Tuesday, February 28, 2006

 
STALINISM STILL LIVES AMONG AMERICAN "LIBERALS"

Stalin of course said that there was perfect freedom of speech in Russia -- as long as people agreed with him

A friend of mine took his young daughter to visit the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, explaining to her that the place is important because years ago it sold books no other store would - even, perhaps especially, books whose ideas many people found offensive. So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he didn't really mind seeing piles of Churchill's books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in.

However, it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed English translation of Oriana Fallaci's new book, "The Force of Reason," might finally be available, and that because Fallaci's militant stance against Islamic militants offends so many people, a store committed to selling banned books would be the perfect place to buy it. So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was in yet.

"No," snapped the clerk. "We don't carry books by fascists."

Now let's just savor the absurd details of this for a minute. City Lights has a long and proud history of supporting banned authors - owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted (and acquitted) for obscenity in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and a photo at the bookstore showed Ferlinghetti proudly posing next to a sign reading "banned books."

Yet his store won't carry, of all people, Fallaci, who is not only being sued in Italy for insulting religion because of her latest book but continues to fight the good fight against those who think that the appropriate response to offensive books and cartoons is violent riots. It's particularly repugnant that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by a snotty San Francisco clerk.....

Strangest of all is the scenario of such a person disliking an author for defending Western civilization against radical Islam - when one of the first things those poor, persecuted Islamists would do, if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the United States, is crush suspected homosexuals like him beneath walls.... The store's website proudly declares that the place is "known for our commitment to freedom of expression".

More here. (HT Augean Stables)

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Google have just introduced the trial (beta) version of a new facility called Google Pages. It is yet another facility that claims to make it easy to create your own home page without your needing to know any html etc. It appears to be in a very rough state at the moment, however. About all I could find that I could usefully do with it was to upload and store images there. The image above comes down from my site there. I hope they allow a bit of bandwidth or the image will NOT come down. They are very generous with diskspace so I hope the same applies to bandwidth. Yes. I do know about photobucket. I have got my most sickening image stored there. See below:



Should Wal-Mart reduce wages? : "Legislators who take orders (and favors) from Wal-Mart's rivals hope their meddling will raise Wal-Mart's labor costs and thus render the company less competitive. But this is a delusion. The whole burden will be borne by workers and by those forced into less-desirable work (or none). Maryland's mandate does not compel Wal-Mart to spend a dollar more on employee compensation. All it demands is that Wal-Mart pays no more than 92 percent of compensation as wages (or non-health benefits). Compelling Wal-Mart employees to accept a larger fraction of their pay in the form of health insurance rather than cash is a particularly bad deal for housewives and students, who are usually covered under Dad's family plan. It is also a bad deal for seniors covered by Medicare. The law injures actual and potential Wal-Mart employees in Maryland, particularly housewives, students and seniors seeking relatively easy part-time work."

There is an interesting site called "Union Facts". They say that "Union leaders have abused the trust of their members. They've misspent member dues and harmed the very same people they promise to protect. The Center for Union Facts has gathered a wealth of information about the size, scope, political activities, and criminal activity of the labor movement in the United States of America". A fact I particularly liked is this one: "Workers at Wal-Mart stores in Ontario earn higher wages than workers at UFCW-represented Real Canadian Super Stores"

Media scum: "Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven." Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends. Yet no major French newspaper carried the story."



Why Summers fell: "Harvard's 27th president announced his resignation last week, but Lawrence Summers's fall from grace actually began on Oct. 26, 2001, less than four months after his presidency began. That was the date on which he addressed the annual public service awards banquest at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and had the temerity to speak favorably of American patriotism -- and, even more audaciously, to express admiration for the men and women who serve in the US armed forces. Patriotism is a word "used too infrequently" on campuses like Harvard's, Summers said, and too many academics regard those who wear the uniform with ''disaffection." He stressed "the importance of clearly expressing our respect and support for the military," and pointedly voiced the "hope that when you have this award next year, among those who will be recognized will be those who have served our country in uniform. . . . [W]e need to remember that of all the kinds of public service, there is a special nobility, a special grace, to those who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for our country." .... Harvard's motto is "Veritas," Latin for "truth." But at Harvard, as in much of academia, ideology, not truth, is the highest value"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/28/2006 09:16:00 PM

Monday, February 27, 2006

 
MIKE TREMOGLIE SUMS UP THE PORTS NONSENSE

The "Washington Post" headline sounded the clarion call that Arabs are "poised to take over significant operations at six American ports."..... This was all very confusing to me. As a Philadelphian who used to live near the waterfront, knew people who worked there and would occasionally watch ships unload, I knew that the port was controlled by the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority (PRPA) - not by any one company.....

It seems the facts are quite different from the hysteria. I asked the port authority to explain what will happen after DPW buys P&O. According to Joe Menta, communications director for the PRPA, what this sale means to Philadelphia is that Dubai Ports will acquire half interest in a firm that loads and unloads ships at one terminal - Tioga Marine. Little or no container cargo passes through this terminal, primarily used for the fruit trade. Menta explained the structure of the port of Philadelphia. It's controlled by the PRPA, an independent entity of the state. PRPA owns several terminals on the waterfront. It leases these terminals to private operators who are primarily responsible for arranging the loading and unloading of cargo.

Arabs will own or control no part of the port itself. The only Arab influence will be on the appointments of some of the board members of the stevedoring firm. This is quite different from the image of Arabs controlling the port. The idea that Dubai Ports World will be determining who comes, who goes, the number and type of ships, how and where they are unloaded and loaded, who's hired and the security for the entire port of Philadelphia is simply not true.

Ever since 9/11, the liberal mantra (which included even some Republicans) has been to chide Americans in general and the Bush administration specifically to be careful about stereotyping all Arabs and Muslims as terrorists. As recently as last week, Al Gore, while speaking in Saudi Arabia, said that the Bush administration had mistreated Arabs. Now, many of these same folks are now themselves stereotyping Arabs.... Many Democrats went from demanding constitutional rights for Arab terrorists in court to opposing Arab business owners buying a share of some terminals.

More here

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Feisty Scottish blogger, Neil Craig has had an apt letter published in The Scotsman: "David Irving is sentenced to three years in jail for denying the Holocaust. The late ruler of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, also denied the Holocaust, but this did not prevent us helping him to get his own country and ethnically cleansing 560,000 Serbs, 240,000 of whom are still "missing". Nor did it prevent him being invited to the United Kingdom's celebration of the defeat of Nazism in Europe. Just as there are some Holocausts which may not be denied and some which may, there are clearly acceptable and unacceptable Nazis".

Was Jerry Jewish?: "Tom and Jerry" was part of a Jewish conspiracy to present mice as clean, an Iranian official said. Hasan Bolkhari, an adviser to the Iranian Education ministry on mass media, said Hollywood Jews created the cartoon in an attempt to turn around the dirty image of mice, because Nazis had stigmatized Jews as mice. "The mouse is very clever and smart," Bolkhari said in a televised seminar on film last week monitored by the Middle East Media Research Instuite. "Everything he does is so cute. He kicks the poor cat's ass. Yet this cruelty does not make you despise the mouse. He looks so nice, and he is so clever...This is exactly why some say it was meant to erase this image of mice from the minds of European children, and to show that the mouse is not dirty and has these traits."

The British answer to rising crime: Reduced punishment: "Home Secretary Charles Clarke has outlined plans to reform the punishment system by pushing forward a new community sentencing policy which would reduce the amount of black offenders sentenced to prison for less serious offences. The incentive is part of a five year plan for the new National Offender Management Service (Noms) which will emphasis tough community punishments and sending criminals to jail only when there is a strong case. It would also contribute towards reducing the problem of prison overcrowding. Offenders who are given community orders will undertake unpaid work with possible `rewards' for offenders in the community who go on the straight and narrow. Mr Clarke was also expected to highlight previously-announced plans for "adult community prisons" for less serious offenders, which would maintain links with family and the local area. A Home Office source said: "This is the Home Secretary's vision for the future direction of how we manage offenders as well as summary of where we are now. "The Home Secretary will look at increasing the number of hours of visible, unpaid work performed by offenders in the community."

It couldn't happen to a better bunch of bastards: "CBS Corp. reported a loss of $9.1 billion in the fourth quarter on hefty charges to write down the value of its radio and television businesses, the media company reported Thursday. CBS was reporting earnings for the first time as a separate company since its split with Viacom Inc. was completed at the beginning of the year. CBS reported the fourth quarter as if it were already a separate entity. On that basis, CBS had a net loss amounting to $6 per share for the three months ended Dec. 31, weighed down by charges to write down the fair market value of its radio and television properties. The valuations of radio stations in particular have suffered in recent years due to stagnant revenues and higher costs. The latest results compared to an even larger net loss of $18.4 billion, or $10.99 per share, in the comparable period in 2004, when the company also recorded big charges to write down its radio stations as well as its outdoor advertising business".

Sharia has won in the media: "Apparently, it hasn't occurred to the media poo-bahs that the prohibition against likenesses of Mohammed should apply only to Muslims, not to the rest of us. (As Dennis Prager noted, 'It's like Jews rioting when someone else eats pork.') The cartoons should've been printed and broadcast as widely as the bruised face of Cheney's hunting partner when he got out of the hospital. That would've resolved the matter overnight, by giving cover to every news outlet and reasserting the primacy of free expression in a free society. And that's what makes the press's abject cravenness so consequential. It implies that, for all intents and purposes, we are living under sharia."

Progress on used nuclear reactor fuel: "It's a question that has dogged the nuclear industry since the 1970s: What can it do with spent fuel rods? The radioactive waste, eventually slated for permanent storage at a still unfinished site in Nevada, has been piling up, mostly at the nation's 65 commercial nuclear power plants. Late Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave its blessing to a solution: a storage site on a barren patch of a reservation in Utah that's home to some 25 native Americans, next to a proving ground for chemical and biological weapons, and near an Air Force bombing range. The NRC licensed what would be the nation's largest -- and only private -- nuclear-waste storage facility. A consortium of utility companies would store for up to 40 years some 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel for an industry rapidly running out of space."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/27/2006 06:53:00 PM

Sunday, February 26, 2006

 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE FACTS

From my point of view as someone whose ancestors came to Australia chained up in the holds of sailing ships, America's two civil wars -- the war of independence being the first -- are quite appalling. Australians achieved all the same ends without a drop of blood being spilt. We were just more patient and less driven by religiously-based absolutism. The excerpts below are from the editor of America's "Patriot Post"

The Founding Fathers established the Constitutional Union as a voluntary agreement among the several states, subordinate to The Declaration of Independence, which never mentions the nation as a singular entity, but instead repeatedly references the states as sovereign bodies, unanimously asserting their independence. The states, in ratifying the Constitution, established the federal government as their agent -- not the other way around. At Virginia's ratification convention, for example, the delegates affirmed "that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to injury or oppression." Were this not true, the federal government would not have been established as federal, but instead a national, unitary and unlimited authority. Notably, and in large measure as a consequence of the War between the States, the "federal" government has grown to become an all-but unitary and unlimited authority.

Our Founders upheld the individual sovereignty of the states, even though the wisdom of secessionist movements was a source of great tension and debate from the day the Constitution was ratified. Tellingly, Hamilton, the greatest proponent of centralization among the Founders, noted in Federalist No. 81 that waging war against the states "would be altogether forced and unwarranted." At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton argued, "Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?"

Yet Lincoln threatened the use of force to maintain the Union in his First Inaugural Address, saying, "In [preserving the Union] there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority." Lincoln may have preserved the Union geographically (at great cost to the Constitution), but politically and philosophically, the concept of a voluntary union was shredded by sword, rifle and cannon.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln employed lofty rhetoric to conceal the truth of our nation's most costly war -- a war that resulted in the deaths of some 600,000 Americans and the severe disabling of over 400,000 more. He claimed to be fighting so that "this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." In fact, Lincoln was ensuring just the opposite by waging an appallingly bloody war while ignoring calls for negotiated peace. It was the "rebels" who were intent on self-government, and it was Lincoln who rejected their right to that end, despite our Founders' clear admonition to the contrary in the Declaration....

The second of Lincoln's two most oft-noted achievements was ending the abomination of slavery. It has come to be understood that this calamitous war was the necessary cost of ridding our nation of slavery, yet no other nation at the time required war to do so. In fact, the cost of the war itself would have more than paid for compensatory emancipation, giving each slave 40 acres and a mule -- all without bloodshed....

Little reported and lightly regarded in our history books is the way Lincoln abused and discarded the individual rights of Northern citizens. Tens of thousands of citizens were imprisoned (most without trial) for political opposition, or "treason," and their property confiscated. Habeas corpus and, in effect, the entire Bill of Rights were suspended. In fact, the Declaration of Independence details remarkably similar abuses by King George to those committed by Lincoln.

More here

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More reason for the Left to hate Wal-Mart: "Wal-Mart is opening more 50 health clinics in their stores, adding to the nine started in a pilot program mainly in the Southeast. This could be the start of something remarkable-if Wal-Mart can begin applying the same downward price pressures to medical prices that it has applied to goods in general, then it could be the beginning of a trend that finally halts the long upward march of medical prices." (HT Brothers Judd)

What can we expect from a corrupt organization? "There are still too many complaints of sexual abuse against United Nations troops, the head of peacekeeping operations has said. Jean-Marie Guehenno said the UN had investigated 295 cases under a new reporting system introduced last year. It could take several more years to reform the system fully, says Jordan's UN envoy who last year urged changes. The 18 peace missions worldwide employ 85,000 staff from over 100 countries, with a budget of nearly $5bn. Mr Guehenno said although significant progress had been made in reducing the number of cases of sexual exploitation following an investigation in the Democratic Republic of Congo two years ago, much more needed to be done. "Allegations being lodged against UN peacekeeping personnel remain high and unacceptably so," he said."

Leftist antisemitism gets a slap: "London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Mr Livingstone was suspended from duty for four weeks from March 1 after being found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute. The three-man Adjudication Panel for England unanimously ruled that Mr Livingstone had been "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive" to Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold in February last year... Since Mr Livingstone lost the case he must pay his own costs - estimated at more than 80,000 pounds".

TSA hysteria never stops: "Some gates shut down after Bush Intercontinental security breach Houston Chronicle "Authorities evacuated thousands of passengers from Bush Intercontinental Airport today after a woman cut through a security checkpoint without being screened. Officials do not think the woman intended any harm. 'She was, in fact, looking for a restroom,' said Christopher White, spokesman for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. 'She walked out the exit lane and turned around and walked right back in,' White said."

African Christians not so patient: "Christian youths burned the corpses of Muslims on Thursday on the streets of Onitsha in southeastern Nigeria, the city worst hit by religious riots that have killed at least 146 people across the country in five days. Christian mobs, seeking revenge for the killings of Christians in the north, attacked Muslims with machetes, set fire to them, destroyed their houses and torched mosques in two days of violence in Onitsha, where 93 people died. "We are very happy that this thing is happening so that the north will learn their lesson," said Anthony Umai, a motorcycle taxi rider, standing close to where Christian youths had piled up the corpses of 10 Muslims and were burning them. Dozens more corpses had been thrown into the back of pick-up trucks by security services overnight, residents said.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/26/2006 07:11:00 PM

Saturday, February 25, 2006

 
Thoughts on David Irving

I note that The Wall St. Journal has editorialized in defence of imprisoned historian David Irving. Excerpt: "And just when the Danish government is under unprecedented attack for its refusal to intervene in the editorial decision-making of a private newspaper, it seems perverse to offer Muslim provocateurs an example of a European country catering to one set of sensitivities but not another".

The WSJ accompanies this defence, however, with vast aspersions on the character and competence of Irving. But any claim that Irving is incompetent is absurd. I have been studying the Hitler era for over 40 years and it is clear to me that NOBODY knows the period better or in more detail than Irving does. He was after all the only one of the many eminent historians consulted who immediately picked the Kujau "Hitler Diaries" as a fake.

So what of the aspersions on Irving's character? I think those aspersions show a lack of understanding too. I would like to venture a more nuanced view. For a start, Irving's earlier position (which he now appears to have recanted) that there was no holocaust at all is clearly absurd. He is undoubtedly right in pointing to the 6 million figure as the roughest of guesses but I am totally unmoved by that. Whether 6 million died or 1 million died, the loss that Hitler inflicted on the human gene pool by his attacks on Jewry is incalculable (I am avoiding moral language here. Outrage is the Leftist's usual substitute for thinking and I hope to do better than that).

So what motivates Irving's gnawing away at the details of the holocaust? I think the WSJ is right in saying that Irving wishes to rehabilitate Hitler as far as he can. But why would he do that? I think I know. I think that Irving has immersed himself so deeply in the Hitler period that it is alive to him. I think in fact that he has fallen under the spell of Hitler. Mainly because of their need to deny that Hitler was a socialist, almost nobody in the modern world understands why Hitler had such vast appeal to Germans or why Germany followed him fanatically to the bitter end. Both Roberts (1938) and Heiden (1939) -- prewar anti-Nazi writers -- portray Hitler as widely revered and popular among the Germans of their day. As Heiden (1939, p. 98) put it: "The great masses of the people did not merely put up with National Socialism. They welcomed it".

So why did they welcome it? It is simple. Socialism and nationalism have long been and long will be the two political ideas which have most emotional appeal to people. And Hitler offered both in one package. That package would be powerfully appealing to this day except for the way Hitler's follies discredited it.

But in his constant reading of material from the period, Irving lives in a world where Hitler's ideas have not yet been discredited and he has fallen victim to their appeal. Very few people these days seem to have read Mein Kampf but it is in fact (as it was meant to be) a very persuasive book if you read it without thought of what it led to. Hitler comes across as an enquiring, passionate and yet reasonable mind who offers persuasive explanations of what has gone wrong with the world. And I think he has persuaded Irving. It is a strange thing but, as we know from the example of Leftist intellectuals today, simplistic explanations often do attract intelligent people.

References:
Heiden, K. (1939) One man against Europe Harmondsworth, Mddx.: Penguin
Roberts, S.H. (1938) The house that Hitler built N.Y.: Harper.

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Eclectecon is an economist who does not know the difference between "forgo" and "forego" but has a good selection of cartoons about cartoonists and Muslims up at the moment.

The AFL-CIO sweatshop: "They work outside in the middle of February at poverty-level wages. They don't have health benefits or regular hours. Their pay is docked for taking bathroom breaks. And they have no one to speak up for their needs. Ask a labor leader if these workers are in desperate need of a union. Then see if he'd like to revise his thought when he learns they're employees of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. With a ringing endorsement from AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, the Carpenters have taken to hiring the homeless to picket construction sites. Needless to say, there's no health care or pension plan contributions for these folks. In Las Vegas, the temp workers hired by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to protest outside Wal-Mart were paid a grand total of $6 an hour. The union was generous enough to cover bathroom breaks, but in the middle of a scorching desert summer with picketers dropping out from the heat, perhaps these part-time employees would have preferred health care."

English to run England again? "William Hague disclosed Tory ambitions to cut back the influence of Scottish MPs on laws affecting England during an attack on Gordon Brown and his powerbase yesterday. Mr Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, barely touched on international issues as he delivered a 20-minute tirade against the Chancellor for being bossy and "stuck in the past".... He opened a new line of attack on the Chancellor, the man most likely to lead Labour against the Tories at the next election, for his defence of Scottish MPs' power at Westminster. In a revival of his own policy as leader of the Conservative Party in the four years to 2001, Mr Hague added: "As Leader of the Opposition during the debates we had on devolution I feel no pleasure in pointing out that Scottish Labour MPs forcing through changes to England's laws does not make for a more harmonious United Kingdom. "Anyone who thinks that we can carry on legislating for England in exactly the same way as we did before devolution is clearly living in the past.""

Google still not Leftist enough. They defy the Bush administration and co-operate with the Chinese Communists but now the Chinese want more: "A state-run newspaper reported Tuesday that Google Inc. is under investigation for operating without a proper license in China and quoted an unnamed government official as saying the Internet giant needs to cooperate further with the authorities in blocking "harmful information" from its search results.... Dubbed the "eunuch edition" by some Chinese Internet users, the new search engine withholds results from Web sites the governing Communist Party finds objectionable, and returns limited results when users enter politically sensitive keywords. Google has defended its decision to launch the censored site, arguing that people in China can continue to use the Chinese version of its regular search engine, Google.com. It has also pointed out that the new search engine is the first in China to inform users when results have been removed because of the government's "laws, regulations and policies." But it appears Chinese authorities are now pressuring Google to cut off access in China to its regular search engine, and to stop telling users of the new site every time a search is censored.

"Yahoo" also does its share of political pandering. There is a story here noting that the words "allah" "binladen" "osama" and "raghead" (among others) were not allowed as part of Yahoo usernames -- until that got adverse publicity.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/25/2006 07:24:00 PM

Friday, February 24, 2006

 
SOME GOOD QUOTES FROM WINDSCHUTTLE'S LATEST ESSAY

"The Western concept of freedom of speech is not an absolute. The limits that should be imposed by good taste, social responsibility and respect for others will always be a matter for debate. But this is a debate that needs to be conducted within Western culture, not imposed on it from outside by threats of death and violence by those who want to put an end to all free debate."

"The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress it."

"But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue."

"Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist."

"The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies."

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Brookes News Update

Did the KGB help plan America's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?: Was Jimmy's Carter's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the culmination of a very successful campaign by the Washington-based Marxist-Leninistm Institute of Policies Studies and the KGB to permanently cripple America's intelligence services?
Why is the Kroger Liberal Party giving Bracks' Muslim blasphemy laws a pass?: Once again, Michael Kroger, why are you allowing Bracks to get away with his pro-Muslim blasphemy laws? I think it's time we got some answers
GDP's gross misconceptions about the Australian and US economies: So how can an economy be adding jobs while manufacturing is shedding them and forecasts for consumption appear optimistic?
So-called ethics, wages and economic stupidity: Labour rents its services out to employers who use it, in combination with other factors, to produce other goods or services, each factor being paid up to the value of its marginal product
Democrats, isolation and the de-ghetto-izing effect of the New Media: If one analyzes just who still votes Democrat these days there are certain commonalities to those communities. Not least amongst them is near-total isolation from the real world
The New York Times and mainstream media hypocrisy: The New York Times has proven to be a dishonest, cowardly, treasonous and bigoted rag
Water. a simple comfort for the citizens of Baghdad: The US Army is supplying Iraqis with the basic services that Saddam's regime had run down

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ELSEWHERE

Jason Malloy has done a HUGE review of Richard Lynn's latest book: Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis. Jason's review is a solid academic paper in its own right but is nonetheless highly readable. Jason does find a few points of contention in what Lynn writes but the vast body of scientific findings that Lynn marshalls puts the case for racial differences in IQ beyond any reasonable scholarly doubt -- though not of course beyond political doubt. Leftists want acclaim, not the facts so they will dispute anything, logic and evidence regardless.



Garrison Keillor, vulgarian: "Yellow-dog Democrats like Keillor spend a lot of time whining about how America's standing in the world has declined of late, but this is how he treats a guest who spends half his time combating anti-Americanism in France. Simply because BHL mentions a fact that has actually caught other eyes (the tendency of Americans to become riotously fat) he is addressed like this: 'Thanks pal. . Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was all that about? Were fat people involved?' One moans for shame that such a vulgar jerk is thought of, and even known overseas, as some kind of national entertainer."

About time: "Japanese Red Army founder Fusako Shigenobu was sentenced to 20 years in prison today for a 1974 siege of the French embassy in The Netherlands during her once-dreaded group's decade of global violence. The grey-haired 60-year-old raised her fist as the judge found her guilty of attempted murder, although he did give her the life sentence requested by prosecutors. "The verdict is not the end. It is only the beginning. Strong will shall keep spreading," Shigenobu said in a haiku poem read outside the courtroom by her lawyer. Shigenobu, a former soy-sauce company worker turned militant supporter of the Palestinian cause, had lived in the Middle East for about 30 years before resurfacing in Japan with her 2000 arrest. As her leftist radicalism lost support both in Japan and the Arab world, she announced the end of the Japanese Red Army in 2001 and has voiced regret over the group's victims, although not the cause."

A population on welfare limits your options: "Detroit's financial mess has put the Detroit Zoo on the endangered list. City council members said their vote was not to close the zoo, but some felt they were being bullied by a state deadline and lawmakers who look down on Detroit.... The Kilpatrick administration and the Zoological society proposed an agreement that council rejected on Monday. A spokesperson for the mayor said the process of closing the zoo has begun. But, she added, the door is still open to discussions with council members should they come up with an alternate plan."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/24/2006 03:39:00 PM

Thursday, February 23, 2006

 
Why have I put a picture of GWB at the top of my blog? It is NOT because I totally agree with him. His big government policies are completely antithetical to my libertarian views. I have just put the picture there as a counterweight to the Leftists who deride this thoroughly responsible, moderate and decent man as "Chimpoleon" etc.

SOME ECONOMICS

Sad to see that Ireland is slipping back into economic Fascism: "Ireland is commonly regarded around the world as a shining example of private markets at work. Yet, unnoticed by many, over the last five years, the country has been sliding into the abyss of rising government spending, indirect tax increases and more regulation and state involvement in the economy.... The whole premise of the European social model based on partnership agreements over wages, including the one practiced in Ireland, is supposed to ensure that the state protects the worker interests. This stated objective of the European corporatist model is not supported by the hard evidence. In fact, the cumulative wage growth in the US since 1996 was 55.7 percent - a full 24.6 percent higher than labor productivity gains alone, making US workers the greatest beneficiaries of total productivity growth. For the Eurozone, the cumulative wage growth was just 24.2 percent as opposed to 44.6 percent in the group of flexible labor market economies. Thus, less partnership-driven economies saw greater gains to workers, while more corporatist economies saw greater returns accruing to the capital owners - hardly the evidence in support of the "caring partnership" vision of our Taoiseach" [Prime Minister].

Friedman on Germany: "At the moment, of course, Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible-to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed. This is far more urgent than it would otherwise be if Germany were not in the euro. This set of policies would open up the German potential. After all, Germany has a very able and productive workforce. It has high-quality products that are valued all over the world. It has every opportunity to be a productive, growing state. It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs."

The politics of economic nationalism : "The rhetoric of economic nationalism is scattered throughout this year's Economic Report of the President, and it pervades policy discussions among politicians and in the press. It comes so naturally that we hardly even notice it -- I'm sure I've slipped into it myself. So it's important to point out how unnatural it really is. ... Nationalism about the economy is a marketing tool for politicians, and it leads to loss of freedom and responsibility, with enormous quantities of resources channeled through government."

Is free trade really wrecking the union?: "The case for free trade really isn't about jobs at all, but rather living standards. In a free labor market, wages and salaries would adjust until all who wanted to work (at the prevailing market rates) could do so. In such a scenario, dropping tariffs wouldn't create jobs, it would merely shift workers from less to more productive lines. Now it's true, in our heavily taxed and regulated labor market, a worker needs to possess a minimum productivity to make him employable, and thus if his productivity goes up (because of free trade) then he is more likely to pass this threshold, so in that sense one could argue that free trade leads to net job growth. But I just wanted to correct the popular misconception that the case for free trade concerns jobs."

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing article here by a Muslim that holds out India as an example of Muslims and non-Muslims all getting along peacefully together. I guess most Indian writers might be reluctant to puncture that balloon but it is of course the most colossal nonsense. "Communal" (Hindu/Muslim) riots and violent clashes are endemic in India. Even Mahatma Gandhi could not stop it. It is true that Hindus and Mussulmen do get along in everyday life in India after a fashion but in India religion is a deadly serious matter. Reincarnation, for instance, is central to how a Hindu understands the world he lives in. If India has not produced Jihadis who go abroad to kill and maim, it is only because Indian Muslims have the more immediate worry of their Hindu neighbours.

The underlying Muslim problem: "It is my belief that a substantial part of what drives Islamism is a cultural dysfunction broadly defined by a terrible fear of sexuality resulting in a vile hatred of women. In other words, the awesome power of female sexuality scares the daylights out of fundamentalist Muslims. My theory might explain why Islamist suicide bombers often wrap their penises in tinfoil so that it's still usable -- ready to deflower (subtext: despoil) virgins galore after Allah supposedly greets what's left of them in "Paradise." My theory might also explain why situational (prison-style) homosexuality, though officially punishable by death, is widespread in the fundamentalist Muslim world. It certainly explains why the practice of forced clitoridectomy; the destruction of a woman's clitoris, is rampant in the Arab Muslim world."

Tony Blair's "Enabling Act" (On March 23 of 1933, Hitler got the German parliament to pass a similar Act): "Some have called it the Henry VIII bill; one MP thought Stalin would be a more appropriate dictator to put his name to it. A leading academic refers to it as the "abolition of parliament bill". You get the point. The bill's real title is bland and boring to the point of soporific, which may be why it hasn't been much noticed; but underneath the benign facade of the legislative and regulatory reform bill lurks a machinery that would give the government the power to pass far-reaching laws without the bother of getting the approval of parliament. On the surface, the bill is aimed at removing regulatory burdens on business by using short-cut procedures which wouldn't require parliamentary debate. The same process would also put into law uncontroversial recommendations by Britain's law commissions, the government's legal thinktanks. All that seems not only reasonable, but positively helpful to the efficiency of law-making. But look again, and Henry VIII comes into the picture. What the government has inserted into the bill is a way of allowing laws to be passed by a minister's order, which bypasses parliament altogether.... It will become possible for the government, by ministerial order, without a debate in parliament, to create new criminal offences, punishable with less than two years imprisonment. It could also, according to Cambridge law professor John Spencer (who is not alone in his analysis), introduce house-arrest, give the police stronger powers of arrest and interrogation, set up new courts, and in effect re-write the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges."

Extraordinary! "Wearing vests covered in military patches, a band of motorcyclists rolls around the country from one soldier's funeral to another, cheering respectfully to overshadow jeers from church protesters. They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals. Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs -- explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq. The bikers shield the families of dead soldiers from the protesters, and overshadow the jeers with patriotic chants and a sea of red, white and blue flags. "The most important thing we can do is let families know that the nation cares," said Don Woodrick, the group's Kentucky captain. "When a total stranger gets on a motorcycle in the middle of winter and drives 300 miles to hold a flag, that makes a powerful statement.""

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/23/2006 06:09:00 PM

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

 
BLOGGER.COM MALFUNCTION

I am rather peeved that I am not being allowed to post on "Socialized Medicine" at the moment. The error message I get is:

553 Permission denied.blog/28/14/4/socglory/archives/2006_02_01_socglory_archive.html

Any clues to what it is all about?

Fortunately the Mirror Site is up and running.

Update

Miracles do happen! I got a same-day reply from blogger.com in response to my email complaining of the above problem. And they fixed the problem too! Below is the reply:

"Thanks for writing in. I've just checked the blog you mentioned, and I was able to post and republish without a problem. A small number of users are seeing a 553 Permission denied error when publishing to Blog*Spot. If this happens to you, log out of Blogger, clear your Blogger.com cookies, and log back in. We are working to fix this problem. For further updates on Blogger issues, please see our Blogger Status page here: http://status.blogger.com/ Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns!"

I used to check the Status page when problems arose but it was rarely updated and never told me anything relevant to the mess of the day so I no longer do.

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BLACK AGGRESSION

That populations of African ancestry worldwide are characterized by enormously high levels of aggression, violence and crime is beyond question. It happens in Africa. It happens in Britain and it happens in the USA. It can of course be suppressed. Apartheid South Africa and pre-1960 America certainly kept it down to much lower levels than it is these days. But the extremity of the measures needed to suppress it tells a tale in itself.

The only really interesting question is why the levels of black aggression are so high. The kneejerk Leftist explanation is of course that it is all due to white "racism". How that explains the huge levels of violence in the all-black countries of Africa is not mentioned. Generations have now grown up in Africa who have scarcely even SEEN a white man and the violence seems to have escalated rather than diminished. So I propose simply to ignore here brain-dead Leftist "explanations".

The higher level of black aggressiveness COULD be explained as an outcome of the exhaustively-documented black/white difference in average IQ. Stupid people have fewer ways of getting what they want so often resort to violence as a last resort. For that reason, Australia's prisons are full of dumb whites. Lynn, however, points to statistical studies showing that the higher level of black aggressiveness cannot be explained by IQ differences alone. He shows that there must be personality differences involved as well and goes on to make a carefully-reasoned case for saying that Blacks are more psychopathic than whites. In a slightly earlier work, Lynn interprets psychopathy as being itself the manifestation of two more basic traits. To quote Itzkoff's summary of Lynn:

"He demonstrates convincingly that from all the available research, psychopaths along with low intelligence are responsible for society's problems with crime, drug addiction, unwed mothers, drug abuse, rape, child abuse, unemployment, etc. These people are the underclass. And they result from the combination of two behavioral traits. They almost universally have low conscientiousness and agreeableness or altruism. (Lynn explains that "altruism" would be a better term than "agreeableness" but that term has now "stuck" as the common descriptor for this behavioral trait). That is, people who are both highly unconscientious and disagreeable are pathological, and both of these traits are highly heritable."

So there is a reasonable case for saying that many blacks have personality deficits on top of ability deficits. And the results are all to obvious in the form of massive black crime -- often crime of the most callous sort.

What the above analysis overlooks to some extent, however, is that whites can be pretty aggressive and violent too. Neither Hitler nor Stalin were blacks and the recent barbarities in the former Yugoslavia are surely second to none in brutality. The obvious difference is, of course, that aggression is not a daily experience amongst most whites, whereas it certainly is a constant undertow in most black populations. It can certainly be argued that the occasional explosive outbursts of aggression that characterize white populations are in fact worse than the constant bubbling of aggression that characterizes black populations but I am here concerned with the factual rather than the evaluative aspects of the matter.

And it would seem that there is at least one place where whites have a pretty high level of constant aggression too: Scotland in general and Glasgow in particular. Glasgow is an enormously violent place in some ways. Knifing people to death in drunken Saturday night brawls is an old tradition among the Glasgow "Jimmies". Yet Glaswegians do not at all come across as particularly aggressive people. In 1977 I personally did a doorknock survey of a random sample of Glaswegians -- including slum-clearance suburbs such as Easterhouse. And, accent aside, they seemed to me to be no different from the average Anglo-Australian. And the results of the survey tended to confirm that lack of distinctiveness. On the two major personality variables that I measured (aggressive dominance and ambition), Glaswegians were found to be no different from Londoners.

So I think that in Glasgow we have a very clear case of a difference being solely attitude-driven -- attitudes which are themselves in turn tradition-driven. I found that Glaswegians were as different to Londoners in attitudes as they were similar in personality. And the tradition at work in the Glasgow fighting is really no mystery. Clan warfare was long endemic in Scotland until the accursed English suppressed it. But attitudinal remnants of that warfare survive. To this day you can hear in Glasgow derisive words such as "Choochtah" applied to Highlanders. In short, I think a culture of pugnacity was long ago generated in Scotland (presumably due to rivalry over very scarce resources) and that the persistence of culture has ensured that considerable remnants of that pugnacity survive into modern times.

That similar traditions would be at work among blacks is obvious. They really are victims of "three strikes and you are out". They are disadvantaged by their abilities, their personalities and their attitudes. Changing ability and personality is is not at present within our reach but there are some possibilities for changing attitudes. So those who aim to improve the situation of blacks should concentrate on the attitudes that blacks have. The attitudes that are at present being inculcated in blacks (that they are helpless "victims") would however seem to be the exact reverse of what is required if improvements in black welfare are seriously desired.

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ELSEWHERE



Still no free speech in Hitler's homeland: "Right-wing British historian David Irving has been sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court for denying the Holocaust 17 years ago, despite his claim to have changed his views. Irving, 67, had pleaded guilty at the trial in Vienna on a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry but insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving, a controversial figure who has had brushes with the law in several countries, appeared stunned by the three-year sentence. "I'm very shocked and I'm going to appeal," he said as he walked out of court."

Perverse Leftist judges in Italy too: "A panel of Italian judges upheld the November acquittals of three North Africans on international terror charges, ruling that recruiting suicide bombers to fight against U.S. soldiers is not terrorism, a lawyer said Thursday. The verdict by the Milan judges, released Wednesday, echoes an earlier one in the case when a lower court judge ruled the actions of the three men were those of guerrillas, not terrorists."

MSM coverup of Saddam's WMDs: "Tape recordings released over the weekend show that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program at least as recently as 2000 - but the press has decided the bombshell development isn't newsworthy. Speaking at the Intelligence Group Summit in Arlington, Va., Saddam tapes translator Bill Tierney revealed that in one recorded conversation, the Iraqi dictator can be heard discussing a plan to enrich uranium using a technique known as plasma separation.... News that Saddam had an ongoing enrichment program comports with the account of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the nuclear physicist who ran Iraq's nuclear centrifuge program. After turning himself in to U.S. forces in July 2003, Dr. Obeidi revealed that he had successfully hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints from U.N. weapons inspectors on Saddam's orders. Despite the staggering implications of the audiotaped uranium revelation, only one mainstream media outlet had covered the news as of Monday morning. Noting that Saddam's enrichment program was "totally unknown to U.N. weapons inspectors," the Washington Times editorialized on Monday: "It is apparent that the American public has much more to learn about . . . . precisely when Saddam's nuclear weapons programs actually stopped.""

Madsen Pirie says that British food has improved way out of sight in recent years and he attributes it to McDonalds! How incorrect can you get?

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/22/2006 05:30:00 PM

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

 
The precentor and the dragon

What is a precentor? Give up? A precentor is a senior official of a cathedral or other large ecclesiastical establishment. It is a minor part of our European Christian background and culture so I like to know about such things. The precentor originally led the singing and he is still usually in charge of a cathedral's musical affairs -- though he also is a senior administrator generally -- often the next down in seniority to the Dean.

I met a precentor last Sunday. Anne and were were in town for a stroll and noticed a service in progress at the metropolitical cathedral of St John (Anglican) so we popped in for a biscuit and a sip of wine. (Just joking! Atheists don't take communion). Anyway the music was good, the service was delightfully mediaeval and we had a quick chat with the precentor afterwards. In the absence of the Dean (who was over at the CATHOLIC cathedral in some good cause!) the Precentor celebrated the Eucharist so also had hand-shaking duties afterwards.

I must admit that I was a bit fuzzy about what precentors actually did -- partly because the duties of precentors do vary -- so I was pleased to meet a live one and find out what he did. He was indeed 2IC to the Dean.

After church we strolled down to the Botanical Gardens for another sit-down and had a very fat dragon (an 18" long lizard) come up to us in an apparent quest for food. A very pleasant Sunday morning!

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The destruction of Rhodesia

This is just a post for those interested in 20th century history. If you don't know anything about the Rhodesia controversy, however, something I wrote over 30 years ago might provide a useful quick update. Now that Zimbabwe (Rhodesia's successor State) is one of the most brutal and mismanaged countries on earth an email I received recently is interesting:

"At some time in the early to mid-1990s, Ian Smith gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. The auditorium was packed, the lobby was packed, and the crowd spilled out of the building. It was the largest turn-out for such a gathering that I have seen in 20+ years. Most of those in attendance were too young to remember the "Unilateral Declaration of Independence" of 1965, and could barely remember the betrayal of 1980. However, they had some inkling of what this man had done and what he had tried to do, and were there to see a living remnant of 20th century history. Smith was completely forthright about what his goal had been: the defense of Western Civilisation -- nothing more and certainly nothing less. The respect accorded him verged on reverence, and he was thronged with autograph seekers.

Yes, Mrs. Thatcher should have dismissed the advice she was given in 1980 (along with the advisors who offered it) and retained Muzorewa. But the real villain of the piece is the clueless Harold Wilson and the gaggle of parlour pinks who surrounded him and ran his government in the swinging '60s. They got the praise of the Wise and Good, their honours and their pensions, but the horrific price was paid by the immiserated unfortunates down in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe."

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ELSEWHERE



The more things change, the more they remain the same: "The Muhammad cartoon protest took a new direction in Pakistan this week as demonstrators took to the streets in Islamabad brandishing signs that proclaimed "God Bless Hitler." Tens of thousands of people took part in the latest round of protests, which took place throughout Pakistan - with gunfire and rioting erupting in some precincts. By midweek, three people, including an 8-year-old boy, had been killed.... Despite wide coverage of the Pakistani protests, the incendiary pro-Nazi placards were ignored in Western media accounts. But a photograph posted to the Web site of the German TV news station N-TV.de shows several Pakistani women clad in traditional Muslim garb holding aloft a large white poster with a message spelled out in English: "God Bless Hitler."

The Muslims have won: "For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries. "They think they have won the debate," he says with a sigh. "They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not. "The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory. "It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent." Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that "in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law".

Fear of Muslims cows the U.S. media: "The Phoenix is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons.... But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and on February 10, in a brutally candid editorial, it explained why. ''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. . . . Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history." The vast majority of US media outlets have shied away from reproducing the drawings, but to my knowledge only the Phoenix has been honest enough to admit that it is capitulating to fear".

The Muslim/Jewish difference: "Muslim fundamentalists have decided that even if you never saw or heard of the cartoons, you deserve to be hit with rocks, have your car wrecked and your embassies destroyed.... Could you picture a Jew killing anybody for such meaningless reasons? If a Jew gets mad he might sneak into your house and steal your Lipitor or he would make a deal with your doctor to lie about your cholesterol number, or just when you have fasted a whole day on Yom Kippur he would sneak into your house and steal all the pastrami sandwiches. I never saw a Jew going into meaningless fights. That is why you seldom see Jewish football players. A Jew is not going to take a chance in spraining his neck or tearing a ligament in his knee just because he was fighting with somebody about catching a ball. He would rather go to a store and buy another ball and avoid the whole problem.... Jews are never known to get into unnecessary physical battles. That is why people are never afraid of being attacked by a Jew. Did you ever hear anybody say, "Don't go into that neighborhood, it is very dangerous, there are a lot of Jews there"?

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/21/2006 07:48:00 PM

Monday, February 20, 2006

 
FREEDOM OF SPEECH INCLUDES THE RIGHT TO DENY THE HOLOCAUST

Although I have always been and always will be the most unwavering supporter of the State of Israel, I don't believe that Israel is well-served by muffling free speech -- even idiotic free speech. So I reproduce below a press release from the U.K. Libertarian Alliance

"At 9:30am on Monday the 20th February 2006, Dr Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance, will appear on Sky News to defend freedom of speech in general, and in particular the right of controversial historian David Irving to say anything he likes about the holocaust. Mr Irving is awaiting trial in Austria for the supposed crime of denying or minimising the holocaust. Commenting ahead of the broadcast, Dr Gabb says:

"Either freedom of speech means the right to say anything at all about politics, religion, science or history, among much else - or it means nothing at all. "There are those who say they believe in freedom of speech, but then insist that the promotion of "hatred" does not come within the meaning of free speech. The Libertarian Alliance utterly rejects this supposed distinction. What some call the promotion of hatred others call telling the truth. In any event, we believe in the right to promote hatred by any means that do not fall within the Common Law definition of assault.

"Whenever the State involves itself in arguments about the truth, disputes between opinions become disputes between opinions and power. And the State has neither special ability nor the right to decide what opinions may be true or false. "Whatever we may think about what he claims, whatever we may think about the motivation for his claims, the claims Mr Irving makes regarding the holocaust are a matter to be settled by historical debate - not by the criminal law....

"We also note with distaste that those journalists throughout Europe who are congratulating each other on how brave and liberal they have been over the anti-Moslem cartoons have not said a word for the freedom of Mr Irving to express himself. "The Libertarian Alliance believes in freedom of speech for all - WITH NO EXCEPTIONS."



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ELSEWHERE

Truth, self-seeking and science: "Newspaper articles recently criticized corporate funding of a few journalists. Monsanto gave money to the Hudson Institute to support a biotech book written by Michael Fumento; Phillip Morris apparently supported Steven Milloy, the author of 'Junk Science.' ExxonMobil contributes to think tanks that question the global-warming scare. The underlying idea is that corporate money is tainted because any research it funds will be self-interested: motivated not by the search for truth but concern for profits. Complex issues of disclosure are involved in some of these journalism cases -- questions I shall not examine. Of greater interest is the implied argument that research funded by the government is pure and disinterested. That needs scrutiny. Government agencies have their own interest, entangled with their mission. In particular they seek to expand, or at least sustain, their share of the budget."

Editorial in "The Times" of London: "Many Americans venturing overseas feel that they are held to be culpable merely for the sound of their accent. When an anti-American film opens in Turkey, it becomes an overnight hit. All this also makes it a hard time to be a friend of America. But it is, therefore, a critical time to stand up to those who would caricature the country. And in doing so to cut through the emotive, hyperbolic and infantile manner in which the US is portrayed, not just in the Middle East, but also throughout Europe.... If Europeans want the US to take more account of their concerns, they should take more trouble to appreciate America's instinct and intent. Neither is always right, but there is far more thought in US policy than the moaners would credit. There is a grave danger in this visceral hostility. The number of Americans who believe the US should mind its own business and let other countries get along on their own has leapt in only three years from 30 per cent to 42 per cent. Mr Bush has set himself against this new isolationism and against trade protectionism, for which there is an increasingly powerful lobby in the US. The worst that could happen is that critics of American engagement might just get their wish.

Leave it to reformed Leftist Christopher Hitchens to rile up a crowd of New York Leftists: "The catcalls started almost from the moment the prickly Brit began defending the Iraq adventure during Wednesday night's squabble at the Ethical Culture Society. "Make zoo noises!" Hitchens taunted. "Bear in mind, if you had been listened to, Bosnia would part of greater Serbia, Afghanistan would be run by the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would still be in charge of Iraq." For good measure, he added: "British intelligence was quite right to say that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Niger. That you can look up." To which a peacenik screamed: "F- you!" "Shut up," Hitchens retorted. "You're rude and silly. And ugly." Afterward, a deeply satisfied Hitchens smoked a cigarette. "I know how to hurt their feelings because I know what they're going through. ... I have a real relish for inflicting pain on them."

Interview with the proprietor of ErosBlog: "Most of my readers want the government out of their bedroom and out of their expressive life, sure. And they may assume I'm a 'liberal' because I'm a free speech absolutist, radically sex-positive, and so forth. But your typical 'liberal' who is a fellow traveler with me on sex and free speech issues might still turn out to think -- as Democrats often do -- that it's perfectly okay to have government goons with guns running around robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. And they usually think it's perfectly okay to further constrain the already-limited choices of poor women 'for their own good' or 'to prevent exploitation' by regulating or prohibiting participation in various sex work trades. I despise that sort of arrogant urge to control other people at gunpoint -- and, as you know, every law boils down to a command that's enforced at gunpoint."



A good summary of Bombay: "And, yes, the poverty is in your face from the moment you step outside the seething, decrepit international airport into the outstretched arms of the swarming touts and beggars. Yet there's a perverse good humour to the hustling. And not just at the airport, either, where we visitors invariably feel at our most vulnerable. What resonates about Mumbai is not the grinding poverty in which most of its 18 million residents live, but the good cheer with which they face what must be the harsh realities of daily life, and the optimism with which they clearly perceive their future. Everyone works. They have to. India has no social security safety net to speak of, at least not one provided by the state. It's one reason family is everything, and why India's upwardly mobile poor tend to arrive in Mumbai with assorted aunts and grandparents in tow, or have them join them as soon as they can. It infuses the city with a sense of purpose and industriousness. And fun. If that sounds a bit like a contradiction, then, that's exactly what Mumbai is. Or maybe a contrast in extremes".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/20/2006 09:29:00 PM

Sunday, February 19, 2006

 
A MUSLIM SPEAKS OUT

"The controversy regarding the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed completely misses the point. Of course, the cartoons are offensive to Muslims, but newspaper cartoons do not warrant the burning of buildings and the killing of innocent people. The cartoons did not cause the disease of hate that we are seeing in the Muslim world on our television screens at night - they are only a symptom of a far greater disease.

I was born and raised as a Muslim in Cairo, Egypt and in the Gaza Strip... In school in Gaza, I learned hate, vengeance and retaliation. Peace was never an option, as it was considered a sign of defeat and weakness. At school we sang songs with verses calling Jews "dogs" (in Arab culture, dogs are considered unclean). Palestinian television extols terrorists, and textbooks still deny the existence of Israel...

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It's a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Unwelcome truths: "In 1998, a kindly grandmother living in New Jersey wrote a book about child-rearing that created quite a stir. In "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," Judith Rich Harris had the temerity to suggest that the most important influences on children were not their parents but genes and peers. This was heresy, and critics immediately attacked the book in reviews with titles such as "Parents Don't Count!" Nonetheless, Mrs. Harris had made a very convincing argument, and she stuck to her guns. Now, with "No Two Alike" (W.W. Norton & Company, 352 pages, $26.95), she has expanded her thesis.... Here is how she describes the situation: The developmentalists found that the children's behavior was correlated with the parents' behavior and attributed the correlation to the effects of the home environment. Though they realized that heredity might account for some of the correlation, they never considered the possibility that heredity might account for all of it. But that is exactly how it turned out. Once the effects of genetic similarities were estimated and skimmed off, the correlation declined to zero. The putative effects of the home environment disappeared.. This was not welcome news for developmental psychologists, and they responded with vitriolic attacks.

Good one: "In 1983, a study of Fascism (Fashizmut) was published in Bulgaria, under the imprint of the People's Youth Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Democratic Youth Union. Its author, Zhelyu Zhelev, did a thoroughly laudable job of anatomizing his subject. In his section on "The Structure of the Fascist State" he adumbrated the whole "Fascist" totalitarian phenomenon, covering in chapter after chapter the importance of indoctrinating "the masses", the need to keep out foreign influences, the role of farcical elections and a powerless "parliament", the necessity of fanaticism, the view that Western "academic freedom" was false. Above all there was the single party and that party's control of the state, of mass organization, of all opinion, of literature and the arts, of the police, of the courts. Before it was suppressed for its hyper-correct analysis of the problem, Fashizmut had become a minor classic among Bulgarian and even Russian dissidents, with some free spirits visiting the Party bookstore and enquiring for copies of Zhelev's Kommunismut".

Conservative Episcopalians split off: "St. Luke's congregation voted to separate from the larger Episcopal Church USA and its Los Angeles diocese because of what St. Luke's Pastor Ronald Jackson said were major theological differences, including the role of Jesus Christ as a path to salvation and the church's ordination of gay clergy.... "The bottom line is that St. Luke's is no longer under the authority of Bishop Bruno or the Diocese of Los Angeles," Jackson said. "The church with authority over us is the [greater Anglican Church] through Archbishop Henry Orombi of the Anglican Province of Uganda and Bishop Evans Kisekka of the Diocese of Luweero, so Bishop Bruno is trying to exercise authority in somebody else's jurisdiction and this move has no effect on us." Jackson said Orombi and Kisekka are aware of the situation and are supportive of St. Luke's move. "So we will continue to preside during worship services, offer pastoral care and continue our outreach ministries, just as we have always done," Jackson said, adding that 91% of his church voted in favor of separating from the Episcopal Church USA and realigning with the Anglican Communion under the jurisdiction of the Ugandan diocese. St. Luke's is the fourth parish to break away from the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles in the past two years."

How Leftist victim ideology has hurt blacks: "However, today there is more de facto segregation than there was in my childhood with segregation laws. While I knew, played with and picked cotton with children from strong, intact, caring black families in the South as I was growing up, my grandchildren get very tired of listening to black classmates complain about their situation while refusing to work, study, try to get along with others, or behave themselves. Today millions of black youth refuse to even GO to school and millions of black men are in prison. They see themselves as "victims" of "white oppression." They aren't. They are victims of the oppression of black leaders that teach behavior and attitudes guaranteed to cause them to fail. To succeed they need to follow the example of the successful people among them -such as Booker T. Washington, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Thomas Sowell to mention a few.

People who believe the Constitution would break if it didn't change with society are "idiots," U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says: "In a speech Monday sponsored by the conservative Federalist Society, Scalia defended his long-held belief in sticking to the plain text of the Constitution "as it was originally written and intended." "Scalia does have a philosophy, it's called originalism," he said. "That's what prevents him from doing the things he would like to do," he told more than 100 politicians and lawyers from this U.S. island territory. According to his judicial philosophy, he said, there can be no room for personal, political or religious beliefs. Scalia criticized those who believe in what he called the "living Constitution." "That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break." "But you would have to be an idiot to believe that," Scalia said. "The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things."

Deceptive polls about abortion: "But the Los Angeles Times framed its poll question more in line with what the Court's rulings really mean: "Generally speaking, are you in favor of the Supreme Court decision which permits a woman to get an abortion from a doctor at any time, or are you opposed to that?" The result: Only 43 percent of respondents were in favor. "It was the lowest level of support recorded because the rest of the polls misinterpret Roe and Doe. They view Roe v. Wade as a decision that legalized abortion but restricted the procedure, not one that made virtually all abortions legal," writes Stricherz. In fact, the overwhelming majority of respondents in Gallup polls disapprove of abortion when a woman and her partner simply do not want another child or when a pregnancy would interfere with a woman's career".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/19/2006 07:40:00 PM

Friday, February 17, 2006

 
SOME CLEARER EXAMPLES OF GOOGLE CENSORSHIP:

My post about Google yesterday got an unusually big response from readers. Apparently I am far from alone in being dubious about Google. I wouldn't put it past them to arbitrarily delete this blog. So do take note of my mirror sites now in case that happens.

A New Zealand reader duplicated my three searches of yesterday and was given links to my backup copies for two of the blogs concerned but nothing at all for the third blog. In all three cases however, Google could not find the blogspot sites! I myself have just repeated the searches and got nothing at all for all 3 blogs. Very bad!

There are extensive details here of how Google has censored "Jihad Watch" and below are a couple more examples that were emailed to me which resulted from queries made using Google Blog Search:





Google seems to have got its act together after the two searches immediately above were done but it does look as if certain search terms have to be "approved" by someone in authority at Google before responses to them can be allowed. It does inspire the thought that if a big-time blogger like Michelle can be so censored, what hope is there for little guys like me? Go MSN Search!

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RACIST BABIES

I was not going to comment on this article (summarizing research by David J. Kelly reported in Developmental Science and Yair Bar-Haim reported in Psychological Science ) but perhaps I should. What it shows is that babies are "racist" from 3 months old. White babies prefer white faces and black babies prefer black faces. But it all depends on exposure. White babies exposed to an equal mix of black and white faces in their early weeks show no preference.

That finding was actually highly predictable from what we already knew about developmental psychology. It is a safety mechanism for babies to know when they are in the "wrong" hands and they turn on their alarm (cry) when they detect it. Any mother who has given her babe to a stranger to hold will have experienced that. So babies learn rapidly what is normal to them and prefer that. And, like all human beings, babies are quick to generalize (Read, 1983; Hamill, Wilson & Nisbett, 1980) in search of safety. The one thing they know much about is faces and they usually know more than one safe face so it helps to find what is general to the "safe" faces. And if there is a prominent feature (such as colour) that is NOT general, they react accordingly.

The reason why I am making this comment, however, is the wrongheaded response that could arise from the findings. It could be argued that the findings present a perfect case for "diversity". Perhaps all white babies need to be given extensive exposure to blacks from early on. That would of course be a fairly Orwellian proposal but, surprisingly enough, it has been tried. White babies in South Africa are normally cared for most of the time by black nannies and maids. And yet white South Africa produced what is arguably the second most racist (apartheid) government of the 20th century! As any conservative will tell you, nothing about human society is simple. And it is certainly hard to predict.

For a more systematic account of what goes on in racial generalizations, see here and here

References:
Hamill, R., Wilson, T.D. & Nisbett, R.E. (1980) Insensitivity to sample bias: Generalizing from a-typical cases. J. Personality & Social Psychology 39, 578-589.
Read, S.J. (1983) Once is enough: Causal reasoning from a single instance. J. Personality & Social Psychology 45, 323-334.

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ELSEWHERE



Famous homosexual bishop is a drunk (but that's fine of course): "The Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson, has started treatment for alcoholism. "I am writing to you from an alcohol treatment center where on February 1, with the encouragement and support of my partner, daughters and colleagues, I checked myself in to deal with my increasing dependence on alcohol," Robinson wrote in an e-mail to clergy Monday that was released Tuesday by the Diocese of New Hampshire. Robinson's assistant, the Rev. Tim Rich, said Tuesday there was no crisis that led to Robinson's decision to seek treatment but rather a growing awareness of his problem".

Stupid airline "security" in Australia: "American rocker and writer Henry Rollins was reported to the National Security hotline during his recent Australian tour because of a book he was reading on a flight to Brisbane. A furious Rollins was informed he was "nominated as a possible threat" for reading Jihad: The Rise Of Militant Islam In Central Asia, writes Kathy McCabe. The incident happened on a flight from Auckland on the recent Big Day Out tour. Rollins told Australian fans during his tour that he received a letter from a "nice woman" who worked "in one of those government areas that deals with anti-terrorism matters." He posted the letter on his website. "Please tell your Government and everyone in your office to go f... themselves. Baghdad's safer than my hometown and your PM is a sissy," he wrote".

Crazy Leftist judges in Germany: "German fighter jets have been banned from shooting down hijacked passenger aircraft, even if it looks as if they are about to be used in a terrorist attack against crowded buildings or football stadiums. The ruling yesterday, imposed by the Constitutional Court, weakens the ability to guard the airspace over the 12 German football stadiums that will be used to stage the World Cup, which will run from June 9 to July 9".

I have just put online here an interesting email from Canada's "Western Standard" newspaper. Apparently they published the Mohammed cartoons and are under attack over it. They must be the first Canadian newspaper to have the courage of their convictions.

There is a pretty pathetic example of Texas justice just up on Strange Justice

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/17/2006 09:33:00 PM

Thursday, February 16, 2006

 
GOOGLE IS REALLY SICK

It's not just Chinese material they censor but also stuff appearing on their own Western blogspot blogs

Paste the following search string into Google: "Nothing in their present policies will affect illegally acquired firearms". MSN Search (http://search.msn.com/) finds it here:

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_gunwatch_archive.html#113318688717459799

But when I tried last night, Google did not find it, even though it is on one of their own blogspot blogs! And it is not just any old blog. According to Technorati, it is a blog that 28 other sites link to. You sure must have to be big-time to attract the attention of Google!

Or try the string of text: "MORE PUBLIC HOSPITAL NEGLIGENCE". MSN Search correctly found it here:

http://socglory.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_socglory_archive.html#113595149870927208

but Google could not find it at all. And 13 other sites link to that blog according to Technorati

Or try the following string of text: "UC SECRECY ABOUT CORRUPT DEAL". MSN Search does not record the blogspot site concerned (http://edwatch.blogspot.com) but it does instead record a backup copy here:

http://jonjayray.bravehost.com/eddec05.html

Google did not record it at all. Yet, according to Technorati, 21 sites link to that blog.

I think Google is on the skids. All the blogs above are mine and they are of course very anti-Leftist. Is that why they are ignored even though they have lots of links leading to them? And my blogs are not just raves either. I have a massive academic background in the field I cover. When will I be good enough for Google? And note that all the searches are of 2005 posts. Google have had plenty of time to find the stuff.

Bill Gates owns MSN Search and it seems that he is a lot less evil than Google. Isn't competition great? So scrap your Google toolbar and get a MSN toolbar.

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ELSEWHERE

An interesting snippet: "My father used to shoot Marxist Chinese propaganga, and I was shocked to see Farenheit 9/11 packed with the most basic techniques of Eisenstein and Griffith. Being a Marxist for 25 years, I developed quite an appreciation for Soviet cinema. Tarkovsky is probably the best of the non-propaganda auters. Eisenstein was the best Marxist propagandist, while, all the way over in the U.S, D.W Griffith did a hell of a job for the anti-black, anti-semitic Klansmen propaganda with Birth of a Nation. Propaganda probably alienates people, so I'll knock that off, but, short of going to Yale University, I have yet to see a good Propaganda course taught. I mention the science of propaganda because it is practically inseparable from Soviet film". [The name of the writer "Xuefei24p" suggests that he is Chinese]



Instinctive allies: "Both the Left and the mujahedin envision a totalitarian state that cleanses the world of evil by force, establishing a just society at the price of an unspecified number of dead. Both are advocates of a supremacist ideology that is immune to self-criticism and unable to tolerate criticism from others. And now as the European Union contemplates new laws that will, in the words of Franco Frattini, who bears the Orwellian designation of EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security, "give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression," the marriage of the European Left and Islamic jihad can proceed all the more speedily"

Two religions of death: "Both Islam and Marxism were concocted by the uberparasites of their times, Karl the First Trustifarian and the Big Moh'. Both doctrines must deny the Right to Life -- and thus the subsidiary Rights of Liberty, Property, Free Speech, Et Cetera -- of all persons. Both ideologies must do so in order to establish and maintain the reign of terror and death, in order to control and exploit the productive population, that their parasitic adherents need to sustain their otherwise useless lives. To accept the concept of the Right to Life that underlies the society of consent is for the Marxist and the Mullah the first step in an act of suicide."

Twin threats to European culture : "Europe is facing two distinct threats to its culture and liberties. These twin threats are very different on the surface, and have little in common, though there are aspects that are deeply intertwined. The twin threats are Europeanism and Jihadism.... The problem that we face is not to ask ourselves why the eurofanatics want to destroy our culture, or why the Jihardists are so violent, but to understand the way in which over the past 70 odd years both groups have put together ideologies that are both so successful and so inimical to our way of life.... The key similarity is the capture by our opponents, of the academic and intellectual high ground. Our government and media, by necessity, take advice on both subjects from experts. And these experts are those that have been trained in our institutions of higher education. It is hard to blame a minister or a journalist if, due to time constraints and the pressure of deadlines, they defer their serious thinking to those who have spent their life's work studying these areas of public policy."

Scott Norvell, the main blogger at Tongue Tied (I just fill in there) is doing a great job of following the cartoon upheavals and all the frantic apologies being uttered by gutless weasels everywhere. The following post gave me a laugh: "Following the lead of the Iranians, a group of Israeli graphic artists has announced their own contest for the best anti-Semitic cartoon. "We'll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew-hating cartoons ever published!" said organizer Amitai Sandy. "No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!" Among the prizes: the famous Matzo-bread baked with the blood of Christian children".

Democrat flip-flops over "spying": "In what can only be called a major reversal, two Democratic leaders, Rep. Jane Harman and former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, admitted the controversial NSA surveillance program was necessary for fighting terrorism... Please don't miss the significance of this turnaround. It is reminiscent of the many flip-flops the Democrats made over the U.S. invasion of Iraq. One month they approved, the next they were appalled at the thought, the next they were on board again".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/16/2006 04:30:00 PM

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

 
Gun-toting USA is the LEAST violent

"Historians, world leaders and assorted pundits with Yankee bashing in mind have long cultivated the idea that America is a violent place. Not so, says Gallup, which released a report yesterday revealing that the nation is not necessarily Dodge City: The impact of crime is lower in the U.S. than in Britain, and in many cases Canada. "The U.S. is often seen from abroad as a relatively lawless society, with murders and gun-related crimes aplenty. But a series of Gallup surveys in Great Britain, Canada and the U.S. suggest the image is somewhat distorted," noted David W. Moore of the Gallup News Service.

It's close, but the United States emerged as the least crime-ridden. In three polls of 3,025 persons -- about 1,000 in each country -- 32 percent of the Americans said they or someone in their households had been a victim of crime of some type within the previous year. Among Canadians, the figure was 33 percent; among Britons, 36 percent. About 71 percent of both Canadians and Britons, compared with 67 percent of Americans, said there had been more crime in their respective countries in the previous 12 months.

Gallup also asked respondents whether they had been mugged, assaulted or had property stolen, among five other unpleasant experiences. Overall, Britain proved the most dangerous, with a quarter of the respondents reporting that they or a family member had been a victim of crime. Canada and the United States were tied at 21 percent. On specific crimes, 22 percent of the British reported their home, car or property had been vandalized. The figure was 17 percent among Canadians and 15 percent among Americans."

More here:

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Is this the last word on the cartoon Jihad? If not, it should be. Bill Kristol, writing in "The Weekly Standard", says that the "anguish" caused by the Danish cartoons is phony -- and he says it very sarcastically. I have an idea that this might be the first time the cartoons have been reproduced in an American newspaper too.

I have just put up here an English translation of the latest article -- "Rejsende i islam" -- from Denmark on the cartoons issue. The article is from the now "infamous" Jyllands Posten itself. It gives a fairly detailed account of how the uproar was provoked by Denmark's Imams -- with enthusiastic help from peak Muslim bodies in Arab countries.

Islamofascists not primarily religious: "We were in a London mosque, discussing the sermons the sheik delivers at Friday congregations. I had asked why God almost never featured in (or, at best, got a cameo role) in sermons that focused almost exclusively on political issues. For the sheik, what mattered was "the sufferings of our brethren under occupation." In other words: In our Islam, we don't do God - we do Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq! Here we have a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb. How did this neo-Islam - a political movement masquerading as religion - come into being, and how can those who know little about Islam distinguish it from the mainstream of the faith?"

A British biologist on the genetics of the male/female difference: "Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research. But I think this dream is Utopian; it assumes that if all doors were opened and all discrimination ended, the different sexes would be professionally indistinguishable. The dream is sustained by a cult of political correctness that ignores the facts of life�and thrives only because the human mind likes to bury experience as it builds beliefs. Here I will argue, as others have many times before, that men and women are born different.

Whites to be a minority in London in only 4 years time: "Whites will be an ethnic minority in Britain by the end of the century. Analysis of official figures indicate that, at current fertility rates and levels of immigration, there will be more non-whites than whites by 2100. It would be the first time in history that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease. Whites will be a minority in London by 2010. In the early 1950s there were only a few tens of thousands of non-whites in the UK. By 1991 that had risen to 3 million - 6 per cent of the population. The population of ethnic minorities has been growing at between 2 and 4 per cent a year. Net immigration has been running at record levels, with 185,000 newcomers last year".

Why are the Oscars and Hollywood no longer relevant?: "It is hard to come up with a more appropriate sentiment for a media and entertainment culture that ignores the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the ongoing intimidation of the Danes even as it prepares to honor the following: Moral equivalency in the war against terror (Munich); Racial tension (Crash); A deeply flawed writer (Capote); the wholesale breaking of marriage vows (Brokeback Mountain); And, let's have one more round of applause for ourselves, another retelling of the McCarthy hearings that fails to note the communist threat was real (Good Night and Good Luck)".

A French Leftist says American Leftists are empty-headed: "Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.... But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a Right. This Right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking. And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void... "

There is a good article here about the sad state of modern Britain. Some of the things he says are a bit over the top but most of it is pretty right -- the low standards of service and civility, the tax-driven high prices, the crowding, the Kafka-esque idea of what constitutes justice etc.

There is an interesting site called Watching America which translates foreign news about the U.S., to enable Americans (and all English speakers) to read what is being written about them and their country throughout the world. Much of the content is available nowhere else in English.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/15/2006 03:56:00 PM

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

 
CUBA AS A SPANISH TOURIST FOUND IT

"We arrived in Cuba without political prejudices, without any intention of setting foot in Varadero Beach, intent on seeing the country outside the much-lauded tourist areas, recalls Spanish backpacker Isane Aparicio Busto. "The blow was shocking. We left with our perceptions about the reality of the Cuban Revolution - and even with our prior social and political principles - demolished.

"All we'd heard about from many Europeans who traveled to Cuba was the rum, the happiness, the salsa, the Caribbean party atmosphere. But they hadn't mentioned the prostitution either - so we should have known they weren't totally leveling with us. We'd traveled to Mexico City and Caracas and known the horrible slums on the outskirts of these cities. But through old Havana we found ourselves walking constantly through a miasma of pestilential odors, with morose faces looking at us from decrepit doorways. My friend and I kept looking at each other asking, 'Where in the hell have all the people traveled who kept telling us poverty doesn't exist in Revolutionary Cuba?'

"We saw police everywhere. And it soon became obvious that Cubans are the victims of the 21st century's version of apartheid. Hotels for foreign tourists, stores for foreign tourists, buses for foreign tourists - a world apart that Cubans themselves are prevented by the police from entering. So we asked a few Cubans how they felt about this system.

And they all answered - while looking around - that it was fine, had to be done that way. That it was the proper way to protect tourists because many Cubans are scoundrels. So was this that proud nationalism of Revolutionary Cuba we'd heard about? The nation's impoverished people forced to treat foreigners with such meekness and deference - to grovel before them? ....

"We learned that the Cuban system is nothing but misery, moral mendacity and abuse. The system simply smothers you. And yet this revolution (with its Che Guevara banners) has sold itself to the youth of the world as a paradigm of equality, liberty and national liberation. And the leaders of the government that governs my country (Spain) simply refuse to come out and call this place a dictatorship. The Cuban people's personal aspirations seemed completely mutilated. I've never felt such anguish about a nation and a people in my life. If I were a Cuban, I'd certainly be on a raft."

More here

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The charming Hillary above. The lucky old USA could have her as its President in two year's time.

Bomb Iran! "Pentagon strategists are drawing up plans for bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks on Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Tehran's suspected efforts to develop an atomic bomb. US Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon loads and working on logistics for an operation. They are reporting to the office of the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as the US updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions... "This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," a senior Pentagon adviser said. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."... the steady flow of disclosures about Iran's secret nuclear operations and the virulent anti-Israeli threats of its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has prompted the fresh assessment of military options by the US. The most likely strategy would involve aerial bombardment by long-distance B2 bombers, each armed with up to 18,000 kilograms of precision weapons, including the latest bunker-busting devices. They would fly from bases in Missouri and refuel in flight."

Antisemitism in the Church of England: "The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to the Chief Rabbi regretting as "unfortunate" the Church of England's decision to review its investments in Israel. In his carefully crafted letter, Dr Rowan Williams, who voted in favour of the motion, denies that it represented a decision to disinvest at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise and a Hamas administration committed to the destruction of Israel is preparing for power. The General Synod is facing wide criticism from senior church leaders, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton, for voting to disinvest from Caterpillar, the US company that manufactures the tractors used in land clearance in the Occupied Territories.... In the motion, Keith Macouronne of the Guildford diocese, moved that the synod "heed the call from our sister church, the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, for morally responsible investment in the Palestinian occupied territories and, in particular, to disinvest from companies profiting from the illegal occupation, such as Caterpillar Inc, until they change their policies." The synod voted overwhelmingly in favour."

The ostriches of Australia's arty Left: "Last Sunday, as Muslims enraged by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed torched Danish diplomatic missions in Lebanon and Syria, Melbourne's artists rallied to defend free speech.... As The Age noted in a profile of comedian Dave O'Neil, another of the stars, "it's the cartoonists and comedians who are the first" to be punished when we lose the right to speak our mind. Too true. Pity now the Danish cartoonists, several now in hiding. Or their editor, now under guard, and facing an inquiry by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.... Daring Dave knew well the risk he was running by turning up on Sunday to defend free speech, but welcomed martyrdom: "I'd love to get locked up for doing this." Dave and his artist friends weren't defending that right to free speech. No, they weren't defending that right against the very real threat of violence by Muslims. They were there to defend free speech instead from the completely imaginary threat of prosecution by the Howard Government, under sedition laws we've actually had for decades. Here again was our cultural elite at play, pretending our greatest danger comes not from radical Islam, but those protecting us from it".

Miserable Leftists again: "Is it aircraft noise, John Howard's long reign, or being overworked and underpaid that makes the so-called chardonnay socialists of Sydney's inner west the most disgruntled people in Australia? A new survey that compares the wellbeing of people in all 150 federal electorates reveals the safe Labor seat of Grayndler, covering Annandale, Leichhardt, Petersham, Newtown, Marrickville and Summer Hill, tops the national list for all-round unhappiness".

Memo for British and European libertarians: The Libertarian International Spring Convention -- one of the high points of the year for freedom lovers -- is on again. The conference will take place in Brussels on 25-26 February to coincide with the Capitalist Ball. As always, there will be exciting talks by some of the best thinkers and activists in the movement and plenty of time for socialising. Register now for a week-end of fun, friendship and freedom building. Contact Christian Michel

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/14/2006 03:04:00 PM

Monday, February 13, 2006

 
The New Slavery of American blacks

Over the last several decades, Liberals and Democrats have been pulling off the greatest scam of all time -- rewriting history itself. It's amazing how, in a free society, they have managed to hijack the past, twisting the truth by subtle manipulation. Somehow the Left has convinced a sizeable portion of Americans that lowered expectations and government coddling are their birthright by reason of their African ancestry. The new slavery is an enslavement of the mind, and its victims willingly embrace their chains.

Multiculturalists (those who preach self-segregation) have convinced many black Americans to believe they even have a different history from the rest of the country. This is a distortion of reality that has already caused much damage to our national identity. What is "black history month" supposed to represent, anyway? All those people and events singled out for special recognition as being part of "black history" were, in fact, AMERICAN events and AMERICAN people. Every American should celebrate the achievements of Americans who made a positive impact on our shared history, without dividing them according to skin color. All Americans have equal reason and right to be proud of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin as well as Booker T. Washington and Benjamin Banneker.

Race-baiting demagogues use hate and fear to keep blacks from considering candidates from any political party but Democrats when in the voting booth. Yet it was Democrats who seceded from the United States in order to preserve their "right" to own other human beings. It was Democrats who formed the Klu Klux Klan and instituted Jim Crow laws, Democrats who fought for "separate but equal" treatment of black Americans, Democrats who stood in the doorways of schools to keep blacks out and Democrats who turned fire hoses on blacks to keep them from voting. And it has been Democrats who have worked to pin all those injustices on Republicans, who have been the true "party of inclusion" all along.

Most important, it was Democrats who founded and preserved and continue to push for social programs designed to destroy autonomy and self-reliance. Lowering standards for education and employment based on race or sex sends the message "you aren't good enough to compete" to members of the "favored" group. So-called "affirmative" action programs and racial quotas only send the message, "you can't make it without help." Yet an overwhelming number of minorities vote for those who continue to push race-based condescension. How do Democrats keep fooling the people they have been oppressing into voting for them, year after year?...

Obviously, Clinton and other Democrats -- black and white -- use emotionally loaded slavery references to paint their political opponents as oppressors. They gamble on the ignorance of history that constitutes a public education these days. The fact that the Left continues to oppose true education reform -- abolishing tenure and subjecting schools to competition through vouchers -- comes as no surprise. If public schools were run more efficiently and competitively, those who attend them might learn more about American history -- the real history -- than the Left wants them to know. The chains of the new slavery are forged from ignorance, after all.

More here

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Those pesky genetics again: "Genetics can play a bigger role in determining a child's reading ability than teaching, an Australian researcher says. An international study showed some children were born with "an unfortunate deal of the genetic deck" when it comes to reading skills, said study co-author Brian Byrne, professor of psychology at the University of New England in northern NSW. No "magic bullet" of encouragement and tutoring would fully improve their reading abilities, he said. Published in the latest issue of the British-based Journal of Research in Reading, the study showed the influence of parents reading to their children diminished significantly a year or so after they started school. "The home environment doesn't leave its mark much on children as they start to go through school, which is surprising to a lot of people," Byrne said. "What seems to determine most of the differences amongst children, just in the normal school setting in terms of their reading skills, are genetics." [Anybody who knows the high correlation between IQ and early reading ability will of course not be at all surprised by the finding. Chris Brand comments on the finding too]

Bogus rights: "Do people have a right to medical treatment whether or not they can pay? What about a right to food or decent housing? Would a U.S. Supreme Court justice hold that these are rights just like those enumerated in our Bill of Rights? In order to have any hope of coherently answering these questions, we have to decide what is a right. The way our Constitution's framers used the term, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people and imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech, or freedom to travel, is something we all simultaneously possess. My right to free speech or freedom to travel imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference. In other words, my exercising my right to speech or travel requires absolutely nothing from you and in no way diminishes any of your rights."

The gas-lines in Iraq are due to price controls, nothing else: "As I say, this isn't some controversial point in theoretical economics. The failure of price controls has been documented (literally) for a period of thousands of years. For an anecdotal bit of evidence, my colleague (who worked at a gas station in the 1970s) said that the gas lines disappeared within one week of the abandonment of price controls. And when I asked what took so long, he said that the owner didn't immediately raise prices because of feared public backlash".

Lost job for backing GOP, ex-trooper says: "A former veteran state trooper from Knoxville, who has filed a federal lawsuit against the Tennessee Department of Safety, told members of the state Senate's Transportation Committee yesterday he lost his job in 2004 because his family supported Republican candidates. 'The gist of my story was I was run out of the highway patrol,' former THP Lt. Charles B. Farmer said. Appearing with his lawyer, Farmer presented supporting documents to the committee which is investigating claims of cronyism in the department. Among them were contribution disclosures showing how much Farmer's wife and father-in-law had donated to Republican candidates in the 2002 statewide election."

A rather alarming post here about a cat parasite that is present in about 40% of human brains. Apparently it alters your behaviour -- including making you less able to concentrate. I think I am going to get tested for it.

It takes Ann Coulter to give us a laugh out of the cartoon uproar. I guess I must like sarcasm.

Strange Justice has just reported a disturbing case where Chicago prosecutors jailed a man they apparently knew from the beginning to be innocent. The case stank so much that the guy eventually got a damages award of $9 million!

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/13/2006 08:13:00 PM

Sunday, February 12, 2006

 
SOME FEARS ARE REALISTIC AND SOME ARE CRAZY

(Post excerpted from Reliapundit)

Yesterday, Hillary "socialized medicine" Clinton charged that the GOP is playing the "fear card" - as if we shouldn't be afraid of terrorists. She said:

"... the GOP election message is: 'All we've got is fear and we're going to keep playing the fear card.'"

When she makes this charge she's as NUTTY as the LOONY-LEFTIST/DOVE comrades - who are now the base of the party, (if not the rank-and-file). I think it is REASONABLE to be afraid of the terrorists who: Fly jets into skyscrapers; bomb Israeli pizzerias and Muslim weddings and funerals; riot and burn embassies over CARTOONS; blow up bars in Bali; behead charity workers; torch train-cars of Hindu pilgrims; destroy 1000 year old Buddhist monuments and behead Thai Buddhists; murder Russian school-children; condemn rape-victims to hanging; dress up their children as genocidal suicide bombers; deny the Holocaust; bomb subways in London and trains in Madrid; murder filmmakers; put fatwas on novelists; and generally try to establish tyranny and theocratic totalitarianism through intimidation and terror.

On the other hand the things the Left is afraid of ARE TOTALLY INSANE: Man-made global warming is the biggest threat we face; we're running out of oil and other natural resources; federal bureaucrats deliberately withheld hurricane rescue services to New Orleanians; the NSA is illegally intercepting all of everyone's international phone calls - (all 200+ BILLION yearly minutes worth!); the FBI is intimidating librarians; Afghanistan was going to be a QUAGMIRE - we weren't supposed to defeat the Afghans since the USSR couldn't; we weren't going to be able to defeat Saddam - because the strategy was wrong - we went in too fast and our supply lines were too strung out; pharmaceutical companies, Wal Mart and the oil companies are ripping us off BIGTIME; off-shore oil-drilling and oil-drilling in ANWR is desecrating the environment; the Bush Tax Cuts will destroy our economy - (Bush has the worst jobs record since Hoover - it's the worst economy since Hoover); abortion will become illegal and unconstitutional if you vote GOP; and the GOP will take away your right to have a living-will (even though ALL the Bush's have one!); Bush and the GOP are trying make America into an Iranian religious state.

The list of unreasonable fear-mongering by the Left goes back in time too. Remember these "golden oldies": Reagan would start WW3; there will be mass global starvation; we're going to run out of oil; NAFTA will ruin our economy; Bobby Kennedy's ol' boss Joe McCarthy was evil personified and Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent; "ending welfare as we know it" will put millions of people on the streets; the Reagan tax cuts will ruin the economy.

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Reagan, Reaganomics and the future: "Ronald Reagan, it has been said, was elected on six words: Strong defense, smaller government, less regulation. With that, came a moral compass, happy nature, septuagenarian's sure stride and an unwavering will to make the world safer for freedom and America's destiny. As a party, we would do well to reset our bearings by his North Star. If we allow ourselves to forget, we will drift into dangerous waters. House Republicans have just elected John Boehner, from Ohio's 8th District, as their new majority leader. He will now be No. 2, under the seasoned leadership of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. The new team offers a new start. That said, 2006 be a decisive election year, and 2008 will be upon us before we know it. It is time to throw open the barn doors and take a hard look inside. Today, the Republican Party inherits the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln."

The huge ripoff of middle-class welfare: "Ronald Reagan memorably complained about "welfare queens," but he never told us that the biggest welfare queens are the already wealthy. Their lobbyists fawn over politicians, giving them little bits of money -- campaign contributions, plane trips, dinners, golf outings -- in exchange for huge chunks of taxpayers' money. Millionaires who own your favorite sports teams get subsidies, as do millionaire farmers, corporations, and well-connected plutocrats of every variety. Even successful, wealthy TV journalists."

Doubling jail time would cut burglary: "Giving thieves longer jail sentences would dramatically reduce the crime rate, says new research that has found the average burglar commits 152 robberies in four years. The study by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics found increasing the average prison sentence for burglary from one to two years could prevent up to 10,000 burglaries each year in NSW, a reduction of 8percentage points. And doubling the percentage of burglars who went to jail when convicted -- from 44per cent to 88per cent -- could prevent 14,000 burglaries a year in NSW. But such a move would be expensive. Reducing the burglary rate by 10per cent would mean 34per cent more burglars in jail at any one time, with an extra cost of $26million a year. Spending $26million on prevention could result in a saving of $156 million -- the cost in insurance claims".

Mexican incursions inflame border situation: "Armed men in Mexican military uniforms have illegally crossed into the United States to provide cover for drug smugglers, and have fired upon U.S. Border Patrol agents on several occasions, a congressional panel was told Tuesday. Border Patrol Union President T.J. Bonner detailed three incidents since 2000 in which U.S. agents were chased and fired upon by what he characterized as Mexican soldiers operating inside U.S. borders. Bonner testified before the House Homeland Security Investigations Subcommittee on Tuesday."

How to support the troops: " "The last time 1st Lt. William 'Eddie' Rebrook IV saw his body armor, he was lying on a stretcher in Iraq, his arm shattered and covered in blood. A field medic tied a tourniquet around Rebrook's right arm to stanch the bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Soldiers yanked off his blood-soaked body armor. He never saw it again. But last week, Rebrook was forced to pay $700 for that body armor, blown up by a roadside bomb more than a year ago. He was leaving the Army for good because of his injuries. He turned in his gear at his base in Fort Hood, Texas. He was informed there was no record that the body armor had been stripped from him in battle. He was told to pay nearly $700 or face not being discharged for weeks, perhaps months."

Ed Driscoll seems to be a guru on many things. In a recent post he even gets it spot-on about Hitler being a Leftist. I have added him to my blogroll.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/12/2006 09:22:00 AM

Saturday, February 11, 2006

 
THE PERILS (AND OCCASIONAL REWARDS) OF OBJECTIVITY

It is always amazing to libertarians when we are referred to by the Left as "extreme Right" or even "Nazis". Libertarians tend to see ALL governments as fascist and that is exactly what we oppose. So to be accused of believing in what you spend most of your time arguing against is pretty weird. But to the simple minds of the Left, anyone they do not like is a "Fascist", of course. But libertarians often get conservatives offside too -- mainly because we believe morality is a personal matter that the government should concern itself with only when a practice clearly attacks the liberties of others. So, as a libertarian, I am used to being a defender of unpopular views.

And it is a good thing that I am. Because as well as being a defender of liberty, I am pernicious in another way: I am also a defender of truth -- historical truth in particular. And THAT can annoy people from both sides of the aisle too. As frequent readers of this blog know well, the history of the Hitler era in particular has interested me for many years -- mainly because the distortions about that era that we are generally fed as history are so unbelievably gross. What I try to do is to UNDERSTAND Nazism as it really was. Merely to condemn it is puerile in my view. And in my big article on Nazism, I do point out the reasons why Nazism was attractive to prewar Germans. And I also, of course, point out that in its day, Nazism was fairly mainstream Leftism. Racism, eugenics and antisemitism were common beliefs among Leftists worldwide in the prewar era.

And my identifying Nazism as socialist (which Hitler himself did) does get me furious emails from Leftists at times. They seem to think that they can counter my careful documentation of everything I say merely by making abusive assertions. The idea that Nazism was Leftist is so foreign to them that evidence just does not matter. So it was interesting that I received yesterday an email from a real Fascist -- evidently a leader of a Norwegian Fascist group. So what did he have to say about my writings on Fascism? Did he furiously reject them as being all wrong? Not at all! He loved them! He thought that I summarized well what Fascism was all about. So modern-day Leftists -- who generally know next to nothing about ANYTHING in history -- think I am all wrong but people who, as practitioners of it, certainly DO know what Fascism is all about, think I am spot-on. I think that is not a bad endorsement of my endeavours to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Even though I am extremely unsympathetic to Fascism, I achieve enough objectivity about it for those so inclined to recognize the attractive side of it in my writings.

And here is where I am going to make a lot of people critical of me: I feel that it is important to note that Hitler and Mussolini were extremely POPULAR Leftists. Fascism is probably the most attractive form of Leftism that has ever been invented. Mussolini was outspokely admired in his day by such diverse figures as Winston Churchill and Frankin Delano Roosevelt and Hitler was really LOVED by many Germans. Modern-day Leftists tend to HATE their fellow-citizens. Hitler loved his fellow Germans and they loved him back. We should be very glad that modern-day Leftists have been so thick as not to learn what they could from history. If they had emulated Hitler instead of Stalin, the whole world would now be completely under their domination. I was actually reluctant to say that -- in case Leftists learn from it. But they are so rigid in their ideas that I think there is little fear of that. If you want to see in full WHY Hitler and Mussolini were so popular, it is all in my articles here and here.

And that brings me to my final point here and the one that will get outraged screeches aimed at me: I think it is always important to look at both sides of every question and that includes looking at the Nazi viewpoint. And there is a modern-day site here that does defend the Nazi viewpoint in a careful way. I certainly do not at all agree with everything on the site but it does nonetheless serve to highlight some of the little-known elements of history that led to the final catastrophe (or catastrophes) of WWII. For instance, in an article that has recently attracted a lot of justified criticism, it points out that Jews around the world were well aware of the dangers Hitler posed and in the mid-30s mounted a big campaign to boycott German goods etc. The article's claim that Hitler was before that campaign not antisemitic is of course absurd -- as every reader of Mein Kampf will know -- but it is clear that the campaign achieved only one significant thing: It thoroughly confirmed Hitler's claim of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against him and against Germany. It helped to make Hitler seem reasonable to other Germans. And partly for that reason, many German Jews opposed the campaign.

Sadly, German Jews had no good options at that time other than to emigrate. And even that was not much of an option. In 1939, a German ocean liner, the SS St. Louis, with 1,000 Jewish refugees aboard, got so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami -- but that great Leftist hero, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would not let them land. They returned to Germany to be exterminated. Leftist "compassion" at work all-round there.

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Why the Arab world is so backward: "The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three "deficits". It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential-and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.... Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all"

In case you have not seen it already, there is a blog post here pointing out that the "offensive" cartoons of Mohammed were republished in an Egyptian newspaper way back in October 2005 with not a hint of protest. So the uproar now is definitely orchestrated rather than being a genuine burst of outrage. The author of the blog appears to be a pro-Western Arab.

Unending British bureaucratic bungling: "The Child Support Agency, 3 billion pounds in debt and lambasted as the worst body of its sort in the developed world, will be redesigned from scratch, the Government said today. After 12 years of backlogs and a costly failure to implement a new computerised system, Mr Hutton said the CSA had managed to collect 4.5 billion pounds in support payments, but had cost 3 billion pounds to run and was staggering under the weight of 3 billion pounds in debt. The agency currently has a backlog of more than 300,000 cases and misses its target of 42 days to process a case by more than a year. For every pound collected from absent parents, the CSA spends 1.85 pounds. David Laws, the Liberal Democrats Work and Pensions Spokesman, said the CSA was "the worst-performing child support agency in the developed world" and that the announcement of yet another review would frustrate single parents waiting for payments."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/11/2006 04:39:00 PM

Friday, February 10, 2006

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

Muslim goons silence Danish journos while in Australia Premier Bracks helps Muslim bigots persecute Christians: If the Prime Minister of Denmark has the guts to stand up and defend free speech, why can't Liberal politicians do likewise and challenge Bracks' Muslim blasphemy laws and the Islamo-fascists behind them?
Incompetent economic commentator calls President Bush a dolt: The Bush-hating Kaletsky is not a good economist. Moreover, I would go so far as to call him a dolt
Paul Krugman's lousy economic thinking: Krugman and his ilk will continue to do all they can to poison the economic waters, such is their pathological hatred of Bush
How a Murdoch reporter swallowed communist Vietnamese anti-American agitprop: The Bush-hating Nason's mendacious reporting from the US is not, I regret to say, an aberration but part of a pattern of ideologically motivated deceit
A lying journalist v. President Bush: There is no other way of putting it: the Bush-hating Eccleston is a vicious lying bigot who ought to be fired
Why Democrats hate patriotism : Democrats are not only not patriotic, they despise and fear anyone who is
Victory of Hamas: not a bad thing after all: Hamas has no choice but to recognize Israel and renounce violence. If they don't, they will starve and will be removed by those who voted for them
Ask the Children why soldiers are dying. They understand: Over a year ago a brave young soldier was riding in a tank 20 miles somewhere outside Mosul, Iraq. While traveling down the well known course, a bomb went off under his vehicle -- changing his life forever
Eminent Domain. Peace for Neubert Purser?: Eminent Domain effectively allows the government to 'condemn' your land and take it from you and this can include your home as well state at the expense of consumers

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RECENTLY POSTED ON ICJS

Justifying Zionicide: The holocaust and the UN
Replacing Judaism
Too much tolerance
Saving Spielberg
Who's who in Hamas
Islamism's willing executioners
Munich ignores German blunders
Danish paper apologises to Muslims

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ELSEWHERE



Of course! The cartoon riots are all GWB's fault! "But eventually the focus of this conflict will shift back to the United States, the undisputed leader of "the West." With all his talk of freedom as a universal right, President Bush pretends to understand that U.S. support of corrupt dictatorships in places such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan contributes to the feeling that Muslims are under attack and helps give strength to fundamentalism and jihad."

Under-represented libertarians: According to the Cato Institute's David Boaz in the Wall Street Journal recently, Gallup polls show that around 20% of the US population are neither liberal nor conservative but libertarian - opposing the use of government either to "promote traditional values" or to "do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses." So where, he asks, are the libertarians in politics and the media? With big-government conservatives spending money like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store, there seems to be nobody to represent the country's libertarians. The Democrats vote against tax cuts and Social Security privatization. The Republicans want to ban abortion and gay partnerships. Media debate divides simply into either pro-Bush or (mostly) anti-Bush. What's a libertarian to do? Along with Gallup, exit polls suggest that Boaz is right, and that there are large numbers of unrepresented Americans who just hate government pushing them around. About 17m of those who voted for John Kerry did not think the government should do more to solve the country's problems. And 28m Bush voters support either gay marriage or civil unions. That's 45m people with broadly libertarian views. But, says Boaz, you'd never know it from watching TV, or listening to elected politicians".

While Ford and GM are going broke: "Shares of Toyota Motor Corp., the world's largest automaker by market value, may rise after the company yesterday said it expects to post another year of record earnings for the year ending in March. Shares of Toyota, which have gained 61 percent in the last 12 months, rose 6.7 percent to 6.530 yen in Tokyo yesterday. This year, profit may exceed last year's 1.17 trillion yen ($9.9 billion) and sales my also beat 18.55 trillion yen, Toyota Senior Managing Director Takeshi Suzuki said yesterday. The yen's weakness inflated the value of overseas sales, giving Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe funds for a record 1.4 trillion yen investment in new factories this year. The expansion may help the company overtake General Motors Corp., which is cutting jobs and shutting plants to stem losses. ``The automaker is expanding production to meet a strong demand and we can expect the company to have another good year of earnings,'' said Teruhisa Ishikawa, a manager at Mizuho Investors Securities Co. in Tokyo. ``The earnings figures were good.'' Toyota, the world's second-biggest automaker, yesterday said third-quarter profit rose 34 percent to a record 397.6 billion yen, buoyed by a weaker yen and increased sales of fuel-efficient cars in the U.S. and Asia. Sales gained 15 percent in the quarter to 5.3 trillion yen.

EU ignores world body: "The European Union put a brave face today on a WTO ruling that it had imposed unfair restrictions on genetically modified crops, insisting there is no need to change its current GM approval system. The bloc's executive arm said that since the United States along with Argentina and Canada filed the case in 2003, the EU had changed the way it approved GM foods for market and therefore the ruling was already dated. "For the moment, we see no consequences for our legislation which we consider to be toughest in the world," European Commission spokeswoman for environment issues Barbara Helfferich said. A WTO dispute settlement panel backed a complaint which charged that a European moratorium on imports of GMOs, in place since 1998, reflected business protectionism rather than concerns about the health of consumers or the environment, according to diplomats in Geneva."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/10/2006 06:33:00 PM

Thursday, February 09, 2006

 
ON APATHY

I was at university during the Vietnam war and the University of Queensland was as frantically antiwar as most universities were at that time. Like the USA, Australia both had conscription and had troops in Vietnam -- and the young treasures at university definitely did not want to get shot at. In such a climate, to be vocally pro-war was almost impossible (though I was) but one group of dissenters got around that by forming what they called "The Student Apathy Group" (SAG). Apathy was almost the only respectable way of dissenting from the prevalent Leftist line. Also studying at the time was a very good humoured Australian Army Major named Imre George Apathy -- of Hungarian origin and universally known as "Bob". When SAG heard that there was a real-life student Apathy on campus, they promptly made him their patron!

So I think it is clear that apathy can be useful at times. And it is in fact very prevalent. I was at a birthday BBQ recently with a small group of perfectly decent ordinary Australians where I supplied the sausages. At one point I said: "And you will be pleased to know that the sausages are halal" I got exactly the response I expected -- total incomprehension. I might as well have said that the sausages were "haram" (forbidden). It was just another indication that those of us who blog, read blogs or just keep up with current events are in fact well out of the mainstream. The average person is interested only in events that affect him or her directly and personally.

And I think that is a good thing. Australia has benefited greatly from economically rational economic policies introduced by both major political parties so Australians can afford to be apathetic. Whichever party gains power will almost certainly do a better job of managing the economy than do most of the world's governments. But apathy has its price. The U.S. economy is not as well managed as the Australian one -- witness the vast U.S. agricultural subsidies -- but Americans have a somewhat higher standard of living than Australians because they are so highly motivated and therefore work harder. By contrast, Australians would rather go to the beach most of the time. And they often do.

Footnote:

Yes. I did join the Australian Army (I became a sergeant) and I did volunteer for service in Vietnam. Incomprehensible, I know. Definitely not apathetic.

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ELSEWHERE

Iran has said that it going to commission a series of cartoons mocking Jews and the holocaust to see if the West reacts to those cartoons in the same way that it has acted about the cartoons of Mohammed. They needn't bother. The Western Left have been doing the same for a long time -- as we see here. And the reaction to the antisemitic Leftist cartoons? "Perfectly OK. Old boy" (To paraphrase). In fact, one such cartoon "was awarded first prize as the best political cartoon of the year" (See here).

Perhaps I have a weird sense of humour but I find the frantically hate-filled Leftist site "Try Works" (widely believed to be written by Ward Churchill) to be quite amusing. Every word on it seems to be written with bulging-eyed fury. And that does touch my sense of the ridiculous. In a recent post they have even called me a Nazi! How original! LOL! But he did reproduce in full the post of mine that he took exception to so I guess I should thank him for exposing my thoughts to an audience that would not normally see them! The "Tryworks" post was in fact picked up by another Leftist site called -- would you believe it? -- Angry Indian! So I guess I have given quite a few Leftists a little thrill of self-righteousness. Since they need that so badly, who am I to begrudge it to them? I note, however, that Churchill and his ilk do not appear to have commented on this post. Perhaps we should feel sorry for the poor old angry Leftists. After all: "Angry people are more likely to sustain injuries serious enough to require emergency medical care"

Good to see that black blogress, La Shawn Barber has taken a fair-minded look at the correlations between race and IQ. She clearly accepts that there ARE important and inherited difference between blacks and whites ON AVERAGE. And she points out that this is already a major public policy issue.

Incitement to violence finally earns a conviction: "Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has been sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of incitement of racial hatred and soliciting murder. Sentencing the hook-handed, one-eyed imam at London's Old Bailey court, Judge Anthony Hughes said Hamza used his authority to encourage his audiences that killing was a religious duty. I do not make the mistake of thinking that you represent Islamic thinking generally," he added, warning that Hamza could face further charges in relation to US claims that he supported an alleged terrorist camp in the Pacific north-west. He could also face losing his British passport, Hughes said, stating that Hamza's words, and their potential spread through followers, made him a "real danger" to the lives of innocent people around the world.

Last resort against Iran looming: "It is the option of last resort with consequences too hideous to contemplate. And yet, with diplomacy nearly exhausted, the use of military force to destroy Iran's nuclear programme is being actively considered by those grappling with one of the world's most pressing security problems. For five years the West has used every diplomatic device at its disposal to entice Iran into complying with strict conditions that would prevent its nuclear programme being diverted to produce an atomic bomb. Those efforts, however, are now faltering. US leaders are openly discussing the looming conflict. A recent poll showed that 57 per cent of Americans favoured military intervention to stop Iran building a bomb. Experts agree that America has the military capability to destroy Iran's dozen known atomic sites. US forces virtually surround Iran with military air bases to the west in Afghanistan, to the east in Iraq, Turkey and Qatar and the south in Oman and Diego Garcia. The US Navy also has a carrier group in the Gulf, armed with attack aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles. B2 stealth bombers flying from mainland America could also be used".

What an imbecile! "A Republican lawmaker who once described Washington's combative U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, as everything a diplomat should not be, had some kind words for him while visiting U.N. headquarters on Monday. "I spend a lot of time with John on the phone. I think he is really working very constructively to move forward," said Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/09/2006 01:24:00 PM

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

 
THE CARTOONS. A SELECTION FROM THE MANY POINTS BEING MADE:

The man who orchestrated the anti-Denmark uprising was a Danish Imam: "Abu Laban's celebrated celeb status is about history in Denmark. Danes have no more patience for those who preach love in one language and war in another, those who publicly play the role of the victim, demand tolerance and then secretly incite hatred. While much of Europe has been asleep at the wheel, oblivious to the monumental threat radical Islam poses to its future, at least one country is increasingly awake. Denmark's first battle is domestic, unmasking the enemy's fifth column inside its borders".

As already pointed out on this blog, Mohammed actually appears quite commonly in Islamic art and has also appeared widely in international cartoons, including America's "South Park", for some time. Indeed there have even uncomplimentary ones of 'Islamic' origin. So why all the fuss now? Daily Kos has an interesting suggestion: Saudi Arabia's mismanagement of the Hajj which left hundreds dead and the Saudi rulers thus needing to deflect criticism. Denmark as a remote small target with little strategic or economic leverage over the Saudis was a suitable scapegoat. Hence the call from the Saudis to boycott Danish exports (which the Saudis hardly buy in any case).

Denmark's role in pioneering and promoting "alternative" energy technology would for conspiracy theorists be an additional motive for Saudi bullying (lots of Danish electricity demand is supplied by wind energy).

Note that South Park has portrayed Mohammed in it's episode Super Best Friends recently. South Park has been accused of defiling the "virgin" Mary as recently as December 2005 but there have been no burnings of US embassies by outraged Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans.

British police need political authorization to act against Muslim lawbreakers: "Protesters who carried placards at the weekend demonstrations in London calling for the beheading of people who insulted Islam, and who shouted terrorist slogans, could be prosecuted for incitement to murder, government sources said yesterday. Charles Clarke, Downing Street and other ministers sent out strong signals to the police and prosecuting authorities to take appropriate action against the demonstrators. Ministers and opposition politicians refrained from joining criticism of the police for failing to arrest people on the spot in the protests at the Danish cartoons. But, while insisting that they would not interfere with the operational independence of the police, they left the authorities in no doubt that they expected action to be taken".

Keith Burgess Jackson comments on Childish Leftists : "I got to wondering what leftist intellectuals think about the violence being perpetrated by Muslims in various parts of the world. After all, leftists profess to care about people. Won't they condemn it in no uncertain terms? Brian Leiter has five guest-bloggers, any one of whom could post something about the violence. Alas, nobody has. William Edmundson, Ph.D., J.D., has a really neat post about the Super Bowl and beer. I went to Crooked Timber. I found only one post, and I don't know what to make of it. I read the hundred or so comments. Perhaps I'm not getting it, but most of the commenters seem to think the violence is funny. Either that or they're using humor to evade responsibility. Many leftists don't know what to make of the Muslim violence. To condemn it would be to take a stand, and that seems so, well, grown-up and old-fashioned. The violence can't be blamed on President Bush, or you can be sure the Left would be all over this issue. Leftists hate Christianity, since they view it as an oppressor religion, but they refuse to say anything even remotely critical about Islam or Muslims, perhaps because that would make them (the critics) seem imperialistic. Better to joke about the violence. Better to retreat into irony and sarcasm. To take a stand would require careful thought and moral backbone, neither of which is conspicuous by its presence among leftists.

Tom Gross has a good selection of defamatory cartoons about Jews and Christians from the Arab world. But I guess "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not part of their religion.

Newslinker asks: Why isn't anyone talking about what Islamists did to images of Budda back in 2001? No Buddhists firebombed or beheaded people in retaliation of the desecration of images of their guru? FLASHBACK from March 2001: "Ignoring an international outcry, Afghanistan's puritanical Taliban Islamic militia began demolishing statues across the country on Thursday, including two towering ancient stone Buddhas".

Chris Brand also has a summary of the cartoon upheavals, mainly from a British viewpoint.

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ELSEWHERE

U.S. roads more dangerous than Afghanistan: "More U.S. troops have died in off-duty motorcycle accidents since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, than have been killed in combat in Afghanistan over that same time, according to safety records. Military commanders in North Carolina say the deaths are largely the result of boredom, bonus pay, and adrenalin to burn off after troops return from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 350 troops have died on bikes since the 2001 terrorist attacks. That's compared to 259 killed while serving in Afghanistan".

Memri has the transcript of an intervierw with Camelia Sadat, daughter of the late Egyptian President, in which she tells of forced marriage at the age of 12 to an abusive husband. And Sadat was generally held to be an enlightened and moderate Muslim. Not to his own daughter, he wasn't.

Surprise, surprise! "At least $US700 million in funds from the Palestinian Authority's coffers have been squandered or stolen by officials over the past few years, an internal investigation revealed yesterday. Palestinian Attorney-General Ahmed al-Moghani cited 50 cases of "financial and administrative corruption" and said 25 officials had been arrested so far. He said 10 officials had fled abroad but the authority was seeking their extradition. "The amount of money that was squandered and stolen is more than $US700 million," Mr Moghani told reporters. "Some of these millions were transferred into personal accounts here and abroad".

I have just done an update to my Picture page -- adding quite a few new pictures. There is even a picture there for steam buffs! All the links to other galleries on the site are also now working.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/08/2006 07:49:00 PM

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

 
MUSLIM DOUBLE STANDARDS



Fox News Channel "Special Report" anchorman Brit Hume said Sunday that violent demonstrations by radical Muslims protesting five-month-old cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammed betray a "howling double standard." "This is really a disgrace," Hume told the panel on "Fox News Sunday." "And it is a disgrace because of the obvious, howling double standard involved here." "What is striking about this is what offends these Muslims who are protesting and these imams," Hume complained. "Does the slaughter of innocent people in many parts of the world in the name of Allah offend them? Is that a sacrilege worthy of protest? "No, not in the least," he said.

Hume noted that there has also been no outrage on the Arab street over "the kinds of slurs against Christians and against the Jewish faith that are regularly spread abroad in the Arab world by the mass media and by many of these imams themselves."

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Zombietime points out that there have in fact been many pictorial representations of Mohammed in the past that have not drawn protests. He reproduces many of them.

Spineless Europeans: "EU officials said Friday that they had no plans to halt aid to Palestinians despite threats by gunmen to the bloc's headquarters in Gaza. European parliamentarians have also voted to keep aid going. On Thursday, about a dozen gunmen connected to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party surrounded the EU Commission's office in Gaza City. They demanded that the governments of Denmark, France, Germany and Norway apologize for cartoons of Mohammed published in newspapers in those countries. Armed Palestinians also threatened a "tough response" for further reprints of the cartoons in front of the French cultural center. Despite the threats, EU officials said they were not going to suspend aid -- at least for now. "If the situation gets more complicated then obviously for us it will not be easy to deal with it," European Commission spokeswoman Emma Udwin said

ACLU summarized: "Instead of defending our liberties, this radical organization threatens our freedom in courtrooms around the country. The ACLU will not defend the rights of the unborn child, opting instead to sacrifice babies on the altar of something called "choice." The ACLU is, in fact, one of the most vocal proponents of all forms of abortion. If a public high school student wants to hold a prayer meeting at school, the ACLU is the first in line trying to sabotage the project. In the vocabulary of the ACLU, there is no such thing as religious liberty. Instead, the organization routinely fights for freedom FROM religion-not freedom to exercise religion. If a mayor wants to place a Christmas display on the grounds of City Hall, the ACLU is at the ready to put a stop to it. If a judge wants to post the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, the ACLU is prepared to fight the idea-all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The method in Leftist unreason: "there is a method in the madness of the Left. There has always been a method in it. The Left is not engaged in an "argument," it is engaged in a revolution in the name of all that is just and right and good. Therefore, it does not aim to out-argue its opponents, but to shame them, to drive them from the field in ignominy, to make them figures of ridicule, moral indignation, and revulsion.... watch Ted Kennedy in action. His attacks on Judge Alito, like his earlier attacks on Judge Bork, were not intended as arguments, and certainly showed little regard for fact. They were all bluster, moral indignation, character assassination, ridicule, ostracism. If words could kill, his were the words of an assassin. This leftist tactic has worked for over one hundred years, because there are not many people who can stand unafraid before it. Most do not want to attract attention to themselves, lest its indignation and vituperation and moral ridicule be turned loose upon them. The tirades in which these words are launched-Senator Kennedy's neck muscles bulge, his flesh turns bright red, his voice rises ever higher so as to forbid anybody-anybody-from interrupting him-are meant to enforce acquiescence, not consent. They are meant to intimidate, not to present an argument."

There is a very well-informed article here about the effects of minimum wage legislation. Excerpt: "Only three things can happen in a business when the government forces wages up. Employers can reduce their costs, most likely by laying off workers or letting some go through attrition. They can raise prices to recoup the higher cost of labor. Or they can settle for lower profits. Advocates of raising the minimum wage have focused lately on studies showing little or no adverse effect on employment from the mandate. But far less attention has been paid to findings that price increases, at least in the short term, may be the most likely reaction of employers. And price increases have to be paid by someone.... The bottom line: A policy most people think is a slam-dunk to help the poor actually only benefits about one-fourth of poor families while hurting the rest and helping almost as many affluent families as it does the poor".

California Democrats love Communist Cuba: "Assemblywoman Nicole Parra and her father traveled to Cuba in early December on what has reportedly become an annual event organized by one of California's most powerful lobbyists and political fundraisers. Parra, D-Hanford, and other participants said the trip was arranged by Darius Anderson, founder of one of Sacramento's premiere lobbying firms and a top fundraiser for former Gov. Gray Davis. Since travel to communist Cuba is generally prohibited except under a license from the U.S. government, Anderson's repeated trips there with lawmakers, business people and others raise a number of questions.... The San Francisco Chronicle reported last December that the Anderson trips to Cuba have become an annual affair. Parra said she and her father, former Kern County Supervisor Pete Parra, paid for the trip, about $3,000 each plus airfare to Miami, out of personal funds. The trip was a personal, educational vacation, Nicole Parra said. At least one other lawmaker who attended, Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City, said she used campaign funds, according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun. Four other Assembly members were among the 100 people on the five-day trip, including the powerful speaker of the Assembly, Fabian Nunez, said Nunez spokesman Steven Maviglio."

Sense from Germany: "German Chancellor Angela Merkel compared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Adolf Hitler as Tehran vowed to resume the enrichment of uranium, which could be used to make nuclear weapons. Amid growing fears that the Iranians are intent on acquiring an "Islamic bomb", Ms Merkel warned that the world must not repeat the mistakes it made in appeasing the Nazis".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/07/2006 07:44:00 PM

 
A DAY TO BE REMEMBERED:



Today is the birthday of Ronald Wilson Reagan. A wonderful man. There will never be another like him. He is my only hero and I know I am one of millions in missing him.

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posted by JR 2/07/2006 12:06:00 AM

Monday, February 06, 2006

 
HOW BRITISH!

I received the following email from my old friend, Rafe Champion, who is mostly to be found blogging at Catallaxy these days.

"In case anyone is wondering about the cartoons that detonated the current agitation, here is a copy from a British libertarian/anarchist site. They were sourced from a Danish site that has been down since 31 Jan. In my view it is generally undesirable and bad manners to lampoon other people's religions, although I can't be sure where good humoured satire stops and offensive lampooning starts. However you can tell when it has gone too far and this means that people who produce works of art like the Piss Christ should be subjected to polite but firm criticism from all fair-minded and reasonable people who think that art and civility matter. There is no place for legislation or violence in response to lapses in taste. As Hayek pointed out, in a free society we have to put up with a lot of things that we don't like."

I must confess to being amused. I think that Rafe must be, like me, the product of a British culture that is now almost dead in Britain itself. What true Muslim who has ever existed would see "polite but firm criticism" as an appropriate response to mockery of their prophet?

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ELSEWHERE

Chronic stupidity at the Defense Dept.: "At a time when our Army and Marines bear by far the heaviest load of our nation's security burdens, OSD proposes reducing the number of soldiers to free up funds for wasteful Cold-War-era weapons systems. Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable. Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.... OSD wants a force that's all fantasy and no fight, a military designed to cope with a threat that might come someday - if we wish hard enough - but that ignores the gory reality our soldiers and Marines are facing every day right now"

Rabbi Aryeh Spero: "There is a madness in today's liberal thinking. It insists on policies that tie our hands to defend ourselves while giving free reign to the jihadists intent on killing us. It is dangerous because it is becoming the law, and thinking, of the land, and the Western world. Never before in history has a country and civilization made it impossible to defend itself from its enemies. Never before in history have the elites running a society done as much to cause national suicide..... Basically, the Left, i.e., the enemies of America living within America, have made it impossible to fight jihadism. We can't kill the enemy, we can't spy on the enemy, we can't interrogate the enemy, we can't find the enemy guilty. The terrorist in the eyes of the liberal is more sacred than the President of the United States. In effect, liberalism has tied us up so -- emotionally, legally, political-correctly -- that we are now defenseless: made so not by the enemy but by ourselves, self-induced. This is madness. We will be murdered by outsiders because those within are opting for suicide. Our military and domestic police strength is meaningless if tied up in legalisms forbidding its use. As to the enemy, he can do what he wants, and cannot be criticized for it."

Bigmouth Leftist failure tells Blair what to do: "Lord Kinnock, the former Labour party leader, has privately advised Tony Blair to fix a date to leave Downing Street, as the prime minister prepares for a climbdown on his flagship education reforms. The Labour peer believes that "clock is ticking" on Blair's reign and that there is "nothing left for him to achieve". Kinnock gave his advice to Blair at a private meeting before Christmas, but he refused to comment publicly yesterday".

UK proposal to police Web hits hurdles : "Another government tech policy has been defeated by the British House of Lords, with members rejecting plans to give police more power over terrorism-related content on Web sites. The government's original plans would have allowed police to act after deciding information on the Internet is related to terrorism. But this was changed by the House of Lords so that police would have to ask judges before telling Internet service providers to remove Web pages, according to the BBC. The government was defeated by 148-147 vote. The bill received a third reading and will now return to the House of Commons."

Exposing pseudo-sophisticated opposition to the war for what it is: "For Stein to advocate opposition to American soldiers while nonchalantly admitting his own lack of service is a remarkable display of arrogance -- a 'wussy' thing to do, one might say. To one who comes from similar circumstances as Stein, but has chosen to serve his country, the thought of such a spineless argument provokes disgust. ... Stein is one of many pseudo-intellectuals who feel that their education and socio-economic status excuse them of the responsibility to serve. They act as if they were entitled to freedom's blessings, just in order to indulge themselves."

Cable rate increases: "We should have learned by now that government is a terrible steward of competition. Its natural impulse is to regulate or manage, when the best it could do is get out of the way. This is especially true when rapid technological change disrupts an industrial sector, like telecommunications, that for decades operated under a restrictive regulatory regime based on the premise all we needed was one provider. With deployment of high-speed fiber optic networks, broadband providers, phone companies and even power companies are poised to enter the local video market, finally offering American families a competitive alternative that will drive innovation in the industry and deliver lower prices. The problem is outdated rules governing the industry prevent cable competition."

The story of how venal American politicians are now doing their best to STOP the conversion of Vietnam to capitalism is here. Excerpt: "Nativists argue that we should protect the catfish farmers in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana from their Vietnamese competitors for the simple reason that they're Americans, even if it means denying consumers safer, cheaper, better-tasting catfish. But because of the players involved, the catfish wars aptly illustrate the absurdity of nativist thinking. Thirty years after the last U.S. troops died in Vietnam, that country is inching its way toward capitalism. With petty politics and protectionist trade barriers, it's now the U.S. government that's standing in its way".

If you have not yet seen the comic-book version of the Koran, it's time you did!

On Australian Politics I have more on the recent stabbings of beachgoing Anglo-Australians by Lebanese Muslims

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/06/2006 08:23:00 PM

Sunday, February 05, 2006

 
Brookes News Update

US economy: the inverted yield curve and recession : The inverted yield curve is emerging because the Fed has been reining in the money supply. So does this mean a recession?
Australian economy: Senator Nick Minchin screws up on tax cuts: Anyone who thinks Government ministers actually know anything about economics need look no further than Finance Minister Nick Minchin. This man thinks tax cuts are inflationary
Economic illiteracy and executive pay : The reality is that the exploitation of shareholders by management on the scale claimed by critics of executive pay is just another leftist spectre
Leftwing journalist smears Bush on NSA wiretaps: Michael Gawenda, former editor of 'The Age', is proof positive that leftism is a disease of the intellect, one of the symptoms of which is a brazen contempt for facts that conflict with reality
A lefty film reviewer praises a nasty piece of anti-capitalist propaganda: It's obviously the 'The Constant Gardener's' ideological leitmotif - and the evidence be damned - that ideological buffoons like Tom Ryan find so attractive
Bin Ladin is a Democrat: Democrats have lied about, slandered and sought to undermine and betray America in its war against Islamic fascist mass murderers. No wonder Osama Bin Ladin chose to merely read from one of their scripts
Poor people get hammered by tax increases: Poor people get hammered when government raises taxes. You see that means the rich don't have the money to invest and grow jobs and the economy
Green fascism and corporate CEOs: What we have is a particularly squalid attempt by a multinational corporation to use the greens' destructive ideology to exploit the power of the state at the expense of consumers

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ELSEWHERE

Disgraceful: The U.S. State Dept. sides with the Muslim hysterics: "The United States blasted the publication by European newspapers of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed as unacceptable incitement to religious or ethnic hatred. "These cartoons are indeed offensive to the beliefs of Muslims," State Department spokesman Justin Higgins said when queried about the furore sparked by the cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility," Higgins told AFP. "Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices."

Taranto comments on a speech by NAACP leader Julian Bond -- and shows how thoroughly the MSM suppress mention of hate-speech emanating from black leaders. They deliberately whitewash blacks (to coin a phrase).

Black conservatives were pretty appalled by the Julian Bond speech: "Bond is said to have called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and predecessor Colin Powell "tokens." He also compared the Bush Administration's judicial nominees to the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan and said "The Republican Party would have the American flag and the [Nazi] swastika flying side by side." "If Julian Bond's comments are indicative of the NAACP, the group has truly lost its way. I believe the NAACP has positioned itself on the far left of the political spectrum, and Mr. Bond's comments give me no reason to think otherwise," said Project 21 member Jimmie Hollis."

Public servants live better than the public itself : "For 50 years, public-sector unions, health care lobbyists, and social services advocacy groups have doggedly been amassing power in state capitols and city halls, using their influence to inflate pay and benefits for their workers and to boost government spending. The bill for that influence is now coming due, and it is overwhelming state and local budgets."

No hope for Europe: "The fertility rates in the western industrialized countries are well below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. For the European Union as a whole, the estimated 2005 fertility rate was 1.47 babies per woman. In some countries, the rate is even lower. However, in France, approximately one birth in three is to a Muslim family. Stripped of the Muslim influence, the fertility rate of the native-born or traditionally European French would be 1.2, similar to the rates in Italy and Spain."

Immigration of little benefit to Australia: "An abiding and unshakeable belief of Australian business is that immigration is good for the economy and we need a lot more of it than we're getting. But is the belief soundly based? According to a Productivity Commission paper on Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth, not really. The economic benefits are "very small"."

No cash for condemners: "The New York Times terms it 'odd.' Other accounts deem it 'unusual.' The Volkoh Conspiracy blog wonders if Atlas is, in fact, shrugging. However, the announcement that BB&T, the nation's ninth largest bank holding company, will not participate in private economic development projects that involve eminent domain action should not shock. The decision is consistent with the corporation's values, harnesses widespread public unease with the Kelo eminent domain ruling, and is another manifestation of symbol-laden stakeholder capitalism."

The last good train service in Britain to be scrapped: "The Gatwick Express, a dedicated rail service from London Victoria, is to be replaced by a slower stopping train to reduce overcrowding on services to commuter towns near the airport. he Government believes that the express is taking up too much capacity on the Brighton main line, which carries 32,000 commuters a day. Many Gatwick Express trains run half-empty, even in peak periods, while commuters from Three Bridges, Haywards Heath and other Sussex towns often have to stand all the way to or from London. But airlines using Gatwick are furious that their passengers will have to fight their way with heavy luggage on to already crowded trains stopping only briefly at the airport. At present, empty trains sit for several minutes at Gatwick station, allowing passengers plenty of time to board".

There is a new Australian Christian blogger. His interests seem to be mainly political. He has an interesting point here about the famous antisemitic "Protocols" being a projection of what Leftists wanted to do.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/05/2006 01:33:00 PM

Saturday, February 04, 2006

 
THE MOHAMMED CARTOONS



I guess most readers have heard about Europe's cartoon uproar by now. Without much support from other governments, the Danish government has been defending the right to free speech in Denmark. That right is under attack because a Danish newspaper printed cartoons about Mohammed. As a result, Muslims have of course started putting pressure on Denmark -- including calls for a boycott of Danish goods and services (Since a major Danish export is ham and bacon, that has its amusing side). So it is encouraging that quite a few European newspapers have now defied Muslim hysteria and reprinted the cartoons. Even the BBC has broadcast glimpses of them. Maybe Europeans are finally getting fed up with the constant demands for special treatment by Muslims. An unusually feisty British reader writes:

"What is vastly more offensive than any cartoon could ever be, is:-

* The Personality Cult demanding special respect for a criminal thug, intolerant aggressive war-monger against peaceful people, inciter and practitioner of rape, piracy, pillage, slavery, nastiest-possible desecration of others' most sacred things, and of deceit. (All extensively documented as he died the Emperor of his warlord empire-on-earth.)

* The book he would have you know to be the flawless, unchangeable Last word of God, which just happens to be one of the nastiest and most stupid books ever written. Why would a real God be so obsessed with details of sex, warmongering and financial arrangements? And make so many glaring self-contradictions in the process?

* The Jihad Denial pretending away of the many millions of murders of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, etc, a still-ongoing global genocide directly inspired by the cult of that thug and his nasty book. That's the GENUINE Islam.

The Mohammedo-Fascists' preoccupation with not being offended stands in the most stupendous contrast to their own tradition of being maximally nasty about the most sacred things of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, etc: ... which started with Mohammed's own desecration of other peoples' sacred idols in Mecca. Why should such a thug be worthy of any special respect himself?

And, of course, BUY DANISH goods if you see them anywhere. There is an unusually sensible Muslim comment here. One of the cartoons concerned is reproduced above and they are all here -- where it rightly comments: "These cartoons are much less offensive than what is routinely printed in every American newspaper about presidents, presidential candidates, and other pols".

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ELSEWHERE

A good comment from Dick McDonald: "Yesterday when I asked a Floridian guest to the RAID rally why he was blaming Republicans for running up the national debt and borrowing from China to pay for tax cuts for the rich and sticking our children with this enormous burden, he had no earthly idea what our external debt was. When I told him the debt was a mere $4.6 trillion in a country worth $120-180 Trillion, he breathed a sigh of relief. When I explained that we were only obligated to China for a mere $250 Billion out of the $4.6 Trillion, his leftist propaganda started to drain from his body. When I informed him that China with a 10% growth rate(which I doubt they can sustain for long) and a GDP of $1.6 Trillion will take many years to catch the US with a $12.5 Trillion GDP and a 4% growth rate, the leftist liquid drained from his eyes. Facts have a way of doing that. Too bad Americans live in a vacuum of myths written by scriptwriters at the NYT. Fill your quiver with facts and you will eventually decimate our enemy. It will take an effort."

More TSA stupidity: ""Margaret Jackson is the blond, bespectacled, fiftyish chairman of Qantas Airlines. She seems as Australian as kangaroos and koalas: cheerful, plucky, and no-nonsense. Only someone completely bonkers could suspect her of being an Islamic terrorist a la the 9/11 hijackers. Which means, of course, that the TSA did. A screener named Bill rifled Maggie's briefcase last year at Los Angeles International Airport. In it he found the sorts of papers you might expect an airline's CEO to carry, specifically, cross-sections and diagrams of an aircraft. Well. The nitwits who strive to protect us from deadly nail clippers and grandmothers in sandals came out swinging. According to Maggie, our man Bill asked her, 'Why have you got all of this?' She told him, 'I'm the chairman of an airline. I'm the chairman of Qantas.' And this black guy, who was, like, eight foot tall, said, 'But you're a woman'. Boy, nothing gets past the TSA these days."

Beware of ad hominem fallacies: "An opinion piece -- whether an individual op-ed or a column -- exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or opinion. Therefore, the strength of the argument is the key factor in determining the effectiveness of the piece. A sloppily constructed, poorly thought-out argument will convince no one -- while a tightly constructed, coherent, and well-written argument can sway minds. That is why opinion pieces are considered intellectual ammunition in the war of ideas. The only valid response to a persuasive argument is an equally persuasive argument towards a different conclusion. Yet the witch hunters' central argument has nothing to do with the virtues of the arguments presented by Bandow and others. Their argument is, essentially, that because the writer has not disclosed information about his income, he is essentially untrustworthy and his opinions should not be given the time of day. This argument is flawed enough to make it invalid. In logic, that's called a fallacy."

Praise be to tax competition!: "Tax competition occurs when a government uses its tax system to try to attract capital, business activity, or wealthy individuals from other countries. At its most obvious this could be a 'tax haven' with very low (or even zero) tax rates, but it could include more subtle provisions such as tax breaks for specific businesses relocating into a country. Game theory suggests that if the low-tax countries successfully attract international investment then other governments will respond, leading to a competitive spiral of tax reductions as they all compete for mobile capital."

Smarter Muslims don't like Islam?: "An increasing number of Muslims living in Norway have over the past few years chosen to send their children to private Christian schools, NRK reports. At the Christian Regnbuen school in Oslo, 20 out of a hundred students are Muslims. Other private schools in Oslo, like St Sunniva and Kristelig Gymnasium, also have many Muslim students. - I believe they feel that their faith is taken more seriously here, that Christian schools have greater respect and understanding for their faith than they find in public schools, says Dean Lars Bjoerge Holm at Kristelig Gymnasium to Dagsavisen".

Phrenology lives! There is a satirical graphic of a Leftist brain here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/04/2006 05:45:00 PM

Friday, February 03, 2006

 
A SMALL VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH IN BRITAIN

The prosecution of two British National Party men for hate speech has failed. The jury acquitted them on some charges and failed to agree on others. It seems that you may now say critical things about Islam in private conversations in Britain. It's not much and even that limited freedom is still under attack: The British government says it is going to try the men again on the charges that the jury could not agree about. There is a good comment on the case and the verdict at Majority Rights.





ANOTHER HISTORIC NAZI POSTER

This one would be from the March 5, 1933 election when Hitler had become Chancellor but Marshall Hindenburg was still President



Translated, the poster reads: "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"

Can you get a more Leftist slogan than that? Modern-day Leftists sometimes try to dismiss Hitler's socialism as something from his early days that he later outgrew. But when this poster was promulgated he was already Chancellor (Prime Minister) so it was far from early days. Once again we see what a barefaced lie it is when Leftists misrepresent Hitler as a Rightist. He campaigned and gained power as a democratic Leftist. The March 5, 1933 election was the last really democratic election prewar Germany had.

Another example of the easy transition from Fascism to modern Leftism: "Where have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s. The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation? Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals - de Man, Heidegger, Eliade - with its expos, of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as "the most distinguished figure" then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein".

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ELSEWHERE

A reader writes: "Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain states that "All human lives ought to be equally valued". Meanwhile Allah's Last Testament is bursting full of vivid declarations of the utter worthlessness of the lives of unbelievers, and invocations to fight and slay them; and the military career of the Prophet was rich in examples of putting those principles into practice. Can I therefore take it as read that the MCB accepts that the Qur'an is not the word of God/Allah and that the Prophet's personal example is incompatible with the MCB's own conception of human rights? Or is the Prophet's well-documented approval of deceit involved here?

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts. Among his news is that the masterly essay by philosopher Neven Sesardic on fraudulent argument among philosophers is now available online. As Sesardic says, there is no topic on which philosophers of science go so conspicuously off the rails as the issue of racial differences in IQ. The philosophers concerned are positively Stalinist in the way they lie about the subject. But I guess there are other ways in which they like Stalin too. They essentially claim that the psychometricians ignore differences in environment, whereas psychometricians have always gone to great trouble to account for the role of the environment! Even my 1972 paper on the subject addressed that issue from the outset. The most surprising thing is that Sesardic did actually get his article published in an academic journal of philosophy. I guess truth still interests some philosophers. Update: I was delighted to receive an email from Neven Sesardic advising me that a revised and expanded version of his essay is now one chapter in his recent book Making Sense of Heritability.

Chris also notes that the book Affirmative Action Hoax now has a companion site here. Both book and site use impeccable science to expose the lie that blacks and whites have the same genetic potential. As the book shows, affirmative action is a huge fraud on whites.

Prager on the Hamas victory: "It is a sad day for humanity when a people choose to elect terrorists as their leaders. But for those of us who believe that clarity is the prerequisite to moral progress, the landslide victory of the terrorist organization Hamas in Palestine has a silver lining.... the Palestinian vote reveals the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace. It likewise reveals the falsity of the Left's belief that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population. That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality. Thanks to this election, the mask has been removed. When given the opportunity to express themselves, most Arabs and many Muslims elsewhere support terror and seek the annihilation of Israel. That is why the Hamas victory is such a defeat for the world's Left -- university professors, news media, socialist parties, the European Union, the United Nations, "peace" activists, editorial writers, and all other apologists for the Palestinians.... On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is".

Jonah Goldberg on the Hamas victory: "Today, various pragmatists, optimists and apologists for the Palestinians say they weren't voting for mass murder and terror, but for honest government and efficient social services. Fatah, the "party" of that terrorist carbuncle Yasser Arafat, was corrupt and incompetent while Hamas has successfully delivered much-needed social services. Hamas ran on "change and reform," proclaim the apologists, not terrorism. Fine, but that was equally true of the Nazis, who traded soup kitchens for indoctrination. Fascist movements have always gained popularity by delivering for the needy, the forgotten and the left out. They have always captured the imagination of the middle class by promising to reform the government, root out corruption, make the trains run on time. And fascist movements have always promised, as Hamas has, to bring about a moral and national restoration."

China Hand has just put up some new posts about Hainan, the big island off the China coast that, unlike Taiwan, remained under Communist control. The contrast with Taiwan is stark, even though Hainan has obvious potential. China Hand's site has been "hacked" in some way, however, so you would be best to load the mirror site.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/03/2006 07:56:00 PM

Thursday, February 02, 2006

 
THE ARROGANCE OF YAHOO

I have long had an impression of Yahoo as an arrogant organization and I am now sure of it. I have had an account with them for some years which I made use of in a minor way. Now they have suddenly deleted it without explanation and for no apparent cause. I sent them an enquiry to find out why but such grand pooh-bahs as Yahoo don't talk to little people like me, of course. I think it should be a warning to others not to rely on their services. I had both an email address with them and a website there -- and both suddenly vanished without even a puff of smoke. It could happen to you too.

As it happens, only a very few people had the email address concerned and I was using the website mainly as a backup. The only thing I had in their webspace that was not available elsewhere was some humorous content. And I must say that their arrogance is rivalled only by their childishness. There are heaps of webhosts that offer "free" (advertiser supported) webspace and many of them are more generous in what they offer than Yahoo is. So what they gain from sending me elsewhere for no apparent reason would seem to be nil. People reading my stuff will now see other people's advertisers rather than Yahoo's advertisers. Clever! I of course always have everything backed up to disk before I post it and you can now see here what used to be on Yahoo. For more of the humorous content see also here. It will be interesting to see how the new host works out. But there are plenty of other hosts if that lot does not work out in some way.

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ELSEWHERE

Leftist ex-Congressman complains of bureaucracy: "During the time I served in Congress, constituents would often say that members of Congress should try to live under the laws they pass. I'm no longer a Congressman, and I have a typical horror story about trying to live under one of the laws passed by the current Congress. Congress this past spring added something called the "Real ID" bill to another piece of legislation... The "Real ID" bill set new national standards for obtaining a driver's license, something previously governed exclusively by state law. Thus, the Republican Congress created a vast new bureaucratic system... This summer, my wife and I applied for diver's licenses in Virginia. My application was granted but my wife's application was rejected even though she served 31 years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of Major General in April. My wife, Kathy, had obtained driver's licenses in numerous states during her various assignments for the military and had never been rejected. The Virginia DMV contacted the Social Security Administration to verify her social security number. Kathy and I were married seven years ago but she did not notify the Social Security Administration of her name change, so they could not verify her Social Security number under her married name. Thus, she was rejected for a driver's license even though the U.S. Army had issued her an ID card with both her married name and her social security number".

Don't forget the Gipper: ""Twenty-five years ago...Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communism... [O]ver this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the exception, for America-in stark contrast to the stagflationary 1970s. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need to be constantly relearned, lest we return to the errors that produced the 1970s... Where Republicans have most strayed from the Reagan vision has been on controlling federal spending. But most still adhere to his tax-cutting lessons, with a few prominent exceptions (notably Senator John McCain). They should all recall the Gipper's words in his inauguration speech 25 years ago: 'It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government'."

The Enron trial begins this week and "Enron" appears in any case to have become a perennial Leftist swear-word so this 2002 post is worth keeping in mind as a roundup of what that debacle actually shows. Excerpt: "Like other anti-free-market commentators, Krugman also spreads the false tale that Enron's chairman, Ken Lay, was a free-market disciple. This too is, well, baloney. Lay was a member of the group of extreme anti-capitalist ideologues known as the Union of Concerned Scientists. He was also a strong supporter of the Kyoto global-warming treaty. He supported this treaty (which the Bush administration refused to sign on to), because he wanted his company to profit from another Byzantine regulatory scheme concocted by the government"

Inequality in NYC: "New York still has its economic problems, to be sure. But "income inequality" isn't one of them. The liberal groups complain that, in the Big Apple, the richest 20 percent of residents have average incomes that are nine times those of the poorest families. If that ratio is the problem, one quick "solution" would be to drive out all those millionaires - that would cut the average income of the top 20 percent. Of course, it would also deprive the city and state of billions of tax dollars that pay for schools, hospitals, subways and other services. In other words, we're lucky to have all those wealthy people here. Let's try to keep them. Beyond having lots of very rich folks, New York's population is unusual in another way: Every year, 100,000 or so poor immigrants move here. They choose the tough challenge of a new life, knowing it's likely to be a better one. We could reduce the number of poor New Yorkers in these statistics by shutting our doors to these new Americans. But that would mean turning our backs on a proud history as a beacon for hopeful people all over the world"

Bring back segregation! "District 10 supervisor candidate Charlie Walker yesterday called for creation of a separate San Francisco school system for African Americans. Separating blacks from whites is necessary because current education of African Americans is not working, Walker told the Sentinel. "I am hoping seriously that we consider separating blacks from whites because it's not working," Walker reflected. "What good did it do us to demonstrate to get our freedom when we didn't get nothing out of it. "The women, the gays, the Asians, the Latinos - they got it and we're still sitting around here. In San Francisco alone, 42% of our people are unemployed."

For my Burns Night celebrations last month we had our clootie dumpling (clootie dumpling is a sort of plum pudding) in a slightly decadent way. To my knowledge most Scots just sprinkle sugar on it but I decided that a rum sauce would go nicely with it. And the sauce was such a great success that I doubt that anybody tasted the actual clootie dumpling! I have therefore put the recipe for the sauce up on my recipe blog. (Mirror site here).

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/02/2006 12:06:00 PM

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

 
REPUBLICANS ARE RACISTS! -- BUT

The latest "Republicans are racists" screech is here. This version of the screech is dressed up in the language of social psychology, however. I know that language very well. I have myself written many academic publications in it and have come to similar conclusions. When the screech ends ""We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting", the article is quite right. The correlation between expressions of conservative attitudes and expressions of racially negative attitudes does not always emerge but mostly it does.

For an intelligent person, WHY that happens is the interesting question, however. That the finding might arise because conservatives are more honest in saying what they really think or that it might arise because Leftists are more deluded (including self-deluded) is never to my knowledge examined. Instead, complicated Freudian explanations for the correlation are offered that fall apart when closely examined.

I have myself done umpteen surveys of what people say about their thinking (attitude surveys) and have come to the commonsense conclusion that "You can't trust 'em". People "put their best foot forward" when answering surveys and often do not say what they really think. Psychologists do have some ways of coping with that. They include in their surveys "lie scales" or "social desirability scales" -- sets of questions that try to detect how frank and honest the respondent is being. I myself routinely included such scales in my surveys. But the most common such scales -- the ones I used -- examine lying about one's behaviour and one cannot assume that lying about behaviour and lying about attitudes are the same. To do so assumes a generality that may not exist. I hate to state the obvious, but people may lie about one thing and not another. You can never tell.

And that people who do not in general lie might lie about particularly sensitive issues such as race should, I hope, be supremely obvious. And given the always tense relationship between Leftists and the truth (as evidenced by the long history of Leftists denying the evils of the Soviet empire) that the liars concerned might be mostly Leftists seems in only marginal need of proof.

So my final conclusion is that attitudes surveys are unreliable sources of information. I rely on behaviour. And when history's most infamous racist said this,

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

I think you can see why. The expressed attitudes associated with a given behaviour may vary greatly with time and place. Expecting a permanent link between one set of expressed attitudes and one set of behaviours is something that only a psychologist would be stupid enough to do. Which is why I study history these days instead of psychology.

The truth of what I have just said has however begun to seep into some psychological skulls and some do therefore make an effort to use brain scans rather than expressed attitudes as a source of information about what people think. The limitations of using such gross measurements of such finely articulated phenomena as brain processes should, I hope, be obvious to all but some of the findings so far have at least been amusing. Such procedures have on some occasions shown fanatical Leftists to be "prejudiced". How awful! I say more about such studies here.

The link I have just given does deal with the work of Banaji -- the main protagonist in the latest screech -- but I might perhaps make one additional observation. At best, Banaji's research technique shows who has bad feelings about blacks. And on her results many Leftists do but there is nonetheless a preponderance of Republicans. Again however, the interesting question to non-simplistic people is: WHY? There is an old saying that "a conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night" so perhaps the technique is detecting those who have had REASON to be negative about blacks. And that such people might vote for a party that panders less to blacks would surprise only a psychologist.

Leftist psychologists are very keen to point the finger at possible instances of "motivated social cognition" ("bias" to you and me) so Michelle Malkin's comment on the latest screech does a good job of lobbing that ball back into their court. Or to put Michelle's point in the language of academic psychology: One wonders what precautions were taken to avoid a Rosenthal effect. But of course who needs such precautions when you know the answer before you start?

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing news report from Sweden here. The article does not explicitly say so but apparently the Swedish police preferred the word of a Muslim doorman to the word of one of Sweden's most prominent Leftists. Make of that what you will. A possible case of the pot calling the kettle Afro-American, I think.

Marginal Revolution on Islam and modernity "In my view all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings compatible with modernity and all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings incompatible with modernity. Call it the completeness theorem. It's how religions adapt and evolve to modernity that is important. Religions are constantly changing, emphasizing certain features, downplaying others, creating new interpretations. Given enough time, I believe that any religion will evolve towards compatability with modernity because it's the memes that combine modernity and religion which will survive and prosper. The problem is that Christianity has had hundreds of years to adapt itself to modernity while Islam has had modernity thrust upon it. Fish don't walk overnight and neither do religions. Nevertheless there are Islamic leaders who, under the pressure of current events, see the direction in which Islam must move and who are actively encouraging evolution in that direction".

Tibor R. Machan on Roe and privacy: "One reason that Roe v. Wade is still with us is that legal scholars and jurists are arguing about the wrong issue. The question isn't whether the US Constitution contains any reference to a right to privacy. Let's assume it does. Let's assume that the Ninth Amendment, as argued in Griswold v. Connecticut and some other cases, implicitly refers to the right to privacy every human beings has. Why would this be relevant? Some might argue that if one has the right to privacy, a woman who has an abortion is doing something private, something no one else has the authority to regulate or ban. But this simply will not do. If a pregnant woman is carrying a child -- as pro-life folks call it, 'an unborn child' -- she has no authority to have a procedure that will kill this child. Wherever one locates a human being, inside the pregnant woman or in a crib or at some hotel, unless he has threatened to attack someone, no one is justified killing him. Only self-defense justifies killing another human being, period. ... Privacy, then, is really quite irrelevant to the debate surrounding Roe v. Wade. The relevant question to be answered is, 'Is the being to be killed in an abortion a human being or is it human only potentially?'"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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 2/01/2006 03:27:00 PM