is unfair for the news media and others who may have read incomplete accounts of this situation to judge the university's intentions and values."" [Let me get this straight: They say that it is unfair for the media to comment because the media don't have the full facts. But the reason they don't have the full facts is because the UNLV is keeping the full facts secret. Sounds a lot like Catch 22 to me! Or a claim that UNLV has a right to prevent discussion of anything they do not want discussed]

Valentines banned: "Saudi Arabia's morality police are on the scent of illicit red roses as part of a clampdown on would-be St Valentine's lovers in the strict Muslim kingdom. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Saudi Arabia's powerful religious vigilantes, have banned shops from selling any red flowers in the run-up to February 14". [I wonder when our Leftist nutjobs will get around to attacking it? There is a SAINT involved, after all! Can't have that! And it's probably "patriarchal" or something too]

There is a useful summary here of a book by a German that gives you the figures to show that the USA is miles ahread of Europe in almost any economic category -- including greater fairness -- contrary to the distortions pushed by Tony Judt. The American poverty level is higher than many average incomes in Europe.

Peg Kaplan has a link to a sustained example of Leftist hate-speech that displays yet again the chronic projection that the Left needs to sustain itself. It portrays Republicans as all being super-rich and uncaring -- quite ignoring the fact that super-rich Americans (like John Kerry and George Soros) are far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans and that donations to charity are far more likely to come from Republicans than Democrats. And the idea that all the Southern "rednecks" who voted for GWB are rich is quite hilarious. And portraying Christians as uncaring despite all their charitable works is just off the planet. Where is the Leftist equivalent of the Salvation Army, for instance? Reality is so pesky to Leftists that it is no wonder they say there is no such thing.

Funny how Leftists used to say IQ is meaningless: "The California Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for dozens of condemned prisoners to escape their death sentences on the grounds they are mentally retarded, defining the disability more flexibly than prosecutors had wanted. Prosecutors, who fear a flood of petitions from death-row inmates, wanted the court to define retardation using a specific IQ level. They suggested 70 on a scale on which the average is 100. The court declined". [Odd how the Left are not all up in arms about this "meaningless" decision! It shows again how nonexistent their "principles" are]

The recent death of Arthur Miller has spurred a few eulogies of him. This eulogy says that he "wrestled with big moral and political questions in America". Since you are not likely to hear it from the MSM, it might be worth reminding readers that he was a proven Soviet dupe.

Michelle Malkin has some background on the now fortunately ousted CNN "News" head Eason Jordan. His history of frantic anti-Americanism is a long one.

White flight in England now: "White and ethnic minority communities are becoming increasingly separated by growing levels of population movement and immigration, a report says today. More white families are moving from London to the regions while many immigrants arrive in the capital from overseas, the think-tank Migrationwatch says. The change in 10 years has been "extraordinarily rapid'', with 606,000 more people moving out of London than arrived from elsewhere in the country. In the same period, a net 726,000 immigrants arrived in the capital.... Migrationwatch says the changes, even for a city as diverse and as vibrant as London, are "unprecedented''. It says: "Migration within the UK is mainly from areas of high ethnic minority population to those with predominantly white populations. "The effect is a rapid increase in the ethnic minority composition of some boroughs, resulting from an outflow of the white population and an inflow of African and Asian international migrants.

There is a good summary here of how the blogosphere helped Bush win the 2004 election.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes more mockery of Jews. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" has more on both Hell and the environment.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/14/2005 06:35:00 PM

Sunday, February 13, 2005

 
AMERICA'S HOPELESSLY BIASED "EDUCATION" SYSTEM

College Far-Leftist propagandizing finally coming under pressure: "A Hamilton College program director has resigned after igniting a furor by inviting to the campus a controversial professor who compared Sept. 11 victims to Nazis. Nancy Rabinowitz said she was resigning "under duress" as director of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture. She will continue to teach comparative literature.... Her departure comes on the heels of a Feb. 3 speaking invitation extended to University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill, whose essay written shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks compared the World Trade Center victims to "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann who ensured the smooth running of the Nazi system. Rabinowitz also drew fire in November when the program she headed offered a temporary teaching position to 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg.... Churchill was forced to resign as a department chairman at Colorado in the recent aftermath of his essay's revelation. In the piece, Churchill also suggested many of those killed in the World Trade Center attacks deserved their fate, and spoke of the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck America."

Lying Leftist professor Ward Churchill is down but not out. He still has his job if not his former seniority. I think his university should have sacked him for lying in his job application to them but that has not happened so far. His job is presently "under review". More on his rather unbelievable record of lying, terrorist-support and America-hatred here and here and here. He is one very sick puppy.

Results of a Leftist education: "While authoritarian states in much of the world are routinely jailing journalists and others for expressing their views, a substantial proportion of U.S. high school students believes the government should censor the American press and that the free speech protections of the Bill of Rights First Amendment go 'too far.' These are among the findings of a two-year $1 million study of 100,000 high school students, nearly 8,000 teachers, and more than 500 administrators and principals, carried out in more than 500 high schools by the University of Connecticut. The study, entitled, 'The Future of the First Amendment,' was commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Hodding Carter III, president of the Foundation, said, 'These results are not only disturbing -- they are dangerous. Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation's future.'"

A good example here of the far-Leftist trash that is a REQUIRED course at San Francisco State university.

Free speech only for Leftists: "In the Summers affair, free speech and academic freedom barely came up, except among a few conservative commentators and one or two academics who were already known for their political incorrectness. Instead, Summers was a pinata to be bashed for material rewards and to send the message that some subjects are simply taboo even among serious scholars, no matter what the evidence, in closed-door, off-the-record meetings. Meanwhile, Ward Churchill, whose scholarship is a joke, whose evidence is tendentious at best, and who called the victims of 9/11 the moral equivalent of a man who sent babies to the gas chambers, is a hero of free speech."

****************************

ELSEWHERE

My comments yesterday about Tony Judt I posted both here and on Majority Rights. Unlike most of his posters, the blog-owner at Majority Rights has a good sense of humour so he put up a response to my post on Judt that gave me a good laugh: "Euro-coffeeists like Judt are Nazis. Coffeeism is morally reprehensible and personally limiting. It has no place in a decent, progressive society where all the coffees of the world are equally celebrated. Fortunately, coffeeism is a social construct, like everything else. Ergo, we liberals can insist that Mr Judt frees himself from it and sees the native American coffee for the coffee it really is".

Leftist lying never stops. Germany is going to ban rallies by the allegedly "Right-wing" NPD. Yet the NPD is an anti-capitalist, pro-Green party! Read some of an interview with their party chairman here if you doubt it. The NPD undoubtedly have a soft spot for Hitler but seeing he had similar policies to theirs, that is hardly surprising.

Michelle Malkin has a wrap up of "Easongate", the latest triumph of the blogosphere over the lying mainstream media. There's an announcement of Eason Jordan's resignation from CNN here that tries its best to sanitize what he said. My most recent comment on him is here. I am glad to have been a small part of the "pajama" brigade.

A small step forward: "The Senate approved a measure Thursday to help shield businesses from major class action lawsuits like the ones that have been brought against tobacco companies, giving President Bush the first legislative victory of his second term. Under the legislation, long sought by big business, large multistate class action lawsuits could no longer be heard in small state courts. Such courts have handed out multimillion-dollar verdicts. Instead, the cases would be heard by federal judges, who have not proven as open to those type of lawsuits. The Senate passed the bill 72-26. It now goes to the House."

More global warming: "Greg Hunt, MP, Parliamentary Secretary with ministerial responsibility for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, said today that Victoria's weather records would need a new chapter following unprecedented weather in the past 24 hours. "Victoria has experienced extreme weather during the past 24 hours, with all-time rainfall records tumbling, very cold temperatures for this time of the year, and very strong winds," Mr Hunt said."

Some Hollywood types can see reality: "Actress Jane Seymour waived a small US flag and cheered after she and about 9,000 other immigrants became US citizens during a naturalisation ceremony in Los Angeles today. The British-born actress who once lived in a mansion near Bath and is best known for her TV series Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, said she has been in the United States since 1976. "I've realised that I've been living here longer than in my home country. America has given me unbelievable opportunities," she said. "I realised that with the US elections I wanted to vote and I couldn't. I felt the time had come to participate more fully."

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Engels claimed that Germans were a superior race. Yes, that was Engels, not Hitler. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" is about Ludwig von Mises and his views on the churches.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/13/2005 10:06:00 PM

Saturday, February 12, 2005

 
TONY JUDT: POOR MAN'S CHOMSKY

There's an article in the N.Y. Review of Books by Tony Judt that is just typical of Leftist distortions and anti-Americanism. And is it supercilious and arrogant! In his opening paragraph Judt baldly assserts that American coffee is "largely without flavor". How do you answer such asinine condescension? What poor stupid people he obviously thinks Americans are. I guess it is at least fair warning of the low quality of the reasoning that follows. Fisking the article is a job for an economic statistician and I am sure that such a fisking will happen so I was going to leave it at that but I cannot resist just a few interim remarks pointing out where some of the distortions lie:

One of his most unforgivable assertions is that America has a high infant mortality. That was the subject of much discussion fairly recently so he really has no excuse for trotting that deception out. America has a high infant mortality rate mainly because America tries hard to save even very premature babies. And many of those attempts fail, of course. So naturally America has more infant deaths than countries that do not try to save such babies and do not count them as babies at all.

And he says that European productivity per worker compares favourably with American productivity. Of course it does. It has to. Europe's legally enforced high minimimum wages ensure that only highly productive people are worth employing. But that leaves around 10% of the European workforce unemployed, compared to around 5% in America. And that extra 5% in Europe produce nothing at all. The only fair comparison would be to compare productivity of the whole workforce, not just the employed part of it. If you did that Europe would really be in the basement!

And he mentions the generous maternity benefits for Swedish mothers. They are generous all right. So generous that few Swedish companies can afford to employ women. So it is only poorly-paid government jobs that most Swedish women can get. And Sweden has a QUARTER of its workforce on welfare of one sort or another, anyway. So that's REAL maternity leave!

What he says about the poor quality of American education, however, is undoubtedly true. He omits to mention, however, that education is the one section of the U.S. economy that his Leftist co-religionists dominate.

But I think his description of the United Nations tells you all you need to know about Mr Judt's desperate blindness. He calls it "the jewel in the crown of international agencies". Words fail me at that point.

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ELSEWHERE

"Gay gene" a myth: "A study to be published in the March 2005 issue of the journal Human Genetics, and available online now, actually undermines the commonly held view that homosexual orientation is determined by genetic factors. The study's lead author Brian Mustanski from University of Illinois at Chicago said in a UIC news release that "There is no one 'gay' gene. Sexual orientation is a complex trait, so it's not surprising that we found several DNA regions involved in its expression." However, a thorough examination of the actual report reveals no statistically significant findings for any of these DNA regions".

Sense from the Saudis! "Labor Minister Dr. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi thinks extremist teachings, not unemployment, are the root causes of terrorism in Saudi Arabia. Gosaibi blamed the spread of terrorism on the "indoctrination that teaches young people they can kill justifiably" and the training some extremists received in terror camps in Afghanistan. "I don't believe that terrorist movement has anything to do with unemployment," the minister told reporters in Riyadh. Unemployment has long been regarded as a major source of frustration in a region possessing one of the world's youngest populations. Many also argue that economic hardships also drive young people from the region toward militancy. As you know Osama Bin Laden is a very rich man and all of his cronies are quite rich," Gosaibi said. "(Venezuelan-born terrorist) Carlos (the Jackal) wasn't exactly a beggar and I am not aware that somebody has been driven to terrorism simply because he could not find a job."

Another Leftist antisemite: "Ken Livingstone was accused last night of having "lost the plot" after an angry confrontation with a Jewish journalist who, he said, was behaving "just like a concentration camp guard". The Mayor clashed with Oliver Finegold, a reporter from the London Evening Standard, on Wednesday night at a party marking the 20th anniversary of Chris Smith becoming the first openly gay MP. His "concentration camp" remark came after being told that the reporter was Jewish, it was claimed..... The Board of Deputies of British Jews said: "We are appalled by this latest outburst by a man whose insensitivity seems to know no bounds."

Given me Irish blood, I've got to note this report: "It was not so long ago, even less than a generation, that Ireland was a threadbare nation, barely relevant in European affairs. Finding a job meant hopping an aircraft out of the country. People counted their pennies, not their commuter miles, and poverty, for many, was a stubborn component of Irish life. But Ireland's jump into the European Union and aggressively pro-business economic policies changed all that. In little more than a decade the so-called Celtic Tiger was transformed from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe to one of the richest in the world. Its gross domestic product per person, not quite 70 per cent of the EU average in 1987, sprung to 136 per cent of the EU average by 2003, while the jobless rate sank to 4 per cent from 17 per cent. In November The Economist cemented Ireland's powerhouse reputation by declaring it the country with the best quality of life in the world."

I often point out (e.g. here) that degree of happiness is a fairly lasting disposition rather than something that is affected by how much money you have and this rather confirms it: "Most people who live with serious disability or illness, such as kidney failure, appear to adapt well and maintain a healthy outlook on life, new research reports. This trend may be surprising to some -- the report also found that people without serious illnesses tended to underestimate the level of happiness in these patients. "We think it is encouraging that for at least some illnesses, life seems to (eventually) go on and that people come to experience good and even normal mood levels," study author Dr. Jason Riis of Princeton University in New Jersey told Reuters Health. "We cannot adapt to anything. But we are generally more resilient than we think," he said. In the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Riis and his colleagues note that this is not the first study to show that people can adjust to good and bad life events. For instance, a nearly 30-year old study found that paraplegics were not that much less happy than lottery winners."

Wicked Thoughts has been putting up a lot of odd and amusing news items lately -- many proving once again that truth is stranger than fiction. The one on Microsoft and the EU really is amazing.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx talks of "dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff". My latest posting on "A scripture blog" asks what sort of Hell "gehenna" is.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/12/2005 07:12:00 PM

Friday, February 11, 2005

 
I would like to add my congratulations to those of the many who will be congratulating His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, on his recently-announced forthcoming marriage.




CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Leftists claim that there is no such thing as right and wrong because what is right in one culture may be wrong in another. And to Leftists all cultures are equal, of course. It is true that values do differ to some degree between cultures but there do also appear to be some inborn moral instincts. Blogger Turin pursues that point. Excerpt below:

The claims of cultural relativism rests upon two assumptions. The first assumption is that there no common human nature shared by all human beings. By human nature is meant a substantive constitution of mind and body that is uniform in all humans across racial, ethnic, cultural, and political groupings. If human nature were to exist, some values would arise out of it, as humans operationalized their human nature in living in diverse conditions; and these values would the same for all humans. This notion is denied by the principle of cultural relativism. The concept of human nature lies behind the opposition of the anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn, to cultural relativity, as expressed in this quotation:

"Contrary to the statements of ... exponents of extreme cultural relativity, standards and values are not completely relative to the cultures from which they derive. Some values are as much givens in human life as the fact that bodies of certain densities fall under specified conditions. These are founded, in part, upon the fundamental biological similarities of all human beings. They arise also out of the circumstance that human existence is invariably a social existence. No society has ever approved suffering as a a good thing in itself. As a means to an end (purification or self-discipline), yes; as punishment--as a means to the ends of society, yes. But for itself--no. No culture fails to put a negative valuation upon killing, indiscriminate lying, and stealing within the in-group. There are important variations, to be sure, in the conception of the extent of the in-group and in the limits of toleration of lying and stealing under certain conditions. But in the core notion of the desirable and nondesirable is constant across all cultures. Nor need we dispute the universality of the conception that rape or any achievement of sexuality by violent means is disapproved. This is a fact of observation as much as the fact that different materials have different specific gravities."

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ELSEWHERE

Aha! We now have an independent report of what CNN Chief Eason Jordan said at Davos. He DID make a scurrilous accusation against American troops but immediately started to backpedal when what he said came under scrutiny. Should anyone trust a "news" organization headed by such a sleaze? I think that question answers itself.

It has always been a common Leftist tactic to take some single thing out of context and draw amazing conclusions from it that ignore all the other facts relevant to the matter. And The Guardian really does us proud with this example of such totally dishonest and deceptive argument -- written by Neil Clark, who is said to be "a writer and broadcaster specialising in east European affairs". I am sure he is just that, regrettably. Tim Worstall goes to the trouble of demolishing the sorry tripe concerned.

Offensive peacenik feels the heat: "Some Sacramento residents are reacting with outrage over a homeowner's controversial war protest in Land Park. When they saw the American soldier display, they decided to do something about it.... What got people so upset? A fake U.S. soldier in uniform hung by the neck with a noose, with a sign on it that says "your tax dollars at work." .... This young man, who would not identify himself, was just walking down the street when he decided he had seen enough. He climbed onto the house and tore down part of the display..... Another man was riding his motorcycle when he decided to stop and do something about the rest of the display, the soldier's hanging pants. So he took them down, and grabbed the torso and took off."

A small but welcome step towards immigration control: "Hoping to keep drivers licenses out of the hands of terrorists, the House voted Thursday to make states verify that applicants are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants. Republicans pushed the measure through on a 261-161 vote despite protests from governors and state motor vehicle departments that it would be too costly and would require them to take on the role of immigration officers. The bill also would make it easier for judges to deport immigrants seeking political asylum if they think they might be terrorists."

They got the America-hating bitch: "veteran civil rights lawyer was convicted Thursday of crossing the line by smuggling messages of violence from one of her jailed clients - a radical Egyptian sheik - to his terrorist disciples on the outside. The jury deliberated 13 days over the past month before convicting Lynne Stewart, 65, a firebrand, left-wing activist known for representing radicals and revolutionaries in her 30 years on the New York legal scene.

Leftists: Masters of empty rhetoric: "The Virginia Senate yesterday approved a constitutional amendment that defines traditional marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The Senate voted 30-10 to pass the amendment after an emotional 30-minute debate during which several Democrats likened the measure to the Holocaust" [normal marriage = mass-murder?]

Corrupt Russia (so what else is new?) "Russia's political class has amassed as much wealth as power under President Vladimir Putin, according to a new 'rich list' published yesterday. In revelations which will outrage many pensioners, who have recently campaigned against welfare cuts, Finance magazine reported that three regional presidents, 20 MPs, 11 senators, a regional governor and a deputy regional governor were among the country's 468 wealthiest individuals."

There is an amazing document by a psychologist here that "examines 155 scholarly investigations: 126 empirical studies and 29 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 116,000". So much for the automatic "blame the man" one hears.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes again Marx's contempt for democracy. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at the NT conception of "hades".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************
posted by JR 2/11/2005 06:42:00 PM

Thursday, February 10, 2005

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

The American economy: is the current account deficit a problem? America's current account deficits are really symptoms of dangerous economic undercurrents that will have to be confronted - the question is when
Great Depression: defending capitalism against anti-market myths, part II What really happened during the Great Depression?
Mr Brown's magical unemployment figures What the coming UK election tells us about Labour's record on jobs and taxes
Women of Iraq - rend your veils and begin Your shoe smacking! It was the night before the election in the land of Iraq, but all through the eastern seaboard bars Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy could be heard roaring, "President Bush your Iraq policies are a catastrophic failure"

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

There is a huge new study of DNA just come out of the Stanford School of Medicine which showed that genetics is almost a perfect predictor of self-described race. See here. In other words whether you are black, white, Asian or Hispanic can clearly be seen in your genes. It certainly knocks on the head the Leftist idea that race is a "social construct". And it's not the first DNA study to identify normal racial categories in the genes. There was a 2002 Yale University study that found the same thing. See here. So realism about race is not an ideology. It is just scientific truth. Anybody who ever thought all races were the same was always battling against the evidence though. It is race-equality that is the ideology.

Hate-filled Leftist professor Ward Churchill is living proof that Leftists mean it when they say there is no such thing as truth. There is certainly no such thing as truth in what he writes. Full details of his blatant lies about American history here

Fabulous: An arrogant bureaucrat being sued for manslaughter: "A council architect was responsible for causing Britain�s biggest outbreak of legionnaires� disease which killed seven and infected 172 others, Preston Crown Court was told yesterday. Gillian Beckingham, 47, a middle-ranking executive for Barrow-in-Furness council, cancelled a maintenance contract governing the air-conditioning system of Forum 28, the town�s main arts centre.

Frogs rediscover work: "Much of France was due to bid farewell to its guaranteed short working week last night with parliament set to pass an unpopular labour reform bill that is feeding discontent with the Government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Mr Raffarin insisted yesterday that big protest marches at the weekend would not divert his drive to undo the compulsory maximum 35-hour week, the measure that was the prime legacy of the previous socialist government. The new legislation will allow people to work up to 48 hours a week if they and their employers agree."

Stupid Europeans again: "On January 28 the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced that the U.S. government will raise tariffs on European yogurt, cheese, fruit, vegetables, and spices in retaliation for increased European Union tariffs on American brown rice... Thus the higher EU tariffs on American rice will harm not only the narrow segment of rice producers as perhaps intended by the EU Commission, but also innumerable European consumers of rice, European producers in other markets, and European workers"

From a review of Ann Coulter's book: "The most interesting and probably most valuable part of Treason is Coulter's analysis of the immediate postwar era. She says the problem was not that the Democrats were given insufficient proof of communist spies in their administration but that "they didn't give a damn". Soviet spies in the government most certainly were not, as the liberal-left continued to maintain, a figment of right-wing imaginations.... McCarthy's allegations that some 57 persons in government were communist spies or security risks in every instance proved to be entirely accurate.... In her final chapter, Coulter poses and answers the question: why do liberals hate America? She points out that the liberal-left, much of the media and of academia continue to support savages as against civilisation and to support intrinsic evil. She concludes that "the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is conservatives believe man was created in God's image while liberals believe they are God - liberals believe they can murder the unborn because they are gods".

Does Islamophobia exist? "The trouble with the idea is that it confuses hatred of, and discrimination against, Muslims on the one hand with criticism of Islam on the other. The charge of "Islamophobia" is all too often used not to highlight racism but to silence critics of Islam, or even Muslims fighting for reform of their communities. In reality, discrimination against Muslims is not as great as is often claimed. When making a film on Islamophobia for Channel 4, I discovered a huge gap between perception and reality"

Smokers, shareholders escape taxation-through-litigation: "The Competitive Enterprise Institute applauds today's court ruling against the federal government's tobacco racketeering suit. 'The federal government's lawsuit to squeeze $280 billion out of the tobacco industry was nothing more than an effort to milk a politically disfavored industry,' said Sam Kazman, general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 'Tobacco may be addictive, but tobacco money is even more addictive,' Kazman observed."

Lopsided moralizing: "The outrage at Lt. Gen. Mattis's comment is outright paradoxical, as well. On the one hand it suggests that there are no morally bad people at all and thus no joy may be experienced when one has helped rid the world of some of the worst such people, especially in the face of their relentless violent onslaught. On the other hand the outrage suggests that the likes of Lt. Gen. Mattis are evil people, deserving of scolding and rebuff. Well, you cannot have it both ways. Either there are evil folks and some so evil as to deserve killing under certain circumstances, or there are none, in which case those who have fun killing others simply need to be cured-they too aren't doing anything morally wrong".

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big range of reading

My latest posting on MarxWords notes how Marx wanted to hear bad news. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" asks: "Is there a Hell?

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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posted by JR 2/10/2005 07:43:00 PM

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

 
AMERICA GOING FASCIST?

Americans have a "Hunger for dictatorship"? Spare us!

Historically, American conservatism has always been isolationist. Isolationism is the translation into international politics of the basic conservative deal, "You leave me alone and I'll leave you alone". And that's why it has in the past always been Leftists or "Progressives" who have got American into foreign wars. So it is no surprise that America's interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have always had opponents on the Right as well as on the Left. Old habits die hard and the fact that war was decisively declared on America by a new and dangerous foe on 9/11/2001 has not found its way into some thick old heads. And Patrick Buchanan and his American Conservative magazine have been the principal advocates of an isolationism that is in reality simply no longer possible. The Islamic fruitcakes are NOT going to leave America alone if America keeps letting them do what they like.

So it is no surprise that The American Conservative has now joined the Left in a cry that America is "going Fascist" under GWB. The article is however written by co-editor Scott McConnell rather than by Buchanan. Buchanan knows his history far too well to write such historically naive stuff. And a knowledge of what Fascism actually was is important if the accusation of "fascism" is to be taken as being more than just the routine and mindless swear-word that it has become among Leftists. And McConnell does make some claim to historical sophistication in his article. He quotes Fritz Stern, a retired professor of history at Columbia. Here is the nub of what McConnell says about Stern's views:

Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a career exploring how what may have been Europe's most civilized country could have turned to barbarism. Central to his work was the notion that the readiness to abandon democracy has deep cultural roots in German soil and that many Europeans, not only Germans, yearned for the safeties and certainties of something like fascism well before the emergence of fascist parties. One could not come away from his classes without a sense of the fragility of democratic systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political circumstance could bring something else to the fore.

This account of Fascism in terms of national character is however a very tired old one and is one that probably owes more to Stern's (understandable) antipathy to Germany than anything more profound. The great weakness of the account is its mismatch to Italy. To argue that Germans longed for order and stability is at least plausible for such a phlegmatic and orderly people but Italians are fundamentally an anarchic, fractious and volatile lot. Insofar as there are national characteristics, Italians and Germans are just about as opposite as you can get. (Ask almost any Italian if you doubt it). Yet both nations went heavily for Fascism, with Italy leading the way. So to attribute Fascism to a particular national character is just mindless.

The plain fact of the matter is that the appeal of Fascism was just a slightly different mix of politics as usual. Fascism appealed to and claimed to represent the workers with its socialistic promises and it kept everyone else onside with the second string to its bow -- strident nationalism. There is nothing mysterious and unique about Fascism or its appeal. Socialism and nationalism appeal to lots of people to this day. The Fascists were just clever enough to combine big dollops of both.

So where does that leave the claim that America is "going Fascist"? Given the criticism (if not hatred) of America that is taught in most American schools and which also pours out daily from most of America's mass media, America is about as opposite to a Fascist state as you could imagine. Any Fascist state worth its salt would have knocked all that on the head years ago. In a Fascist State you would be hearing nothing but patriotic and nationalist propaganda in your media and in your schools. So America lacks even the first precondition for "going Fascist". Despite big efforts, George Bush cannot even get American schools to teach phonics, let alone nationalism.

There are other idiocies in the article but what's the point....?

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ELSEWHERE

The poor old Leftists. They haven't got a clue. In Sawicky's abuse-filled attack on Intapundit, he tries to say that mainstream Leftists are really decent guys not at all like the fruitcakes we are always hearing about on the American Left. But to prove his point he says that Michael Moore and Chomsky are geat men and ends his own post by saying that if he had had his way Saddam would still be in power! If that's the moderate Left, they all have a bit missing. Scott Campbell comments more extensively on Sawicky than I think he deserves.

What a dilemma for the Left! "During America's commemoration of Black History Month, some pro-life activists are charging that legalized abortion has led to a "black genocide" of more than 14 million unborn African-American babies. They condemn, in particular, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, whose president Gloria Feldt announced last week that she's resigning. "For every five African-American women who get pregnant, three have an abortion," Clenard Childress Jr., director of the Northeast Chapter of the Life Education And Resource Network, told the Cybercast News Service. "This is a horrific injustice to women, and it's decimating our communities.""

More good news from Iraq: "With a hero who gave his life for the elections, a revived national anthem blaring from car stereos and a greater willingness to help police, the public mood appears to be moving more clearly against the insurgency in Iraq, political and security officials said. In the week since national elections, police officers and Iraqi National Guardsmen said they have received more tips from the public, resulting in more arrests and greater effectiveness in their efforts to weaken the violent insurgency rocking the country".

There is a most interesting site here showing what real patriots were the Hollywood stars of yesteryear. Most of them were WW2 veterans. A great contrast with the utter lack of experience among the empty vessels of today.

One of the more laughable claims of the MSM is that they do fact-checking whereas bloggers do not. "Powerline" has recently given two powerful examples of just who it is that does the fact-checking. See here and here. If something suits MSM biases, it immediately needs no fact-checking, apparently.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes how Marx admitted to being deliberately ambiguous in what he said. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" says Jesus was a conservative insofar as he was political at all.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************


posted by JR 2/09/2005 09:09:00 PM

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I pick out what I think are my best posts for the week:

On Dissecting Leftism I point out that what the racist "Far Right" believe today is virtually the same as what Leftists once believed.

On Political Correctness Watch I note evidence against the Leftist claim that self-esteem is all-important for mental health

On Greenie Watch I note that Greenies are the new imperialists

On Education Watch I note academic double standards. Freedom of speech is only for Leftists.

On Socialized Medicine I note that huge savings in health care costs can come from improved efficiencies

On Gun Watch I note the idiocy of ballistic fingerprinting

On Leftists as Elitists I point out what an elitist Michael Moore is

On A scripture blog I ask was Jesus a Leftist?

On MarxWords I note that Marx referred to one of his "friends" as a "Jewish Nigger"

On Majority Rights I point out that the founder of modern conservatism was a Jew

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ELSEWHERE

V.D. Hanson has a good takedown on the crazy California Leftie Senator Boxer: "The senator once went after erstwhile rival Bruce Herschensohn, Senator Packwood, and Clarence Thomas for their purported sexual insensitivities-but urged forgiveness for President Clinton's more egregiously inappropriate conduct, whose preemptive bombing of Milosevic she supported despite the absence of either Senate or UN approval... Then Boxer proclaimed of the professed reason to go to war: "It was WMD period.". Boxer's statement was simply not true. Read the joint congressional declaration that was approved on October 11, 2002 by Senator Boxer's colleagues".

Greenie gets it right for once: "African leaders agreed bold plans at the weekend to preserve the world's second biggest rainforest area but Kenya's Nobel prize-winning environmentalist told them they would need to root out corruption to succeed. At a conference in Brazzaville, central African heads of state signed a treaty pledging to protect the forests of the Congo Basin from massive poaching and illegal or irresponsible logging which threaten the flora and fauna of the region".

This article shows what a crock the "mentally retarded" defence is. It mentions a murderer saved from executuion because of his low IQ. But his IQ has now risen substantially. IQ does not change much so the earlier low scores were just malingering.

How pesky for the Dems. Their great hero, FDR, seems to have wanted private savings accounts for Social Security purposes too: "Second, old-age benefits, including compulsory and voluntary annuities"

Protestor motivations: "Protesters shout about the tragedy of death in war, to be sure. But according to their own Godless worldviews, their reasons for opposing war are without foundation. Why would death or suffering be wrong or worth opposing if, according to atheism or materialistic science, it's been happening as a natural part of the bloody evolutionary process for millions of years?... D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, no friend of the Bush administration, nevertheless was quoted in the Washington Post as saying in so many words that these people make him very angry because they're "so selfish that they can't give him this one day." Often, when the police swarm in after things get especially rowdy, protesters will shout in exact unison the common canard, "These are our streets!" while they struggle mightily in the officers' clutches, perhaps attempting to reach into their pockets and present their deeds for the property. No, they're not your streets. They belong to all of us. Didn't your parents ever teach you to share? Rooted in that selfishness is an extreme closed-mindedness as well. They're convinced their opposition to war is just, but refuse to acknowledge that others feel the same way about defending their beliefs - and defending their nation from those who would do it harm".

The FCC backslides on unbundling: "The FCC has been one of the most rogue agencies in recent memory. Charged with writing regulations to carry out the will of Congress in the Telecom Act of 1996, the agency has been rebuked by the D.C. District Court no fewer then three times for writing regulations that flew directly in the face of the act's deregulatory intentions.... Finally this year, the commission seemed to get religion. In the last months of 2004, the commission made the correct decision on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), determining states could not regulate this transforming new technology.... In December, the FCC announced the results of its fourth attempt at network-sharing rules. Until recently, the assumption was that, chastened by the courts and driven by the free-market convictions of Chairman Michael Powell, the commission would do the right thing and quickly phase out line-sharing and unbundling regulations. But the FCC has backslid. Oddly, although the commission acknowledges the damage done by unbundling regulations, it can't resist leaving them in place for another year on mass-market lines and indefinitely on high-capacity lines used by businesses... It is unbelievable that almost a decade after the 1996 act, the FCC still has not carried it out."

My latest posting on MarxWords notes some more ferocious antisemitic abuse from Engels. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at texts which tend to show Jesus as a Leftist.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************


posted by JR 2/08/2005 07:32:00 PM

Monday, February 07, 2005

 
THE VALIDITY OF THE IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST

There are two articles here and here that summarize some research by Indian psychologist Mazharin Banaji on a "covert" measure of racism called the Implicit Associations Test (IAT). A common finding from use of the test is that all sorts of people are quicker to pair "good" words with whites and "bad" words with blacks. The most surprising thing about the test is that many people who are conspicuously anti-racist show the same quickness to associate good with white.

Finding "covert" measures of anything -- and racism in particular -- has long been a "holy grail" for psychologists and there have been some conspicuous failures in the quest. So is the IAT the holy grail? Sadly, No. The first thing a psychometrician asks about any test of anything is: Is it valid? -- meaning, does it measure what it purports to measure? But there is another question logically prior to that: What does it purport to measure? And the answer in this case seems to be straightforward: It purports to ascertain whether a person has prejudiced, negative or antagonistic attitudes towards various minorities. That being so, the test is obviously NOT valid. It is not valid on what psychologists call a "criterion groups" examination. And it is precisely the feature of interest in the IAT that lots of people who are by any criterion either non-racist or actively anti-racist get high scores on racism according to the test. So the IAT does NOT pick out non-racist or anti-racist people accurately.

So does the test measure anything? Anybody who is familiar with the stereotyping literature will find that easily answered. There have now been many decades of research into stereotyping and the findings about it are roughly the opposite of what is popularly believed. There are two literature surveys here and here which document that. The important point for our present purposes is that stereotypes have long been found to have a "kernel of truth", as Allport put it. Far from being rigid or fixed, they are highly responsive to modification through fresh information. They are our first and most immediate response to any new situation -- but to be useful, they also have to be continually modified as information about the situation comes in -- and they are.

So what the IAT findings show is that the experience white people have of blacks is generally negative. Whites know from experience or observation that blacks in general are (for instance) more dangerous to them. Given the enormously disproportionate incidence of violent crime among blacks, it would be a sad day indeed if no-one had noticed that. So what the IAT measures is EXPECTATIONS of blacks, not ATTITUDES to blacks. It shows what we see as most probable about blacks but tells us nothing about any more complex attitudes we may have towards blacks. So the IAT simply records our experience of reality without telling us anything about how we interpret that reality.

That view of the IAT also explains why even many blacks associate badness with blacks. Blacks are of course the most frequent victims of black crime (for instance). Since it is very common for whites to shun blacks in various ways (no eye contact etc.) however, many blacks will still have most positive associations with their own kind. And the IAT shows that too.

There is an academic review article here (PDF) which also fairly effectively undermines the claims of the IAT as a measure of racially biased attitudes. See also here for comments on another study using the IAT.

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ELSEWHERE

Amusing. Liberal Avenger noted my demonstration of his hypocrisy of two days ago but was completely unable to defend his stance. All he could manage was some ad hominem abuse. He said I must be "lonely". How typically Leftist! Abuse in lieu of rational argument. The emails I get from Leftists are dominated by abuse too. See LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS for the latest example.

Nepalling BBC ethics: "British Broadcasting Corporation's coverage of the recent developments in Nepal raises questions about ethics.... The anchor mentioned its Nepal stringer, Netra KC, by name. He also mentioned the fact that since telephone lines were disconnected in Nepal, KC was nipping across the border into India and making calls from there. Soon after that, there were unconfirmed reports that Netra KC had either gone into hiding or was missing. Today, an official intimation came from the International Federation of Journalists who issued a statement saying the president and general secretary of the Federation of Nepalese Journalists had been arrested. It further added that BBC representative Netra KC had also "disappeared" after being called to the army barracks in Nepalgunj. "The IFJ is calling for the international community to support our courageous Nepalese colleagues," the statement said. But if the report about KC is true, it raises questions about the BBC's ethics in disclosing the name and mode of operation of its representative in a country where emergency has been imposed and press freedom curtailed.

Farm sanity good for U.S., good for Oz: "Australian farmers could reap big dividends from the Bush administration's "monumental" decision to slash US farm subsidies in an effort to reduce Washington's budget deficit, Trade Minister Mark Vaile predicted last night. Deep cuts in US farm and commodity programs were expected in the new Bush administration budget, limiting subsidies to individual farmers that can run up to $US2 million ($2.588 million) a year to just $US250,000 in some cases. Mr Vaile last night hailed the proposal as a significant breakthrough for Australian farmers, but warned it would face strong resistance from the US farm lobby. "This is a very positive signal that the Bush administration is going to bite the bullet and go ahead with a reduction of farm subsidies," he told The Australian".

The pathetic Dutch: "In the Netherlands the national flag is now banned on most schools. If a student wears the national flag of his own country he will be suspended or expelled from school. The reason for this is that this provokes the immigrants (the muslims) and therefore it is considered discrimination if you wear your country's flag in your own country. Even people who have an bumpersticker whit the flag on their car are harassed and called a facist by the Muslims. Most schools also ban certain clothing like the Lonsdale brand and combat boots with white or red laces. This is also concidered a sign of racism. There are of course no restrictions for the immigrants on clothing."

This article by Mathias Dapfner, Chief of the huge German publisher, Axel Springer, shows that some Germans do get it. It is titled: "Europe, thy name is cowardice". Excerpt: "Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush. Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program. And now we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement... How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere? By suggesting that we really should have a "Muslim Holiday" in Germany.....These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewelry when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbor's house"

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx was paranoid about both Jews and Jesuits. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at arguments that Jesus was conservative.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************

posted by JR 2/07/2005 10:35:00 PM

Sunday, February 06, 2005

 
Today is Ronald Reagan's birthday. There is a fitting tribute to him here




SOME ECONOMICS

Ireland leads the way: "European nations have been lowering corporate-tax rates as they compete for foreign investment, pressuring the U.S. for similar cuts, the Wall Street Journal said, citing John Breaux, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana on a White House-backed tax-reform panel. Ireland cut its rate to 12.5 percent from 24 percent between 2000 and 2003, prompting European countries to make similar changes, the newspaper said. This month, the Netherlands lowered its corporate-tax rate by three percentage points to 31.5 percent, the newspaper said".

Are tax rates a factor in job growth and economic development? "Nevada, which does not levy a state corporate or individual income tax, has recorded the highest percentage employment growth in the U.S. for the second consecutive year. Coincidence? Total Nevada nonfarm payroll employment expanded 4.8 percent in 2004, according to data recently released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the expansion is heating up in Nevada. Last year's blistering employment growth was actually higher than in 2003 when Nevada's labor market led the nation at 3.9 percent. Capital investment isn't fleeing to Nevada because of all that water in the desert. The Golden State's labor market expanded at a much lower rate of 1.1 percent in 2004. Tax rates in Arkansas on capital investment are among the highest in the South. That state's job-creation rate barely budged last year while the U.S. economy created 2.2 million jobs."

A good tax reform idea: "A tax scheme that would address these problems is the savings-exempt income tax (SEI tax), an idea associated with British Nobel prize-winning economist, the late Professor James E. Meade. A savings-exempt income tax, as the name suggests, is a form of income tax where the tax is levied only on that part of income that is spent, exempting the part that is saved. Instead of paying 20 or 40 per cent on whatever you earned, you would pay a progressive rate of tax on whatever you spent".

Laffer must be laughing: "When the capital gains tax rate was at its maximum in the late 1970s, capital-gains tax receipts averaged slightly under $8 billion annually. From 1998 to 2002, the maximum capital-gains tax rate was approximately half the rate of the late 1970s, yet capital-gains tax revenues averaged 11 times higher ($88.6 billion per year), though the economy (nominally) was only 4 times larger."

There is a big research paper here (PDF) comparing many countries which shows that governments which offer most security to private property preside over the greatest economic growth and the highest income levels: "The institutional approach to growth is based on the idea that both the availability and productivity of resources will be influenced by the institutional and policy environment. While there is some debate about the exact characteristics of the institutions that are most appropriate for economic growth and prosperity, there is considerable agreement that secure property rights are crucial, and that the impediments to exchange must be minimal. Institutions and policies are reflective of government actions. To promote economic growth, governments must not only follow actions that are supportive of secure property rights and freedom of exchange, they must also make a convincing and credible commitment that the policies will be maintained in the future."

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ELSEWHERE

The following news item shows that the double standard about Communism and Fascism is still thriving right up to the present day in the socialistic EU: "A group of conservative European Union lawmakers from eastern Europe called Thursday for a ban on communist symbols, including the red star and the hammer and sickle, to match a proposed EU ban on the Nazi swastika. The group from Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic said the communist symbols should be included in any ban because of the suffering caused by Soviet-backed regimes in eastern Europe.... EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini has proposed a Europe-wide ban on display of the swastikas and other Nazi symbols as part of a campaign to combat anti-Semitism and intolerance... Frattini's spokesman, Friso Roscam Abbing, said the EU head office was not at this time pushing for a similar ban on communist symbols"

How absurd: "The preachers in England have fallen on hard times since they pretty much turned Jesus out of the church, but the archbishop of Canterbury has come up with a novel idea to make himself relevant: If you can't get 'em to church, get 'em to the greenhouse. The churches of England - the churches of the Church of England - are going eco-friendly. Dr. Rowan Williams wants his vicars to serve only organic bread and wine for holy communion, to urge parishioners to ride to service in car pools, recycle "waste products," and to sell only "fair trade products" at church fairs and Bingo suppers".

I agree with Deinonychus antirrhopus about firing the disgusting fraud Ward Churchill. If any conservative had said anything as offensive he would be on welfare for the rest of his life. I would link to Deinonychus antirrhopus more often except that it is too hard to spell. Perhaps I could just refer to him as "That Greek guy".

More Democrat hypocrisy: "In his State of the Union rebuttal, Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid attacked President Bush's call to allow younger workers to be allowed to voluntarily put a portion of their Social Security tax dollars into Personal Retirement Accounts. These accounts would be owned and controlled by workers, could be passed on to loved ones, and would most likely be invested in stocks and bonds. Sen. Reid said investing in such a manner is 'Social Security roulette.' If that is the case, Sen. Reid must think 'roulette' is a great way to save for retirement, considering he himself is heavily invested in stocks and bonds."

A Leftist who half gets it: "It is a week to do a liberal's heart good. The star of the show last week was Condoleezza Rice, a black woman. The chief supporting actor was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Jewish woman. The occasion was the ceremonial swearing in of Rice as U.S. secretary of state. Ginsburg is the Supreme Court justice who administered the oath. This week, if all goes as planned, Alberto Gonzales will win Senate approval to become our next attorney general. Gonzales is Hispanic and was born into poverty. And, ending yesterday, elections were held in Iraq. For these reasons, you'd expect liberals to be jumping up and down with joy. Don't liberals support diversity and racial equality? Don't liberals support free elections in other free nations? The answers are yes and yes. So why aren't we cheering? Well, in a small way, we are. No matter how you might suspect President George W. Bush's motives, you have to give him credit for his actions. He's done a marvelous job of putting minorities into positions of power. However, one could argue (and I do), that Rice and Gonzales are the wrong minorities."

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx abused a rival as a "Jewish nigger". My latest posting on "A scripture blog" notes more evidence from the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 6:4 that the Hebrew God was a single entity, not a trinity.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Communism

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************

posted by JR 2/06/2005 07:34:00 PM

Saturday, February 05, 2005

 
A SLIMY AVENGER

There is so much distortion and evasion on Left/liberal blogs that I mostly do not know where to start in commenting on it so I leave the job to other conservative bloggers. But in that spirit of loyalty to friends which I regard as a major conservative virtue, I am going to say something about an attack on Keith Burgess Jackson by Liberal Avenger. I am also moved to reply because the attack does illustrate something that is quite pervasive among Leftists -- slippery standards. Leftists have no fixed principles. If a principle suits their rhetorical needs of today they will proclaim their loyalty to it -- and then cheerfully adopt the opposite principle tomorrow if that happens to suit the rhetorical needs of that day.

Some context first: One of the most pervasive themes in Leftist apologetics is that good intentions are what really matters. Leftists go into paroxysms of condemnation of anybody who is or was a Nazi but smile indulgently on people who were or are Communists. To conservatives, of course, both Communists and Nazis were brutal mass-murderers who deserve no exculpation. But what Leftists say is that Communists were really "idealistic" and "well-intentioned" so cannot be held to blame for anything. Their good intentions are all that matters in any evaluation of them. So it is perfectly proper to wear shirts emblazoned with images of the murderous Che Guevara but worthy of a fainting fit if anybody wears a swastika armband. So at the height of the Cold War the Soviet Communists were often referred to as being simply "liberals in a hurry". The obvious corollary -- that "liberals" are just slowed-down Communists -- tended not to be mentioned.

So what is Liberal Avenger's explanation of why the Left do not celebrate anything to do with the American intervention in Iraq? He says that only results count! He says that Leftists/liberals will only applaud the American intervention in Iraq when all the difficulties there have been overcome and it is a peaceful democracy with no more American troops on its soil. The good intentions of the Bush administration -- such as the removal of a Fascist dictator, the protection of America from possible WMDs and the promotion of democracy -- do not matter at all and are no cause for praise. What is cause for praise in Communists is justification for nothing more than abuse in George W. Bush. It would be hard to find a clearer example of fake principles.

*****************************

FROM BROOKES NEWS

The Great Depression - then and know It's 75 years later and our economic commentators still can't get their facts straight about the Great Depression
Condoleezza Rice branded a liar by journalist Eccleston's dishonest reporting on Condoleezza Rice has exposed him as a political bigot and a malicious liar
Elian raid excessive-force case begins `It wasn't Juan Miguel who wanted Elian back,' says Elian's uncle Lazaro in the indispensable book Unvanquished, by Enrique Encinosa. `It was Fidel.' And the media made sure he got him.
High taxes cripple economic growth Conservatives tend to instinctively realise that tax cuts stimulate savings and production. On the other hand, their opponents fully grasp that significant tax cuts weaken their power to bribe and punish
The gateway to the soul Greens and so-called progressives would tax and regulate Europe into abject poverty
Great Depression: defending capitalism against anti-market myths, part I Free market economics did not deepen and prolong the Great Depression - Hoover and Roosevelt did that
Associated Press put terrorist collaborators on its payroll We now have evidence that Associated Press has been collaborating with terrorists in Iraq

Details here

*************************************

ELSEWHERE

The psychopathic Left: ""Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing." -- Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005. It took a Polish rescuer of Jews in the Holocaust, cited this week 60 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp, to best describe those people who cannot or refuse to know the difference between good and evil. They are "worth nothing." Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil, the Left has either been neutral toward or actively supported evil. The Left could not identify communism as evil; has been neutral toward or actually supported the anti-democratic pro-terrorist Palestinians against the liberal democracy called Israel; and has found it impossible to support the war for democracy and against an Arab/Muslim enemy in Iraq as evil as any fascist the Left ever claimed to hate... About 60 percent of the Iraqi people went to vote despite the fact that every Iraqi voter risked his or her life and the lives of their children, whose throats the Islamic fascists threatened to slit. Yet, the Left continues to label the war for Iraqi democracy "immoral" while praising the tyrant of Cuba. Leftists do so for the same reason they admired Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung and condemned American arms as the greatest threat to world peace during and after the Cold War. The Left "does not know the difference between good and evil." And that is why it is worth nothing.

The put-down of the Iraq elections as similar to the 1967 Vietnam elections seems to have been grabbed as a liferaft by Leftists all over the place. I thought my post of 3rd demolished the comparison in double-quick time but if you want a really comprehensive demolition of the comparison, read Christopher Hitchens on the subject.

Capitalism is more moral: "I suggested that the application of the force needed to redistribute wealth and to enforce "positive (welfare) rights" inherent in socialist policies was what made socialism highly immoral. Of course a capitalist society uses force too, but it is a force that protects negative (Lockean) rights (such as enforcing business contracts and protecting citizens from arbitrary state intervention), so it affects only those who do not respect the freedom of others. Capitalism, I explained, is not only good for an economy; more important, it is also morally good for the whole society, which is why capitalism is sustainable and why it works as well as it does"

I deliberately did not blog on President Bush's SOTU yesterday as I knew that the rest of the blogosphere would be all over it but Taranto says most of what I would have said anyway. I did however jib at this statement of his about GWB: "If he has a successful second term, he will probably rank as the most consequential president since FDR". To my mind Ronald Reagan was the most consequential President since Washington! I suppose that view of Reagan will get me labelled as a "Cold Warrior" but I will wear that badge with pride any day. I have been appalled by the brutality of Communism since I was 13 -- and that was 48 years ago.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx had a stereotypical view of Jews. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" notes more evidence from the Hebrew that Genesis 1:1 is a lot more vague than it at first seems.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************


posted by JR 2/05/2005 06:45:00 PM

Friday, February 04, 2005

 
ARE "THE FAR-RIGHT" SIMPLY OLD-FASHIONED LEFTISTS?

I seem to be doomed to challenging conventional ideas about the nature of the political spectrum -- most notably in that I often point out that Hitler was a Leftist. I also however, have done a thorough empirical examination (via survey research) of the libertarian idea that the political spectrum is two dimensional -- and found that the evidence is against that as well. I now think I have a third rebellion to undertake. I think that the term "Far Right" is a misnomer altogether. The Far Right certainly does not describe Hitler and the Fascists but I don't think it even describes accurately the present-day racist groups who tend to attract that label. I think that the people so called are only another flavour of the Far Left. The so-called Far Right may say that they are against "Jews" whereas the Far Left say they are against "Zionists" but both are talking about essentially the same people. And even the "Anti-Zionist" mask of the Left tends to slip rather readily to reveal the real Jew-hatred underneath.

I am of course far from original in noting that there are very considerable similarities between the present-day Far Right and Far Left in what they say. When I have the stomach for it, I do read bits of what both of them say -- and on many occasions what the two groups say seems virtually interchangeable. And both of course have the same rage-filled tone. And both see themselves as a Herrenvolk, to use Hitler's word ("Master people"). The justification that the Right give for their claimed superior status is racial whereas the Left claim (incredibly in view of their chronic rage) superior "compassion". But both see themselves as a misunderstood elite and as victims of conspiracies against them. It certainly shows Hitler's cleverness in claiming BOTH greater compassion and racial superiority. He got the full range of nuts on his side that way. What I see is that the alleged Far Right are in fact simply old-fashioned Leftists -- Leftists who have been stranded by history, if you like. What they believe would have made them normal Leftists in the early 20th and late 19th centuries. There is certainly nothing that they believe that cannot be found in Marx & Engels -- even the call for racial unity is there and Engels was very nationalist and a believer in racial superiority. And of course Marx was vehement in his hatred of Jews.

And the Chomsky-like disrespect for facts is there in the "Rightists" too. A recent personal experience of mine illustrated that rather vividly for me: As well as posting to my own blogs, I also post to Majority Rights, which attracts frequent comments from vehement Far Rightists who constantly rave on about Jews. Being an awful tease, I posted something there recently under the heading "The neocons were right!" To both Far Left and Far Right, "neocons" = "Jews" so I expected eruptions in the comments boxes and I got them. And one of the eruptions was this: "Ray and Schwarz share an employer: David Horowitz Frontpage magazine"

Old guy though I am, I was still amazed that a lie could be so immediate, blatant, unfounded and shameless. For the record, David Horowitz has never paid me a cent, though in the last 12 months or so I have donated several times to appeals he has sent out in aid of his various causes. So rather than David paying me, I pay HIM! Just as Chomsky and his ilk do, however, my "Rightist" critic has taken a fact and distorted it. He sees deep meaning in the fact that David Horowitz did on five occasions in 2002 and 2003 publish articles that I wrote and then submitted to him. The idea that David had to pay me to write what I did is a laugh, though. We academics are thoroughly used to not being paid a cent for our writings and so it was with the articles I submitted to David Horowitz. So I don't think that even the remarkably inventive U.S. Supreme Court would be able to use any of that to deduce that David is or was in any sense my "employer".

I used to think that the "Far Right" differed from the Fascists and Communists in being anti-socialist. But when it comes to actual policy that is just not true. The "Far Right" are as heavily into autarky (national self-sufficiency) and against free-trade as the Fascists and Communists are. Both are thoroughly paternalistic economically.

I think the conclusion that I draw from it all is a very basic conservative one: All theories about society are oversimplifications and hence wrong but there is a great need that many people feel for oversimplifications and the the Left caters to that. So the oversimplifiers are all Leftists in the end, regardless of what their starting point may be and regardless of any claims to the contrary. And all the groups concerned seem to agree that if the facts don't suit the oversimplification, change the facts!

An important implication of what I am saying is that I don't think there CAN BE such a thing as an extreme conservative. Extremes are for theorists and conservatives are people whose modus operandi is to go by what can be shown to work for the good of people over the long haul, rather than going by any theories. And I just don't see how you can be extreme about that. So my (slightly) revisionist view of the political spectrum is that it has conservatives at one end and a motley assortment of dreamers at the other.

*************************

ELSEWHERE

The "cowboys" were right! "The European Union has abandoned its target of becoming the world's most dynamic economy by the end of the decade, and instead adopted as its next "big project" a less ambitious programme aimed at cutting the Continent's massive unemployment. The European Commission's new economic strategy, which promotes deregulation and free markets, draws heavily on the experience of Britain, the EU's most successful large economy. It marks a sharp change of tack for the Commission, the EU's executive body, which previously put more priority on social protection, as demanded by countries such as France and Germany.... The report suggests reducing regulations on business and deepening the single European market by reducing barriers to trade in services.... Socialist leaders in the European Parliament complained that it was "mimicking the American approach"."

The "cowboys" win again: "The productivity of American workers, the critical component for rising living standards, increased by 4.1 percent in 2004, capping a remarkable three-year period in which worker efficiency climbed at the fastest pace in a half century"

Libertarian Girl notes some research findings which show that the brain is not fully mature until age 25. Sure suggests some thoughts about youthful radicalism, doesn't it? Libertarian Girl also has some very sensible comments about the need for libertarians to be more inclusive and less fanatical. She's got brains as well as beauty, that girl.

Nathan Tabor has the story of the Leftist attack on Sinclair Broadcasting -- demonstrating the usual Leftist "tolerance" and respect for free speech, of course.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes how Marx celebrated the death of a relative. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Old Testament references to God in the plural.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************


posted by JR 2/04/2005 08:47:00 PM

Thursday, February 03, 2005

 
SOME ECONOMICS

Economic freedom greatest in middle America: "If you want to start a business but are not sure where to set up shop, should you head for a vibrant megalopolis like New York City? A nucleus of brainpower and venture capital like Silicon Valley? Or a city of flamboyant creativity like Miami? Actually, whether you're writing software or whipping up candy bars, chances are you would be better off in Kansas, according to The U.S. Economic Freedom Index: 2004 Report, published by the Pacific Research Institute and Forbes magazine. The report says Kansas is the state with the greatest level of economic freedom in the country, as measured by tax rates, business regulation, the behavior of the courts, and how the government spends its money."

America is not facing an unavoidable energy shortage: "The year 2004 will be remembered as a year of high prices for gasoline and natural gas, and Americans are understandably worried about the cost of energy for 2005 and beyond. But the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released a preliminary version of its Annual Energy Outlook 2005, and it paints a surprisingly optimistic picture for the decades ahead. With regard to petroleum, EIA acknowledges that global demand will remain strong, especially with China's growing need for motor fuels unlikely to subside. Nonetheless, the report does not predict runaway prices."

There is a very well-researched article here which shows that countries with British legal traditions do a lot better economically than countries which use French-based law.

In-sourcing to America. The Chinese invest in America too: "many local officials in the US are jockeying for position to win Chinese investments. Massachusetts officials, besides trying to secure investments in the fishing business, think the area is ripe for investments in medical products and pharmaceuticals. "Ultimately as they bring their products over here and need the full licensing and permitting that is required on the high-tech end of things, Massachusetts is the logical landing spot [because of the presence of legal personnel who can take care of it]," says Julian Muennich, treasurer of the Massachusetts International Trade Council. Last week, Philadelphia officials met with a Chinese delegation in New York for the Chinabrand 2005 expo. They talked about the city's educational facilities and an upcoming extravaganza called the Splendor of China, which will attract 400 Chinese companies to the city"

Federalism beats Oregon: "The McDonald's restaurant in Hermiston, Oregon is outsourcing customers drive-thru meals to North Dakota. The restaurant on Highway 395 has outsourced one of the most important jobs at the drive-through window -- order taking. When a customer drives through, they'll be patched through to Grand Forks, North Dakota to place the order. Why? Because the minimum wage in North Dakota is five-dollars and 15 cents, compared to Oregon's seven-dollars and 25 cents".

Rafe Champion has up some interesting histories of economists who deserved to have more notice taken of them.

Canadian farmers are taking action over the way their livelihood and lifestyle is being destroyed by ever-multiplying government regulations.

Government hurts family businesses: "Conservatives who believe in both tradition and the free market sometimes have struggles within their heart when they see Mom and Pop shutter their hardware store on Main Street in the massive shadow of a Goliath Home Depot. Family business is good for the family and the community, but can we really overturn the 'election' results when consumers vote with their dollars for Megacorp? On top of that, providing a greater selection of goods for lower prices frees up more capital in a community, providing an opportunity for new stores or businesses to come in and compete for that leftover cash."

*********************************

ELSEWHERE

Wishful thinking at work? The Guardian was one of the newspapers taken in by the "captured soldier" hoax. There is a wiser version of the story here. Powerline has some acerbic comments. There is a picture of the toy here

The Guardian has also at last found a way of putting an anti-U.S. spin on the Iraqi election turnout. They say that the turnout in the 1967 South Vietnam election was good too. From that they somehow manage to deduce that both the Vietnamese and the Iraqis really hate America! Would it not be just a tad simpler to conclude that BOTH the Iraqis and the Vietnamese want democracy but that the Vietnamese didn't get it? And why did they not get it? Because a peacenik U.S. Congress cut off aid to the South Vietnamese while Russia and China did NOT cut off aid to North Vietnam. There is nothing like that happening in Iraq today. TCS has some interesting comments on the matter too.

Isn't welfare wonderful? "The number of people out of work in Germany has risen above five million for the first time since reunification in 1990, the Government is expected to announce today. The rate of unemployment is likely to exceed 11 per cent, heaping pressure on the Government of Gerhard Schroeder, the Chancellor, to speed up the pace of reform to kickstart the country's faltering economy".

That's democracy: "A quarter of a century after Saddam Hussein executed its leaders and drove their comrades underground or into exile the Iraqi Communist party has resurfaced and looks set to make a respectable showing once votes are counted in Sunday's elections"

Tom Wolfe says that America's intervention in Iraq is part of a long line of American interventions abroad -- most which were in fact under Left-leaning Presidents. A good quote from the very popular Theodore Roosevelt (founder of the "Progressive" party) in 1904: ""The steady aim of this nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. ...Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. ...The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. ... The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right cannot be divorced." Very much like GWB's recent inaugural address.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big range of select reading.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx despised the Russians. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at "In the beginning" in both Greek and Hebrew.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************


posted by JR 2/03/2005 06:54:00 PM

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

 
THE IRAQ ELECTIONS

Email about the election from an Iraqi doctor now living in America: "We have always known that the media has portrayed the Iraq liberation unfairly. On Jan , 14 , 2005 I gave my presidentail talk at the Louisiana Surgical Association: "Mesopotamia: The cradle nof civilization: From Hammurabi to Saddam and beyond". I clearly illustrated not just the negative side of the war but also the positive side of Iraqi liberation. I informed my friends at the meeting that that 80-85 % of Iraqis are very grateful to this nation for terminating Saddam and for staying the course so that the Iraqi people will establish a free, Federal and pluralistic government !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am glad to see that Iraqis very bravely went to the polls to let the world know that we are indeed grateful to the Americans and the British and to show our respect for our men and women in uniform ... etc. Iraqi success will bring a significant change in the Middle East".

Is this the biggest bit of bulldust ever? "World leaders have praised the conduct of Iraq's first multi-party elections for more than 50 years. ... French President Jacques Chirac described them as a "great success for the international community". [I kind of thought it was a great success for AMERICA!].

After the election turnout ordinary Iraqis now have a victory: "The Iraqis now have their heroic story of resistance. Americans could not vote for them. We could not walk down Iraq's most dangerous highway in their place. Iraqis seized their own future. They have their narrative, their symbols, their victory..... the heroic effort of millions of Iraqis to un-pry the clenched fists of murderers is the stuff nations are built on"

We won! "The news from Iraq is spectacularly good: local authorities estimate almost 75 percent of the electorate has voted. This is a triumph for every Iraqi, for America, for the Muslim world -- indeed, for the whole world. But it is a particular victory for an exceedingly small group in Washington: those who maintained confidence in the appeal of democracy, in the commonsense and intelligence of the Iraqis, and in the correctness of the path taken by President George W. Bush to Baghdad and beyond. As stated, the group of non-Iraqis in America entitled to exult is tiny: it consists of President Bush himself, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, certain other members of the cabinet and defense establishment, and a highly exclusive media list: Bill Kristol and crew at The Weekly Standard, myself and some others writing on TCS and a handful of other publications".

Michelle Malkin summarizes: "With the exception of Sullivan, the top bloggers on the left side of the blogosphere have decided to mark this historic day by hiding under their bedcovers. As of 1:45pm EST today, Talking Points Memo is silent on the Iraqi elections. Atrios is silent on the Iraqi elections. Crooked Timber is silent on the Iraqi elections. And Daily Kos has one post today from "Armando," who sneered: "This Election is simply, in my estimation, an exercise in pretty pictures.""

Leftists: The new party of the status quo: "There was a time when liberals would cheer at the prospect of freedom and democracy in places long under the stench of oppression. Today, any attempts to right past wrongs and free men from tyranny are looked on with scorn. Yesterday's idealistic liberals are today's realists; preferring the `stability' of dictators to the spread of democracy. They are fearful of asserting themselves on the world stage without the approval of the United Nations. They refuse to judge other cultures but are quick to judge American actions as immoral".

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ELSEWHERE

Australia's Leftist leader opposes abortion: "Kim Beazley has publicly declared his opposition to abortion, sparking concern and division among pro-choice ALP MPs as a powerful bipartisan pro-life coalition entered the fray for the first time. In a clear shift from former leader Mark Latham's pro-choice stance on abortion, Mr Beazley said he did not support applying criminal sanctions, backing greater support and education for women. Mr Beazley, a committed Christian, described his view yesterday as a personal "moral stance" and strongly rejected any moves to criminalise abortion for women.

There is a very detailed article here showing that it was the American media that won the Vietnam war for the Communists.

Soviet America? "Every parent in America should be made aware of a presidential initiative called the "New Freedom Commission on Mental Health." This commission issued a report last year calling for the mandatory mental health screening of American schoolchildren, meaning millions of kids will be forced to undergo psychiatric screening whether their parents consent or not. At issue is the fundamental right of parents to decide what medical treatment is appropriate for their children. Forced mental health screening simply has no place in a free or decent society. The government does not own you or your kids, and it has no legitimate authority to interfere in your family's intimate health matters. Psychiatric diagnoses are inherently subjective, and the drugs regularly prescribed produce serious side effects, especially in children's developing brains. The bottom line is that mental health issues are a matter for parents, children, and their doctors, not government".

Blacks above the law? "The NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, is refusing to cooperate with an IRS investigation into whether its chairman made an improper political speech, charging that the timing of the probe was itself politically motivated. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said in October that the group's tax-exempt status was under review after its chairman, Julian Bond, gave a speech that criticized President Bush. In a letter to the IRS on Thursday, NAACP attorneys said the group will not hand over documents requested in the probe ..... The IRS has said it's probing about 60 charities, churches and other tax-exempt groups for potentially breaking federal rules that bar them from participating in political activity".

The New Victorians is an interest group that might be of interest to some of my readers. I am myself a member. I have always said that the people of the Victorian era had a lot of things right -- things that modern-day society gets wrong -- such as making a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

I know I should not give a fruitloop a link but I cannot help being amused that the blogger who runs a Leftist imitation of this site has not yet figured out how to put his archive links on a separate page, as I do.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx had the typical antisemite's deep suspicion of "Jewish bankers". My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Isaiah 43:10 -- "Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************

posted by JR 2/02/2005 10:07:00 PM

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I pick out what I think are my best posts for the week:

On Dissecting Leftism I noted that Einstein was a Marxist.

On Political Correctness Watch I posted an email from the Deep South which says that conservatives treat women better

On Greenie Watch I have laugh at the latest Greenie whale research

On Education Watch I look at "thought crime" in academe

On Socialized Medicine I look at the mess that is the California medical system

On Gun Watch I look at the sad history of gun regulation in Britain

On Leftists as Elitists I posted an article that shows an incredibly hostile attitude to ordinary people

On Marx Words I note that Marx favoured race war

On A scripture blog I refute an "irrefutable" proof of the Trinity doctrine (based on John 1:3)

On Majority Rights I posted an email that started a big discussion about causes of the holocaust.

*************************************

ELSEWHERE

Spartac.us has a good roundup of Left and Right reactions to the Iraq elections. Some prime examples of Leftist carping, of course. There's even a lonely Massachusetts blogger who is celebrating the turnout. And, would you believe? Arab broadcasters were more positive in their coverage of the elections than the German ones were!" They're sick puppies over there in Germany.

Random Observations has an interesting angle on the claim that U.S. policy is run by the "neocons"

The world's leading dissident? "Shortly after his re-election, President Bush met with former Soviet dissident and now Israeli Cabinet Minister Natan Sharansky. Bush has read Sharansky's The Case for Democracy, as have several of his Cabinet members, including incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. For his part, Sharansky called President Bush, 'The world's leading dissident.' Now that is a compliment!"

Sowell on MSM bias: "There are still people in the mainstream media who profess bewilderment that they are accused of being biased. But you need to look no further than reporting on the war in Iraq to see the bias staring you in the face, day after day, on the front page of The New York Times and in much of the rest of the media. If a battle ends with Americans killing a hundred guerrillas and terrorists, while sustaining 10 fatalities, that is an American victory. But not in the mainstream media. The headline is more likely to read: "Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq." This kind of journalism can turn victory into defeat.... there is the mainstream media's almost exclusive focus on American casualties in Iraq, with little or no attention to the often much larger casualties inflicted on the enemy. Since terrorists are pouring into Iraq in response to calls from international terrorist networks, the number of those killed is especially important, for these are people who will no longer be around to launch more attacks on American soil. With all the turmoil and bloodshed in Iraq, military and civilian people returning from that country are increasingly expressing amazement at the difference between what they have seen and the one-sided picture that the media present to the public here".

There is an article here which shows that the "evil" power companies during the 2000/2001 California electricity shortage were actually the heroes of the day -- running their plant at destructive levels in an attempt to meet demand. The real culprits were the Greenies and the politicians: "Deregulation was sold to the public as a way to lower electricity bills to consumers. But one of the reasons that deregulation unraveled was that California's monopoly utilities had to recover their unpaid sunk costs, called "stranded assets," for nuclear power plants besieged by environmental lawsuits and over-market subsidies for renewable energy plants (e.g., solar, wind, biomass). And municipalities wanted to siphon electricity ratepayer's monies off to retrofit old polluting power plants or build new peaker plants.... How much the restrictions on flows for the protection of salmon runs may have had a bearing on the plunge in hydropower remains uncertain, but many such restrictions kicked-in around 1999-2000".

California shiftiness: "California politicians love to gripe about how the state gets shorted by the federal government. Those complaints sound peculiar against the background of some recent news. Over the last three years, the state Department of Health Services has received about $100 million in federal funds to fight bioterrorism, and officials there can't seem to account for it".

Wicked Thoughts is now a well-established humour blog but it may rise to new heights now that a daily item of odd news is being added to the jokes.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx was hostile to his own mother. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at passages which refer to Jesus as being "worshipped"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

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posted by JR 2/01/2005 07:10:00 PM