Tuesday, January 31, 2006

 
THE HOLY FATHER ON ISLAM

More on the discussions at Castelgandolfo



Some more detail is coming out about recent discussions by and with the Pope on the possibility of reform within Islam. This article has links to other articles discussing the debate the Pope's comments have kicked up. In sum the earlier brief note on this blog that the Pope seems to believe reform of Islam is not impossible, but nonetheless likely to be exceedingly difficult, (in other words, "don't hold your breath") would seem to hold. Interestingly this later Chiesa report indicates that if reform is to come it is likely to be from areas such as Turkey, Indonesia or from Western Muslims. The labelling of 'so called' Western countries is also interesting, ...is this a tacit acknowledgement that parts of Europe are no longer in the West? Eurabia? Key excerpt:

"The Holy Father is well-informed enough to know that there have existed and that there exist today, probably increasingly, other interpretations of the Qur'anic evidence with regard to a theology of revelation. These considered Muslim views and approaches do not (yet?), it would seem, inform the thinking and approach of a sizable Islamic movement or organisation - and we do not know what future problems lie ahead in this regard - but it does exist and is vividly discussed in many places, both in academia and beyond.

"An open debate on these matters does not yet seem to be possible within the Arab world but Turkish and Indonesian society grant relatively more room for airing and discussing such ideas, and the so-called Western countries offer even more space".

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There are even big genetic racial differences in earwax! "It is not a subject scientists generally wax about. But a seven-page scientific paper published today is solely devoted to the genetics of earwax. Human earwax comes in two varieties -- wet and dry. According to the journal Nature Genetics, dry earwax is seen in up to 95 per cent of East Asians, but no more than 3 per cent of Europeans and Africans. The reason for the difference is a gene called ABCC11 which controls earwax-altering molecules. A 39-strong international team did the research. The role of earwax was unclear, said the scientists. "Insect trapping, self-cleaning and prevention of dryness of the external auditory canal are its plausible functions," they wrote. Armpit (axillary) odour was associated with wet-type earwax, raising the possibility that earwax might be involved in sexual attraction."

Crooked British cops: "Undercover detectives altered a surveillance log to avoid blame for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes in a bungled counter-terrorist operation, according to police watchdogs. The disclosure, in a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, puts fresh pressure on Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and his officers over the shooting.... Police sources say that the report, which is being studied by the Crown Prosecution Service, shows that a Special Branch logbook describing Mr de Menezes's last movements had been altered to hide that he had wrongly been identified as a suspect.... The IPCC team is said to have been alerted by a whistle-blower. A scientific technique for checking changes in documents showed the change that had been made. [All they are good at these days is political correctness]

Jeff Jacoby on the Hamas election win: "Western reactions to the outcome of the Palestinian election last week mostly came in two varieties: highly negative and decidedly undecided.... I think the sweeping Hamas victory is by far the best result that could have been hoped for. I say that not because Hamas is anything other than a blood-drenched terrorist group responsible for killing or maiming thousands of innocent victims, but because its lopsided win is an unambiguous reality check into the nature of Palestinian society. And if there is one thing that the West badly needs, it is more realism and less delusion about the Palestinians".

World Bank 'toadying to the corrupt': Sir Edward Clay, the outspoken former British envoy to Kenya, let rip at the World Bank yesterday for lending $120 million to President Kibaki's Government when it was embroiled in a massive corruption scandal. In a letter to Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank, Sir Edward accused the organisation of "toadying to a thoroughly corrupt administration" and said that last week's loan made a mockery of efforts to stamp out high-level looting.

William F. Buckley, Jr. on Bolivian President Morales: "Morales shapes his complaint in language similar to that which has been used by the father of the movement against socialism, Milton Friedman -- the language of free trade. Whose problem is it that many Americans use cocaine? And that they desire it intensely enough to give it a street price sufficient to support Bolivian producers at every level -- the agricultural workers, the refiners, and the exporters? The point is in part cynical, because Morales knows perfectly well that human weakness will always produce a demand for toxic substances, if they provide intense pleasures en route to devastation. But he is shrewd enough to pick up on the point of free trade -- even though it is a part of the neoliberalism he has otherwise denounced. What right does the United States government have to convert its concern for weak-minded Americans into a veto power on Bolivian agriculture?"

Interesting stories here and here about how capitalist Boeing has outsmarted the socialist European Airbus. One cost item not mentioned in Las Vegas Sun article is the various costs in deicing the A380 on the tarmac during snow and ice conditions in winter time. Although this is not a problem in warmer climes it is routine in the higher latitudes each winter and it is costly in time, materials, manpower and delays.

The horny-headed one has a great post on deceptive Leftist "statistics" about poverty. The poor are actually getting richer and the rich are getting poorer.

A little birdie tells me that the obnoxious Brian Leiter is feeling the heat of Keith Burgess-Jackson's Anti-Leiter blog. Keith seems to be feeling his oats so Leiter might be in for a long haul.

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 1/31/2006 04:32:00 PM

Monday, January 30, 2006

 
AN ABORIGINAL SUNDAY

This post will encourage Leftists to shriek "racist" and "Nazi" at me but they regularly shriek that at GWB and heaps of other conservatives so I am going to disregard such shrieks as devalued currency.

I grew up with Aborigines (Australian native blacks) in my class at school and I have seen plenty of them since -- particularly as a landlord (Yes. I HAVE let rooms and houses to them. Racists do that, you know) -- so I think I know a bit about them. And if you are looking for "cultural" differences, Aborigines must be as different from people of Northern European ancestry as you can get. And the reason why is that they were isolated in Australia from other populations for up to 60,000 years (on some estimates). So they evolved separately. And they evolved to suit Australia as it originally was. And the abilities they evolved -- particularly a remarkable capacity for observing and remembering minute details of the landscape -- do in some ways leave the rest of us for dead. In other ways, however, they are badly lacking in what is needed to fit into modern Western society -- a strikingly poor ability to plan ahead being their most obvious handicap. They very much "live for the day".

One thing I have always envied them is their ability to relax. They can sit around under a tree all day happily doing exactly nothing. I, however, am one of those instinctively hard-driving people who is genetically from the far North of the world. And the fact that, in my retirement, I post daily to seven blogs of my own and contribute frequently to four group blogs is, I think, some testimony to that. It is as hard for me to sit back and do nothing as it is easy for Aborigines. But yesterday I managed it. Just as Aborigines often do, I spent the whole day sitting around and doing practically nothing other than some intermittent chatting. Anne accompanied me in this experience, of course. She is probably more full of beans than I am these days, however, so she caved in first and shot off to do something at about 7pm. She spent many years as a remote-area nurse working with (and getting on with) Aborigines so knows them even better than I do. So she knew all about the model I had in mind when I said we were having an Aborigine day. She enjoyed it but she couldn't keep it up! Genetics will out.

Update:

I receive a heap of supportive emails but, although every one is greatly appreciated, I reproduce on my blogs only the tiniest fraction of such mail. I seem to be having a spasm of reproducing emails today, however. I have just added emails as updates to posts on GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH so I think I will also reproduce an email relevant to the post above:

"Your observations are -- as usual -- spot on. My wife Pam also worked as a remote area nurse (N.T., Qld., Torres Straits) and we came to like Aborigines very much".

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More scientific evidence of deep-lying racial differences: "A common genetic mutation may explain why Asian heart patients are less likely than others to get relief from chest pain when they take nitroglycerin, a new Chinese study finds. Fudan University researchers examined 111 coronary heart disease patients who were self-administering nitroglycerin under the tongue whenever they experienced an acute angina attacks. Eighty (72 percent) of the patients reported that they had pain relief within 10 minutes of taking the nitroglycerin, while the remainder of the patients experienced no pain relief. The researchers found that many of the patients who didn't respond to nitroglycerin had an inactive mutant form of the ALDH2 gene. This mutant version is called ALDH2*2. In order for nitroglycerin to be effective, a patient's body has to be able to convert the nitroglycerin into nitric oxide. This process requires ALDH2. It's estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of the Asian population has the ALDH2*2 mutation. This information needs to be considered when doctors recommend nitroglycerin for Asian patients, the study authors said".

An interesting thought: "I finally figured out why the angry left hates President Bush. Psychiatrists call it transference. President Clinton almost destroyed the Democratic Party while he was in the White House. We all remember the wasted years, the scandals and the Republicans sweeping to power in 1994. And, if not for Bill, Al Gore would have won in 2000. So the angry left really hates Bill Clinton. But, through a process called cognitive dissonance, they can't hate one of their own, so they have transferred the hate to President Bush. But they really don't believe it, do they? [The Left are past-masters of using psychological defence-mechanisms to shield themselves from reality so use of transference is not at all unlikely]

Calls to act on Soviet crimes: "Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Council of Europe became the first international body to consider the crimes against humanity that were committed by the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and other states. In a debate that relit the clash between Russia and Western European countries, the 43-nation council considered a report by a Swedish parliamentarian that also called on former communist states to teach the truth about their former regimes, erect memorials to the victims and create days of remembrance. A resolution, adopted by a simple majority, referred to "individual and collective assassinations, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportation, torture, slave labour and other forms of mass physical terror."

Tibor Machan: Limiting outsourcing is wrong and harmful : "If my kid has been mowing your lawn for $5 an hour and he has gotten used to this, when some other kid offers to mow it for $3 an hour, my kid will be upset. He will have been outbid! The alternative of putting the competitor and the customer in chains isn't acceptable. It's flat out morally wrong. The only thing my own kid can do is either find some other job where he can make his $5 an hour or lower his price and keep the job at $3 an hour or less. Now if I had given the mowing job to my child and got a better offer and took it, I could be faulted for my insensitivity as a parent. But most of us aren't related to those who work at the Big Three, so we do not owe them special considerations that trump commerce."

The Rising Cost of Complying with the Federal Income Tax: "In 2005, taxpayers will pay roughly $1.2 trillion in federal income taxes. But America's tax burden is more than just the amount of tax paid. It also includes the cost of complying with federal taxes, including tax planning, paperwork and other hassles caused by tax complexity.... In 2005 individuals, businesses and nonprofits will spend an estimated 6 billion hours complying with the federal income tax code, with an estimated compliance cost of over $265.1 billion. This amounts to imposing a 22-cent tax compliance surcharge for every dollar the income tax system collects. Projections show that by 2015 the compliance cost will grow to $482.7 billion".

There is a satirical article here called: "Sexual orientation is flexible, right?"

Mike Pechar has a great post on how the "caring" Leftists of San Francisco are doing their best to dump the "homeless" onto other cities. Leftist piety does not last long when it affects Leftist wallets.

I have just put up on Australian Politics the latest salvo in Australia's history wars -- where Australia's lying Leftist historians are being exposed for what they are. Warning: The site is not quite office-safe at the moment.

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 1/30/2006 06:22:00 PM

Sunday, January 29, 2006

 
DON'T GO WOBBLY ON IRAN

(Excerpt from Jeff Jacoby)

"It is not on the table. It is not on the agenda. I happen to think it is inconceivable." That was British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in September, telling the BBC what he thinks about the use of military force to prevent Iran's homicidal theocrats from acquiring nuclear weapons... Fortunately, not everyone is off in Cloud Cuckoo Land when it comes to dealing with Tehran. The acting prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, put his government's position bluntly: "Under no circumstances, and at no point," he said on Jan. 17, "can Israel allow anyone with these kinds of malicious designs against us [to] have control of weapons of destruction that can threaten our existence." As the Jewish state has good reason to know, dictators who publicly vow to commit mass murder generally mean what they say -- and are generally not deterred by threats of "diplomatic solutions."

Israel is widely assumed to be at work on plans to destroy Iran's nuclear program. Iranian rulers have repeatedly declared their intention to wipe Israel off the map, and Vice President Dick Cheney said publicly more than a year ago that Israel "might well decide to act first" and attack Iran's nuclear facilities in its own self-defense. But it isn't clear that Israel could pull off such an operation, which would be far more complex than its strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. Unlike Osirak, which was a stand-alone facility, Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed among dozens of sites. Many are hidden underground. "To attack them all with cruise missiles and fighter-bombers," notes The Economist, "would require an extended campaign and hundreds of sorties. Corridors would have to be cleared through Iran's air defenses and the Iranian air force destroyed." Israel could not hope to carry off such a sustained military effort against targets a thousand miles away. Which is why, if Iran's nuclear program is to be demolished by force, it will have to be done by the United States....

The Bush administration -- and, increasingly, leading Democrats -- have been speaking out with growing urgency about preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear threat. What is not stressed enough is that Iran is not just a potential menace -- it is a clear and present danger right now. The radical Islamists in Tehran bankroll the world's deadliest terrorists. They foment violence in Iraq. They lied for 18 years about their nuclear activities. They persecute democratic activists and oppress women. They declare that their goals are "a world without Zionism or America" and "the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization." It was they who began the war we are in -- the global conflict between Islamofascism and the West -- with their seizure of the US embassy in 1979. Fanatic, apocalyptic, totalitarian, the mullahs who rule Iran see their destiny as waging jihad and extending theocracy across the entire Middle East. Under no circumstances can such enemies be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons -- or to doubt that we will do what we must to make sure that they don't.

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The irresponsible suits running Ford and GM might even lose dominance in that great American sport of auto racing: 'It was not a little jarring several years ago when NASCAR fans began arriving at racetracks in Toyota Tundra trucks and other vehicles built by foreign manufacturers. Now, Japanese automaker Toyota is preparing to leave the parking lot and drive into that bastion of American auto racing and culture -- NASCAR's Nextel Cup series. Not since the mid-1950s, when British-made Jaguars ran a handful of races in NASCAR's top series, has a foreign make competed in the Cup. From that time until 2000, when NASCAR allowed a Toyota-powered car in the now-defunct Goody's Dash Series, even the suggestion that a car or engine built by the Japanese, the Germans or any other non-Americans could eventually race in NASCAR kindled everything from heated debate to physical confrontation among the parochial and rabid fans of stock-car racing. Once Toyota ratcheted up to the Craftsman Truck Series in 2004, though, it became clear the next step was stock cars. It was announced earlier this week that a NASCAR edition of the Camry, the best-selling car in the United States in seven of the past eight years, will begin racing in 2007 in both of NASCAR's top stock-car series, the Cup and Busch".

Guess who favours voting rights for felons: "Democratic lawmakers, who have long pushed to restore voting rights to Maryland felons, say racial politics and election-year considerations make this the year they open the polls to every ex-convict. 'This law seriously disenfranchises a large number of African-Americans,' said Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat who is gathering sponsors for a voting-rights restoration bill she plans to submit. 'Their disenfranchisement impacts the power of African-Americans in this state,' said Mrs. Marriott, whose bill would give all felons the vote immediately upon release from prison."

MA: Romney may veto religious funds bill: "Governor Mitt Romney signaled yesterday that he is likely to oppose a bill requiring religious institutions to disclose their finances, creating a major hurdle for advocates of the legislation who must gain a veto-proof vote in the House to guarantee that it becomes law. The governor's comment caught supporters of the bill off guard, particularly since Romney had appeared to support the measure last August. Romney's comment also comes as supporters engage in a fierce political struggle on Beacon Hill over the legislation with the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and other religious denominations. Opponents say the measure violates religious freedoms and puts undue financial burdens on churches, particularly smaller denominations. Meeting with reporters in his office yesterday, Romney said the bill appears to be 'far more intrusive' than 'routine, regulatory interaction' and would place 'substantial burdens on religious organizations.'"

The Left still love traitors to America: "You would think, by now, with a half-century of scholarship behind us and a great deal of damning evidence on display, we would not have to be arguing about the guilt or innocence of various iconic figures of the late 1940s and 1950s: Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White or, perhaps most notoriously, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But the martyr status of such figures seems irresistible, even today, to a certain kind of sentimental leftist. They still remain symbols of some malevolent American quality--never mind the truth of what they actually did.... In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev noted that the Rosenbergs "vastly aided production of our A-bomb." Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh wrote a damning account of their activities in "The Rosenberg File" (1983). And the Rosenbergs' guilt was corroborated by the 1995 declassification of the Venona documents, thousands of decrypted KGB cables intercepted by the National Security Agency in the 1940s. The notion that anyone would today deny their fundamental complicity in Soviet subversion is extraordinary, almost comically so"

Italian restaurant supports the troops: "Tremoglie approached Finocchiaro about sending some of his pasta and sauce to Marine Corps Sgt. Brandon Rogers, and Finocchiaro was happy to oblige. According to Tremoglie, who has since sent two shipments of four pounds of pasta along with sauce, dried mushrooms and cookies, Finocchiario refused payment both times with a simple statement: "It's my honor to do it." Finocchiaro said the e-mails he received from Rogers showing his unit enjoying the pasta were the only payment he could ever want. "It was a touching moment to see them cooking on a stove in the middle of nowhere. Just to see the e-mail, that was a huge payback for us," Finocchiaro said. "I'm sure that they have some good food over there, but that was a moment that makes them feel like they're home."

An amusing screech here from an over-optimistic user of blogger.com. I feel no sympathy for him/her whatever. I myself put NOTHING online until I have saved it to disk.

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 1/29/2006 10:11:00 PM

Saturday, January 28, 2006

 
I GET RESULTS -- SORT OF

My goodness! My derisive comments about the vituperative Leftist "Tryworks" site have had a most unexpected result. I actually stimulated them to temporary politeness! What I said must have really hit home. I reproduce here an email I recently received from their "John Moredock" (a.k.a. Ward Churchill?). I reproduce it as an out-of-character curiosity, not because I accept any of the assertions in it. Being polite was obviously painful for them, however, as they shortly thereafter reproduced the missive concerned on their own site, accompanied by their usual vitriol.

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Stupid Wal-Mart enviers defeated: "Eighteen months after the Chicago City Council torpedoed a South Side Wal-Mart, 24,500 Chicagoans applied for 325 jobs at a Wal-Mart opening Friday in south suburban Evergreen Park, one block outside the city limits. The new Wal-Mart at 2500 W. 95th is one block west of Western Avenue, the city boundary. Of 25,000 job applicants, all but 500 listed Chicago addresses, said John Bisio, regional manager of public affairs for Wal-Mart.... The Chicago alderman who tried to bring a Wal-Mart to the Chatham neighborhood was left gnashing his teeth. "I always tell people I'm not for Wal-Mart, but I am for that project coming into the city and to my ward. We can't beat them," said Ald. Howard Brookins Jr. (21st). "The same things they talk about Wal-Mart doing to Small Town U.S.A when they build on the outskirts of town is the same thing they have done to the City of Chicago without fanfare. Nobody distinguishes that if I cross Western Avenue at 95th Street, I am no longer in Chicago. For all practical purposes, Wal-Mart is in the city of Chicago without us receiving any benefit. You're going to see the parking lot filled with cars with Chicago city stickers." Eighteen months ago, Brookins negotiated with Wal-Mart for a store at 83rd and Stewart, former site of the Ryerson steel plant. His plan fell apart when other South Side aldermen failed to support his request for a zoning change."



Cuban coverup: "Czech supermodel Helena Houdova took a break from the catwalk to visit communist Cuba and was arrested for taking photographs in a slum. The former Miss Czech Republic 1999 runs a foundation in New York that supports disadvantaged children and wanted to see what she could do to help in Cuba. But on Monday, Cuban security police detained Houdova and her companion, Czech psychologist Mariana Kroftova, while they were taking photographs in the poor Havana area of Arroyo Naranjo. They were released 11 hours later after signing a let ter saying they would not engage in "counter-revolutionary" activities. "We were afraid," Houdova said. "We grew up under communism and know what it is like."

What does it mean to be a (Canadian) conservative? "In yesterday's Canadian election, the new Conservative Party swept into power for the first time since 1993. Paul Martin and the Liberals, it turns out, were unsuccessful in their campaign to demonize -- yet again -- Canadian conservatives. But what does it mean to be a Canadian conservative? Is it the same as being an American conservative? Do the same markers apply, such as one's stance on abortion or gay marriage, lower taxes, free trade and smaller government, a strong military and vigilant national defense? To a certain extent, yes.... But the problem with defining Canadian conservatism exclusively in the above terms is that it overlooks the fundamental issue plaguing Canada since the 1960s: the separation movement in the French-speaking province of Quebec. The traditional liberal response to Quebec separatism was a call for greater centralization of power. There is no better example of this than the fetishism of socialized medicine. More than a mere health care system, socialized medicine acts as a symbol of Canadian unity and food for identity-starved Canadians. Policy choices-socialized medicine or not-soon morph into the "Canadian values" espoused by the Liberal Party-to be contrasted with the "American" values of their political opponents, the Conservatives.... But Conservatives see this as a big mistake. Instead, the reason for Quebec's continued disaffection is federal meddling in its affairs, a sentiment shared to a lesser extent by other provinces, such as Alberta. The Conservative response is a policy of "open federalism."

The latest statistics on race in Britain: "The number of people in ethnic-minority groups is growing significantly as the white British population continues to decrease, government figures show. England's non-white population rose by more than half a million between 2001 and 2003 to 7.1 million, with the Chinese community growing at the fastest rate. Over the same period the white British population fell by 100,300 to 42.8 million, according to a report by the Office for National Statistics. The figures suggest an overall decline in ethnic segregation as non-white groups move into almost every area of the country. London continues to have the greatest concentration of non-white British ethnic groups, with 40.7 per cent of the capital's population in 2003 belonging to a non-white British group. But faster growth of the non-white British population in all areas outside London means that its share of the non-white population has fallen from 44.7 per cent to 42.5per cent.

England no longer a green and pleasant land: "Muggings and violent attacks on people soared by more than 10 per cent in the third quarter of last year as the police struggled to contain street crime, according to figures published yesterday. Street robbery is rising at its fastest since Tony Blair demanded action three years ago by the Home Office and police to tackle the issue. The increase in violent crime came as rising numbers of people expressed concern at the extent of antisocial behaviour, including public drunkenness and drug dealing in their neighbourhoods. Homicides of people under 16 rose by a quarter in the year to the end of September 2005". [No mention of the race or religion of the criminals, of course

WMDs moved to Syria: "The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed. The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun. "There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over." Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

"Closing a loophole": Washington-speak for squelching a bit of freedom overlooked by the regulators : "Outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is opposing a regulatory loophole that allows corporations to own banks, according to a media report Thursday.Greenspan's opposition, contained in a 12-page letter to Congress, thrusts him into the controversy over an attempt by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to use the loophole to establish a bank in Utah... Wal-Mart officials have said they don't plan to establish bank branches, but would use the Utah bank as a back-office processing center, handling debit-card, credit-card and electronic check-transfer payments by customers at its stores, according to The Journal. Wal-Mart estimates it could save money by bringing that work in-house, according to The Journal".

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 1/28/2006 03:32:00 PM

Friday, January 27, 2006

 
Brookes News Update

Paul Krugman's economic shortcomings: Krugman spends his time at the 'New York Times' spewing anti-Republican bile and hatred while simultaneously spinning fantastic conspiracy theories reaching back 40 years. Methinks it's straitjacket time
The Australian dollar: anti-marketeer attacks deregulation - and gets it wrong: One shouldn't be too hard on Mr Feil considering that our so-called free marketeers are no better. If they are not prepared to recognise the significance of money supply why should anti-marketeers like Feil act differently?
Lefty journalist trashes Wal-Mart and slimes President Bush: Gawenda is reason enough to despise the media. As Washington correspondent for The Age this leftwing hack can always be counted on to paint a grim picture of America
Bracks' religious tolerance laws: Bracks' anti-free speech laws that favour Muslim bigots are coming under increasing pressure as more people realise the oppressive nature of these laws and their spiteful anti-Christian character
A Rupert Murdoch journalist smears President Bush's America: The smear-mongering David Nason just cannot contain himself. Overflowing with self-righteousness he maliciously portrayed a Republican judge as an out-and-out racist, As if he were a metaphor for Bush's America
Leftwing film reviewer drools over Clooney's anti-McCarthy agitprop: Tom Ryan, film and television critic for the Sunday Age Preview, is an example of that breed of lefty who just cannot conceal his political bigotry. Hence his sneers about terrorism and his support for Clooney's lying Goodnight, and Good Luck
Alito hearings bring out the worst in the pro-abortion crowd: It is high time that NARAL, the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood stop their lobbying campaigns for the Supreme Court. They are not concerned with the integrity of the Constitution

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Several people have emailed me to suggest that the poisonous Leftist site, "Tryworks" (should that be "Tryhard"?) is in fact all written by the contemptible Ward Churchill himself under various pseudonyms. That a hate-filled Ward Churchill should write a hate-filled blog certainly sounds reasonable so if anyone is up-to-date with textual analysis techniques that could be an interesting line of enquiry. My own interest in Churchill is minimal, however. Jim Paine, John Rubery and the American Indian Movement do a pretty good job of keeping him pinned down.

An unusually sensible archbishop: "Tony Blair's Government was condemned yesterday by the Archbishop of York for passing too much legislation and risking debasement of the law as a result. The Most Rev John Sentamu, speaking after being sworn in to the House of Lords, made clear that he would be an active member of the Upper House... The Archbishop said: "What I feel very strongly about is when you make a lot of laws all the time, one has to be extremely careful they are not made in haste." He called for a study on exactly how many laws had been passed since Labour was elected in 1997. "I think there have been too many," he said. "The more laws you pass, the greater the insecurity you create in society." Dr Sentamu, who fled Uganda, his country of birth, and came to Britain when it became clear that his life was at risk from Amin's Government, continued: "Laws are good because they show us how we need to be governed. But the more laws you have got, the more the law becomes debased."

Revival for Germany? "Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, yesterday promised a free-market revolution in Europe's biggest and most troubled economy, dismantling the mass of regulations that have been built up over recent decades. She said that Germany must follow the economic policies of Britain... Using language almost identical to that used by Margaret Thatcher when she was the British Prime Minister, the centre-right leader mapped out a U-turn in her country's treasured social model, repeatedly emphasising that Germans must stop fearing the world, embrace freedom and learn to take responsibility for their own lives instead of looking to the State. She said that rules introduced by previous governments to protect workers were strangling initiative, and had led to "terrifyingly high unemployment". She declared that there would be a new type of "social market economy"."

Evil bureaucrats: ""On January 9th, 15 Cuban rafters plucked a few days earlier from the decrepit and unused Flagler Bridge in the Florida Keys were repatriated to their communist gulag homeland. The reason given by the US Government was that these migrants never achieved 'dry foot' status under the Wet Foot-Dry Foot policy. This decision was based on the fact that the bridge was no longer in use and did not connect to dry land, so it was considered 'wet.' This is just one more example of the bureaucratically sick twist of semantics going on In Washington DC. Wet Foot-Dry Foot is a presidential decree signed by former President Bill Clinton"

Another attack on the "Dark Ages" myth: "Only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry and astrology into astronomy, with thinkers moving beyond mere technology into true research. Stark rejects the century-old scenario of Max Weber that Protestantism undergirded capitalism. Stark maintains that the main elements were invented by Catholic monks and lay Italians, centuries before the Reformation. He also thinks it's high time to eradicate "an incredible lie that long disfigured our knowledge of history": the claim that between the fall of ancient Rome and the secular Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe suffered through so-called Dark Ages of "ignorance, superstition and misery." That's a "hoax," he says, that was invented by 18th-century intellectuals who hated religion and especially Roman Catholicism. In reality, he says, the centuries before Protestantism and modern secularism saw huge progress in technology, education and human betterment".

Slovakia's pension reforms: "Politicians in Europe and America who remain in denial about the huge black holes at the heart of their state pension systems should take a look at the remarkable reforms pushed through by Slovakia. That tiny Eastern European country, already famed for its flat tax, launched its pension reform on 1 January last year. Under Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda's new -system, Slovakia's 2.2m workers were given a choice: they could either remain fully reliant on the pay-as-you-go pension system or take a part of their social security contributions and invest it in personal retirement accounts managed by a number of different investment funds."

Thought of the day from Les Bates: "For all of the publically communistic posturings and moanings, John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose as their place of residence the most capitalist city in the most capitalist nation on Earth".

I have just put up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE no less than THREE articles looking at the causes and effects of the recent Maryland attack on Wal-Mart over its health insurance policies.

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 1/27/2006 06:27:00 PM

 
AUSTRALIA DAY TODAY

Australia day is a national holiday. It commemorates the arrival in Australia of the first white settlers on 26 Jan., 1788. So I guess it is terribly politically incorrect these days. There is minimal criticism of it, however. My many relatives on my mother's side have for many years been celebrating it with a get-together over a BBQ. It is normally the one time of the year that we see one-another so it is nice to have that opportunity to keep in touch. There are usually about 20 of us. The children who were brought along by their parents many years ago still come -- now bringing their own children with them. And that of course is a great delight to us all.

My Burns Night last night was a great (if lowkey) success. The cockaleekie soup, haggis, tatties, neeps and clootie dumpling were all first class. Pipe music was played, the haggis was properly addressed and favourite Burns poems were read. We were all a bit too old to hit the Scotch whisky too heavily, though.

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LOL. My passing mention of a certain poisonous Leftist site yesterday produced the predictable vituperative response. Pure abuse. Nothing to reply to there at all. But I think we can safely take it that their admission "And, Yes, It Is Hatred That Warms Our Heart" is a sincere one. I discuss the central role of hate in Leftist psychology at some length here.

Interesting thought from a reader: "Do you think some Dems and Libs are upset with Bush because they know he is doing what Clinton should have done? Clinton could have gone down as one of the greatest had he toppled the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but he is in danger of being forgotten, stuck between the Cold War and the War on Terror. IMO he screwed Gore (thank GOD). If he had attacked the Taliban, I think Gore would have walked in the Oval office. That event would have dispelled the notion that the Dems are weak on security. But Clinton's lack of action added to that notion. I think a small bit of what we are seeing is the Dems angry at what could have been".

Kay S. Hymowitz argues that America really is becoming two countries, one rich and one poor-but it's not because of any economic or racial injustice. It's because children born and raised in married, two-parent families are on average much more likely to succeed than children brought up by divorced or never-married mothers. Cultural renewal, not social services, is what's needed to promote prosperity for all-the American version of equality.

See here some details of discussions with the Pope on the difficulties of reconciling Islam and democracy. Two reports are available discussing the Pope's views on the issue. One view is seen as pessimistic and another optimistic. The pessimistic view is that reconciliation is nearly impossible and would require changes in Islam never seen before. The optimistic view is essentially the same.

Did the socialist and pro-Mussolini FDR save capitalism? You don't need to make any kind of fancy free market economic argument to disprove this nonsensical Leftist claim. David T. Beito uses simple historical reasoning, the calendar and a quick look at the election returns to torpedo this myth.

Prince of Wales helps to enhance Wal-Mart's image: "The world's biggest retail corporation, which is under fire from environmentalists, trade unions and community leaders, has enlisted an unlikely champion to try to improve its image. Lee Scott, the chief executive of Wal-Mart, which owns Asda, the second-biggest retailer in Britain, had a two-hour meeting with the Prince of Wales at Clarence House".

Iraq war not a big burden on the huge American economy: "Critics of the war in Iraq often complain about the "escalating cost of the war." Listening to them, you'd never know that the war is one of the least expensive in American history. Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University, has measured the cost of each major American war up through the first Gulf War. We took these costs and compared them to the cost of the Iraq war and found that the Iraq experience has consumed a smaller percentage of GDP (just 2 percent of one year's wealth creation) than every other American war except the first Gulf War (which measured just 1 percent of GDP).

I like it!: "Activists who want U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter to pay a personal price for ruling New London, Conn., could seize private property for a development project rallied Sunday in Souter's small hometown, arguing the town should take Souter's home to build a hotel.... He said the five Supreme Court justices who sided with the Connecticut city on the eminent domain controversy "shot a hole in the Constitution." He said opponents should organize nationwide and vote officials out of office if they push similar projects. Doug Schwartz, of New London, Conn., urged the crowd on. He said eminent domain problems have plagued the city for decades. Clements said he and volunteers gathered 188 signatures Saturday in support of having the town take Souter's home so the property could be turned into a hotel -- the "Hotel Lost Liberty"."

Why am I not weeping? "A civil-registered Dassault Falcon 20E VIP business jet operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) crashed on 9 January killing the crew and much of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Ground Forces"

Marc Morano, the journalist who blew the whistle on the fake "war hero" status of John Murtha, has got a lot of flak over his story. He has however had a chance to defend himself on CNN. Transcript here

Mike Jericho has a BIG post on bias at the BBC. I won't even try to excerpt it but it mainly concerns their pro-Muslim stance. Mike has obviously put a lot of work into it so I think it is worth a read.

The latest issue of Ovi Magazine is out with lots to browse through.

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 1/27/2006 01:06:00 AM

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

 
BURNS NIGHT!

I don't feel much in the mood for pointing out Leftist distortions and deceptions today so I will talk about more personal things. I might however note in passing that there is a particularly poisonous Leftist site here that seems to be enamoured of the egregious Prof. Ward Churchill. They seem impressed that Churchill is popular with his students. The fact that con-men are usually popular is not mentioned. There is a systematic dismantling of some of their deceptions about Churchill here

With that aside, I am going to say a few words about what I did on Monday. Monday was Anne's birthday and preparations also had to be made for Burns night on Wednesday (TODAY!) so I was busier than usual. At 9am I set out to track down and capture a haggis for Wednesday dinner. And it was in fact more of an expedition than I had expected. Being a lazy sod, I don't make my own haggis but get it off a very talented man who is both a master butcher and a brilliant pastrycook. Visiting his shop is always a great pleasure. His website is here. I usually get to his shop by taking an exit off the freeway that leads straight to the shop but on Monday I discovered that the bureaucrats who know better what is good for us than we do ourselves had closed that exit off. So I spent half a nerve-frazzling hour trying to find an alternative route to the shop. I eventually succeeded more from luck than good management. And, Yes, I DID stop and ask for directions at a nearby service station but the young girl on duty there did not have a clue, not too surprisingly.

Anyway, I did finally get my haggis plus some clootie dumpling for dessert. I am marking the birthday of the poet in a very low-key way this year. No speeches etc. There will be just four of us at my place to share some haggis and probably read some of the poems. For those unfortunate souls who have never been to a proper Burns night, you can at least read about it here. My own previous post on it is here.

Anyway, on Monday night I took Anne to the Hilton for the smorgasbord. The Hilton smorgasbord is probably the dearest in town but the food is probably also the best -- including a big bucket of the incomparable Sydney rock-oysters in prime condition. I had bought Anne some white slacks (of a very un-slack kind) plus an embroidered white top for the occasion and she got into high heels for what she said was the first time in 40 years so she looked pretty good to me. For some inscrutable reason she seemed to think that I looked good in a blue shirt and grey slacks but there is no accounting for taste. Anyway, we people in our 60s can still have a lot of fun, surprising though that news might be to much younger people.

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ELSEWHERE



Tory win in Canada: "Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party won national elections Monday and ended 13 years of Liberal rule, a victory expected to move Canada rightward on social and economic issues and lead to improved ties with the United States. The Conservatives' winning margin was too narrow to avoid ruling with a minority government, a situation that will make it difficult to get legislation through a divided House of Commons... With nearly all votes counted in the race for the 308-seat House, officials results showed Conservatives with 123 seats; Liberals with 103; Bloc Quebecois with 50, New Democratic Party with 28; and one seat to an Independent. Three seats still haven't been determined. Prime Minister Paul Martin conceded defeat and said he would step down as head of the party"

Amusing: My post yesterday about the hate-filled Canadian John Chuckman seems to have got under the chuckful one's skin. I got a speedy email rejoinder from him. I cannot find the rejoinder online at the moment so I reproduce it in full here (together with a few more comments from me) for the entertainment of all.

Israel has Leftist loonies that are arguably the looniest of all. They abuse and call "Nazis" the very Israeli soldiers who protect them from extermination by the Arabs. What would Leftists do without the word "Nazi" to abuse people with?

Blair tries to cut one of Britain's biggest rackets: "Ministers will try to sound the death knell of the sick-note culture today by unveiling plans to take a million people off incapacity benefit at a saving of up to 7 billion pounds. The proposals will mean hundreds of thousands of people who have been on the benefit for many years being asked to attend interviews to judge their suitability for work. After Tony Blair made clear yesterday that he was ready for a showdown with his party over the education Bill, he will open up a new battlefront with his backing for the plan that John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will present. Like the schools Bill, it may receive support from the Conservatives. Doctors will be urged to consider alternatives to writing sick notes if they believe that their patients will be helped by doing work"

While the Da Vinci Code movie debuts at Cannes, the real story of a fake gospel goes unnoticed in the mainstream media. The late professor Morton Smith apparently created a fake "Secret Mark" gospel with the intent on showing that Jesus was homosexual. Apparently Morton Smith was homosexual although it is never openly documented owing to political correctness. This new book by an attorney, Stephen C. Carlson, has debunked the whole thing. They will never make a movie about it. Instead millions will flock to the fictional Da Vinci Code and swallow it hook line and sinker. I have never read nor do I intend to read the Da Vinci Code but it apparently contains some very large howlers. It refers for instance to Opus Dei monks whereas Opus Dei is a layman's movement.

The EU pot calls the Turkish kettle black: "The European Union today welcomed Turkey's decision to end the prosecution of Orhan Pamuk, the country's best selling writer, but urged a wider reform of the country's free speech laws.... Olli Rehn, the EU's Enlargement Commissioner, said the collapse of the case should lead to a "positive outcome" for the dozens of Turkish journalists and authors currently facing similar charges.... "It is clear for me that Turkey needs to fill properly the loopholes of the current Penal Code, which leave too much room for abusive and restrictive interpretations limiting freedom of expression.""

Chris Brand has just put together a new lot of posts which he believes represent good news on racial matters.

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 1/25/2006 03:44:00 PM

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

 
LEFTIST LOGIC: THE NAZIS INVOKED GOD SO ANYBODY WHO INVOKES GOD IS A NAZI

That is the classic non sequitur underlying a piece of pure hate by the aptly-named Canadian John Chuckman. According to him, asking the blessing of God is akin to Nazism. The entire article is one distortion after another. Putting a balanced argument would leave him with nothing to say. I have added just a few comments out of the many that spring to mind

I hadn't realized until recently that Stephen Harper was using "God Bless Canada!" as a tagline for his speeches. Some may think this a harmless, or even beneficent, expression for a politician to use, but for those with knowledge of history, nothing could be a more frightening. I do believe we all know to whom Harper is tipping his hat with these words. George Bush, author of two wars which have killed more than a hundred thousand innocent people [A reference to a now thoroughly discredited piece of Leftist propaganda masquerading as science] and the champion of an ugly set of repressive laws [Being a Canadian Leftist, I guess he means the awful oppression of homosexuals being allowed civil unions only -- which is just the same as Hitler murdering homosexuals by the thousands, of course] in the United States, says "God Bless America!" every chance he gets.

Some might say Bush uses the line because he has nothing else to say, and I don't doubt this is part of the truth. But slogans of this kind are always used to protect dangerous people from criticism. The words are used also as code, a kind of insidious political wink, to bloodthirsty supporters, the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell types [Who was it again that Robertson and Falwell killed? I forget. Was it Mary Jo Kopechne perhaps?] . They says [He is as weak on grammar as he is on the facts] things that cannot be uttered in public [Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell hold back from speaking their minds in public?? This bozo must be the only guy who thinks so]. Bush usually says it in front of a set of gigantic, eagle-topped American flags, reminiscent of nothing so much as the days when Germany's leader spoke and sputtered in front of platoons of monstrous, threatening flags. [But I guess the red flag would be OK]

Bush also always wears a prominently-placed American flag pin on his lapel, just in case you forget where he's from. I can never help thinking of the image of Hitler wearing his quiet Iron Cross on an otherwise plain, neatly-tailored uniform. [So all patriotic Americans are Nazis, I guess. And the similarity between a German war decoration and the American flag really is obvious, isn't it?] Neatness and patriotism for the cameras instead of troops sloshing through human blood. The belt buckle of the German legions which murdered their way across Europe were embossed with "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us) [But "Allah akhbar", meaning "God is great" is OK of course] over a fierce eagle grasping the swastika. This is only to say that there is a record in fairly recent history of the use of religious slogans in politics to cover horrors. I recall a photograph of American Marines, having illegally [Illegally under what law? Are heaps of U.N. resolutions that Saddam refused to comply with and big majority votes in the U.S. Congress not enough?] invaded Iraq, kneeling for a quick blessing before going out to kill more Iraqis in their own land [How nasty of them to kill terrorists while the terrorists are trying to kill them!].

The blurb about Chuckman says: "He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency". I would say that all three of those attributes are conspicuously missing from the above article.

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ELSEWHERE

Murdoch is on the ball: "Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent company of The Times, yesterday gave warning that British competitiveness and productivity were being held back by over-regulation stemming from the Government.... Mr Murdoch said that Labour was "extending the nanny state," and complained that the "cost of business was going up" at a time when newspaper advertising, and by implication the wider economy, was "tightening up". Arguing that education was fundamental to Britain's competitiveness in the world, Mr Murdoch said: "If the labour Party is so stupid as to prevent Blair from putting through his [education] reforms, then the Conservative Party should certainly support Blair. We're not educating our people properly here."

Conservatives ahead in Canada: "Latest opinion polls are predicting a clear win for the opposition Conservative Party in tomorrow's Canadian election but leader Stephen Harper will need a late spike in support to achieve an absolute majority in the 308-seat House of Commons. After starting the eight-week campaign well behind Paul Martin's Liberal Government, Mr Harper has retained his comfortable 7- to 12-point lead in all the major polls published at the weekend.

The European parliament shows its fundamentally anti-democratic nature by acting as if its rejected constitution had been approved: "Look at the number of policies and institutions envisaged by the constitution that have been, or are being, enacted regardless: the European External Action Service, the European Human Rights Agency, the European Defence Agency, the European Space Programme, the European External Borders Agency, a justicable Charter of Fundamental Rights. None of these has a proper legal basis outside the constitution"

A good Indonesian Muslim: "I have been called 'Chrislam' because I am so close to Christians," Abdurrahman Wahid is saying. "When I was criticized by a certain Muslim preacher for not being harsh enough against the 'kaffir' [infidels] -- for being too close to Jews and Christians -- I told him to read the Koran again. Because when the Koran speaks of 'infidels,' it means idolaters," not monotheists.... With 200 million residents, Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim nation, and Wahid -- popularly known as Gus Dur -- was not only its first democratically elected president but the longtime chairman of its largest Muslim organization, the 35 million-member Nadhlatul Ulama. A revered religious scholar who studied in Cairo and Baghdad, Wahid is a longtime champion of a moderate, progressive, and nonpolitical Islam. As a result, he has frequently clashed with militant fundamentalists whose growing influence, fueled by Arab/Wahhabi oil money, is undermining Indonesia's traditional religious pluralism".

Modern liberalism's central flaw : "Modern liberals sadly cling to their most grievous flaw and that is what makes them, even if at times only inadvertently, fundamentally misanthropic. They believe that advancing their objectives, even those that are perfectly valid, ought to be done by using coercion against those whose cooperation they seek. This major, colossal error on their part makes it even difficult to join them in their various campaigns to help those they wish to help, to argue against those whom they rightly oppose. As a recent example, consider the war in Iraq. Most modern liberals oppose this war but do so on grounds that are frankly blatantly hypocritical"

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 1/24/2006 09:57:00 PM

Monday, January 23, 2006

 
PARDON ME WHILE I LAUGH

Below is part of a rather pathetic news report to which I have added a few comments:

"Hundreds of progressive Christians from around the country are coming to Berkeley next week to plan how to take Christianity back from the right wing. [Only hundreds! How amusing! Probably more like dozens. And THEY are going to convert millions of Christians to Leftism?]

"'Progressive Christian' is not an oxymoron [just an ordinary moron], despite what the right says," said Diane Thomas, director of advanced placement programs at the Pacific School of Religion, part of UC Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. PSR is sponsoring the event. "Our goal is to put the soul back in Christianity, to focus it back on what it's always been about," said Thomas.

The event will be held Monday through Thursday at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. PSR Dean of Faculty Emeritus Delwin Brown, one of the main speakers, says the left has itself to blame for its present powerless condition. "We assumed that a more humane, more compassionate, more intellectually serious interpretation of Christianity would inevitably win out," he said. "We forfeited the argument to the other side." Brown said the left also has a tradition of hostility to religion that handicaps its ability to talk to people of faith. [A sudden rush of reality to his head]

"There's been a long-seated suspicion of authoritarianism [including Communism?], primary of which is organized religion [Organized religion is the main source of authoritarianism? He must have forgotten about the whole history of the Left from the French revolution on -- but in this guy's weird religion maybe the Communists were not authoritiarian!].

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ELSEWHERE

Thomas Holsinger makes the case for invading Iran: "All the reasons for invading Iraq apply doubly to Iran, and with far greater urgency. Iran right now poses the imminent threat to America which Iraq did not in 2003. Iran may already have some nuclear weapons, purchased from North Korea or made with materials acquired from North Korea, which would increase its threat to us from imminent to direct and immediate." [And even Pat Buchanan seems to agree!]

V.D. Hanson on Leftist self-contradiction: "At home, much about Iraq has been turned around in Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass fashion. Indeed the debate over Iraq has too often descended into Jabberwocky-like gibberish. We were once slandered as hegemonic; but when we didn't steal anything in Iraq, and instead spent billions in aid, suddenly we were called naive by the now realist Left. The war was caricatured as all about grabbing oil. Then when the price skyrocketed, we were dubbed foolish for tampering with the fragile petroleum landscape, or with not charging Iraqi price-gouging exporters for our time and services. Americans tried to remain idealistic on the principle that Iraqis, if freed and helped, could craft a workable democracy, and that such consensual governments would make the volatile Middle East safer, since elected and legitimate governments rarely attack their own kind. In response, the supposedly idealistic Left charged that we were bellicose and imperialistic - as if being on the side of the purple-fingered Iraqi voter was not preferable to being on the side of the terrorist and insurrectionist, who masked his fascism with national rhetoric."

Religious freedom to be restricted in EU : "Clergymen across the United Kingdom have been left highly concerned by a European Union report which has recommended that clergy not be allowed a right of conscientious objection to conducting gay weddings if the Parliament decides to enact legislation permitting same sex marriages. The EU ruling states that the rights of access to abortion, euthanasia, birth control and marriage trump the right of conscience to opt out of conducting gay weddings, reported The Church of England Newspaper. The highly controversial report by the EU's Network of Independent Experts on Human Rights said that where "euthanasia or assisted suicide are partially decriminalized, the right to religious conscientious objection, while it should be recognized to the medical doctors asked to perform euthanasia or to assist a person in committing suicide, should not be exercised in a way which leads to depriving any person from the possibility of exercising effectively his or her rights as guaranteed under the applicable legislation." The report also stated that the "right of access" should take precedence over the right for clergy or registrars to object to solemnizing gay weddings, where the law permitted them.

German government scammed: "Part of the ransom money alleged to have been paid by the German government to win the freedom of Iraq hostage Susanne Osthoff last month was found on Osthoff after her release, the German magazine Focus said on Saturday. Without citing its sources, Focus said officials at the German embassy in Baghdad had found several thousand U.S. dollars in the 43-year-old German archaeologist's clothes when she took a shower at the embassy shortly after being freed.... Osthoff, who converted to Islam and lived in Iraq, was seized heading north from Baghdad on Nov. 25 by gunmen who threatened in a videotape to kill her and her driver unless Germany ended all support for the Iraqi government... Two days after her release, the German government freed a Hizbollah member jailed for life in 1985 for the murder of a U.S. Navy diver. Berlin has denied a connection between the two events. Osthoff herself caused a stir when she said in an interview at the end of December that she did not believe her kidnappers were criminals.

Some readers may be aware of the Italian Muslim leader who is PRO-Israel. As he says here: "Israel exists by Divine Right, confirmed in both the Bible and Qur'an." There is also video of a recent interview with him (in English) here

Walter Williams explains that the poor get RICHER!: "Talk about the poor getting poorer tugs at the hearts of decent people and squares nicely with the agenda of big government advocates, but it doesn't square with the facts. ...The authors analyzed University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data that tracked more than 50,000 individual families since 1968. Cox and Alms found: Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. Three-quarters of these families had moved into the three highest income quintiles. ...Cox and Alm's findings were supported by a U.S. Treasury Department study that used an entirely different data base, income tax returns. The U.S. Treasury found that 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom income quintile in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile by 1988 -- 66 percent to second and third quintiles and 15 percent to the top quintile".

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 1/23/2006 05:21:00 PM

Sunday, January 22, 2006

 
DERRIDA

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for Leftists. Their peculiar compulsions often give them a need to deny reality, which is why the "nothing is real" brand of Continental philosophers appeal to them -- with Jacques Derrida being the chief reality denier -- a man who always had a rapturous audience of Leftists on his visits to America. But listen to the painful stuff that Derrida had to say about the 9/11/2001 events in NYC and elsewhere:

"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy-a name, a number-points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

Amusingly, he got it right in his last sentence above. Leftists are often intelligent people. They must at times find it depressing that they have to claim to find wisdom in such a hopelessly incoherent soul as Derrida. They would find more sense in the average loony bin. (HT Capitalism Magazine)

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Brookes News Update

Inflation and the US economy -- what's the problem?: As money is not neutral, a price stabilisation policy would aggravate inflation and destabilise the economy by distorting prices and production
The commodities boom and China: the missing ingredient: A great deal has been said about the current commodity boom -- nearly all of it wrong. As usual so-called analysts fell into the trap of confusing symptoms with causes
Murdoch journalists smear President Bush over NSA spying program: What was particularly dishonest about these so-called journalists was their refusal to give space to anyone who could provide a legal argument for the President's surveillance program
The media bats for the Dems to blame the GOP for Abramoff: The Bush-hating Michael Gawenda is another lefty journalist who is falling over himself to slime the Republicans over the Abramoff affair
Illinois GOP: Finding the Promised Land: What incentive is there for voters to unseat a Democratic incumbent and hire a Republican in his place, if the GOP offers candidates who, on the issues, are nothing more than Democrat-light?
Lefty journalist distorts the facts on General Motors' crisis: The leftwing Stephen Ellis is another Murdoch journalist who has trouble confronting reality, in between bashing markets and president Bush
Capitalism is the real friend of the poor -- not socialism: The one question our anti-poverty warriors never really address is the nature and origins of poverty. They always give the impression that poverty is a unique problem caused by an unjust distribution of wealth and income
Keynesians are wrong -- cost cutting does benefit the economy: Cost cutting is an important means of correcting previous erroneous decisions in order to be able to return to a situation where real wealth can be generated again

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ELSEWHERE

Access to the German version of Wikipedia has been restricted by a German court. This is of course an intolerable attack on free speech which I am sure all libertarians will do their best to defeat. You can see that the forbidden information which caused the site to be taken down -- the information that the real name of a German/Yugoslav hacker known as "Tron" was in fact Boris Floricic -- cannot be found via a search of the German site but the information IS still freely available on the U.S. site. To do my bit towards spreading the forbidden information, I will repeat the core of it here in my rough German: Hacker Tron heisst im Tatsache Boris Floricic. "Tron" is ein Beiname. Weiter hier. And my comment to the German court concerned: "Heil Hitler"!

Interesting that anti-hereditarian psychologist Prof. Elizabeth Spelke now say that at least some types of mathematical ability are genetically hard-wired. Sometimes the data can atom-bomb even a Leftist mind. But she is probably only an affirmative action appointee so unparsimonious thinking on her part should be no surprise.

In the latest "City Journal" we read how Democrats have begun to wield campaign-finance regulations, especially McCain-Feingold, and are pushing for a new Fairness Doctrine to try to muzzle the influential new media world of talk radio, cable-TV news, and the blogosphere. In short order, these outlets have ended the monopoly on U.S. political discourse that the liberal mainstream media, headed by CBS News and the New York Times, so long enjoyed, with seismic political consequences, possibly including George W. Bush's reelection. Apoplectic at its loss of power, the Left, rather than debating these new media, is trying to smother them, in such a flagrant attempt to suppress free speech as would make the Founders weep.

Cheney says domestic surveillance vital : "Vice President Dick Cheney offered a robust defense of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program Thursday, calling it an essential tool in monitoring the activities of al-Qaida and associated terrorist organizations. But he stressed the program was limited in scope and had been conducted in a way that safeguarded civil liberties. In a luncheon speech at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public policy think tank, Cheney warned that the United States still faced significant threats from a network of terrorists intent on establishing a radical Islamic empire throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East."

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 1/22/2006 08:29:00 PM

Saturday, January 21, 2006

 
DEFENDING FAKE-HERO MURTHA: MORE DESPERATE LEFTIST "AD HOMINEM" NONSENSE

"Ad hominem" arguments (i.e. denigrating your opponent) are what you use when the opponent's facts are all against you

The January 18, 2006 NY Times Op Ed by James Webb attempts to discredit Marc Morano's reporting by stating in part: "One of the authors of the Murtha article was Marc Morano, a long-time writer and producer for Rush Limbaugh."

Marc Morano has circulated by email the following reply (partially quoted here): "So I guess all news reporting by ABC News's George Stephanopoulos, who worked for the Clinton administration, and NBC News's Tim Russert, who once worked for former Democratic Sen. D. Patrick Moynihan, should all be disregarded because they have a Democratic Party background.

Questioning a politician's war record has always been a legitimate role of journalists. Former President Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by some in the media for serving in Hollywood making films supporting U.S. participation in World War II. The AP and the Washington Post in 1988 questioned whether or not then-Vice President George H. W. Bush's (G. W. Bush's father) bailed out of his air plane too soon during a Navy bombing mission in World War II, causing the death of his two co-pilots. (See the August 12, 1988 the Associated Press article entitled: "War Buddy Reluctantly Disputes Bush's Account of Bomber Bailout."). The Nation magazine questioned the inflating of Sen. Bob Dole's war record in 1996. Of course, President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard has been scrutinized by multiple news outlets, as was Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War service. Why do so many believe Rep. John Murtha's war record should be above scrutiny?

Nobody has disputed the facts of the Cybercast News Service article written by myself and Randy Hall."

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ELSEWHERE

Vive la France! "France said on Thursday it would be ready to use nuclear weapons against any state that carried out a terrorist attack against it, reaffirming the need for its nuclear deterrent. Deflecting criticism of France's costly nuclear arms program, President Jacques Chirac said security came at a price and France must be able to hit back hard at a hostile state's centers of power and its "capacity to act.""

Another Leftist clutch at straws: "Scripps Howard News Service announced Jan. 13 that it's severing its business relationship with columnist Michael Fumento, who's also a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. The move comes after inquiries from BusinessWeek Online about payments Fumento received from agribusiness giant Monsanto -- a frequent subject of praise in Fumento's opinion columns and a book. In a statement released on Jan. 13, Scripps Howard News Service Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland said Fumento "did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto." [The payments actually went to the Hudson Inst. -- which DID disclose them!]

Amusing comment on an Irish Catholic priest who fathered a child: "It's great to hear of a normal heterosexual priest for a change. There's nothing wrong with a loving relationship. He should be left alone".

Another loony Leftist who cannot tell the difference between Nazism and democracy (not really surprising): "These are not your father's Republicans. These Republicans take no prisoners. Cross them and, even if you are a fellow traveler, they will have you rubbed out. They tasted first blood during the Clinton years, and like chicken-killing dogs, liked it. So when they picked Texan George W. Bush as their candidate, they decided it was time to see just how far they could take the smear, how far they could push it. But pushing it -- bending the truth, even breaking it -- was politically dangerous. They needed deniability and distance. So they outsourced their smear work. That's when the Brownshirts arrived. It was one thing to accuse a sitting president of lying about sex, and quite another to accuse war heroes of being lying cowards."

There is an amazing article here about the racial slurs that have been directed at SCOTUS nomineee Alito by Democrats. Calling him a "wop" was the least of it. It seems that Italian-Americans have joined WASPs as fair game for the Left. For people who claim to deplore racism, ethnic slurs directed at ANY group are pretty amazing. But principles and consistency have always been alien to the Left.

Ann Coulter: "As noted here previously, George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy. Since I described McCarthy as a great American patriot defamed by liberals in my 2003 book, "Treason," liberals have had two more years to produce a person - just one person - falsely accused by McCarthy. They still can't do it. Meanwhile, I can prove that Murrow's good friend Lawrence Duggan was a Soviet spy responsible for having innocent people murdered".

'Plantation' remarks still echoing on Hill: "Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's fiery political remark Monday that the Republican House is like a 'plantation' has triggered charges of playing the race card and a sharp rebuke from first lady Laura Bush, who called her comment ridiculous. The New York Democrat's racial broadside during a Martin Luther King Day appearance at a Baptist church in Harlem continued to spark debate yesterday on both sides of the political aisle. Black Democratic leaders such as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois defended and attempted to explain Mrs. Clinton's remarks, saying she was referring to a "further consolidation of power" by Republicans in Washington. But Mrs. Bush, en route home from a trip to West Africa, said, 'I think it's ridiculous -- it's a ridiculous comment.'"

There is an appalling story here of how the (mostly French) Belgian Left have allied themselves with the Muslims to hit out at the Dutch-speaking Belgians (Flemings).

There is a story on Australian Politics of a quite extraordinary outburst of rage and hate from a prominent Australian Leftist.

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 1/21/2006 04:34:00 PM

Friday, January 20, 2006

 
INDONESIA

These are the charming people immediately to Australia's North

Muslim Indonesians rival Pol Pot and the Nazis: "The Indonesian military used starvation as a weapon to exterminate the [Christian] East Timorese, according to a UN report documenting the deaths of as many as 180,000 civilians at the hands of the occupying forces. The 2500-page report, obtained by The Australian, has been suppressed for months by the East Timorese Government and will infuriate Indonesia, which has punished only a handful of soldiers for the murders, assaults and rapes that occurred during its 24 years of occupation. Napalm and chemical weapons, which poisoned the food and water supply, were used by Indonesian soldiers against the East Timorese in the brutal invasion and annexation of the half-island to Australia's north, according to the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation report... It documents a litany of massacres, thousands of summary executions of civilians and the torture of 8500 East Timorese - with horrific details of public beheadings, the mutilation of genitalia, the burying and burning alive of victims, use of cigarettes to burn victims and also ears and genitals being lopped off to display to families.... The deaths amounted to almost a third of East Timor's pre-invasion population .... The Indonesian security forces "consciously decided to use starvation of East Timorese civilians as a weapon of war", the report says... "The violations were committed in execution of a systematic plan approved, conducted and controlled by Indonesian military commanders at the highest level." ... The commission carefully notes that many of the Indonesian military officers who played key roles in the occupation have since been promoted and details their ascension in the military."

Indonesians tyrannizing Melanesians right now : "More than 40 West Papuan asylum-seekers who fled the troubled Indonesian province in a large outrigger canoe six days ago landed on a remote beach in far north Queensland yesterday.... The 25m traditional dugout canoe was fitted with an outboard motor and was flying the outlawed West Papuan flag. "Save West Papua people souls from genocide, intimidation and terorist from military government of Indonesia," read a crudely worded banner on the boat. "We West Papua need freedom, peace, love and justice in our home." ... Faced with increasing political tension in West Papua and the overwhelming strength of the Indonesian military, Ms Byrne said the asylum-seekers fled the troubled province rather than risk being jailed and tortured for their knowledge of government affairs.... The asylum-seekers are believed to include Herman Wanggai, a student leader from West Papua who had spent time in prison for treason, his wife and their three-year-old twins. [See my earlier post here for background on the plight of the Papuans]

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ELSEWHERE

Thatcher's legacy squandered by Blair: "Perceptions about the "state of the nation" tend to change only gradually. In the 1980s the belief that Britain was doomed to decline lingered for some time after the Thatcher reforms had paved the road to economic recovery. Labour, by contrast, has benefited from revived national confidence that Britain had rediscovered the secrets of market-led success. That confidence appears increasingly misplaced.... Public sector productivity is deplorably low, so that the larger the public payroll, the worse Britain's overall economy performs. In every year since Labour came to power, British output per hour, which had previously been showing relative improvement, has fallen further behind that of the United States. This year's productivity gain is expected to be a mere 0.9 per cent, equal to that of Germany, well behind France (1.4 per cent), and half the rate in the US (1.8 per cent) and Japan (1.9 per cent)... The past eight years have seen a marked "continental drift" in Britain. Taxes here are now higher than in Germany for the first time in a generation. According to the OECD, which is as objective as any institution, British state spending will swallow a bigger slice of national wealth next year than the famously profligate German welfare state".

Socialist tax laws could drive big British companies overseas: "The Times has learnt that at least one FTSE 100 company is investigating domiciling itself outside the UK following an 18-month crackdown by Revenue & Customs on tax avoidance. Other companies are so angry at the clampdown on previously accepted business practices that they are refusing to co-operate with Revenue's attempts to understand corporate tax planning. Guy Brannan, head of tax at Linklaters, the City law firm, said that the relocation plans of a number of companies were at a "pretty advanced stage". Mr Brannan said: "The Government's attitude is becoming counter-productive. If companies do not have to be headquartered in the UK and a large proportion of their business is elsewhere, they are investigating moving outside the UK." The Netherlands, Ireland and Luxembourg were popular alternatives to Britain, he said.... Last November Ian McCafferty, the CBI's chief economic adviser, attacked the Treasury's anti-avoidance campaign. "These measures are effectively a covert means of extending the tax base to raise revenue while circumventing previously accepted tax principle and practice," he said."

A richly deserved penalty: "A California court sentenced a couple to nine years in prison for planting a fingertip in a bowl of chilli to swindle a Wendy's fast-food restaurant. A judge in Santa Clara Superior Court sentenced Anna Ayala and her husband Jaime Plascencia to nine years' imprisonment for their role in the Wendy's scam, which caused a sharp fall in sales at the third-largest US burger chain.... Ayala, 39, a Las Vegas resident, initially claimed she found the piece of finger after buying the bowl of chilli last March. She hired a lawyer and complained publicly about the experience, attracting wide attention to the seemingly bizarre incident... Wendy's International, based in Dublin, Ohio, paid a $US100,000 ($133,000) reward for information to help establish the source of the fingertip. Company officials said it took Wendy's months to recover from the bad publicity and lost millions of dollars in sales because of the incident. At one point it gave away free ice-cream to try to lure customers back into its San Jose area restaurants."

Keith Burgess Jackson has finally given up on Hillary Clinton. He now calls her a "harpy". She certainly is a nasty piece of goods. Let's hope she gets the Donk nomination for Prez in 2008. She will be her own worst enemy.

I am delighted to report that the posts on Tongue Tied by Scott and myself are helping to educate America's young people in a way that the official education system would never do. A U.S. college English student has just sent me a copy of an essay that she handed in as part of her coursework. The essay was inspired by what she read on Tongue Tied. It is some evidence that the mind-control attempted by the Left-dominated U.S. educational system will never completely succeed. I have reproduced the essay here

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts to update us on the news about on race and IQ. See 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 1/20/2006 08:41:00 PM

Thursday, January 19, 2006

 
RACE AND IQ -- DESPERATE REARGUARD ACTION AT "THE GUARDIAN"

Leftists will of course always believe what they want to believe. Their simplistic conceptions of the world matter far more to them than the facts. But even for Leftists, the truth about race and IQ is getting increasingly hard to ignore. And a recent article in "the Guardian" by Marek Kohn is testimony to that. He admits that the old Leftist shibboleths like "race does not exist" just sound hysterical these days and refers to sources that set out at length the evidence that race not only exists but that it is important. In particular, he refers to two publications by Charles Murray that set out at massive length the scientific evidence for group differences, racial differences in IQ included.

So what is a Leftist to do who knows as much about the facts as Kohn does? He bleats. But as well as bleating, he deliberately misleads. He says that Murray only "suggested" that there are differences in average IQ between the races. The difference in average black/white IQ would however have to be the most massively proven finding in the whole of psychology. It has emerged ad nauseam in study after study stretching back nearly 100 years. What does it take to turn a "suggestion" into a fact? I guess Kohn must be one of those post-modernists for whom there are no such things as facts. If you cut his salary, I think you would find that he would have no hesitation in regarding that as a fact, however -- a fact to be howled loudly about.

In the end, however, Kohn does not challenge the research findings. All he does is bleat about their explanation. Because he cannot see how racial differences in IQ have arisen, he seems to think that this means that they do not exist. I might as well argue that because I cannot understand how someone as stupid as Marek Kohn could exist then he does not exist either. A Freudian would call that strategy a "denial" defence mechanism. It is of course true that our explanations of how racial differences in IQ have arisen are speculative but most explanations in astrophysics are speculative too. Does that mean that the stars and the planets do not exist? I would like to suggest that in the great scheme of things it does not really matter much whether Marek Kohn understands something or not. But the facts matter.

His conclusion is however perfectly sensible, even if he cannot resist a pun: "We have gone beyond the stage where the question of racial science could be seen as a straightforward contest between decent values and sinister pseudoscience. It's no longer black and white".

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ELSEWHERE

Assisted suicide now legal in the USA: "The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the Bush administration's attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die, protecting Oregon's one-of-a-kind assisted-suicide law.... The administration improperly tried to use a federal drug law to pursue Oregon doctors who prescribe lethal doses of prescription medicines, the court said in a rebuke to former Attorney General John Ashcroft. The 6-3 ruling could encourage other states to consider copying Oregon's law, used to end the lives of more than 200 seriously ill people in that state."

Hollywood puts ideology first: "Christian groups led a furious campaign against Hollywood yesterday, accusing the Golden Globe Awards of promoting films with gay or "leftist" themes to serve a political agenda. The criticism was made after Brokeback Mountain, a film about the forbidden love between gay Wyoming cowboys, won four awards. Other winners included Philip Seymour Hoffman, named Best Actor for his portrayal of the homosexual writer Truman Capote; and Felicity Huffman, the Desperate Housewives actress who played a transsexual with a gay prostitute son in Transamerica. "Once again, the media elites are proving that their pet projects are more important than profit," Janice Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, said. "None of the three movies - Capote, Transamerica or Brokeback Mountain - is a box office hit. Brokeback Mountain has barely topped $25 million in ticket sales. If America isn't watching these films, why are they winning the awards?" The criticism from the American heartland carried more weight than usual this year because Hollywood suffered the biggest decline in attendance in two decades last year. Some of the few box office hits of the year were films such as The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which appealed strongly to Christian audiences".

House of Lords defends free speech: "Plans to curtail the actions of Islamic extremists by banning the glorification of terrorism suffered a setback last night after peers voted down the proposed new offence. A series of peers denounced the offence as pointless and said that its removal from the Terrorism Bill would still allow suspects to be charged with indirect encouragement to commit acts of terror. A move to strike glorification of terrorism from the Bill was carried by 270 votes to 144, a majority of 126, at its report stage despite government protests that the power was needed".

Black racism: "Nagin promised that New Orleans will be a "chocolate" city again. Many of the city's black neighborhoods were heavily damaged by Katrina. "It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans - the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans." [See my comment on Nagin here]

Another Democrat nut: "Ohio's Republican leader wants Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Paul Hackett to apologize for calling some conservative Republicans religious fanatics and comparing them to terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Hackett was unapologetic Tuesday for the comments in a newspaper story, saying religious fanatics of any flavor should be ashamed. "I said it. I meant it. I stand behind it," he said. Hackett said in a Sunday column in The Columbus Dispatch: "The Republican Party has been hijacked by the religious fanatics that, in my opinion, aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden and a lot of the other religious nuts around the world." ... Hackett also said the practice of denying homosexuals equal rights is un-American. The newspaper asked Hackett if that meant the 62 percent of Ohioans who voted to ban gay marriage were un-American. "If what they believe is that we're going to have a scale on judging which Americans have equal rights, yeah, that's un-American," Hackett said". [See Reliapundit for some comments on the nutty one]

There is a new site up to enable bloggers to circulate news. I don't really know what it is good for but I have put up a few posts there just for fun. See here. May be worth exploring.

Some headlines on Australian Politics today: "More multiple rapes by Muslims", "Police attack on civil liberties in Victoria", "Uranium stupidity" and "Australia has brick-thick "security" staff too"

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 1/19/2006 07:44:00 PM

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

 
LEGAL SCUM EXPLOIT LEFTIST CALIFORNIA LAW

They emigrated from Taiwan as boys, worked hard, kept close to family, and now - before either is 30 - they are stuck with a little lawsuit with big statewide implications. Bill and Sam Wu of Elk Grove have joined the burgeoning rolls of California business and property owners under siege by serial suers. In this case - and there are many - the Wus are the target of a prolific Carmichael attorney, who has filed more than 150 disability-access lawsuits since August 2003.

To some, Scott N. Johnson, who is quadriplegic and drives a full-size van with hand controls and a wheelchair lift, is a crusader for the disabled, busting businesses for violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. To others, he is an opportunist - the Wus say extortionist - who makes a fat living driving around town, scouring mom-and-pop operations for even the smallest infractions, then filing lawsuits and squeezing out quick settlements.

What's clear is this: California, as one of only a few states that allows for monetary damages and attorneys' fees in ADA cases, is seeing an explosion in disability-access lawsuits. And a huge chunk of those cases is coming from just a handful of plaintiffs and attorneys, people whose litigious track records have made many business owners - big and small alike - suspicious and wary of any disabled person who comes on their premises.

"This is Scott's way of making money," says Bill Wu, 28, who fixed the access problem last year on the family's commercial property in North Highlands, which had been deemed ADA-compliant by the county. But the Wu brothers don't want to settle for the $4,000 they say Johnson offered. And so they are fighting, navigating the complexities of the federal court system without law degrees.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing Leftist post here called "A million tiny strands" which is particularly aimed at conservative and anti-Green journalist Marc Morano -- but also at Cybercast News service and other conservative writers. What the author "discovers" -- "gasp"! -- is that Morano and other conservatives tend to get support from people and companies who agree with them -- including companies such as Monsanto. Monsanto produces seed for genetically engineered crops so these days is apparently nearly as evil as oil companies. In a reflection of what is no doubt his own typically amoral Leftist thinking, our Leftist writer concludes from this that Morano and others are BOUGHT. They are not saying what they really think but are simply company propagandists telling lies. This is of course a totally ad hominem argument -- attacking the speaker rather than the facts and arguments he puts forward and has, as such, no scholarly merit whatever -- and suggests that the attacker LACKS arguments of substance. But ad hominem arguments do seem to have some influence on people so let me shoot back by pointing out that I personally have often run Morano's writings on my blogs and that I agree with almost all the things that the writers say whom our Leftist attacks. And just find ONE CENT that ANY company has ever donated to me. I am and always have been entirely supported by my own work and its proceeds. So in the weird world of the ad hominem arguer that must prove that what Morano says is right and correct? Search me! I guess Leftists will always find some way to escape confronting the facts so I don't exactly expect consistency there.

Americans vote with their feet too: "For the second year in a row, the Census Bureau reports, the population of Massachusetts has shrunk. During the 12 months ending July 1, 2005, the Bay State experienced a net loss of more than 8,600 residents, or 0.1 percent of its population. It was one of only three states to end the year with fewer people than it had at the start -- New York and Rhode Island were the others -- and the only one to do so for the second year running. A statistical blip this isn't. Not counting foreign immigrants, Massachusetts has been losing more people than it attracts every year since 1990, according to MassINC, a Boston-based research institute. The net outflow during the 12 years from 1990 to 2002 -- the excess of people leaving Massachusetts over those entering -- was 213,000, and the hemorrhaging has only gotten worse since then. MassINC reported in 2003 that one-fourth of Bay State residents would leave if they had the opportunity to do so. Among those who have lived in Massachusetts for less than 10 years, the proportion is even higher".

Why nobody cares about the woes of Detroit: "In the fat years of the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. companies squandered profits on misguided acquisitions and poor product decisions. Too many Americans once owned Detroit cars and believed that dealers and the companies mistreated them when their vehicles had problems. In short, a sizable percentage of the American public is not sympathetic to the plight of the domestic manufacturers. The United Auto Workers union and its members have an image problem, too. Sure, in recent years GM and Ford have made progress in working with unions and in achieving improvements in quality. However, for far too long UAW workers laughed at complaints about quality, and the union did nothing to punish workers who failed to perform. In terms of pay, pensions and health care, UAW workers are better off than most Americans in private industry.... Maybe it is time for the companies to stop their dividends. Maybe it is time for the union to tell its members how bad things are. And maybe it is time for the Governor of Michigan to understand why people don't want to build in her state".

House of Lords to the rescue again: "The Government's plan for identity cards suffered a double blow this evening after Lords ordered a detailed investigation into the cost of the scheme and demanded a more secure method of recording and storing citizens' personal information. Peers voted by 237 to 156, a majority of 81, on an amednment ordering an inquiry to put a precise figure on the revenue and capital costs of implementing the controversial Identity Cards Bill. The Government suffered a second defeat when peers voted by 206 to 144, a majority of 62, to demand a secure and reliable method of recording and storing citizens' personal data. Ministers must now either agree to the investigation or ask the Commons, where an earlier backbench revolt slashed Tony Blair's majority to just 25, to overturn the Lords' demands. The Lords' debate centred on a London School of Economics report which claimed the scheme would cost up to 19 billion pounds -- more than 30 times the Government's estimate - and that the cost of an individual ID card could be high as 300 pounds.

After five years of socialist government: "NZ business confidence has slumped to its lowest level since before the 1987 sharemarket crash, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) said on Tuesday in its quarterly survey of business opinion (QSBO). The independent organisation said a net 61 per cent of firms expected conditions to deteriorate over the next six months. This compared with a net 32 per cent of pessimists in the last survey in October. Not since March 1986 has the economy's mood been so downbeat. NZIER director Brent Layton said the survey increased the likelihood of a recession. The seasonally-adjusted figure was even more dire with a net 71 per cent pessimistic against 34 per cent in October. This is the most pessimistic in 35 years and possibly of the 45-year history of the survey, one of the most respected in the country".

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 1/18/2006 10:10:00 PM

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

 
ECONOMICS ROUNDUP

The founding ideas were right: "When discussing the incentives granted by government to people thinking about settling in America, Benjamin Franklin cited only those "derived from good laws and liberty." Recent arrivals would have to roll up their sleeves and put their backs into it because, as Franklin noted, streets were not "paved with half-peck loaves," houses were not "tiled with pancakes," and edible fowl did not "fly about ready-roasted, crying `Come eat me!'" But if a person were "sober, industrious, and frugal," he could "establish himself in business" and "enjoy securely the profits of his industry." Pursuing happiness could be hard and possibly very rewarding work".

The Media's Top 10 Economic Myths of 2005: "The Media Research Center's Free Market Project spent 2005 tracking news reporting on business and economic issues and compiled a list of the most common and most egregious errors. They ran the gamut from omissions to exaggerations and plain misinformation: America should follow French fashion in business; We must raise taxes to cope with ballooning deficits; Global warming is causing stronger hurricanes; America is cheap with its foreign aid; Hurricane Katrina will send the economy into a tailspin; The housing bubble is about to burst; Americans are dying of fat; Consumers are choosing between food and fuel; Big, profitable companies are up to no good; The U.S. economy is hopeless

Leftists never learn: "An attempt by Venezuela's leftwing president, Hugo Ch~vez, to double the price that coffee producers pay farmers for a sack of beans has led to empty shelves in supermarkets throughout the country and fears of shortages of other basic foodstuffs. President Ch~vez, who maintains price controls on basic foodstuffs, raised the price of coffee beans by 100% last month after weeks of protests by coffee farmers. But most of the country's coffee producers, who buy, roast and grind the beans, refused to sell on the coffee yesterday, claiming their margins had been cut, and began hoarding thousands of sacks of unprocessed beans... Some supermarkets in the capital, Caracas, said they had also run out of sugar, chicken, powdered milk and maize. Store managers said they were not being supplied with new stock from wholesalers and producers, who were complaining that their profit margins were too low. Frustrated customers were told that coffee, milk and sugar suppliers were sitting on their goods until the government raised retail prices. Some owners of street cafes in Caracas said they would run out of coffee within days if the government and coffee producers did not reach an agreement. Venezuelans love their morning cup of coffee and there was growing unease among office workers yesterday that their daily shot of espresso or cappuccino might soon be unavailable. The increase in the price of raw coffee beans was initially applauded by impoverished farmers. But the government did not raise the price at which retailers sell processed coffee to the shops".

Can trade ever harm a country? "A recent article from the Guardian joins the growing outcry against free trade. Its central message is that countries adopting 'neo-liberal' market reforms, recommended by academic economists, have done worse than those countries that ignored the supposed experts and spurned free trade. Every time I reread the article -- with the subtitle 'A look at Vietnam and Mexico exposes the myth of market liberalization' -- I discover more and more fallacies. To economize on the reader's precious time, I finally decided to quit digging for more errors and jot down the ones I'd already found..... this article hasn't focused on the positive case for free trade, as it has been made in countless other places. What I have done above is merely illustrate the invalid (and sometimes downright silly) arguments that, unfortunately, even trained economists use to justify bigger government."

Left/Right economics summarized: "The subject of this article is Kuttner's column about the debate, rather than the debate itself -- Kuttner the fight judge, not Kuttner the boxer. I was particularly struck by Kuttner's statement above. Evidently, the concept of genuine humility is so foreign to Kuttner that he regards an expression of humility as a debating tactic. In a sense, that is why Kuttner belongs on the left. Contemporary liberalism without hubris is Hamlet without the Prince.... Genuine humility is a feature of libertarian conservatism, which may be the fundamental reason that it differs from neoconservatism. If you think you have all of the answers, then it is difficult to resist passing No Child Left Behind Laws and other expressions of government hubris. Libertarian conservatives believe that we do not know enough to justify imposing our will on others through government. Supporters of activist government believe they know more than we do. I fear that they know less."

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ELSEWHERE

Want a laugh? Some Leftist git by the name of Prof. Allan Patience -- an adherent of the Australian Fabian Society -- is trying to tell us that modern-day conservatives are not really conservative because a true conservative is a sort of socialist. More about him and his mixed-up ideas on Australian Politics. Also see Australian Politics for the story of a Greenie local council who awarded a contract to Halliburton!

The right of conscientious objection is increasingly being denied to Christians in secularist Europe. You can be in big legal trouble unless you have secularist (or Muslim) beliefs.

The Canadian decline: "Over the past 20 years, Canada has become a place where merely speaking truth to power is a considered a revolutionary act. Over the past 20 years, our people have come to dread liberty because it demands responsibility. When you go into the voting both on January 23rd it may well be the last, best hope to take our country back. All you have to do is remember that a nation of sheep will always produce governments of wolves."

There is a list here of just some of the far-Left anti-Bush ballyhoo surrounding MLK day. It is one of the wonders of 20th century politics that most people seem not to know that it was REPUBLICANS who got the Civil Rights Act through Congress: "Republicans favored the bill 138 to 34; Democrats supported it 152-96. Republicans supported it in higher proportions than Democrats. Even though those Democrats were Southern segregationists, without Republicans the bill would have failed. Republicans were the other much-needed leg of the Civil Rights Act of 1964".

Today it's Leftists who stand in the schoolhouse door: "Milwaukee's innovative school choice program has become a beacon of hope for reformers everywhere. But the educational establishment has never accepted its success and is now striking back. A cap on the number of students that can attend the city's private choice schools has been reached, and starting Feb. 1, education officials will implement a rationing plan to allocate the program's available seats...."

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 1/17/2006 06:46:00 PM

Monday, January 16, 2006

 
IQ AND THE ARMY

As both a psychometrician and as a former Australian army psychologist, I suppose I should say something about the controversial Fred Kaplan article on lowered IQ standards for US Army recruits. I am not going to say much because I think Kaplan is spot-on -- though he does manage to write his whole article without using the term "IQ" once. As even Leftist commentators such as Kevin Drum have acknowledged, however, the "aptitude" test the U.S. Army uses to evaluate potential recruits is essentially an IQ test.

Kaplan does in fact do a useful job of summarizing the evidence for how important IQ is among soldiers. The idea that you can use any dummy as "cannon-fodder" is very much out of date. Putting a deadly weapon into the hands of a dummy is likely to make him more a danger to his fellow-soldiers than to the enemy. Modern soldiering in particular ideally requires a high level of intelligence. So the "validity" (usefulness, correctness, informativeness) of IQ tests is not confined to predicting educational achievement but also extends into fields very different from classroom performance -- to fields such as military efficiency. And that is why we have the term IQ -- because there IS a general factor of mental (or problem-solving) ability. There IS such a thing as a general factor of intelligence that shows up in a wide variety of situations.

So the fact that the US army is now recruiting less bright people to fill its ranks is a very bad thing indeed. It will tend to make the army less effective and more self destructive -- as if we did not have a big enough "friendly-fire" problem already! I think the US army should learn the ancient lesson of Gideon (Judges chapter 7) and stick with high standards no matter what.

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ELSEWHERE

Hate-filled homos -- they must be prosecuted: "The Gay and Lesbian Alliance (GLA) yesterday declared war on the South African National Blood Service (SANBS), as scores of its members turned up to donate blood under false pretences. And, a shocking 65 percent of the gay men who donated blood without disclosing their sexual preference are unsure whether they are HIV- positive. On Friday, about 300 men complied with a plea by the GLA to its claimed 100 000 male members to donate blood to SANBS centres across the country, but not to disclose their sexual orientation. The request is a part of an ongoing national campaign to protest the SANBS policy of excluding men who engage in sexual activity with other men from donating blood. David Baxter, media director for GLA, said on Friday that 65 percent of the members of GLA who had donated blood were unsure whether they were HIV-positive. He later said one of the donors had full-blown Aids". (HT Interested Participant).

Wal-Mart has become a political football: "UpWalMart. com and Wal-Mart Watch have at least two things in common : They criticize Wal-Mart, and they criticize each other. A few weeks ago, WakeUp-WalMart. com, financed by the grocery workers union, launched its latest TV ad campaign questioning whether Christians should shop at Wal-Mart, given its low wages and benefits. At the same time, the group sent a letter to Wal-Mart Store Inc. chief executive Lee Scott signed by 65 ministers. "Jesus would not embrace Wal-Mart's values of greed and profits at any cost, particularly when children suffer as a result of those misguided values," the letter said. Wal-Mart was upset. But so was Wal-Mart Watch, a group backed in part by the service workers union and formed to take on the world's largest retailer. Wal-Mart Watch declined to put its name on the ad, even though it earlier had helped cull names from its lists of religious leaders for the letter. "What would Jesus do, indeed," Tracy Sefl, Wal-Mart Watch communications director, said in an email to The Wall Street Journal. "I think he would say the ad was a mistake. We heard from numerous supporters who were offended."... The two organizations are top-heavy with former Democratic operatives from the 2004 presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Howard Dean. Both groups arose as Wal-Mart's rapid expansion made it a lightning rod in some corners of labor and the political left for a long list of grievances against big business.

Jack Wheeler has reproduced some of the cartoons mocking Islam that have caused such an uproar in Denmark. Should be more of it.

Jihad: The Year the Muslims Took Rome: "Few know about it, but it happened.... What happened is that in 846 some Muslim Arabs arrived in a fleet at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to Rome, sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter all of the gold and silver it contained. And this was not just an incidental attack. In 827 the Arabs had conquered Sicily, which they kept under their dominion for two and a half centuries. Rome was under serious threat from nearby. In 847, the year after the assault, the newly elected pope Leo IV began the construction of walls around the entire perimeter of the Vatican, 12 meters high and equipped with 44 towers. He completed the project in six years. These are the "Leonine" walls, and significant traces of them still remain. But very few today know that these walls were erected to defend the see of Peter from an Islamic jihad. And many of those who do know this remain silent out of discretion. "Bridges, not walls" is the fashionable slogan today. (See The Legacy of Jihad. Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims by Andrew G. Bostom)

A marvellous article about China: "Renmin University, also known as the People's University of China, has an enrollment of almost 19,000 and is one of China's most respected schools. It was founded in 1950 by the Communist party. The children of many Chinese officials were educated there, and three generations of Chinese leaders, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, have paid special attention to the school's development. So I was especially surprised by what I learned. It was about 8 P.M. on a Friday when I ventured onto Renmin's campus. In a courtyard near the school's east gate, I discovered some 200 students who were exchanging views about history, economics, politics, and culture. It was U.S. history, economics, politics, and culture that they were discussing - and they were speaking English.... Some students smiled and began to ask me questions. One asked where I was from and I said, "The United States, Washington, D.C." Immediately, he flashed two thumbs up and said "Very good. America is very good. America is our model." ... While thinking through U.S. policy toward China, the Congress and the administration should know that a surprising number of Chinese people embrace U.S. ideals and are fond of American culture. At a time when U.S. policies are reviled around the world, that is something to celebrate and promote. It strikes me as an investment in government of the people, by the people, for the people in China".

California Democrats protect sex offenders: "A state Senate committee on Tuesday killed a "Jessica's Law" proposal to punish sex offenders that was one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top priorities this year. Senate Bill 588 by Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster, would have increased penalties for various sex crimes, required satellite monitoring of sex offense felons and forced sex offense registrants to live more than 2,000 feet from schools and parks. The legislation failed on a 5-2 party-line vote in the Democrat-dominated Senate Public Safety Committee".

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 1/16/2006 03:20:00 PM

Sunday, January 15, 2006

 
THE KID-HATERS

Kid-haters are surprisingly common, as the excerpt below notes. They always amuse me, though, because their own attitudes will cause them to die out. They are merely a passing evolutionary dead-end. They have not died out so far because there was a lot of pressure on women to have children once, whether they wanted children or not. Now that pressure is mostly gone, however, such women will cease to reproduce and future generations will be rid of their quaint egocentric attitudes

"There has been much gloomy beard-tugging in recent years about the demographic decline of Western countries. Though it is true that parents in the U.S. are managing to replace themselves--unlike, for example, Europeans--we do not live in an era of big families. Today fewer than 10% of Americans live in households of five or more people and only 1.8% in families of seven or more.

That means that if your family consists of a mother and father and five children, you live where I do, which is statistically on the lunatic fringe. "Omigod, five kids?" people gasp when I tell them. "Are you nuts?"... Mr. Quaid is touching on something that members of large families do encounter: the awareness that they cause a sensation in public. From some passersby come fond glances. From others, thinly veiled hostility. "People always tense up when they see a big family coming," observes our 11-year-old, a veteran observer of adult fastidiousness... Some adults flare their nostrils with distaste at the sight of even one child.

Little wonder then, that large families will come in for hard looks from those who believe that they are overpopulating the planet, or selfishly consuming too many resources, or simply exhibiting religious zealotry. The odd thing is that, off the screen, large families are seldom the ones with wildly misbehaving children. In real life, they tend to be the orderly people with the polite children, the families in which older siblings can be seen caring for their little brothers and sisters without griping about it".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Big-time legal blogger Eugene Volokh has just linked to Keith Burgess Jackson's fisking of the NYT deceptions about Alito. Coincidentally, Keith had just linked to the latest post on his anti-Leiter blog. That means lots of legal types will probably see the new Leiter blog. Excellent! Leiter needs to find out what it is like to be on the receiving end of attacks, particularly as he appears to be mightily miffed by any such attacks.

Another Leftist fraud. It looks like the war medals of John Murtha were just as unearned as those of John Kerry. A few scratches were magnified into creating a fictional Leftist "war hero".

Wal-Mart enviers have a win: "Maryland lawmakers bucked the will of the state's Republican governor and the nation's largest retailer yesterday, voting to become the first state to effectively require that Wal-Mart spend more on employee health care. In a veto reversal that was closely watched nationally, lawmakers in the Democrat-led General Assembly voted largely along party lines for a measure that legislatures in more than 30 states are considering replicating".

Arts subsidies lead to more arts bureaucrats, not more artists : "It's often claimed we have a healthy arts industry. It is more accurate to say we have a healthy arts administration industry. The bulk of permanent staff of arts organisations are engaged in marketing, administration and finance. The people who write, design, stage and perform are mostly casual workers on short contracts."

How come we never hear from anti-death penalty campaigners when it comes to China? "The People's Republic of China continues to carry out more judicial executions than the rest of the world combined. "In addition, despite having the largest population in the world, China possibly executes a higher proportion of its population than any other country, except for Singapore, which has one of the smallest populations. "Behind these facts lies a criminal justice system which cannot and does not guarantee a fair trial under international law to defendants. "Often defendants are denied their right to legal representation until after they have been interrogated, and even then, access in practice is strictly limited. The period of pre-arrest or pre-trial detention is often arbitrary, lasting in one extreme case for 28 years".

Scotland: Walk-in DNA test clinic opens: "Scotland's first walk-in DNA clinic is opening its doors in Aberdeen. Those behind the venture say it could signal the end of lengthy and costly paternity tests. But others are urging caution in what can be a legal and emotional minefield. Many believe DNA testing, and in particular paternity testing, is a sign of the times, not helped by figures which suggest that one in 25 fathers in Britain could unknowingly be raising another man's child. The increasing use of genetic testing for both medical and legal reasons are allowing couples to gain biological proof of who fathered the child. The Aberdeen DNA Clinic is another step forward in the process as the first clinic of its kind in Scotland to offer a walk-in service."

Soldiers sue for reimbursement: "Four Massachusetts National Guard soldiers, called to active duty after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, filed a federal lawsuit yesterday, arguing they were forced to pay for their own lodging, meals, and commuting expenses while they were protecting the state from terrorism. The lawsuit is apparently the first claim of its kind nationally, and the soldiers hope to expand their suit to include hundreds of others who have served in the Massachusetts National Guard since Sept. 11, their lawyers said. If the soldiers in all approximately 300 positions at issue were fully reimbursed for every day since Sept. 11, 2001, they would be owed an estimated $73 million, the lawyers said. The four plaintiffs said they were never given reasons why their reimbursements -- a maximum of $158 a day for food and lodging, plus travel expenses -- were denied."

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 1/15/2006 05:45:00 PM

Saturday, January 14, 2006

 
AND THE LEFT WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO CONTROL EVERYTHING!

Government is the problem not the solution: "In all times and in all places there has been too much government. We now know what prosperity is: it is the gradual extension of the division of labour through the free exchange of goods and ideas, and the consequent introduction of efficiencies by the invention of new technologies. This is the process that has given us health, wealth and wisdom on a scale unimagined by our ancestors. It not only raises material standards of living, it also fuels social integration, fairness and charity. It has never failed yet. No society has grown poorer or more unequal through trade, exchange and invention. Think of pre-Ming as opposed to Ming China, seventeenth century Holland as opposed to imperial Spain, eighteenth century England as opposed to Louis XIV's France, twentieth century America as opposed to Stalin's Russia, or post-war Japan, Hong Kong and Korea as opposed to Ghana, Cuba and Argentina. Think of the Phoenicians as opposed to the Egyptians, Athens as opposed to Sparta, the Hanseatic League as opposed to the Roman Empire. In every case, weak or decentralised government, but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all, whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war".

Your government will protect you (1): "A jumbo jet that had lost an engine and was losing power in the other three was diverted over Central London, putting hundreds of lives at risk on the ground, an investigation has found. The crew were "fortunate" that there was good visibility because in low cloud "the aircraft might have landed well short of the runway", according to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB). It ordered the Civil Aviation Authority to carry out an urgent review of the guidance given to air traffic controllers on diverting aircraft in emergencies over densely populated areas".

Your government will protect you (2): "An e-mail that showed up in my inbox the other day contained a photograph of the modern floodgates that keep Venice from being inundated by the Adriatic Sea. Below it was a picture of Holland's high-tech dams, which rise as much as 40 feet above the waves that perpetually threaten the Dutch. A third photo showed London's futuristic-looking flood barriers, a series of semicircular silver gates along the Thames that can be raised or lowered as needed to regulate tidal heaves surging up from the North Sea. Following these images of impressive European flood control technology came a picture from New Orleans. It showed a section of a broken, low-tech, decidedly unimpressive concrete levee surrounded by water, presumably taken in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Sneered an accompanying message: "Way to go, Corps of Engineers!" Whether it is fair to compare New Orleans's flood-control system with Europe's, or whether those European barriers are as effective as they are photogenic, I don't have the expertise to judge. Nonetheless, that e-mail is a good reminder of a key truth about the Katrina disaster: It was mostly the result of government failure".

Government failure even in a rich and moralistic Islamic society: "Twenty years ago, Shobokshi told me, Jeddah had been provided with the money to build a modern sewage system that would accommodate the fast-growing city. The government official in charge of the project, however, took the money and built himself a mansion in San Francisco and a palace in Jeddah that is equipped with a discothSque and a bowling alley. As a result, Shobokshi said, the streets in Jeddah are constantly filled with tanker trucks to drain the city's cesspools. Worse, sewage has got mixed into Jeddah's groundwater, and this has contaminated drinking water in many parts of the city. "We have new diseases of the eye and skin that didn't exist here ten years ago," Shobokshi said. "Lung and breast cancers are forty per cent above the national rate. Hepatitis is so high that it has to be classified as an epidemic".

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ELSEWHERE

Why do I not feel bothered by this news? "At least 345 pilgrims were killed yesterday when one of the holiest rituals of haj in Saudi Arabia turned to tragedy. White-robed believers rushing to stone the Devil in a symbolic ceremony were caught up in a stampede and crushed. Many who escaped death were seriously hurt, with 289 people reported injured".

There is an interesting article by Bernard Chapin here about the unrealistically high expectations of a partner that single women in their 30s and over tend to have. The article mirrors to an extent observations that I too have made. The unrealism of many women in that age range is certainly puzzling. I remember once overhearing a discussion between two waitresses when one of the waitresses said: "Oh! I'm waiting for my millionaire". Since the lady concerned was fat and sloppy, with short bleached hair and a brassy manner, I can only hope she was joking. I cannot imagine a millionaire who would not be able to find a better option than her. One is tempted to say that it is only the foolishly picky women who are still single by age 30 but the unrealism is also no doubt to a substantial extent due to the constantly preached feminist myths that deny all the basic truths about males and females. I am aware that what both I and Chapin say would be dismissed by feminists as sour grapes but I gather that Bernard is happily married and as someone who twice married ladies in their 40s, I think that I too am rather proof against such ad hominem criticisms.

There is a good historical roundup here that asks us not to judge France by her current despicable political class. There is much truth in what he says but I think he overlooks the extent to which contempt for France is largely a reflection of the feverish French hatred of America and "the Anglo-Saxons" generally. There is also a more personal article here that speaks kindly of the French.

As a legally-qualified academic, Keith Burgess Jackson is taking a particular interest in the nomination of Alito to SCOTUS. Today he "deconstructs" the specious opposition of the NYT to the nomination.

There is an excellent and comprehensive memoir of the heroic life of Ariel Sharon here. In this time of great trial for him and for Israel, it is good to remind ourselves of the Herculean efforts Israel has had to make just to exist.

There is a new book out called Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis. That should give the church-haters heartburn! They always accuse Pius of being a Nazi collaborator. There is part of an interview with the author here.

There is another roundup of the latest news on race and IQ by Chris Brand just up 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 1/14/2006 02:48:00 PM

Friday, January 13, 2006

 
Brookes News Update

US economy, productivity and the Bush boom: Commentators are dangerously wrong about US productivity and the boom bust cycle
Islamic Clerics sanction child sex and Bahraini women's rights activist expresses outrage: Is it conceivable for a grown man to have sex with an infant girl? And you people tell me that the Islamic Sharia authorizes this
Jack Murtha betrayed America - and for what?: Democrats are playing politics with the lives of US citizens and in the most hateful way anyone has ever seen our Congress
Defending capitalism against socialist lunacy: Many socialists still peddle the absurd myth that unemployment and 'excess capacity' are created by the need for capitalists to invest to make profits rather than create jobs or meet 'social needs'
The dangerous myth of price stability: There is almost complete unanimity among economists that the most important role of the central bank is to attain price level stability. This is a dangerous fallacy
Mexicans Hire Bush Advisor to Stop US Border, Illegal Immigration Reforms: Mexican President Vincente Fox has bought the services of a Republican strategist to help stop the public outcry over rampant illegal immigration
The coming day of the blog: Political blogs are going to end up more on the activism side because bloggers care about issues.

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

ELSEWHERE

Sharon stuns doctors: "Israeli leader Ariel Sharon had appeared aware of his younger son at his bedside, his chief surgeon said. He also expressed astonishment at Mr Sharon's powers of recovery after a serious stroke. The 77-year-old Prime Minister, whose fate is crucial to Israel and the wider Middle East, remains in intensive care but doctors said they had been able to all but stop the drugs that had been keeping him in an artificial coma. His chief surgeon, Felix Umansky, told AFP it could take months to assess the full extent of the damage Mr Sharon has suffered. But his progress so far had defied all expectations, Mr Umansky said, amid suggestions by some of the Prime Minister's allies that he could even lead his new Kadima party at a March general election".

Support for Sharon's party soars: "Voters have swarmed towards the fledgling political party of Israeli leader Ariel Sharon, which is now set to win more seats in the new parliament than before its founder was stricken. A fresh opinion poll shows the new party, which Mr Sharon dubbed Kadima in mid-November, would pick up 44 seats in the Knesset if national elections - scheduled for March 28 - were held now. Before the veteran Prime Minister suffered his massive stroke eight days ago, Kadima had not polled higher than 40 seats, which was still enough to give it commanding majority".

Dutch must send troops: US: "Washington's former administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer has warned the Dutch they could face economic penalties in the US if they fail to send troops to Afghanistan. NATO has also turned up the heat on the Dutch, while the fate of a 200-strong provincial reconstruction team Australia wants to send to Afghanistan hangs in the balance because it is relying on the Dutch to provide security. "I assume from time to time decisions must be taken by the US Government and Congress which affect Dutch economic interests," Mr Bremer, a former ambassador to The Netherlands, told Dutch newspaper De Volksrant. "It is not difficult to imagine that decisions will be made that are not in the best interests of The Netherlands".

Another nail in the coffin for GM. Irresponsible management eventually hurts: "Honda Motor Corp. swept the top honors at the Detroit auto show on Sunday as its all-new Civic and first-ever pickup, the Ridgeline, were voted car and truck of the year by a panel of automotive writers. The result marked another setback for Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp., which have been losing market share to Japanese competitors in their home market and have pledged to mount a comeback in the passenger car market".

Curing Poverty or Using Poverty? ""China is lifting a million people a month out of poverty." It is just one statement in an interesting new book titled "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford. But it has huge implications. I haven't checked out the statistics but they sound reasonable. If so, this is something worth everyone's attention. People on the political left make a lot of noise about poverty and advocate all sorts of programs and policies to reduce it but they show incredibly little interest in how poverty has actually been reduced, whether in China or anywhere else. You can bet the rent money that the left will show little or no interest in how Chinese by the millions are rising out of poverty every year. The left showed far more interest in China back when it was run by Mao in far left fashion -- and when millions of Chinese were starving.... Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of wealth. But you would be wrong."

NYPD Gets 'Islamic-Culture Training': "Police in New York are getting "Islamic-culture training" to prepare them for dealing with Muslims in the city, home to 16 percent of the nation's Muslims. About 100 members of the NYPD's hostage negotiating team spent a day at a local college learning about mosques, prayer rituals, holidays and other facets of Islamic life. The instruction was designed to give negotiators tips on dealing with any hostage situation involving Muslim perpetrators, according to the New York Post. Points of Muslim etiquette covered in the training include: Don't step on prayer rugs, never display the soles of your feet; Shake a woman's hand only if she offers it, and: Remember that dogs are not allowed in most Muslim homes

America's founders did not intend for there to be a separation of God and state, as shown by the fact that all 50 states acknowledge God in their state constitutions . An actual list of quotations from each constitution is here. Somewhere along the way, the Federal Courts and the Supreme Court have misinterpreted the US Constitution. How could fifty States be wrong? One is faced with the prospect that maybe, just maybe, the ACLU and the out-of-control federal courts are wrong!

More deliberately misleading NYT reporting: The Rev. Lusk affair

There's a slightly encouraging post here about libertarianism in France.

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 1/13/2006 07:30:00 PM

Thursday, January 12, 2006

 
North Carolina madness

From Nathan Tabor

A lot of changes have been taking place in North Carolina over the past few years. Did anyone happen to notice that the illegal immigration population in North Carolina jumped 43% in 2004? That's almost double what it was just one year ago. We now have the eighth largest population of undocumented immigrants in the United States. That's right, over 300,000 illegal immigrants now reside in North Carolina. Is it because of our temperate climate? Our beautiful scenery? Not likely.

Illegal immigrants are flocking to our beloved state because we are handing out driver's licenses with the ease of movie tickets or grocery coupons. We don't seem to ask for any kind of real identification when applying for a license. We don't ask for a social security number, and we do not require any kind of proof that the person applying is a citizen. Therefore, it is an easy task for an illegal immigrant to obtain fake documents here in North Carolina, and many are moving here to do just that.

What does a driver's license do for an illegal immigrant? At best, it legitimizes their status to prospective employers, to law enforcement, and to any other institution that uses a driver's license as universal identification. They can now present a very real license, and few would ever know it was not legal. It enables them to keep their illegal status hidden effectively from the rest of the world, for a much longer period of time. At worst, it provides a deadly terrorist with a key to access dangerous areas by obtaining employment in and around those areas. We saw this last April, when 27 illegal immigrants were arrested while working as airplane mechanics at the Piedmont Triad International Airport at Greensboro. All had been issued driver's licenses. All were repairing planes. Is someone not making a connection here?

The good news is that this problem is easily solved. Anyone applying for a Driver's license in North Carolina must be made to provide a social security number and two other forms of identification. There is absolutely no reason not to.

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

ELSEWHERE

Another Leftist antisemite: "Prominent Jewish rights group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, accused Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez on Wednesday of using what it said were anti-Semitic remarks and demanded an apology. In a televised Christmas Eve speech, Chavez, a left-winger, said that 'minorities, descendants of those who crucified Christ... have grabbed all the wealth of the world for themselves.'"

Fascism, Islamism and anti-Semitism: "Too many critics of U.S. foreign policy betray a profoundly naive view of human nature: They ignore the ability of propaganda to nullify reason, pervert conscience, and inflame our blackest impulses. People who believe such slurs are psychologically and spiritually prepared to believe almost anything -- and, eventually, to act on those beliefs. 'Nonsense in the intellect,' warned C.S. Lewis, 'draws evil after it.' The nonsense of anti-Semitism is the elephant in the Arab living room. At the moment, the elephant is thrashing about most conspicuously in Iran, but he's at home in much of the Muslim world. 'Over the last half-century, anti-Semitism has been the essential theology of the Arab world,' writes historian Paul Johnson, author of A History of the Jews. 'The Arabs have wasted trillions in oil royalties on weapons of war and propaganda ... In their flight from reason, they have failed to modernize or civilize their societies, to introduce democracy, or to consolidate the rule of law.'"

PETA: Cruel and unusual : "On January 9, two employees of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) will appear in court to answer felony charges of animal cruelty. Far from being an isolated incident or an illustration of PETA's hypocrisy, their crimes offer a chilling insight into the beliefs that motivate the group's strategy of animal rights advocay. What the trial reveals may well be just the tip of the iceberg."

A post here on Michael Schermer's generalization that: "Where goods cross frontiers, armies won't. Restated: where economic borders are porous between two nations, political borders become impervious to armies".

Cartoon war in Denmark "Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is shocked at the way in which some Muslims are misrepresenting Denmark in the Islamic world. �I am speechless that those people, whom we have given the right to live in Denmark and where they freely have chosen to stay, are now touring Arab countries and inciting antipathy towards Denmark and the Danish people,� Rasmussen told journalists yesterday. Rasmussen was responding to the recent visits by certain imams, Muslim intellectuals and representatives of Danish Muslim organizations who toured a number of Muslim countries to �explain� the Danish cartoon affair to local political and religious leaders and media. The affair started last September when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of Muhammad. Meanwhile, after last week�s rejection of their complaint by the public prosecutor, Danish Muslim organisations have announced that they will take the newspaper to the European Court of Human Rights over the controversial publication. Islam forbids the depiction of the Muslim prophet. Carsten Juste, the editor of Jyllands-Posten repeated late last week that the daily will not apologise for publishing the cartoons: �We will not apologise, because we live in Denmark under Danish law, and we have freedom of speech in this country. If we apologised, we would betray the generations who have fought for this right, and the moderate Muslims who are democratically minded.�"

Sir Humphrey has an interesting excerpt in which the claim is made that the Pope sees Islam as fundamentally unreformable and incapable of change in a more humane direction.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Kills. The W. Va. miners could have walked out: "It is perhaps the most heartbreaking question raised by a heartbreaking accident: Did 12 miners die deep inside the Sago Mine because instead of trying to walk to safety after an explosion, they went by the book and waited for help that took too long to arrive? They apparently had enough oxygen in their respirators to last an hour or more and no wall of debris blocked their escape, mine company officials said. They could not have known it, but less than 2,000 feet away was breathable air.

If you want to feel ill, the election manifesto of the Canadian Liberal party is here. NOBODY is as sanctimonious as the Canadian Liberals. (HT to the Shotgun blog)

I have just put up here an article that draws together some information about the social class origins of German Nazis and Italian Fascists in the pre-WW2 period. Marxists say that Fascism was "bourgeois" but modern scholarship shows that Nazism and Fascism were what they claimed to be: National rather than class-based.

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 1/12/2006 05:11:00 PM

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

 
SOME ECONOMICS

Free trade benefits all: "Trade liberalization talks in Hong Kong ended with a deal to further liberalize access for poor countries' exports to rich countries' markets. Urged on by the misguided nongovernmental organizations, poor countries wasted an excellent opportunity to enhance their own prosperity by opening their markets to foreign competition, however. Therefore, benefits of trade liberalization for many poor countries, especially those in Africa, are likely to be severely limited. So it is worthwhile to again restate the case for free trade and to back it with evidence countries open to trade tend to be more prosperous than protectionist countries."

A flat-out winner for tax reform: "The report issued last month by President Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform landed in no-man's land. The right was disappointed that its proposals were so timid, and the left was critical because the report highlighted the damaging impact of high tax rates on work, saving and investment. Perhaps the panel could have won more hearts and minds if it had examined the real-world experience with tax reform. The flat-tax revolution in Eastern Europe is particularly compelling. Nine nations from the old Soviet bloc have adopted the flat tax -- which taxes income at one rate -- and others are poised to. In an ironic twist, these countries are rejecting the class-warfare politics of yesteryear and building tax systems specifically designed to attract investment, fuel economic growth and treat all citizens fairly."

Minimum wage ACORN roots: "According to a Dec. 25 report in the Boston Globe, the Democratic Party is joining forces with the activist group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to place initiatives on state ballots this fall to raise the minimum wage. The idea is to energize the poor to vote for Democratic candidates as well as the initiative. ACORN's involvement in this campaign is amusing because a few years ago the group sued the state of California in order to be exempted from its minimum wage requirement, which was higher than the federal government's. In its appellate brief, ACORN acknowledged that the more it had to pay each worker, the fewer such workers it would be able to hire. Of course, the same thing is true for businesses as well, something minimum wage advocates refuse to admit."

CEOs should mind their own business: "President Coolidge once said the business of America is business. He might have added that the business of business is to pursue profits, for lately some corporate leaders seem to have lost sight of that basic precept. Instead, they have embraced corporate social responsibility (CSR), the political doctrine du jour of the leftist ninnies who seek to further socials goals that they have decided are virtuous. The activist-inspired CSR movement represents the convergence of two seemingly discordant political doctrines: - corporate socialization and the privatization of regulation."

American Marxist economist Harry Magdoff died recently. Was he a Soviet agent?. Good riddance to bad rubbish either way. From his biography, it was clearly emotion, not reason that drove him.

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ELSEWHERE

Dogmatic atheist: "Controversial scientist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins, dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler," calls religion a "virus" and faith-based education "child abuse" in a two-part series he wrote and appears in that begins airing on the UK's Channel 4, beginning tomorrow evening." [Since the vast majority of the human race is religious, this galoot thinks most people are mentally diseased child abusers. That's the sort of respect for other people that you are always getting from the Left. It does help us to see why they cheerfully wipe people out by the millions when they get unrestricted power -- e.g. Stalin, Mao etc]

Elitist Europe: As authoritarian as ever: "A few years back, after a prolonged immersion in American Protestant fundamentalism (I was writing a book), I moved from the U.S. to Western Europe, ready to bask in an open, secular, liberal culture. Instead I discovered that European social democracy, too, was a kind of fundamentalism, rigid and doctrinaire, yielding what Swedish writer Johan Norberg calls "one-idea states"-nations where an echo chamber of insular elites calls the shots, where monochrome media daily reiterate statist mantras and shut out contrarian views, and where teachers and professors systematically misrepresent the U.S. (millions of Europeans believe that free public schools, unemployment insurance, and pensions are unknown in America). The more I saw of the European elites' chronic distrust of the public, and the public's habitual deference to those elites, the fonder I grew of the nasty, ridiculous rough-and-tumble of American democracy, in which every voice is heard"

Chatting up the TSA: "Next time you go to the airport be sure to put on a happy face, even if you've been informed that your flight has been delayed by an hour and that you'll miss all your connections. You'll need this cheerful facade to make it through the TSA airport security checkpoint. As if being asked to strip off shoes, coats, belts and other clothing before going through a metal detector and getting your personal belongings x-rayed is not enough, the TSA will begin psychoanalyzing air travelers in 40 major airports next year. TSA screeners, who are not even fully trained law enforcement personnel, let alone professional psychologists, will perform behavior analysis screening on all passengers."

Marxist Mexico's busybody president: "The president of Marxist Mexico, Vincente Fox, is a real busybody when it comes to sticking his nose into the affairs of the United States. He has more crust than a loaf of bread. Early in December, 2005, it was announced that a federal judge had lifted the final barrier stopping the United States from completion of a fence along much of its border with Mexico. Fox has been more than critical of the fence plan ever since he heard about it. His problem seems to be that it will keep all the illegals on his side of the border, where most of them belong anyway, instead of letting them sneak across into our Southwestern states so they can get all the free welfare goodies on this side. He called the new fence a violation of 'human and labor rights.' Whose human and labor rights -- why those of the illegal immigrants of course. So if illegals are not allowed to enter this country illegally we are now violating their human rights! To listen to Fox's political posturing you would think that Mexico, almost single-handedly built the United States."

KBJ on a fallacious appeal to authority: "Law professors are expert in law. They are not moral experts. Nobody is a moral expert. So what are we to make of this�a letter signed by several hundred law professors? They say they oppose Judge Samuel Alito's appointment to the United States Supreme Court. But why? Is it because he's incompetent? Is it because his knowledge of the law is inadequate? Is it because he lacks the requisite analytical, argumentative, or critical skills? The answer comes at the end of the letter (before the names): These law professors don't like his values. They think he will make the country "less equal and less free." That these people are experts in law (I give them the benefit of the doubt) has nothing to do with whether anyone should share their values. What a disgraceful document! These law professors are trying to parlay their legal expertise into moral influence. They are trying to fool people into inferring moral authority from legal authority. They are suborning fallacy.

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 1/11/2006 08:23:00 PM

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

 
"STEREOTYPE THREAT"

I commented fairly acerbically in April 2004 on the latest gambit among psychologists for explaining away low average black IQ and educational attainment. It is the "stereotype threat" theory. The theory seems to have a number of incarnations but at its wackiest, it says that blacks do poorly because they are afraid of letting down their race! Nonsense as gross as that hardly needs comment but let me simply ask: If such fears exist at all, why do they not make the student try harder and thus do better?

A somewhat more reasonable theory is that blacks "drop their bundle": They know that they are on average unlikely to do well so don't really try to do well. All the studies that I have heard of over the years tend to show, however, that blacks have unusually HIGH motivation in the testing situation -- so that theory need not detain us.

In that situation, psychologists have had to devise ever more dubious experiments to support their ideas. The latest appears to be a study reported here of which we read: "In their spring study of 81 students at Boca Ciega High School in Gulfport, Brett Jones and Tom Kellow investigated "stereotype threat," a phenomenon in which students worry their failure might confirm a negative belief about their race'.

They found that giving a test under "threatening" conditions -- where students were told that the result would predict their later educational success -- produced much lower scores among blacks than when the test was given with a more reassuring introduction. Under the more reassuring condition, scores of blacks and whites were about the same. The authors concluded that the findings supported their theory.

It is difficult to know where to start in commenting on such nonsense. Quite aside from the total disregard for sampling that is characteristic of most psychological research, Occam's razor has been completely ignored. If the findings show anything, they simply show that blacks handle stress less well. There is no need to bring "stereotypes" into the explanation. But the gaping oddity in the findings is that blacks and whites did in one condition do about equally well on the test. That is totally contrary to all prior findings where some attempt at sampling was used and suggests that the whole setup was severely contrived in some way and that the results therefore tell us nothing at all. To put it as politely as I can, there was at least a very strong "Rosenthal" (experimenter expectation) effect at work.

I am not the first to find the "theory" risible. Steve Sailer also dissects it and there is an even more savage takedown at Gene Expression. Charles Murray is probably the most succinct of us all, however. Of the original study in the field, he says: "Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, demonstrated experimentally that test performance by academically talented blacks was worse when a test was called an IQ test than when it was innocuously described as a research tool. Press reports erroneously interpreted this as meaning that stereotype threat explained away the black-white difference. In reality, Messrs. Steele and Aronson showed only that it increases the usual black-white difference; if one eliminates stereotype threat, the usual difference remains". See also here and here.

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby on Abramoff: "The worst is that Abramoff is a Jew. Not only a Jew, but an Orthodox Jew -- someone who claims to be committed to strictly observing Jewish law and faithfully adhering to the Torah's ethical standards. But instead of upholding those ethical standards Abramoff trampled on them, and a "religious" Jew who behaves so corruptly disgraces not only himself but all religious Jews. He brings his faith into contempt. He is guilty of what Jewish tradition calls, with disgust, *chillul ha-Shem* -- a desecration of God's name. For me -- also an observant Jew -- that is the worst thing of all. Honesty in financial dealings is not optional in Judaism; it is mandatory. The Talmud teaches that when a person is brought to judgment in the world-to-come, the first question the heavenly tribunal puts to him is: "Did you conduct your business affairs in good faith?" A Jew who takes the values of his religion seriously must be scrupulous in his transactions with others"

Most Senate Dems Took Abramoff Cash: "Nearly ninety percent of Senate Democrats took money linked to disgraced "Republican" lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to a list compiled by the Republican National Committee. Though reporters continue to insist that the Abramoff imbroglio is "a Republican scandal," 2008 Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton took more than $12,000 in tainted cash. Compared to the party's 2004 standard bearer, however, she's a piker. John Kerry raked in nearly $100,000 in Abramoff-linked donations. In fact, 40 of the party's 45 U.S. senators made the Jack Abramoff dishonor roll"

Media Critic Donald Rumsfeld: "Defense Secretary's Rumsfeld's speech on Iraq, in which he strongly criticized the conduct of the U.S. media, deserves to be read in its entirety. Unfortunately, the Secretary expressed the false hope that the media might be persuaded to come around to responsible journalism. He said, "it's important also for the media to hold itself to account." Well, don't count on it, Mr. Secretary. Remember how Newsweek had published that phony Koran-in-the-toilet story. Rumsfeld mentioned it, saying, "Not too long ago, there was a false and terribly damaging story about a Koran that was supposedly flushed down a toilet in Guantanamo, and in the riots that followed in several countries, some people were killed." Yet nobody was fired or even reprimanded by Newsweek over that false story. So much for accountability from the media."

MN: GOP blogger served with libel lawsuit: "A dispute between a self-described 'Republican operative' and a former Democratic campaign organizer widely quoted in Minnesota media has turned into a libel lawsuit that could help set legal standards for Internet blogs. The suit pits Blois Olson, a Democratic public relations executive who is a frequent guest on Twin Cities Public Television's 'Almanac' show, against Michael Brodkorb, a former Minnesota Republican Party employee who operates a political blog -- or Web journal -- called minnesotademocratsexposed.com. Olson's lawsuit, which was served to Brodkorb on Tuesday but has not yet been filed in court, seeks damages of more than $50,000 and a court order forcing Brodkorb to remove from the blog a Dec. 28 posting about Olson and his St. Paul-based public relations company. In the Dec. 28 item, Brodkorb suggested that Olson had publicly criticized former FBI agent Coleen Rowley's campaign for Congress because Rowley's campaign staff last summer refused to hire Olson's firm, New School Communications. Olson insists the item was a fabrication; Brodkorb says he's confident it was true."

Keith Burgess Jackson has just done a big fisking of the latest NYT attack on Supreme Court nominee Alito.

Tom Heard updates us on the latest antics of Communist-loving Harry Belafonte. GWB is "the greatest terrorist in the world" etc.

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 1/10/2006 05:52:00 PM

Monday, January 09, 2006

 
A POWERFUL ARTICLE FROM A FORMER THATCHER MINISTER

Just a few excerpts from an article by Lord Tebbit about Britain's new Tory leader

There is no doubt Mr Cameron is a remarkable political animal. From back office, through the back benches to leadership in half a decade is unusual. From proud authorship of a Conservative 2005 manifesto widely criticised for narrow dogmatism, to its condemnation and utter rejection is hardly less so. Nor could Mr Cameron's uplifting effect on the party's poll ratings be anything but amazing. Unfortunately razzle-dazzle success and exciting policy statements only whet the public appetite for more non-stop political pyrotechnics than any man can deliver. Mr Cameron is now in danger of such an outstanding public relations success dissolving into tetchy doubts about his political orientation. Is he really "New Labour Lite", a Tory wolf in Lib-Dem sheep's clothing, or for that matter a Lib-Dem sheep leading a pack of Tory wolves?...

Quite why Mr Cameron believes that voters who flocked to Mrs Thatcher's dark blue flag defected to Blair's pale pink or Kennedy's muddy yellow banners I do not understand. Nor can I see that if they did, they would now flock back to a pale blue and pink flag emblazoned "Thatcher Was Rubbish". In any case, for all the talk about Tory voters switching to Labour in 1997, the figures show that if it did happen, the numbers were tiny. What happened was that Labour voters turned out, as did Lib-Dems voting tactically to get the Tories out, and 4.5 million Tory voters stayed at home unable to stomach John Major's ERM disaster.

Nor should Tories be ashamed of Mr Cameron's concern with world poverty, but throwing money at corrupt dictators because they have ruined their economies will help neither poor Africans nor poor British. The trouble is that we have other problems here at home. With selection on ability (but not ability to pay) and vouchers ruled out, how will we improve our schools? If the Treasury alone can finance hospitals, how can they be run for patients and not for the Treasury?... How would Cameron deal with multiculturalism, which threatens social stability? Would he encourage marriage and stable families? Could he free us from our masters in Brussels? Like the voters, I wait for Mr Cameron to show as much interest in all this as the chocolate oranges in WH Smith. His answers will decide the election.

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Constant attacks on Wal-Mart hurt the poor in yet another way: "Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the nation's largest food retailer, said Thursday it will no longer donate nearly-expired or expired food to local groups feeding the hungry. Instead, that food will be thrown away, a move several Sacramento charities consider wasteful. Olan James, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said the policy, which applies to all 1,224 Wal-Marts, 1,929 Supercenters and 558 Sam's Clubs, is an attempt to protect the corporation from liability in case someone who eats the donated food gets sick."

Deceptive Munich: "Ever since World War II, the German city of Munich has been symbolic of a single, solitary political lesson: the folly of 'appeasement.' The 1938 Munich Pact represented the futility of compromising with evil. This was always a bit unfair to poor British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had better reasons to sign on to the pact than most people remember. But the moral of the story was a good one, going all the way back to Aesop, who told the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which ends with the frog being shocked that the scorpion would sting him even though the scorpion could do nothing else, for that was its nature. Hitler was a scorpion, and thinking or hoping otherwise wouldn't change that fact. Much of the Cold War was predicated on this lesson, as the World War II generation agreed not to let down its guard ever again. Steven Spielberg would like to rewrite the meaning of Munich. In his film about the response to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Spielberg seems determined to invest the word with a new meaning: We must not treat scorpions like scorpions."

Media ignore the truth again: "Guilt by association. It is a common tool used to discredit those deemed a threat to the established order. Recently, I've found myself on the receiving end of such a tactic courtesy of a piece by Jonathan Finer and Douglas Struck in the Washington Post. On the day after Christmas, the Washington Post featured an article titled "Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War - U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage," of which my recent embed in Iraq was the subject of scrutiny as a military-information operation. It is a fact-challenged article that manages to cast an unfair shadow on my reporting from Iraq. The piece claims that I had retired from the military, when in fact it requires 20 years of service to retire. I served four years on active duty and two years in the National Guard. The authors report that I was credentialed by the American Enterprise Institute, when in fact this is impossible, as a think tank cannot provide media credentials - this must be done by a recognized news organization. I was credentialed by The Weekly Standard and the Canadian talk-radio show The World Tonight. And finally, contrary to the report, I was not in Iraq when the article was published. I had been home for nearly a week. Each of these items could have been easily confirmed by a simple inquiry....."

UK immigration: Sense creeping in? "A large-scale overhaul of the asylum system has begun which will lead to at least a third of all asylum seekers being placed in detention centres for the 'fast-track' processing of their claims for refugee status. The 'new asylum model,' which ministers hope will be implemented by September, also envisages far greater controls over failed asylum seekers facing removal, including the use of electronic tagging, reporting requirements and detention."

No free speech in Muslim Turkey: "After writers and intellectuals, bar owners have become the latest targets of a controversial Turkish law limiting freedom of expression, the daily Hurriyet reported on Friday. The owners of nine Istanbul bars and restaurant have drawn the wrath of the authorities for staging a protest last month over what they called frequent and arbitrary police inspections which they said harmed their business, the mass-selling daily reported. The protesters closed shop for a day, hanging banners denouncing 'arbitrary and unlawful practices and pressure by the police, conducted under the guise of inspections.' Police removed the banners and filed complaints against the bar owners, leading to their indictment under Article 301 for 'openly denigrating the police force,' Hurriyet said."

Big Brother has arrived in the UK: "John Prescott has told tax inspectors to use satellites to snoop on householders' attempts to improve their homes. Images of new conservatories and garages taken from space will be used to hike up council taxes and other property levies, official guidance obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveals. Mr Prescott's department is overseeing the creation of a database containing the details of every house in Britain to help tax inspectors to assess new charges. Even minor improvements, invisible from the road, will be caught by 'spy in the sky' technology that uses a mix of aerial and satellite images taken over time to spot changes."

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 1/09/2006 06:43:00 PM

Sunday, January 08, 2006

 
ABRAMOFF

I don't even try to follow all the minutiae of American politics so for those like me I thought the following sounded like a rather fun summary of a man very much in the news these days:

"Here are some of the details of the Abramoff story. He made more money as a lobbyist than anyone had ever even imagined making. He bilked two Indian tribes out of $82 million by representing both of them -- as they waged a fight against EACH OTHER. The longer they fought, the more money he made off BOTH OF THEM. He bought off libertarian newspaper columnists. It appears he owned at least one congressman who was willing to do his bidding by using the Congressional Record as a weapon in his private business dealings.

In the course of those dealings, he bought a casino cruise-ship company with a mobbed-up former owner of the Dial-A-Mattress concession in Washington, D.C. Less than a year after that transaction, the original owner of the casino company was shot to death on a Fort Lauderdale street, and three members of the Gambino crime family have now been arrested for the murder. Those three Gambino-ites were put on the company's payroll by the Dial-A-Mattress guy. Meanwhile, in Washington there was Abramoff's partner, the former chief of staff to the House Majority Leader. This guy, Michael Scanlon, had set up a "think tank" at his beach house in Delaware to launder lobbying money -- a think tank run by a bartender and a yoga instructor who might well have been "more than friends" of Scanlon's.

This is like a really bad novel. An Orthodox Jewish lobbyist stealing money from Indian tribes, funneling it through a yoga instructor at the beach, and being a possible accessory to a gangland hit in Florida? And it's all true. It's the best Washington story in years!"

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ACLU moves further Left: "Not satisfied with its ongoing anti-President Bush campaigns (the group took out a full-page Ad in the "we-hate-Bush-all-the-time" NY Times that blasted the president), the ACLU has already come out against any and all probes into who leaked information to the Times' staff , in regards to formerly top-secret national security information. In fact, the ACLU is veritably furious that the Justice Department has the audacity to actually investigate treacherous behaviors. How dare the Justice Department work toward protecting the country? In a press release, ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero stated: "President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens. But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistleblowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law!" In other words, according to the ACLU President Bush has no right to protect the United States (the question of NSA intercepts of terrorist phone calls--regarding legal v illegal--appears to have an equal number of legal scholars on both sides of the debate), but allowing and condoning treason (as long as it also hurts any Republican-president) is "okay" with the ACLU. Besides, Romero told us that leaking national security information is a good thing--as long as it "gets Bush". In fact, any far-Left agenda is acceptable to the ACLU--as long as it promotes its cause toward the destruction of the USA".

Islam is the religion of violence: "Christian women are being abused on the streets of Baghdad by Islamo-fascist thugs for not wearing the hijab. Shop owners--mostly Christians--who sold beer under Saddam without fear are now being shot dead in their own places of business. Four churches were bombed in a single day in Baghdad, priests have been threatened and killed, Christian children are being forced to read the Qur'an and Christian Midnight Mass was cancelled this year because of fears of being bombed..... Islamo-fascism is ubiquitous. Seventeen thousand police officers are currently deployed in Jakarta, Indonesia, to protect Christian churches from those who believe 'Burn, baby, burn' is second only to 'Allahu akbar.' Twenty-nine churches were hit on Christmas Eve five years ago and the Indonesian government didn't want a repeat of that--at least not while applying for assistance at Uncle Sam's Welfare Office. Hundreds of thousands of East Timorese have been murdered by Muslim terrorists over the past decades and, more recently, generic Qur'an-spouting psychopaths beheaded three Christian schoolgirls.... And the sorry tale continues: The Palestinian Authority has driven tens of thousands of Christians out of Jerusalem, the persecution of Coptic Christians continues unabated in Egypt. In Pakistan, Christian children are still being kidnapped and raised as Muslims. From Australia to Zanzibar, thousands of non-Muslim women are being gang-raped by sexist chauvinist pigs inspired by the Qur'an."

American poverty now comes with a color TV, DVD and computer: "In case there was any doubt, a study has confirmed that Americans have a lot of what economists know, technically, as stuff. The computer has surpassed the dishwasher as a standard household appliance. The poorest Americans have posted a sharp rise in access to air conditioning. The richest Americans still own the most cars, but they are choosing to own slightly fewer of them than they used to. These Census findings, released in December, were true even before gifts piled up under trees. These nuggets provide a glimpse of American lifestyles that isn't captured in the raw data of monthly economic reports. At a time of concern about the standard of living for future generations, the study offers hopeful signs of tangible progress, even as the pace of income growth has slowed in recent years.... by almost all measures, the data show rising well-being for all of society. And while the wealth gap may not be narrowing, the rich-poor gap in lifestyles has narrowed substantially since 1992 when measured in many of these tangible items. "In terms of the items people have ... it amazes me the number of people who are at or near the poverty line that have color TVs, cable, washer, dryer, microwave," says Michael Cosgrove, an economist at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas.... Two-thirds of those in poverty had air conditioners in 1998, up from 50% in 1992. Personal computers have grown increasingly ubiquitous. Where fewer than 20% of homes had them in 1992, nearly 60% did in 2002 (more than own dishwashers). Two-thirds of those in poverty had air conditioners in 1998, up from 50% in 1992. Personal computers have grown increasingly ubiquitous. Where fewer than 20% of homes had them in 1992, nearly 60% did in 2002 (more than own dishwashers).

Our law-abiding ways of doing things make us rich: "Economists are gradually shifting the way we think about the determinants of economic well-being. Traditionally, the focus was on resources. Increasingly, we appear to be moving toward a focus on beliefs. A new study from the World Bank, called Where is the Wealth of Nations? (which I first saw mentioned in Ronald Bailey's article in Reason magazine), is a landmark event in this transformation of economic viewpoint. First, it adds to the growing body of evidence that institutional factors, such as property rights, play a significant role in economic development.... Over the past 50 years, economists have become less materialistic. No, we have not become hippies, rejected consumerism, and discovered spirituality. As social scientists, however, we have noticed that a large share of wealth comes from factors other than basic labor and capital.... The current consensus is that institutions matter. The rule of law is important. Clear property rights are important. On the negative side, protectionism, corruption, and barriers to entrepreneurship are important."

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 1/08/2006 05:40:00 PM

Saturday, January 07, 2006

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

US economy and productivity: some truths and fallacies: Two dangerous myths -- one a crude derivation of the other -- appear to be re-emerging as an explanation of the Bush boom. However, the fundamental point is that the ultimate source of rising productivity is investment
Why do dollar rates fluctuate?: When it comes to exchange rates confusion is the order of the day. Regardless of sneering references to speculators, it is not they who are at fault but the central banks
Bracks' Star Chamber commission applies the law selectively against Christians in favour of Muslim
bigots: The cowardly dhimmis who sit on the Equal Opportunity Commission and the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal have basically admitted that they are persecuting two Christian pastors at the behest of a Muslim bigot who incited religious hatred
Times' treason likely in cahoot with Dems: The New York Times must be investigated as to how it illegally obtained classified war-time information and whether it coordinated its activities with members of the Democrat Party
I Spy: Terrorists at Work: Spying gives us valuable knowledge about terrorist planning and activities. We can use that knowledge to save American lives and continue the fight against terrorism
Islamic fundamentalism is the elephant in the room: I am not the only Jew who has intimate knowledge of what happened to our people once before, not that long ago. The threat of Islamic Fundamentalism is on the march
Israel facing leadership crisis: Israel is in need of strong National leadership. She can't afford the continuation of the same self-destructive games any more

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ELSEWHERE

Major Terror Plot Against U.S. Ignored: "The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. - because it would tend to support President Bush's use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups. News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported in the American media. Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S. Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and railway stations, and the terrorists' goal, he said, was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11".


The party of Margaret Thatcher is now led by a blithering idiot: "David Cameron, Conservative leader, on Wednesday launched an outspoken attack on retailers, singling out WH?Smith for offering cut-price chocolate oranges. He accused it of irresponsible marketing that made people fat. His remarks, in a speech on health policy, sparked concern that the Tories had embarked on a campaign against big business to win votes from Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Mr Cameron said the consumer industries could do more to promote healthy lifestyles. "Try to buy a newspaper at the train station and, as you queue to pay, you're surrounded by cut-price offers for giant chocolate bars... As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith promote half-price chocolate oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?" he said. The comments caused bemusement at the retailer and embarrassment among senior Tories with City links, one of whom said it was a mistake to target WH Smith in this way. The company denied acting irresponsibly, saying it also sold dried fruit. "I am not quite sure why he picked on us. We offer customers a whole range of products so they have a choice," it said".

The imaginary America of the deaf and blind European Left: This past New Years Day, an editorial from across the Alps caught our attention. It was published in "Der Standard," Austria's self-described "leading quality newspaper": According to columnist Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi, American journalism has been on the ropes ever since President Bush took office. And because of the President and his scheming corporate pals, American media have come under unparalleled "pressure" to censor themselves, refrain from criticizing the government, ignore topics involving the rest of the world and avoid domestic "social" issues such as single, homeless, oppressed, depressed, drug-addicted mothers." [No criticism of the government in America!!!! What sort of bubble do these pathetic Europeans live in?? Do they even live on the same planet as the rest of us?]

Those peace-loving Muslims and the ineffectual French again: "A gang of more than 20 youths -- thought to be North African immigrants -- terrorized hundreds of train passengers in a rampage of violence, robbery and sexual assault on New Year's Day ... The gang of between 20 and 30 youths boarded the train, heading from Nice on the French Riviera to Lyon, in eastern France, early on Jan. 1, as it carried 600 passengers home from New Year's Eve partying overnight. Once inside, they went wild, forcing passengers to hand over mobile phones and wallets, and slashing seats and breaking windows. A 20-year-old woman cornered by several of the marauders was sexually molested. "It was a real scene of pillage on the train," said the regional state prosecutor, Dominique Luigi, adding that the passengers were in a state of "panic." Train staff alerted police, and the train pulled into a station to wait. The three officers who initially turned up later were joined by reinforcements. A waitress in a bar near the station said two young women from the train had come inside in tears. "They told me there had been groping. They talked about sexual assaults. They were really traumatized," she said. The train resumed its journey with the heavy police presence on board but, just before Marseille, the youths pulled the emergency stop and many escaped." [No Pasaran has more details]

If you ever doubted that Leftists lack any principles, this profile of super-popular Leftist blogger Moulitsas should set all doubts at rest. He sounds a lot like other Greeks I have known.

I have put up here another installment of my correspondence about Australian/American differences in "authenticity".

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 1/07/2006 03:07:00 PM

Friday, January 06, 2006

 
FOLLOW-UP TO YESTERDAY'S "AUTHENTICITY" POST

I of course knew that the impressions I set down yesterday were rather provocative and therefore thought a long time about posting them. Because they had a potential to offend well-justified American feelings of patriotism, I was careful to point out that my generalizations were only that -- ones to which there were plenty of exceptions. A definite omission in what I posted however was that I should have said that I had in mind big-city Americans. Most of my time in the USA was spent in (horrors!) Los Angeles, San Francisco and NYC. I should have added that my experience of small-town America was of thoroughly warm-hearted and genuine people. Unfortunately, however, in most ways it is the big cities that set the tone and have most influence. Only one of the emails I received about the post was condemnatory and it was very ad hominem so I will not reproduce it. Below are however four other emails I received:

1). "Having lived in NYC for 15 some years before returning to New Zealand, I'd have to say you're not wrong. However, I did find upstate NY (rural) people to be far more authentic - as were pretty much all the Southeners I happened upon. On the flip side, I didn't come across many "she'll be right" Americans - most are pretty competitive and believe "good is not as good as better"".

2). "Just read your grafs about phony Americans. I have only met a few Aussies, and I must say they did seem very genuine. I'm not sure where in America you have traveled, but it sounds like you may have been in an urban areas, perhaps in the Northeast, or (shudder) Southern California. Next time, try rural Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado, anywhere in the deep South, or anywhere rural or "small town" in nature. Some call these areas "fly over country." Perhaps a better impression will emerge. Or perhaps you have visited such places and come away with the same poor impressions. I'm not sure what to think about that, as I find most rural and small town Americans to be noticeably deficient in worrying over their image."

3). I didn't think this post was pointless at all. Your comments about one of the characteristics of Australians and Americans is straight to the heart of the difference between our countries. I wanted to go to go Australia on R&R while I was in Viet-Nam and didn't get to go. I was finally able to make it almost twenty years later. I finished my assignment on the island of Guam and was going back to the States to retire from the military. Before I came back I took thirty days leave and most of my savings and went to Australia. I saw as much of the county as I could in the time I had but it's the people that made my visit such a memorable experience. I've traveled across most the United States during my military career and I agree with what you say: Americans in general are more concerned with the impression they create. I didn't see that concern at all in the Australians I met in the pubs of Sydney, Melbourne and Adlelaide and played cards with on the train going to Alice Springs. An expression you sometimes hear in the U.S. is "get real"; there would be no use for that expression in Australia.

4). "I have just read your article regarding the problem with Americans having difficulty defining who they are and spending too much time presenting some image of the moment. There is a degree of truth in that statement, but I believe there is a degree of truth in that statement in any society that permits their members to be who they want to be. The real problem isn't their not knowing who they are. The problem is not knowing who they should be.

I had the pleasure of meeting some Aussie sailors in the late 60's when my ship ported in Singapore. I will agree wholeheartedly that Aussies have few inhibitions and are truly genuine. Most of them would rather fight and drink than do almost anything else. I say this with affection as I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

The real problem we Americans have is a lack of interest in history and the lessons it teaches because we rely on television entirely too much. I think you will find there is more depth in Americans than you realize when the going gets tough. At home as well as abroad, we also have the tendency to want to be liked entirely too much. As a result we adapt to the circumstances and adopt ideas that may be detrimental to us too easily. Americans are an easygoing lot. That is why we hate wars so much. Wars interfere with a good time. Extreme adversity will however, bring out what is best in American society, which has been the most generous society the world has ever known.

It is true we have a judgmental mentality in America, although that judgmental attitude is tempered with a degree of acceptance that would be totally unacceptable in most places of the world. What you say is true, puritanical restraints create hypocrisy, but as nationally syndicated columnist William Raspberry once noted, "There is something to be said for hypocrisy". What? It acts as a restraint since those at are being hypocritical recognize they are doing something wrong. Where as today, we have few hypocrites and few restraints. Neither is good, but you can't be a hypocrite unless you have values".

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ELSEWHERE

Another historical insight into the Leftist mind: Opposite a car park that I sometimes use on those rare occasaions when I go to the bank, there is a graffito up which says, "Stop GHOGM". Now what in the blue blazes is "CHOGM"? -- you might ask. It stands for "Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting" -- with the Commonwealth concerned being the British Commonwealth. It is purely a talk-shop with no powers whatsover, though its members do seem to hope (usually in vain) that their resolutions will have some moral force towards lessening human rights abuses. So what could be more innocuous and worthy? Yet to the Left it should be "stopped". Why? There is no rational reason. It is just that the Left like disrupting the normal activities of other people. That is it, pure and simple. There is no other rhyme or reason to it. Trying to please or placate the Left is pointless. They will always find SOMETHING to condemn, no matter how brainless the condemnation may be.

The bureaucratized British: "In his book, Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs, Page deconstructs many of the most cherished beliefs of the men and women who run our military. Most spend their careers defending the indefensible, Page says, largely because it is the only way to keep their jobs and inflation-proof pensions. The number of officers is way out of proportion to the number of service units that actually need commanders. "The army's two combat divisions - one of which is at least partly fictional - might call for 10 or 15 brigadiers, two or three major-generals and a single lieutenant-general to run them," Page said. "Maybe we should also have some extra generals - say two or three times this number. What we actually have is more than 10 times as many." There are 180 brigadiers and 60 generals. And, as Page points out, the military hierarchy is even more distorted in the Royal Navy, where there are 41 admirals with only 40 major warships or submarines to look after. The RAF has 40 air marshals for 36 squadrons. Little has improved since C Northcote Parkinson of "Parkinson's law" fame first identified the problem 50 years ago".

The lying Castro: "The longest-ruling despot in the world is Fidel Castro, who seized power in Cuba 47 years ago this week. Like most dictators, Castro is a brazen liar, especially about his own regime. This, for example, is what he told an international conference in Havana in April 2001: "There have never been death squads in our country, nor a single missing person, nor a single political assassination, nor a single victim of torture. . . . You may travel around the country, ask the people, look for a single piece of evidence, try to find a single case where the Revolutionary government has ordered or tolerated such an action. And if you find them, then I will never speak in public again." ,,, Castro's mocking challenge -- "try to find a single case" -- is not going unanswered. The Cuba Archive project (www.CubaArchive.org) is working to document the cost, in human life, of more than five decades of Cuban dictatorship... It is heartbreaking work.... So far the archive has catalogued the deaths of 9,240 victims of the Castro regime"

I have just put up a new recipe on my recipe blog. (Mirror site here). It is a convenient recipe for that yummy Hungarian creation -- Liptauer Cheese spread. Great for parties and canapes.

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 1/06/2006 06:34:00 PM

Thursday, January 05, 2006

 
ON BEING AUTHENTIC

This is probably a pretty pointless post but I just want to say a little about one of the differences I have noticed between U.S. and Australian society. In Australia, it is almost a national religion to be authentic. To be "fair dinkum" is expected and to "bung on an act" is regarded as very low indeed. In standard English that means that to be respected, Australians have to be genuine, sincere, honest, natural and unpretentious. I myself share those values and I hope I exemplify them.

In the USA, however, there seems to be little of that attitude. From my observations on my various trips to the USA, honesty seems to run a distant second to making a good impression. It seems to me that most Americans don't really know who they are at all. They are constantly aware of their "image" and often wonder how they can improve it but "being themselves" is almost a meaningless expression to them. Obviously not all Americans are like that and readers of this blog who write to me seem generally to be a pretty individualistic lot who know where they stand and are not afraid to express it. But, on the whole, I see American society to be a very largely phony society. I think the average American is a good-hearted person but the pressures under which they operate militate against frankness and openness.

So what are those pressures? I think a lot of it goes back to America's puritan origins. Puritanism is against nature so where puritanism prevails hypocrisy is a quite inevitable outcome. And while America is no longer puritan in the original sense of that word, it still retains the judgmentalism of one-another that the original puritans had. These days puritanism is more likely to manifest itself in the form of recycling your garbage than in keeping the Sabbath but the need to claim virtue is still there.

So in the end I feel rather sad about the pressures under which Americans operate but I think it should be encouraging that there is a much more relaxed and natural society on the other side of the globe. Being authentic is possible and works well.

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ELSEWHERE

I have just put up here a rather sad email from a disabled American veteran who had the temerity to challenge illegal behavior on the part of the U.S. Postal "Service". They cut off his mail, of course. That's the behaviour you have to expect from an arrogant, legally protected monopoly.

A reader writes: "Marin County, North of San Francisco, is a liberal bastion. It is also the location of the Russian and Napa rivers, two streams that just went over their banks causing millions of dollars damage. One decimated city, Sebastopol, probably wishes it had declared itself a flood free city instead of a nuclear-free city. I wonder if I should ask the cities up there to contribute to the Wild and Scenic Rivers cause.

The usual Leftist love of violence: "A Labour Party campaign manager went on trial today accused of trying to throttle a young Tory activist on the eve of the General Election. David Harding, a Labour Party worker, is accused of punching and grabbing the throat of Robert Benham, 25, a parliamentary assistant to Andrew Rosindell, the Conservative MP for Romford in Essex, on May 4 last year. Harding, 48, of Hornchurch in Essex, denies common assault. He also denies using abusive words or behaviour during the alleged incident.

More Muslim thuggery: "They weren't your average thugs. Dressed in bow ties and dark suits, the group of nearly a dozen men entered a corner store and smashed bottles of liquor, wine and beer with metal pipes, shattering refrigerator cases and leaving behind a terrified clerk along with piles of broken glass. No one was held up. Nothing was stolen. The vandals just wanted to leave a message: Stop selling booze to fellow Muslims. In urban America, friction between poor residents and the immigrant merchants who sell cigarettes, bread and alcoholic beverages from neighborhood markets is nothing new. But the recent attack at San Pablo Liquor has injected religion into the old debate over whether a glut of such stores contributes to violent crime, vagrancy and other social ills. Followed by an identical attack at another West Oakland store the same evening, the episode highlighted tensions -- and different interpretations of doctrine -- between black Muslims hoping to reclaim troubled parts of the city and Middle Eastern shop owners, many of them also of Muslim faith".

A good rant: "A former friend of mine has called me a "zombie nutcase." Why? Because I refused to waste an hour of my irreplaceable time to watch a video which purports to be: "A one hour analysis of 9/11 and how it is more likely than not that the government was actually behind the attacks." What purpose would this video serve? It would, if believed, terminally discredit the Bush administration and the War on Terror. Who would benefit from the terminal discrediting of the Bush administration and the War on Terror? Certainly not the Libertarians, and the Perot faction is for all practical purposes dead as Lenin. Who could possibly replace President Bush and the Republicans as the ruling party in the United States? The Democrats, of course. The problem with this is that the Democrats are a bunch of traitors, thieves, and murderers who don't care how high the pile of human bodies is as long as they are firmly seated on top, and thus are objectively unfit to hold any form of public office. And if this wasn't bad enough, as a former Army combat rifleman who refuses to be an mindlessly obedient drone in the socialist collective I would be looked upon by the Democrats as some form of vermin".

Who would have predicted it? "The city of Houston is appealing for emergency funding to help to fight a huge crime wave following the arrival of refugees from hurricane-hit New Orleans. The murder rate in the Texan city leapt by 24 per cent last year, with the toll for November and December up by 70 per cent on the same period in 2004. There were 324 murders in Houston in 2005, compared with 263 in 2004. Of the 2005 tally, 51 occurred in November and December - up 21 on the same period of 2004. The police department has not monitored precisely how many can be attributed to those evacuated after Hurricane Katrina, but says that at least 12 homicides in the past four months have involved evacuees either as victims or perpetrators. While stressing that they cannot lay all the blame at the door of hurricane evacuees, the police chief and the mayor suggest that the influx of as many as 150,000 extra people has been a contributory factor. The issue is highly sensitive as the majority of the hurricane's victims were drawn from New Orleans's black underclass."

One of my regular Dutch correspondents was moved to comment on my reference yesterday to this stupid Dutch site. He says that such stupidity is all too typical in the Netherlands today and offers some interesting comments on the Netherlands generally. I have posted his email 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.

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posted by JR 1/05/2006 07:48:00 PM

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

 
THE JFK ASSASSINATION AGAIN

Here's something interesting from Germany's Der Spiegel (in German). It is a report about a (Leftist) German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann, who thinks he has evidence that Castro ordered the assassination of JFK:

His documentary "Rendezvous mit dem Tod" revolves around the 6 days in September 1963 that Oswald spent in Mexico City. It took Huisman five years to make the film, with extensive research in Mexico and the US. His first hint was an interview with the retired FBI-Agent James Hosty, who was one of the guys that interrogated Oswald after the assassination. He said Oswald was very arrogant and only showed weakness when asked what he did in Mexico City. Huismann has more: a G2 agent from Cuba, who says "we did it"; witnesses and evidence that Oswald had intensive contact with people of the Cuban embassy in Mexico.

An active member of the Russian FSB told Huismann that the KGB notified the Cubans about Oswald after he was in the Soviet Union, and the Cubans contacted Oswald shortly after that. Another Witness, the retired FBI agent Laurence Keenan, was in Mexico in 1963 and says he felt like he found "Pandora's box" there, but was personally ordered back to Washington by Edgar Hoover after only three days.

The German ARD and the Japanese NHK sponsored the film, and also paid a Mexican journalist for about a year to investigate in Mexico. The film will be aired on January the 6th.

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ELSEWHERE

More Leftist censorship: There is a site called Article Destination that looked to me like it might be what it claims to be -- a useful way of circulating articles. So I put up a few of my articles on their site. But they showed their true colours when I submitted this rigorously factual and fully referenced article to them. They deleted it! Identifying Nazism with the Left is just too much of course and MUST be censored. The site where I have the article posted gets over 1,000 hits a day and has a high Google ranking so the censorship attempt will fortunately fail.

Putin caves in: "Russia is restoring full gas deliveries to European states, effectively easing a blockade on Ukraine, but the Kremlin's row with its ex-Soviet neighbour that triggered the sanction is still bubbling. Russia accused Kiev of illegally tapping off gas from the pipeline crossing its territory to Europe after the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom cut its feed for Ukraine on Sunday. States from Serbia to Germany complained of supply cuts and Washington warned Moscow against using energy as a political tool. In agreeing yesterday to restore pumping close to normal levels, Moscow bowed to Western pressure and acknowledged, albeit reluctantly and with some frustration, that it could not fully control and channel gas supplies crossing Ukraine. "With the aim of preventing a possible energy crisis, caused by Ukraine illegally taking gas, Gazprom has taken the decision to deliver additional gas into the gas transport system of Ukraine," the company said in a statement".

There is a page here by some highly educated but ignorant Dutchman who claims to show that Europe is more civilized than the USA. The major part of his spiel is an attempt to specify what is necessary for a democracy to function. And what a fool he makes of himself! He sees a judicially enforceable written constitition as necessary and a separation of the legislature and the administration as necessary. Yet I live in a country (Australia) where there is NO separation of the administration and the legislature. So is Australia not democratic? Only an arrogant fool of a Dutchman would say so. And it is not only Australia he ignores. Canada, New Zealand and many other British-influenced countries have similar systems. And the world's most venerable democracy (Britain) has no written or judicially enforceable constitution at all. Ultimately, the British politicians can do what they like. So is Britain not democratic? The irony is of course that the country the ignoramus is trying to criticize (the USA) does have all the desired characteristics he lists. I guess it is all testimony to how totally inadequate to an understanding of the world a European education is.

Not postmodern enough? "They can't judge a book without its cover. Publishers and agents have rejected two Booker prize-winning novels submitted as works by aspiring authors. One of the books considered unworthy by the publishing industry was by V S Naipaul, one of Britain's greatest living writers, who won the Nobel prize for literature. The exercise by The Sunday Times draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent. Typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of Naipaul's In a Free State and a second novel, Holiday, by Stanley Middleton, were sent to 20 publishers and agents. None appears to have recognised them as Booker prizewinners from the 1970s that were lauded as British novel writing at its best. Of the 21 replies, all but one were rejections".

New Orleans corruption: "Some members of the governor's staff will return from the three-day holiday on Tuesday to newly renovated offices at the State Capitol. Shortly after the two hurricanes, Gov. Kathleen Blanco decided to renovate some of her staff's offices. At the time of her decision, Blanco also was hinting at deep budget cuts to state programs and the possibility of laying off 20 percent of the state workforce. The project cost $564,838".

Hollywood parasites: "Apparently, Wayne Newton and Robin Williams are having a hard time lining up Hollywood "talent" to go to Iraq to entertain the troops -- the troops, mind you, that provide them with the freedom to make huge sums of money for engaging in a pleasant occupation under pleasant conditions (resulting, all too often, in a trashy or silly product).... Now, celebrities are afraid, so it seems, that deigning to entertain the troops will be construed as an endorsement of the war, and -- heavens! -- that wouldn't do at all. Might be bad for the career, or result in some odd glances at the fashionable cocktail parties. Barbara Streisand, Alec Baldwin and all the rest of the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots needn't waste any of our time suggesting that they "support" the troops, if not the President. Obviously, they don't".

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 1/04/2006 06:30:00 PM

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

 
SOME OF THE ARTICLES RECENTLY UP ON ICJS:

US: No militants in Palestinian cabinet
Justice still in detention
Western Muslims' racist rape spree
Talk June 2004 by Mark Regev
Talk December 2005 by Mark Regev
Road to the point of no return
Are we becoming "acclimated" to terror?
Down at your ABC, they sure know how to party
Persecuting the Holy Land's Christians
Off the Air
Middle East feels the ripple of progress
Too much law not enough order
Critics on the wrong track over racism
Dangerous Peaceniks on the Hudson
Pentagon breaks the Islam taboo
Iran's threat
Two States or two universes
In Iran, arming for Armageddon
Media bias is real, finds UCLA political scientist
Muslim gang rapes and the Aussie riots
Was careless coverage to blame for racial conflict?
Media must avoid fanning flames
Press must lift its game on self-regulation
The etiquette of destruction
The 'shock jocks' are in tune with the silent
majority
Press Council dismisses Age complaint
It's time to think
Interview with Pierre Rehov
Blame race riots on police force neglect
Sons of beaches: a land girt by bigots
The rise of middle eastern crime in Australia
Helping eople evicted from Gaza
The white moor as willing executioner
The Media War on Israel
Five questions non-Muslims would like answered
Expert: Saudis have radicalized 80% of US mosques

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ELSEWHERE

I have just spammed all the bloggers I know with the following message but a lot of the messages probably got trashed as junk so I am repeating it here in case I missed anyone: "Keith Burgess Jackson, a tenured philosophy professor, has just started a new blog designed to deflate thuggish far-Leftist blogger, Brian Leiter. Leiter has a lot of influence and uses it to harm people who dare to challenge him. So Keith wants to try to civilize him a bit. Apparently Leiter is obsessed with his reputation. Keith has reason to believe that Leiter scours the internet for references to himself and then writes to people to get bad references removed. Leiter has also apparently hired a lawyer to get the University of Pennsylvania law students to take down their rankings blog. Keith wants to put him down, but only by saying true things about him. Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If you would like to help, at least please blogroll the new blog so that it rises in Google's rankings, so that when people type "Brian Leiter" into Google, the new blog comes up. I myself have no connection with the new blog -- just a wish to see it thrive. The blog is here".



The new year celebrations: "Londoners ignored a subway strike to welcome the New Year. Some Japanese climbed a snowcapped peak to see the first sunrise of 2006. GIs in Iraq got a year-end "American Idol" treat. New Year's celebrations like these spread throughout the world Saturday and early Sunday and were generally jubilant, a contrast with last year when the devastation of the Indian Ocean tsunami led many countries and individuals to cancel festivities. In France, youths burned hundreds of cars in a traditional year-end form of vandalism, but the country appeared to have avoided a massive resurgence of the rioting that broke out this fall. By 4 a.m. Sunday, police counted 343 vehicles burned - just slightly more than the comparable figure from last year, 323, police said. They also arrested 266 people, but it wasn't clear if the arrests were linked to the vandalism".

There is voluminous documentation here of the often ludicrous Leftist bias in the Los Angeles Times.

There is an interesting review of the state of U.S. immigration legislation here: "While it's easy to write an immigration bill and give it a stern name, it's awfully hard to pass one. That will be the challenge confronting Congress next year."

There is a pretty disgusting story just up on Australian Politics about the Australian flag being banned from Sydney's most popular beach because it might "inflame" someone.

Wicked Thoughts has got a very funny blooper just up.

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 1/03/2006 07:38:00 PM

Monday, January 02, 2006

 
SOME OF THE RECENT ARTICLES UP ON "THINK ISRAEL"

GAZA FALLOUT by Al Skudsi bin Hookah
YASSER ABBAS by Tom Gross
TERRORISM: THE ROOT CAUSES by David Meir-Levi
JIHADI TERRORISM: RIDICULOUS EXPLANATIONS, COMPLEX SOLUTIONS by Dr. Babu Suseelan
THE ORIGIN OF THE OCCUPATION MYTH by Howard Grief
HOW AFGHAN CAPTIVITY SHAPED MY FEMINISM by Phyllis Chesler
WHAT'S WRONG: THE ARAB LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF ARAB SOCIETY by Barry Rubin
AL-QAEDA IN EUROPE by Jamie Glazov
FOR JEWS, THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TWO IRANS by Abbas Milani
THE BANGLADESH GOVERNMENT AND THE AHMADIAS SECT by Salah Choudhury
A MOSQUE GROWS IN BOSTON by Dean Barnett
FRANCE AND THE JEWISH HERITAGE IN JERUSALEM by Elliott A. Green
FRENCH HISTORY AND CURRENT ATTITUDES TO ISRAEL: An Interview with Freddy Eytan by Manfred Gerstenfeld
PRINCE CHARLES: ISLAM'S NEW AMBASSADOR by Cinnamon Stillwell
"MUNICH" STANDS FOR "APPEASEMENT" by Kate Wright
ELIMINATING ISRAEL POLITELY by Daniel Pipes
UN CEREMONY INCLUDES MAP OF "PALESTINE" IN PLACE OF ISRAEL by Ezra HaLevi
MUSLIMS MARCH OVER CARTOONS OF THE PROPHET by Kate Connolly
MEDIA BIAS IS REAL by Meg Sullivan

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ELSEWHERE

There is so much reading above that I am not going to put up much else today:

The kids are all right, dammit: "In 1972, said David Mindich, a journalism professor at St. Michael's College and author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, half of all college students read a newspaper every day. Now the percentage is 21 percent. He and other panelists invoked a long-term decline in youth political participation, a trend which is at the very least complicated by the turnout in the 2004 election, in which, according to Pew Charitable Trusts, the youth vote surged more than any other group's. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, the notion of today's youth as disengaged is not particularly convincing."

Tom Sowell on Cheap politicians : "I don't make a million dollars a year but I think every member of Congress should be paid at least that much. It's not because those turkeys in Washington deserve it but because we deserve much better people than we have in Congress. Paying every member of Congress a million dollars a year is absolutely trivial compared to the vast amounts of taxpayers' money wasted by cheap politicians doing things to get themselves re-elected. You could pay every member of Congress a million dollars a year for a century for less money than it costs to run the Agriculture Department one year. There is no point complaining about the ineptness, deception or corruption of government while refusing to do anything to change the incentives and constraints that lead to ineptness, deception and corruption."

They are teaching some pretty weird economics at Harrisburg Area Community College (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania). We read here: "The main sources of the U.S. public debt are: (1) Wars; (2) Recessions; (3) Tax-rate cuts". No mention of government spending!

Lee Harris has a very sarcastic comment here on what it takes to win a Nobel prize.

There is another (sarcastic) article on the inaccuracy of Wikipedia here

With the help of a Dutch-speaking reader, I have just put up here some background on the anti-capitalist Nazi poster that I put up yesterday.

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts - updating us on the latest news about race and IQ

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 1/02/2006 02:09:00 PM

Sunday, January 01, 2006

 
HAPPY NEW YEAR! to all who come by here



I am writing this in the wee small hours of 2006, my New Year's Eve celebrations having just concluded. Ann and I went to a social occasion earlier in the evening but we spent the last couple of hours of the old year in one-another's company only. As midnight approached we put on a tape of "Andy Stewart's Hogmanay". Even an ersatz Scottish New Year is better than no Scottish New Year! We greatly enjoyed it anyway. I have always loved the great old Scottish sentimental songs and Andy gave us a great selection of them. The Scots know who they are and what they are.

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ANOTHER NAZI POSTER FROM WW2

This one was issued in the Netherlands for a Dutch audience. Given my limited comprehension of Dutch, I do not totally follow the history of the poster but I gather that it was issued by the Nazi occupation authorities after the German invasion of the Netherlands. In any case, however, it is a striking display of how Leftist Nazism was. In translation the poster reads: "With Germany AGAINST capitalism".



The poster is one of a series. You can see the rest of them here. Other posters in the series say Nazism is against Bolshevism, for a new Europe etc. -- all of which sounds a lot like the modern-day EU to me. There is a discussion of the series here (In Dutch).

Next time someone tells you that Nazism was Rightist, ask them how come the Nazis were against capitalism!

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ELSEWHERE

Out of Asia? "Two archaeologists are challenging what many experts consider to be the basic assumption of human migration-that humankind arose in Africa and spread over the globe from there. The pair proposes an alternative explanation for human origins: arising in and spreading out of Asia. Robin Dennell, of the University of Sheffield in England, and Wil Roebroeks, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, describe their ideas in the December 22 issue of Nature. They believe that early-human fossil discoveries over the past ten years suggest very different conclusions about where humans, or humanlike beings, first walked the Earth. New Asian finds are significant, they say, especially the 1.75 million-year-old small-brained early-human fossils found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and the 18,000-year-old "hobbit" fossils (Homo floresiensis) discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Such finds suggest that Asia's earliest human ancestors may be older by hundreds of thousands of years than previously believed, the scientists say".

Economic freedom in the Arab world : The idea economic freedom is essential to human progress catches on in the Arab world. "At a gala dinner here attended by hundreds of Arab diplomats and other prominent guests, a new Omani organization, the International Research Foundation, released an 'Economic Freedom of the Arab World' report showing how big differences in policies in the region can produce big differences in economic outcomes. The report looks at 39 variables in 16 countries, ranging from size of government to monetary policy, trade openness, regulation and the rule of law. Published in conjunction with the Fraser Institute, whose global index on economic freedom is well known, the report suggests what is true of the world is also true in the Arab region: Economically free countries tend to be more prosperous and faster growing."

Baby Boomers' unhappy future: "The U.S. economy speeds toward a brick wall. But instead of trying to stop or even slow the fiscal train wreck, many senior citizens want to push hard on the accelerator. Nothing was more evident at the recent 2005 White House Conference on Aging than the palpable greed of seniors. Perhaps they see it as getting even with their Baby Boomer kids for how we aggravated them in the 1960s and '70s. Whatever their motives, they are not very realistic. As U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, the chief federal auditor, made clear, our country can't afford existing programs for the elderly, such as Medicare. If more benefits are piled on, as many conference delegates demanded, we face economic disaster. Policymaking in Washington is often nine-tenths political theater and one-tenth deliberation. The Conference on Aging was no exception."

Monopoly blues: "There are many other instances of economic inefficiency and other maladies caused by government supported monopolies -- just think of how elementary and high schools, as well as a great many colleges and universities, are monopolistic by coercing support from taxpayers for themselves, thus restricting other educational options for their clients. (Private schools aren't allowed to expropriate their operating expenses!) All in all, these unnatural monopolies -- as distinct form the natural ones that exist simply because they have managed to outdo competitors in their line of business -- impose serious burdens on many of us. But they are now so entrenched that hardly anyone even discusses breaking them up. The last time a serious change was made was when Ma Bell was broken up and even then the result wasn't quite what a free market would produce."

Europe must embrace true free speech: "In Europe, five years into the 21st century, two writers face trial and imprisonment for something they said or wrote. Both could be incarcerated, not for physically harming another person or for damaging property, but for uttering words that European states deem offensive. Yet only one has been defended by the international literati, who have described the attempt to curtail his freedom of speech as an act of 'anachronistic brutality.' The other writer's plight has been ignored; worse, many liberals have supported the campaign to punish him for expressing outrageous views. As such, the two cases cast a harsh light on the debate about free speech in Europe: They suggest we Europeans have a partial, picky attitude to freedom of expression, and thus do not understand the real meaning of this fundamental liberty."

Stupid support for the U.S. textile industry: ""It's easy to list the ways in which U.S. cotton and textile policies are intensely stupid. They jack up prices, muck up foreign policy, and keep us all looking a little more J.C. Penney than Bergdorf Goodman. What's harder is to explain is why no one much cares, or at least cares enough to change a sorry state of affairs that has persisted for centuries. In The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Pietra Rivoli, a business professor at Georgetown University, goes a long way toward explaining why we continue to support an economically preposterous industry. Tracing the deeply politicized life of a six-dollar shirt, Rivoli draws on economic theory, American history, and her travels through Texas, Dar es Salaam, Shanghai, and Washington. The result is lively, accessible, and infuriating."

I love it! Keith Burgess Jackson has started a new blog specifically targeting the thuggish Brian Leiter.

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 1/01/2006 06:09:00 PM