Thursday, March 31, 2005

 
BLACK INCOME DISPARITIES

First we read this in USA Today:

Black and Asian women with bachelor's degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with four-year degrees make more than anyone else.

So how come blacks are tops among women and whites are tops among men? About the women we read that they do well because of:

the tendency of minority women, especially blacks, to more often hold more than one job or work more than 40 hours a week, and the tendency of black professional women who take time off to have a child to return to the work force sooner than others.

So black women do well because they work harder. But for black men we read:

Workplace discrimination and the continuing difficulties of minorities to get into higher-paying management positions could help explain the disparities among men, experts say.

So black women do well because they work harder but black men do badly because of "discrimination". But if discrimination holds black men back, why does it not hold black women back? Is the writer implying that black women sleep their way to the top? I think that's more offensive than anything I would dare to say and I don't think it is true. Could the real explanation for black men lagging be -- horror! -- that black men don't work as hard as black women? Back in Africa the men mostly sit around while the women work. That couldn't happen in America, could it? No! It is wicked white discrimination that must be trotted out like a kneejerk reflex.

And I guess it would be vastly incorrect for me to mention another obvious reason for low average black male achievement: About a third of them either are in prison or have been there. Prison is an excellent college for crime but a very poor college for everything else.

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

ELSEWHERE

The Irish show the way: "In 1985, the Irish economy was in a shambles. It was facing excessive budgets deficits and minimal growth. Its GNP p.c. amounted to only 65% of the Belgian level. In addition, Irish unemployment stood at 17% against 10% for Belgium. Until 1985 both countries followed similar Keynesian policies of deficit spending. In 1983 Belgian public spending even exceed-ed 50% of GNP. Excessive spending triggered a vicious circle of continuing rises of the tax burden and public debt. The graphs above show that until 1980 Irish public spending followed the same path as that of Belgium, with similar growth performance. However, in 1985 Ireland made a u-turn. It drastically lowered the tax burden. All wasteful government spending was eliminated. In three years time public spending was reduced by no less then 20%. The result was that Ireland entered a period of explosive GNP growth, averaging 5.6% from 1985 to 2002. This is rough-ly three times the Belgian growth rate. The boom went hand in hand with the creation of new jobs, which was far in excess of that in Belgium. Because of its awe-inspiring rise in prosperity Ireland has now more resources available for all sorts of social, cultural and environmental initiatives than Belgium does".

Stupid Californians try to destroy jobs: "The City Council here is set to consider whether to impose a living-wage policy for all companies that provide services to the city, a move airport officials warn could lead to the loss of millions of dollars in revenue. San Jose was the first major Bay Area city to establish the living-wage policy, which was put in place in 1998. But the mandatory wage increase has yet to be imposed on all companies, including airport rental car agencies, amid concerns that the policy could hinder San Jose's ability to attract and keep businesses..... Representatives of Hertz, Avis and Alamo/National rental car companies oppose the wage increase. "Is it fair to saddle an already unprofitable business with $1.5 million more in costs? No, said Hertz spokesman Rich Broome. "We believe the wages we offer are fair for the work being done.""

Confusing control and security: "Suppose you were a sadist and really hated your fellow men - what type of job would you try to get? Well, you might try to become head of airline security for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), where you could devise a system like the following. You would: * Hire people who are wannabee drill instructors, to order passengers around as if they were new Marine Corps recruits. * Demand passengers show their IDs up to four times before boarding, even though you know IDs are easily forged. ... * Take away relatively harmless personal items, such as tweezers, hat pins, sewing scissors, etc., while leaving people with items that are much more lethal in trained hands. * Harass small children, elderly women, infirm individuals and young attractive women by making them go through difficult body motions and inappropriate touching. ..."

Castro's daughter: "As a 3-year-old, Alina Fernandez didn't know that the Communist revolution that swept Cuba was led by her father. The only thing she could see was what the revolution did to her TV cartoons...... Eventually, the situation in Cuba worsened when the Soviet Union withdrew its support from Cuba in 1989. By 1993, she had to take her daughter out of school because there was no electricity - and no teachers. And by this time, she had already become a dissident. That's when she knew she had to leave, and she was able to smuggle herself out of the country with a little help and a fake passport. She has not seen her homeland or her father ever since."

Muslims find Christ: "Despite unprecedented press coverage of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East since September 11, 2001, one big story is not being told by mainstream media. Scores of Muslims are converting to evangelical Christianity and will be celebrating their first Easter this year, even amidst widespread persecution and the very real threat of death..... One Arab Christian leader tells me that based on his research with churches and ministries throughout the Islamic world, he now believes more than 1.5 million Muslims worldwide have trusted Christ since 9/11. Such numbers are difficult to verify, but the trend is clear. "More Muslims are becoming followers of Jesus Christ today than at any other time in history," a prominent Arab Christian leader told me recently, on the condition that I not mention his name or organization. "It's not something we talk much about openly, but it is very exciting and very important.""

A good example here of how Leftist pollsters can get any result they want out of a public opinion poll by asking loaded questuions.

I have just come across a Canadian blog that I really like. Dare I say it? Let it bleed is almost a Canadian version of Dissecting Leftism. It's got the same contempt for the Left, anyway.

My latest post on MARXWORDS shows that Engels thought native blacks to be dumber than German 8-year-olds.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/31/2005 07:19:00 PM

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

 
BLACK ASSERTIVENESS -- THEN AND NOW

I received yesterday the following interesting email from a man who might well be the "father" of the blogosphere -- in the sense of being the oldest blogger there is. Dick McDonald is in his 70s and is as lively as a cricket. He is referring to this post of mine from two days ago, called "How important is culture?":

You said something yesterday about blacks that didn't ring true with my personal experience with the black population when I was a kid. Compared to other kids of the era, I believe I had a bird's eye view of their culture and "maybe" their genes. You wrote:

"The overwhelming source of uncivil (to put it mildly) behaviour in the USA is undoubtedly the black population -- who are at least as Christian as the whites -- perhaps more so overall. So the source of destructive and disruptive black behaviour is not in their culture. It is in their genetics. Yes. I know all the Leftist tosh about the legacy of slavery suppressing their self-esteem etc but since all the studies shows that blacks tend to have unusually HIGH self-esteem, I am not going to waste time on that one."

This statement is valid when you look at today's conditions in the USA. But I grew up in a very different world and I can attest to the fact that "black aggressiveness and self-esteem" were the furthest thing from your mind in assessing "colored people" of that day.

We lived in a whites only neighborhood in West Hollywood, California. But I visited the "black" bars and chicken joints of South Central Los Angeles on a regular basis from 1940 through 1946. I accompanied my father who during that period owned and operated the largest record company in the world exclusively devoted to black singers, Giltedge Records. As Dad's singers were comparable in station to the gangster rapper's of today, they couldn't be more dissimilar.

The blacks I knew personally and culturally were painfully passive and their self-esteem on a scale of 1 to 10 was hovering just above 1. They were depicted in movies mostly as servants. When observed the word "massa" came to mind. They always were portrayed in movies as being frightened of their shadow and that is the way they came across in real life. The only violent minority of that time were the Mexican "Cholo's and they were more "Zoot Suit" than dangerous. Then the streets of South Central were calm compared to the war zones they are today.

At the time blacks were barred from participating in professional sports with whites. So I would say that I had a cat bird seat in watching black genes at work in the entertainment joints where among their own their self-esteem was the highest. It just wasn't there. Then they were as polite as the ever-bowing Chinese of the era and would generally run from any confrontation. They were not fighters then. They also were never angry..

Their transformation here in LA was slow. It started with the spectacular success of Jackie Robinson at UCLA and later with the Dodgers; with UCLA's Doctor Ralph Bunche who climbed the ladder to head up the UN.and Sidney Poitier in "Look Who's Coming To Dinner". Somewhere along the line, their attitudes changed, their self esteem soared and they changed to the super-aggressive anger that instructs us today.

I have to say my university played a big role in the transformation with Bunche, Robinson, Kenny Washington and Rafer Johnson. But the times were passive and so were blacks. The anger had yet to be stoked by the MSM and black opportunist leaders looking for a paycheck or a story. I harken back to Marshall McLuhan's admonition "The media IS the message" or something like that.

You are the expert on genes and culture. I was just an casual untrained observer of the scene. But the "blacks" of my youth are not the blacks of "today". Not by a million miles. If there was such a thing as a dormant gene, it sure got juiced in the last 20 years. It surely was absent or in hiding then.

Dick makes a very good point that is almost never mentioned today: That the oppressive discrimination against blacks that was normal in America up until the 60s did make them very submissive and hence much less threatening to whites. Blacks were afraid, rightly or not, that if they got "uppity", they would end up hanging from a tree. They had learned to "know their place" (at the bottom). So Dick's point about a generally low level of black self-esteem at that time is undoubtedly true. It would be surprising if the oppression which blacks suffered from at that time did not have a severe impact on their self-esteem. American Blacks were very largely a cowed population at that time.

All recent studies (See also here and here and the academic review abstracted at the foot of this post) however show that black self-esteem is now at higher averages than that of whites -- reflecting a recovery to natural levels now that systematic oppression has ended. And with that, of course, the fear of whites has also vanished and something like 80% of violent crime against whites is now inflicted by blacks.

I am not quite as old as Dick and I am also not American so in none of these matters can I speak from personal experience. I can however speak from experience of another very similar situation -- South Africa under apartheid. I was in South Africa in 1979 doing field research into -- would you believe? -- racial attitudes. The resultant research report was published in a widely-circulated academic journal and you can read it here.

While I was there I got to know one of the local libertarians well. He was then and still is someone devoted to using libertarian ideas to improving the lot of blacks. Like most white South Africans at that time, however, he was greatly frustrated by the false and simplistic views foreigners tended to have about South Africa in that era. As part of re-educating me, he took me at one stage for a drive through Soweto -- the big black township just outside Johnannesburg that was already at that time internationally notorious for crime and violence. His first point was to show me that there were no checkpoints or other barriers. You could just get into your car and drive there. And his second point was that it was generally a safe and friendly place for whites to go -- at least during daylight hours. We could get out of the car at will and without fear -- which we did -- and in fact a common response in blacks who saw us driving past was to wave! Which is of course a friendly gesture. I noted the same thing when I took the train from Johannesburg down to Bloemfontein. The train's occupants were almost all white but as it passed various black settlements (with roofs generally held down by rocks!) along the way, the people in the settlements would all come out and wave to us.

Now most South African blacks were then and still are enthusiastic Christians. And Soweto (and South Africa generally) was then and still is a place with enormous levels of black-on-black violence. And in this post-apartheid era you would soon be either dead or very sorry for yourself if you tried to do in any black South African township what Leon and I did in 1979. So the idea that Christianity leads to high levels of pro-social behaviour -- as American Christians often claim -- is as patently falsified among black South Africans as it is among black Americans. That the heavy hand of entrenched white oppression can deflect black aggression away from whites (and perhaps to a degree to suppress it generally) in some eras does nothing to falsify that.

In fact, if it were culture that made the difference, present-day international comparisons would lead us to conclude that Christianity is an antisocial influence. I certainly don't always agree with Kristof but he is right about Africa and religion:

"If on a Sunday you want to attend a lively, jammed full, fervent and life-changing service of Christian worship, you want to be in Nairobi, not in Stockholm," notes Mark Noll, a professor at Wheaton College. He adds, "But if you want to walk home safely late at night, you want to be in Stockholm, not Nairobi."

Nairobi is of course in Africa. But high levels of lawless and violent behaviour are characteristic of African-origin populations worldwide -- no matter what system they live under or what their history is -- so it is in fact clearly black genetics that matter, not their culture.

But if we include in our meaning of "culture" the effective laws and other enforced requirements we operate under, then culture does indeed matter to how we live. In my earlier post, however, I was using the word "culture" to mean the common rules in our environment that we follow (or not) of our own free will.

---------

Reference: (with abstract)
Twenge, J. M., & Crocker, J. (2002). Race and self-esteem: Meta-analyses comparing Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 371-408.

Abstract: These meta-analyses examine race differences in self-esteem among 712 datapoints. Blacks scored higher than Whites on self-esteem measures (d = .19), but Whites score higher than other racial minority groups, including Hispanics (d = -.09), Asians (d = -.30), and American Indians (d = -.21). Most of these differences were smallest in childhood and grew larger with age. Blacks' self-esteem increased over time relative to Whites', with the Black advantage not appearing until the 1980s. Black and Hispanic samples scored higher on measures without an academic self-esteem subscale. Relative to Whites, minority males had lower self-esteem than did females, and Black and Hispanic self-esteem was higher in groups with high socioeconomic status. The results are most consistent with a cultural interpretation of racial differences in self-esteem.

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

ELSEWHERE

What a laugh! The NYT has discovered that in Australia, as in the USA, slightly less than half of the population have Leftist views. Wow! "As the point person in the Bush administration's campaign to improve America's image in the world, Karen Hughes may face a more difficult challenge than she imagined and discover that she will have to travel far beyond the Middle East. A poll released Monday in Australia, long known for friendly relations with Americans, found that only 58 percent of the population had a positive view of the United States."

MARXWORDS is back! I have dug up another lot of quotations from Marx which show how much he and Hitler were two peas in a pod. So if Hitler was a Rightist so was Marx! But if the poor old Leftists have to claim that Marx was a Rightist they would really be a laughing stock! Clearly, both the great European mass-murderers of the 20th century -- Hitler and Stalin -- were acolytes of Marx and, as such, far to the Left. From Lenin to Milosevich, mass-murder has been Leftist. Even the belief in Aryan superiority was Leftist before the second world war. U.S. Democrat President Woodrow Wilson of course believed in it and, as we shall see in a few days time, so did Engels. So keep checking MARXWORDS!

Most readers of this blog will by now be well aware of the Leftist myth that the early British settlers of Tasmania committed genocide against the native black population there. The myth has of course been painstakingly demolished at huge length by Keith Windschuttle. There was however another article much prior to Windschuttle's work which makes essentially the same argument. It is very brief but even so makes quite horrifying and therefore quite gripping reading. It is by Patricia Cobern and I have just put it online here or here.

Arnold Kling argues that the universities today are a lot like the Catholic Church before Martin Luther came along.

A good post from Norm Geras, a left-leaning blogger and authority on Marx, about the dishonest way many Leftists compare modern Western conservatives to the Nazis. A Leftist who takes the facts seriously is always refreshing.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/30/2005 06:36:00 PM

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I show that Hitler's Nazism was a popular, working-class movement and that it was Green/Left, not "Rightist"

On Political Correctness Watch I point to evidence that multiculturalism has destroyed Britain's sense of community

On Greenie Watch I note that the huge advantages of biotechnology have mostly been destroyed by ignorant politics

On Gun Watch I suggest that the solution to school shootings is to arm the teachers

On Education Watch I note how desperate parents are to escape Los Angeles public schools

On Socialized Medicine I note how a public hospital had a transplant donor for a boy with kidney failure but put off the operation for 3 years -- until the boy died

On A Scripture Blog I looked at what happens to the earth after the day of judgment

On Leftists as Elitists I give some examples of the sheer stupidity of Gore Vidal

On Blogger News I ask how important is culture?

On Majority Rights I reproduce a rave about how gutless are the British Conservative party

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

ELSEWHERE

French corruption again: "The latest corruption trial of the French president's cronies leaves the public shaking their heads, yet again. It is a case of deja vu for millions of French people: forty-seven politicians and other officials are on trial this week over a vast kickback scheme. For several years in the early 1990s, construction companies are said to have paid 90 million euros ($116 million) in bribes, swelling the coffers of political parties. Their reward: contracts to build and maintain secondary schools in the Paris area. And yet again, the trials involve President Chirac when he served as mayor of Paris and his allies"

Albanians show up other Europeans: "The announcement several days ago Albania -- a small country with limited resources -- was sending an additional 50 well-trained troops to Iraq came as a surprise to some observers. But it really should not have surprised anyone. Albania was one of only four countries to send combat troops during the operation "Iraqi Freedom." Albania is probably the most pro-American country on Earth. It showed its support of the United States early, when it initially sent 70 commandos to join the Coalition of the Willing's effort to bring peace, stability and free elections to Iraq. These new troops bring to a total of 120 Albanian soldiers serving in Iraq..... "We Albanians are a nation of freedom fighters who know something about living under oppression," Albanian Prime Minister Fatos Nano wrote in a letter to President Bush. "That is why we wholeheartedly support the American-led effort to free the people of Iraq. And though we are a small country with a small military, we are proud to stand side by side with our allies in the fight to end the reign of terror in Baghdad.""

There is an article here which argues that it is Europe's abandonment of religion that is causing their birthrate to plunge so dramatically -- to the point where the population of many European countries will as much as halve only two or three decades from now.

A summary of the latest Democrat document forgery here -- a supposedly Republican memo about Terri Schiavo

There is an article here about the very fragile human rights situation in Cuba today.

This should freak the Leftists: "Christian conservative leaders from scores of Ohio's fastest growing churches are mounting a campaign to win control of local government posts and Republican organizations, starting with the 2006 governor's race. In a manifesto that is being circulated among church leaders and on the Internet, the group, which is called the Ohio Restoration Project, is planning to mobilize 2,000 evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic leaders in a network of so-called Patriot Pastors to register half a million new voters, enlist activists, train candidates and endorse conservative causes in the next year. The initial goal is to elect Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a conservative Republican, governor in 2006" [And wait for the Leftists to call Blackwell an "Uncle Tom"]

Amazing! Bureaucracy doesn't reduce crime "The [U.K.] government has failed to reduce violent crime despite its pledges to tackle the problem, according to the last set of crime statistics likely to be released before the election. Home Office figures, due to be published next month, are expected to show that offences such as assaults and wounding increased by 8% in England and Wales last year. In some areas police recorded a 30% rise in personal violence. Police say the increase has been caused by binge drinking and a shortage of officers to patrol the streets because constables are tied up with duties such as form-filling, inflicted on them by the government... "As soon as the government says `We want to measure something' I have got to get somebody to fill a form or sit at a computer screen so it can be measured," said one senior officer in Lancashire, where there was a 20% rise in violent crime. "If we measured less and there was not so much excessive bureaucracy we could have more people on the street fighting crime".

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/29/2005 09:20:00 PM

Monday, March 28, 2005

 
HOW IMPORTANT IS CULTURE?

How important to us today is the Protestant Christian culture that appears to have been so central in creating the modern world? Most conservatives I know would answer: "VERY important". And Leftists of course would also say that it is important -- but only as something that needs to be eradicated as quickly as possible.

I don't agree with either. I hark back to another important and historic conservative belief -- in the importance of human nature. I think that what is normally attributed to culture is in fact almost all due to genetics. And the studies that are now coming out of genetics research are pretty startling confirmation of that. It is in fact something of a wonder to me that conservatives do very often seem to maintain in their heads two rather contradictory beliefs -- in the importance of culture and in the importance of genetics. It is obviously true that what we are is the product of both but I don't see how conservatives can assert the central importance of human nature (which they normally do) and also give a large role to culture. Anybody I put that point to normally retreats into saying that BOTH are important -- perhaps 50-50 or perhaps 60-40 but that neither can be downplayed or ignored.

But that's not what the evidence shows as far as I can see. I don't want to beat people over the head with genetics research findings (though I think I will in a minute) so let me initially point to some things that are widely known. I am however going to have to offend just about everybody to do so. Take the importance of Christian culture. There is a very vigorous flow of claims from Christians to the effect that it is only America's Christian heritage that keeps America civil. Yet that is patently false. The overwhelming source of uncivil (to put it mildly) behaviour in the USA is undoubtedly the black population -- who are at least as Christian as the whites -- perhaps more so overall. So the source of destructive and disruptive black behaviour is not in their culture. It is in their genetics. Yes. I know all the Leftist tosh about the legacy of slavery suppressing their self-esteem etc but since all the studies shows that blacks tend to have unusually HIGH self-esteem, I am not going to waste time on that one.

I suppose I have just spoken an unmentionable truth that you need to blot out from your consciousness in order to get by in American society today but, unlike Leftists, I think the truth is vitally important and I intend to persist with my lifelong habit of exploring it wherever it may lead. And what we see in the black/white behavioural difference is a huge gap that certainly cannot be attributed to Christianity or the lack of it. It is true that there has evolved in recent years a black "rap" culture which is just about as antisocial as you could conceivably get but the black/white behavioural gap goes way back -- to long before the evolution of rap culture. Rap culture is more an effect than a cause.

And I am now going to mention something else that is going to lose me friends. Most Leftists lead perfectly decent personal lives whether or not they subscribe to any form of Christian thinking or values. I myself prefer to deal with Christians where I can because I think that Christianity does have some effect in keeping people honest but I normally don't know anything about the beliefs of the people I come across in everyday life except that on average about half must be Left-leaning and about half must be Right-leaning. But I have yet to be able to detect any person's politics from just the way they behave. So culture doesn't seem to matter there either.

And it is not just that I lead a sheltered life. For twelve years I taught sociology in a major Australian university -- where most of my colleagues were Marxists of one sort or another. And I always made clear my view that Marx was just an obsolete economist. In the middle of my time there I even wrote a big book in defence of conservatism. So how did my colleagues treat me? With the greatest civility. Even though my views were clearly anathema to them they even used to invite me to some of their parties! So how much difference to everyday behaviour did their cultural beliefs and my cultural beliefs make? None that I can see.

Now let me mention something else. I like Indians. I even have four of them living in my house with me (two Hindus, one Sikh and one Muslim). And if there is any group of people I know who are outstanding for warmth, civility, good humour, patience and sociability it would have to be Indians. Their culture could hardly be more different from my own Presbyterian heritage but their behaviour sets a standard that makes Westerners a pretty rough lot by comparison. If I thought culture was important for making decent human beings I would be recommending that we all take up Hinduism.

Anyway, I have probably said enough by now to be giving all my readers indigestion of some sort but for those masochistic enough to want to explore the issues I have raised in more detail, I have an article on the role of Christian culture here (or here) and two articles touching on the central importance of genetics here and here (or here and here). Which do you think genetics has more influence on: How tall you are or your political beliefs? You may be surprised at what the geneticists have found.

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

ELSEWHERE

What a stupid old fart the President of France is: "During the summit, Mr Chirac said that "ultra-liberalism" - for that, read market forces - was the "new communism of our age"".

Jacques Chirac is the amoral leader of an amoral nation: "Let us not forget that Chirac in his youth was a communist, distributing l'Humanite, the French communist newspaper, on street corners. [He] is more of a "girouette" (wind vane) than Clinton ever was..."

Some amazing pictures of a people-smuggling operation here. The things people will do to get into that "cowboy" USA! I guess trampling all over the feelings of the "international community" must be a good thing.

Good comment from Tom Heard: "The United Nations, my favorite organization has decided to send 10,000 peacekeepers to Darfur. A little too little and a lot too late. Hundreds of thousands displaced and by some counts a genocide of 150,000 has been taking place there and the UN decides to pass a Resolution. That's all this region needs right now, 10,000 rapists and pedophiles to add to their problems."

An email: "As always, eagerly covering up for the Communists, The New York Times today, in the obituary for Judge Wright (the memorable "Turn 'Em Loose Bruce" ) never mentions the judge's active participation in Communist rallies in the 1970's. I recall seeing his name on posters in Harlem, together with Angela Davis and other such "luminaries".

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/28/2005 06:42:00 PM

Sunday, March 27, 2005

 
SOME ECONOMIC ISSUES

Farm aid getting hit from left and right: "Among the groups working to convince Congress to rein in farm subsidies are the liberal Environmental Working Group and the conservative Club for Growth. Former Club for Growth President Stephen Moore told the Chicago Tribune for a January 8 article, 'Farm subsidies are one of the most expensive forms of corporate welfare in the federal budget. Most Americans believe it goes to the small family farmer, but the truth is that the lion's share goes to large agribusiness.' Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, told the Tribune, 'If you lay off a factory worker in Chicago because you outsource the job, we give them $10,000 and a hug and a certificate for retraining. What we give these guys [farmers] is $150,000 for cotton year after year that keeps them in the game internationally.'"

The latest excuse to slug the consumer "The US multinational establishment, having successfully championed free-trade orthodoxy for decades, may now be flirting with protectionist heresy--a stiff tariff against China to stanch America's hemorrhaging trade deficits. Fred Bergsten, the multinationals' leading economic authority, warns that the United States is in "big trouble," taking on foreign debt beyond anything any industrial nation has experienced and comparable to Mexico and Thailand just before they crashed in the 1990s. Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics, is lobbying elite circles to demand decisive action by the Bush Administration--an "import surcharge" as high as 50 percent on all Chinese imports--to avert financial meltdown".

Leftist hatred of economic success in evidence: "As Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., tries to plant dozens of new Supercenters in California, lawyers aligned with opposition groups the company calls fronts for labor unions and competitors are using California's tough environmental laws to stall the nation's largest retailer. From rural Northern California to the crowded south, a handful of lawyers have sued more than 30 cities that approved the 200,000-square-foot combination grocery and department stores, claiming that local officials hungry for sales taxes have miscalculated their environmental consequences.... In many cases, these suits have been filed on behalf of obscure, often-secretive, community groups that have few known members. Some of them have been backed by the labor unions leading an anti-Wal-Mart fight in California, while others have few apparent sources of money. They're delaying the opening of some stores by months or years and slowing Wal-Mart's plan to build up to 40 new Supercenters ... The suits haven't stopped the company from opening any stores, said Peter Kanelos, a company spokesman. "All they've done is delay the stores."

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

ELSEWHERE

From PoliPundit: "The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has released a set of proposed �rules� for political speech on the Internet. These rules specify exactly what speech is, and isn�t, allowed on the Internet. I�m not kidding. They really do want to regulate political speech on the Internet. Bloggers, like yours truly, could be fined and punished for writing about a political candidate, if the FEC decides that we violated some aspect of their byzantine �rules.�... Fortunately, there is something you can do. The FEC is asking for your comments on the proposed �rules.�"

Another twisted social worker: "A county mental health counselor appears to have been with a 16-year- old Oakland girl when the teenager allegedly slashed the throat of a 75-year- old woman near the Berkeley Rose Garden last week, county officials said Friday. Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson said the female employee, who was placed on leave pending several investigations, apparently had not called police to report the March 16 attack. "That would be the first action a normal person would take," Carson said Friday. "The fact is that we are under the impression that she did not call the Police Department." The employee, who is about 30 years old, was a counselor in the guidance center at Juvenile Hall, where the suspect is currently in custody"

A hidden epidemic: "There is a 'hidden epidemic' in this country, and it amazes me that people who can do something about it either don't recognize it, refuse to recognize it, or are part of the cause of it. This epidemic is children 's abuse, sex abuse, and death WHILE IN THE CARE OF THE CHILD PROTECTORS. These are the people who are supposed to be 'protecting' our children. They take our children from us as a first option and on the flimsiest of excuses, put them in foster care, there to die or be sexually or physically abused much more often than they ever are at home. ... Have you heard anything about this 'epidemic' in the news? No. And you won't, because these 'child protectors' are very good at hiding the truth from the public or 'poo-pooing' it when it does come out. They have a permanent legal 'gag order' on all facts concerning their operations."

NYC slides into mass illiteracy: "City officials recalled preparation material for math tests that had been sent to teachers after discovering they were filled with math and spelling mistakes. The materials were designed for math students in grades 3 through 7, and had been sent to math coaches and local instructional superintendents. The errors were found late Wednesday before the guide reached classrooms. Several answers in the guide were wrong. There were also sloppy diagrams and improper notation of exponents. There were at least 18 errors in the guide, and grammar and spelling issues proved just as problematic as the math. For example, the word "fourth" was misspelled on the cover of the 4th-grade manual. School officials blamed the mistakes on an ineffective fact-checker".

Book by Thomas Sowell: Black Rednecks and White Liberals. "An essay titled "The Real History of Slavery" presents a jolting re-examination of that tragic institution and the narrow and distorted way it is too often seen today. The reasons for the venomous hatred of Jews, and of other groups like them in countries around the world, are explored in an essay that asks, "Are Jews Generic?" Misconceptions of German history in general, and of the Nazi era in particular, are also re-examined. So too are the inspiring achievements and painful tragedies of black education in the United States".

The failed faith: "Like Communism, liberalism was put into practice. Better for the idealists if it had remained a dream. But as anyone who has lived within a mile of a government-housing project will know, real-life liberalism is a menacing thing -- anti-utopia. Neighborhoods menaced by young men without fathers, their mothers financed by the state, should by now have disillusioned even the most progressive minded. So should inner-city state schools, where parents play little or no role, and perhaps don't even know where the school is. Although its adherents don't like to discuss the point, the liberal faith has much in common with Communism... Liberalism and Communism both regarded egalitarianism as an ideal and both were godless; Communism openly so, liberalism more obscurely. Democracy admittedly distinguished between them, but the liberal admiration for an ideological judiciary shows that they, too, would like nothing more than a government that is free to impose its will by fiat (provided it is run by the right people).".

There is a choice posting on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS about Gore Vidal.

My latest posting on "A scripture blog" notifies a hiatus.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/27/2005 06:59:00 PM

Saturday, March 26, 2005

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

US economy and current account deficit fallacies If those who claim that the strength of the US economy is driving the current account deficit were right then the dollar would not be falling. But what can one expect when from January 2001 to December 2004 M1 grew by 27 per cent?
Mistaken identities & the Paddy McGuinness fiasco 'Well I never! Guess what? Media Watch sprung that old fool Paddy McGuinness. Old Paddy got himself in hot water by publicly accusing Ali bin Ramsey of not doing what he himself did not do
China's economy is a stunted giant It will be a great many years before China can pose a real military threat to the US, unless Americans do something incredibly stupid like handing both Houses and the Oval Office over to the Democrats
Four myths of the Asian economic crisis The depth and suddenness of the economic crisis that swept through the Asian economies took most economists and investment advisers by complete surprise. It shouldn't have
Louisiana Governor swoons over Castro Observe the moralizing and humbug by U.S. political and business hucksters when they visit Cuba
The state creates the black market What is the connection between the various methods used by the many crime gangs and paramilitary forces to enrich themselves?

Details here

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

ELSEWHERE

I must say that I am disturbed that Google News is no longer indexing what it calls "hate-speech" sites. Leftist sites are full of hate for conservatives, Christians etc so are we going to see them censored too? I suspect not. What has happened, in other words, is that Leftist agitation has caused extremes of political incorrectness to be censored -- with no guarantee at all that lesser levels of political incorrectness will not in time be censored too. It does in fact look like bad news for Google. There is already an alternative search service called "All the Web". It may get a lot more users if people get sick of Google's arbitrary censorship. I have myself for some time been finding that Clusty.com finds stuff that Google does not so Google may now have passed its peak.

David Horowitz: "What I've shown is that there are only a couple of degrees of separation between anybody on the left and the terrorists -- and that includes people in the Democratic Party, even those who are anti-terrorist. For example, the coalition of civil liberties groups that attacked the USA Patriot Act are thoroughly penetrated by pro-terrorist radicals based in organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. This doesn't mean that every Democrat or every Republican who opposes the USA Patriot Act is a "useful idiot." ... But it does mean that they need to be more mindful of the arguments they are being presented with and supporting".

Another bloated bureaucracy: "The agency responsible for child welfare in Washington state has overspent its budget by $12 million.... The Children's Administration, with a $450 million annual budget, oversees foster care and child protection in Washington. It's part of the Department of Social and Health Services. Uma Ahluwalia, director of the Children's Administration, blamed the budget busting on lack of spending controls, inaccurate cost projections, higher telecommunication costs and years of unpredictable financial management. She was appointed to lead the agency 18 months ago and said she has seen widely varied DSHS budgets even in that short time..... The foster care system has been troubled by tragedies, including the recent deaths of several children in state care. Last summer, the state promised to make improvements as part of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit over inadequacies in foster care."

Bad brains: "Last month the Supreme Court ruled that teenagers under age 18 who commit premeditated murder cannot be executed. The court based its ruling in part on recent studies that found that the frontal lobes of teenagers were not sufficiently developed, making them not fully responsible for their actions. ... Naturally, death penalty opponents and child advocacy organizations hailed the court's decision. But this diminished capacity argument could well play out in disturbing ways. Already the immature teen brain argument has been used by legislators to impose various restrictions on teenage drivers .... Progressives who applauded the Supreme Court's decision with regard to imposing the death penalty might not be so happy when conservatives turn around and use that decision to justify imposing moreparental consent laws on teenage women who are seeking an abortion."

Pejman on saving the marriage: Conservatism and libertarianism: "A few years ago, I wrote an article discussing the ways in which libertarians and conservatives have common cause on a number of policy issues -- and how the Blogosphere can work to bring libertarians and conservatives closer together. Along somewhat similar lines, we have seen articles by people like Kenneth Silber who have discussed the fusion between libertarian and conservative ideas, and Stephen Stanton, whose analysis of 'South Park Republicans' helps further identify people who are comfortable as libertarian-conservatives -- people like me. My status as a libertarian-conservative is why I took interest in a recent debate concerning whether the libertarian-conservative marriage that has existed since the Cold War could be saved."

Corrupt bureaucracy: "Russell Redenbaugh, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member who unexpectedly resigned this week, said he isn't sure the panel even has a purpose anymore, adding that its very design is resistant to accountability and reform. 'It's not the people, it's the missing process, the missing accountability,' he said Wednesday, a day after he sent a resignation letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist [R-TN]. Republicans in Congress appointed him to the commission post 15 years ago. 'Previously, I was blind to the fact that we have a structural problem here,' he said. 'If you don't report to anybody, you aren't accountable to anybody. The commission can't act any better than a trust fund casualty. The money is going to come anyway, so it's no surprise the kids turn out that way.' Redenbaugh is referring to what some commissioners call a fiscal 'hole,' created by 12 years of near-secret bookkeeping."

Getting serious on bureaucracy reform: "Bureaucracy reform may be the original oxymoron, but amazing progress is being made against inefficient civil service rules and regulations, against lifetime employment with guaranteed raises no matter how poorly one performs. President George W. Bush is absolutely revolutionizing federal work force procedures. The Department of Homeland Security has already put into effect its new system of pay-for-performance, expedited personnel appeals and consultation rather than endless bargaining with unions over work rules. ... Pay for performance is not only the efficient way, it is the only right way to pay employees. Those who do the best work and contribute most to the public good should be rewarded better. Incentives should be given for good performance but, practically, if the best workers are not paid more, they will leave for more money in the private sector."

I have just transferred here Chris Brand's posts for the month so far -- replete as usual with political incorrectness about race, IQ etc.

My RECIPE BLOG has just undergone a temporary revival. I have posted there a recipe for an unusual dessert from India -- almond rice.

My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at the Day of Judgment as described by Jesus.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/26/2005 09:22:00 PM

Friday, March 25, 2005

 

GOOD FRIDAY

Remembering the day that a government murdered the greatest teacher the world has ever seen.

May his wisdom always live on in the hearts of men

A CONSERVATIVE FEMALE NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD:

Last month, when syndicated columnist Susan Estrich went public with her feud with Los Angeles Times Editorial Page Editor Michael Kinsley for not running enough columns by women and local writers, she put the gender card back on the table. Credit Estrich for getting the pack journalists to find a big story in a phenomenon any rube can see. Stop the presses: Most opinion writers are men.

Estrich may say she wants to promote diversity of opinion as well as gender diversity, but I've been watching the diversity game for some years. In journalism, diversity is a club the left uses to increase the hiring of lefties. Feminists say they want more female columnists when what they really want are only more liberal female columnists. Or, in their lingo, they want "authentic" women. So when the left pushes for more diversity in a profession that is overwhelmingly liberal already, it really is pushing for less diversity of ideas.

Why are there fewer female opinion-page columnists than men? It's funny: Opinion mavens -- who can chime in on everything from steroids to farm policy -- suddenly can't quite figure it out. Kinsley told his paper he can't explain it. New York Times Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff." (Note: If Harvard University President Larry Summers had said what Collins said, feminist professors would be demanding one of his body parts.).

When I speak in public, there are two questions people invariably ask: One is, "Why is journalism so overwhelmingly liberal?" Recently a Bay Area journalism professor actually told me that conservatives shouldn't be journalists because conservatives are less likely to question the status quo. I disagreed with his definition, but I responded that this region is filled with liberals, so if you want reporters who will question the status quo, you should push Bay Area media to hire more conservatives. To this, he said nothing, and then left the room. There went his noble reason for muzzling the opposition.

(Excerpts only above. The rest is here. Michael Kinsley, the original target of Ms Estrich, has some rather amusing recent comments on it all too.)

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

ELSEWHERE

Looks good: "Kyrgyzstan's opposition looked to have seized control of the Central Asian country on Thursday after days of violent protest but there was no word on the whereabouts of President Askar Akayev, the man it wants to oust. Rumours flew that Akayev had fled the mountainous country which appears likely to become the third ex-Soviet state in two years to see its entrenched leadership fall to popular protests after disputed elections, following Ukraine and Georgia". [Looks like another Muslim country going democratic. More egg on the face for the Leftists and more kudos to GWB]

The Alien People's Republic of Berkeley: "Parents, students and teachers at Berkeley's Thomas Jefferson Elementary School will soon vote on whether to rename their school because the nation's third president was a slave owner. The question of whether to rename the school has been debated for more than two years -- since several teachers, including an African American mother of three former Jefferson students, said Jefferson's moniker offended them and suggested a name change. On Monday, Principal Betty Delaney released a list of potential new names -- one nominated by a student, the rest by adults. Parents, students and teachers must first vote on a new name, then take a second vote on whether to replace Jefferson with the new name. The school board must officially approve any name change."

The British solution to illegal immigration: Make it legal: "Britain has cut asylum claims - by handing out tens of thousands of work permits, it emerged last night. Applications for asylum fell from 60,047 in 2003 to 40,402 last year. But the figures are dwarfed by the 240,000 a year who swarm into Britain as legal migrants - that's almost equal to the combined populations of Portsmouth and Cambridge. Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch UK said: "The number of asylum claimants has been cut to about 40,000 but this is now just one fifth of the immigration total. This is partly because the number of work permits has been quadrupled from 42,000 in 1997 to 156,000 in 2004. The issue for Britain is the total immigration - and that has substantially increased." Another issue is the slow removal rate of illegal immigrants, barely one in five of whom are sent home

A nasty one for the opponents of free-trade: "A funny thing happened on the way to dollar devaluation -- America, apparently, has become a source of cheap labor -- at least in currency exchange-rate terms. According to a report from Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Japan's Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., will begin producing Quest minivans for export to -- get this -- China. Ha! And Nissan isn't even the first Japanese automaker to be producing cheap goods in the new Third World, for export abroad. Toyota and Honda are playing this game as well, producing thousands of cars in the U.S. for export to Europe, every year".

Doomed by special rights: "Consider that employment among disabled people had reached a high in 1989, after years of economic expansion, rising in compassion for the disabled, and advances in technology that permitted their more thorough integration into the workforce. Then something awful happened: the government granted the disabled special rights (the ADA) and thereby made them more expensive and dangerously litigious to hire. What followed was a human rights disaster: the longest slide in disabled employment ever recorded, according to five different measures used to record unemployment among the disabled."

Stefan Karlsson explains as simply as it can be explained that America's huge current trade deficit is not a problem of itself. The real problem is high U.S. government spending. High deficits actually mean that foreigners like investing in the country concerned.

Asbestos phobia: "Officials in the town of Asbestos, Quebec are considering changing the name of their town because nobody likes asbestos anymore. Sure it saved untold thousands from death because of its fireproof properties, but it's killed a bunch of people too. So the word "asbestos" is now on the politically correct hit-list. Never mind that the town was named for its primary product, that it exists basically because the stuff was under the ground, that it reflects their proud history."

I have got a few postings up on GUN WATCH about the recent school shooting.

My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at what happens to the earth after the Day of Judgment.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/25/2005 06:39:00 PM

Thursday, March 24, 2005

 
HITLER AGAIN: MYTHS VERSUS FACT

Nazism was a popular, working-class movement but it was Green/Left, not "Rightist"

The fact that the recent Minnesota school massacre was done by a young admirer of Hitler will of course have the Leftist bloggers frothing at the mouth and trying to prove that conservatives are to blame -- because Hitler was "Rightist", you see. The fact that Hitler's most unrelenting opponent was the arch-Conservative Winston Churchill and the fact that Hitler started out his war in alliance with the Communist Stalin will not be mentioned of course. Leftists have no trouble ignoring even the most basic facts of history. And it has always been a mystery how Leftists can call "conservative" a man who imposed such vast changes on Germany -- considering that Leftists define conservatism as "opposition to change"!

What the media is notably ignoring is that, although he was no conservative, Hitler WAS a Greenie -- and the Hitler-admiring groups that the shooter was linked to were environmental extremists.

That Hitler was far closer to Communism than conservatism and that he shared almost all of his ideas with Marx & Engels is also rarely acknowledged. When Henry Ford said that "history is bunk" he could well have been describing history as it is generally taught in the schools today. But little bits of information do leak out to the public occasionally. The latest comes in the form of a book recently released in Germany. Excerpt from a review of it:

"A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state. To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also -- in great contrast to World War I -- particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt"

In saying "most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector", the author in fact tells only half the story. As anybody who has read much of Mein Kampf should be aware, the whole book is essentially a love-song to the German people. Hitler loved his German nation and was deeply troubled by the big political divisions among them -- until he "discovered" that the divisions were not the fault of Germans themselves but rather the fault of Jewish agitators who were misleading many of them. Since many of the Communist agitators in Hitler's Vienna immediately after World War I do in fact appear to have been Jewish, his explanation had some plausibility. So Hitler told the German people that they were wonderful (a Herrenvolk or "master people"), that he would fight their enemies (the Jews), and that he would look after them in the usual paternalistic socialist way. So the German people loved him back and fought to the death for him. Simple, isn't it? There is nothing conservative about it, though. Collectivism and treating people primarily as members of groups is Leftist. Conservatives stand for individualism.

The last desperate scream of the Leftist history teachers in trying to portray Nazism as "rightist" is their accusation that Nazism was not working-class but rather "bourgeois" (middle class). I have always found this claim amusing. As Heiden (1939) and others point out at length, Hitler was a hobo until 1914 so how does a hobo get to lead a middle-class movement? And both Roberts (1938) and Heiden (1939) -- prewar anti-Nazi writers -- portray Hitler as widely revered and popular among the Germans of their day. As Heiden (1939, p. 98) put it: "The great masses of the people did not merely put up with National Socialism. They welcomed it". And Madden (1987) presents modern-day scholarly evidence derived from archival research to show that Nazis came from all social classes in large numbers. Perhaps most useful is the work of Fischer (1978), who looked at the class composition of the most active and committed Nazi group -- the members of the Sturm Abteilung (S.A., Stormtroopers, Brownshirts). He found that "the workers are over-represented in the S.A." (p. 140). In fact, in the 1933-1934 period, 69.9% of the S.A. were working class compared to 53.2% in the overall German population of that time. The Marxist claim is, then, utter nonsense and, as usual, the opposite of the truth. Mussolini, too, found supporters and adversaries in all social classes (De Felice, 1977, p. 176). And particularly in the early years of Fascism, Mussolini often attacked the bourgeoisie in his speeches!

And as Von Mises wrote in 1940:

"Unless we are utterly oblivious to the facts, we must realize that the German workers are the most reliable supporters of the Hitler regime. Nazism has won them over completely by eliminating unemployment and by reducing the entrepreneurs to the status of shop managers (Betriebsfuehrer). Big business, shopkeepers, and peasants are disappointed. Labor is well satisfied and will stand by Hitler, unless the war takes a turn which would destroy their hope for a better life after the peace treaty. Only military reverses can deprive Hitler of the backing of the German workers.

The fact that the capitalists and entrepreneurs, faced with the alternative of Communism or Nazism, chose the latter, does not require any further explanation. They preferred to live as shop managers under Hitler than to be "liquidated" as "bourgeois" by Stalin. Capitalists don't like to be killed any more than other people do"

It is in fact Communist movements that always have bourgeois leaders and mostly bourgeois supporters. The workers usually vote for more moderate Leftists. So once again we see Leftists projecting onto others things that are really true of themselves.

References:
De Felice, R. (1977) Interpretations of Fascism Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P.
Fischer, C.J. (1978) The occupational background of the S.A.'s rank and file membership during the depression years, 1929 to mid-1934. In: Stachura, P. The shaping of the Nazi state. London: Croom Helm.
Heiden, K. (1939) One man against Europe Harmondsworth, Mddx.: Penguin
Madden, P. (1987) The social class origins of Nazi party members as determined by occupations, 1919-1933. Social Science Quarterly 68, 263-280.
Roberts, S.H. (1938) The house that Hitler built N.Y.: Harper.

(I put up an earlier version of this post on Blogger News)

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

ELSEWHERE

A disgraceful story: "A Southern Illinois woman was arrested last week after trying to intervene on behalf of her 14-year old daughter's effort to have an abortion. The girl was allegedly taken to an abortion clinic by the mother of the man allegedly to have impregnated the 14-year old".

Hey! I have just found out what the word "Soros" means (as in Leftist billionaire George Soros). It is ancient Greek for "coffin". Rather fitting when you think of the way socialism killed millions in the 20th century.

Arnie cracks down on cheats: "To the outrage of advocates for the elderly and disabled, the Schwarzenegger administration is trying to declare an emergency so the state can immediately start collecting more of the assets of Medi-Cal recipients after they die. Federal law requires the state to recoup the cost of Medi-Cal benefits provided to the low-income elderly who die leaving assets, but courts have said California's collection policies are inconsistent. In proposed emergency regulations filed last week, officials in the Department of Health Services said they wanted to start seeking repayment from the heirs of Medi-Cal recipients who shelter their homes in life estates. Life estates allow people to transfer ownership of their houses while they are still alive. Administration officials also said they would start demanding that heirs of Medi-Cal recipients repay the state for the cost of home-care services. The administration also wants to charge heirs 7 percent interest on the amount owed to the state if they are unable to pay off the entire bill at once"

Christina Hoff Sommers documents what a band of bigoted feminist viragos are the accusers of President Larry Summers at Harvard.

The truth will out: "The Minister for Economic Reform, Michael Costa, has triggered alarm for the Carr Government by stating up to 20 per cent of the state's 340,000 public servants might be surplus to requirements.... Late yesterday, a spokesman for Mr Costa strongly denied the minister had made any such observation, but half an hour later said the minister now did not wish to make any comment on private discussions about the fate of displaced workers "as a matter of principle". However, three separate accounts have been obtained by the Herald from people who attended the meeting. They say Mr Costa became inflamed when energy union officials pressed the Government to find jobs for the handful of Pacific Power workers who had yet to find new positions after the utility was dissolved two years ago. One witness said: "In the middle of the meeting, Costa just let fly that he had 340,000 workers in NSW and that maybe 20 per cent were surplus to requirement and it would be him who would do something about it.""

Carnival of the Vanities is up again. A bumper issue this time.

My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at what Paul means when he talks of a spiritual "body".

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/24/2005 06:57:00 PM

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

 
SHOCK, HORROR! THE NYT MENTIONS RACE AND INTELLIGENCE IN THE SAME ARTICLE

But only obliquely. It refers to IQ as "test scores". Tests of how high you can jump, perhaps? Tests of what a good shot you are? Tests of how good you are at picking stockmarket winners? They don't say. They obviously think you would KNOW which test scores are being referred to

Roland G. Fryer Jr. is 27 years old and he is an assistant professor of economics at Harvard and he is black....

When he presents a paper, Fryer is earnest and genial and excitable, sometimes carrying on like a Southern preacher. While he denies that his work is united by a grand thesis -- he is a scientist, he explains, devoted to squeezing truths from the data, wherever that may lead -- he does admit to having a mission: ''I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong. One could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well. You can look at the black-white differential in out-of-wedlock births or infant mortality or life expectancy. Blacks are the worst-performing ethnic group on SAT's. Blacks earn less than whites. They are still just not doing well, period.''

To Fryer, the language of economics, a field proud of its coldblooded rationalism, is ideally suited for otherwise volatile conversations. ''I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and a place where I don't think we can,'' he says. ''Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you say something like, 'Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?' everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn't that be on the table?'' ....

Glaeser and Fryer, along with David M. Cutler, another Harvard economist, are the authors of a paper that traffics in one form of genetic theorizing. It addresses the six-year disparity in life expectancy for blacks versus whites, arguing that much of the gap is due to a single factor: a higher rate of salt sensitivity among African-Americans, which leads to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease....

So here is Fryer's final anomaly: he is a man who revels in his blackness and yet also says he believes, as DuBois believed, that black underachievement cannot entirely be laid at the feet of discrimination. Fryer has a huge appetite for advocacy but a far larger appetite for science, and as a scientist he won't exclude any possibilities, including black behaviors, from the menu of factors that contribute to the black condition.

(Excerpts only above. More here)

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

ELSEWHERE

An interesting finding about blog readership here: "The top states are nearly if not all Blue States - the bottom clearly Red with a few exceptions". So it looks like Leftists read blogs a lot more than conservatives do. As I pointed out some time ago, Leftist beliefs are so at variance with reality that Leftists are constantly looking for something to prop their beliefs up -- so they turn to the internet in droves for the reinforcement they need. For conservatives, however, it the opposite: Everything about everyday life confirms their beliefs so they don't need to do anything much to reassure themselves of the rightness of their beliefs. I go into all that a bit more here.

German obtuseness: "In a sputtering economy, Niles Werke shows how to get the German locomotive running again. The century-old machine-tool company is at the top of its field. Sales are expected to rise by 10 percent this year. "We expect 2005 to be another good year," says Frank Reichel, director of its Berlin plant. Defying a lagging economy, Germany's flagship engineering sector is booming. But despite plants that hum at capacity, companies like Niles aren't hiring. Its failure to create jobs is miring Germany in a political and economic crisis, making the country ground zero in a growing debate over Europe's economy..... "What we need is flexibility," says Reichel. "Our main problem is the job protection laws and regulation. Sooner or later, business will slow down again and when that happens we can't have too many people on the payroll." The problem, say analysts, is that the government, which is closely allied with labor unions, is unwilling to deregulate the labor market to the extent that economists say is necessary to boost investment and job growth..... German labor laws make it difficult for companies to reduce staff during weak business periods...."

There is a good satire here on the EU and "The Single European Tank". I suspect it's not far from the truth, in fact.

Australian Leftist historians revere Ward Churchill! "In Australia, Churchill is being presented as a scholarly authority on the Aborigines. In the newly released anthology Genocide and Settler Society, editor Dirk Moses of the University of Sydney's history department quotes Churchill's 1997 book A Little Matter of Genocide as one of his main sources on the Tasmanian Aborigines. Churchill compares the fate of the Tasmanians with that of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis..." (Via the Blithering one)

Shifts in Muslim opinion: "In Its final report, the 9/11 commission said that the United States must prevail over a 'radical ideological movement in the Islamic world.' Recent news from Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, shows that this can indeed happen. A poll commissioned by the nonprofit Terror Free Tomorrow found the first substantial shift of public opinion in the Muslim world since the beginning of the war on terrorism. More people in Indonesia now favor American efforts against terrorism than oppose them. In a dramatic turnaround, support for Osama bin Laden and terrorism have dropped significantly, while favorable opinion of the US has increased. The poll, conducted by a leading Indonesian pollster, showed that the reason for this positive change was the American response to the tsunami. Its implications are both broad and profound."

Sex-education classes attract parental opposition: "More than 200 people took part yesterday in an intense, three-hour meeting about teenage sexuality in Montgomery County public schools. The town hall meeting was sponsored by Citizens for Responsible Curriculum, a parent-run group opposed to new sex-education classes in the schools because of what they call 'moral and scientific gaps' in the curriculum. Among the concerns is a video on using a condom and elements of the curriculum that, group members say, portray homosexuality as the moral equal to heterosexuality, and fails to present alternative moral perspectives or full discussions on the health risks posed by homosexuality. 'I am shocked and appalled at what I have seen here today,' said Tonya Wilkerson, mother of a 16-year-old boy. She also said the video's failure to 'at least give equal billing to abstinence' was 'abhorrent.'"

Lost Tooth Society has a good article on the psychological connections between Leftists and Greenies.

My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at a Leftist claim that Republicans oppose what Christ stood for.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/23/2005 10:00:00 PM

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I look at what is conservatism

On Political Correctness Watch I note the Ladies Against Feminism organization

On Greenie Watch I note that where the Greenies have not banned DDT, the socialists have misused it.

On Education Watch I note that Doctorates of education are not what they seem

On Socialized Medicine I note a British hospital so bad that an elderly patient suicided rather than go back there

On Gun Watch I note that the great majority of American airline pilots are still unarmed

On Leftists as Elitists I note the ignorance of the Leftist elite

On Marx Words I give evidence of very similar thinking in Karl Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

On A Scripture Blog I note two stories of creation in Genesis

On Majority Rights I note that the British elite protect Gypsies despite great opposition from ordinary English people

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

ELSEWHERE

Confused "thinkers": Some young Democrats have tried to come up with the "principles" of Leftism. This is one of their efforts: "It is the shared responsibility of a nation to ensure each citizen's freedom, security and equality". That is of course an echo of the French Revolution and is equally vicious: How can you have freedom and equality at the same time? Equality can only be enforced by tyranny. People are NOT equal and never will be -- any more than the Left will ever have genuine principles.

And here's an example of REAL Leftist "principles" at work. The principle? Leftists are always right: "Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg demonstrates the twisted logic of the left in her article, "Dying in Iraq Is Not a Job Opportunity." The double standard of the left is evidenced as she describes events at the City College of New York's (CCNY) Job Fair last week, at which a group of about twenty students stood in front of the National Guard table and began chanting anti-war slogans. She writes, "The situation became aggressive when the security officers came in. They looked like they were ready for action.".... Defending the protestors, Weill-Greenberg writes, "They did nothing wrong and the faculty union has demanded that all charges be dropped." ... What hyphen-woman conveniently forgets to mention is that the students were instructed to demonstrate outside the building after they told the administration of their plans. "They were not peacefully protesting," CCNY President Gregory H. Williams said in a telephone interview. "They assaulted two police officers." CCNY's public relations director Ellis Simon said that one security officer went to the hospital after being "beaten up fairly badly." Hyphen-woman. just doesn't seem to understand that recruiters also have rights. The recruiters were there legally and with the permission of CCNY. The students weren't.""

Dems lack not only principles but even ideas: "You can almost see the gleeful anticipation in the eyes of Democrats these days. After being outmaneuvered by Republicans on tax cuts and failing to reach a consensus on Iraq, they now sense a win on Social Security.... Still, over the longer term, they run a risk in challenging Bush without ideas of their own. Social Security requires a fix. It's not the largest or most imminent budgetary crisis the nation faces. That's Medicare. But it's impossible to deny that Social Security will be in a bind as baby boomers retire and live longer than previous generations.... Without a plan, Democrats risk looking unconcerned about future retirees. What's more, they risk ceding to the GOP an issue that they've dominated for 75 years. Democrats need to counter the perception that they are a party without ideas.... But a set of ideas and principles would allow them to put forward a good-faith effort to be part of a solution.... For now, the Democrats' "just say no" strategy reflects poorly on the party".

The frantic distortions of the Leftist MSM about the Schiavo case are ably demolished here. The L.A. Times is Soviet-style in its selective reporting of the facts. And more lies exposed here.

Good! Leftist liars get the chop: "The BBC today announced plans to cut 3,780 jobs to save hundreds of millions of dollars, as the world's biggest public broadcaster undergoes a major shake-up. The BBC said today it would slash 2,050 posts after 1,730 job losses confirmed earlier this month, making a total of 3,780 positions or one in seven jobs. The cuts would bring cost savings of $860 million a year to reinvest in programs -- $85 million more than first targetted by the BBC in December. Among the redundancies announced today would be 420 posts in news, 66 in sport, 150 in drama, entertainment and children's programs, 735 in the regions, 58 in new media and 424 in factual and learning".

A real escape from Islam: "Jesus saves and if you're an illegal immigrant in detention in Australia, he may save you from being sent back to where you came from. The Government's confirmed that it's reviewing the cases of 30 detainees from Iran, who've converted from Islam to Christianity. They argue that if they're forced to return to Iran they'll be persecuted, with some refugee advocates saying they could even face the death penalty".

My latest posting on "A scripture blog" takes a look at paternalistic Leftist Christians.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/22/2005 07:14:00 PM

Monday, March 21, 2005

 
CLINTON AT DAVOS

The event at the recent World Economic Forum at Davos that most of us have heard about is the lying anti-American propaganda spewed out by Eason Jordan, head of CNN News -- propaganda that eventually led to his downfall. There were however other disgraceful events there too. Below is an account of one of them:

"The big American kahuna, of course, is not Graham Allison, and not even Sharon Stone, but Bill Clinton. He sits on a panel dealing with aid to Africa, along with Blair, Bono (the rock star), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and the presidents of South Africa and Nigeria: Mbeki and Obasanjo. The moderator of the session, French anchorwoman Christine Ockrent, wheels on Clinton, demanding to know why America is so stingy when it comes to foreign aid (did you know we were?). He answers, "Because no one will ever get beat running for Congress or president" by failing to espouse such aid. I have complimented Clinton's Davos performances before - in general, he's pretty good abroad - but he is a bit shameful here. Then it gets worse.

Clinton says, "The White House has just announced another $80 billion for the war in Iraq, and we could take half of that" and solve all of Africa's problems. The crowd whoops and cheers. This is a cheap political technique: to say, "Instead of spending money on X, we ought to spend it on Y." If Clinton thinks we should spend more on foreign aid, he should say so. And if he opposes our efforts in Iraq, he should say so. But to spite the war while calling for more aid to Africa - cheap....

But Clinton isn't through yet: He says that anyone who complains about corruption in African governments - who expresses caution about handing over money to these governments - "should be put in a closet, so no one has to listen to [him]." That, too, elicits whoops and cheers. And it is an odd thing for a democrat to say. Some of us believe that Carter is our worst ex-president ever (the opposite of the conventional wisdom). But the Arkansan is nipping at his heels".

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

A reasonable proposition: "May God Bless Jessica Lunsford's soul, and sooth the grief of her family with the faith and knowledge that Jessica is in a better world than ours now. Which leads us to this question: HOW DO WE MAKE OUR WORLD BETTER? I KNOW HOW: By locking up convicted child molesters for life. Punishment and prisons supposedly exist to PROTECT society. If the current laws allow our most precious and beautiful citizens - OUR CHILDREN - to be at continued risk of further harm then the laws are inadequate and must be changed!"

More Islamic democracy coming? "Protests over Kyrgyzstan's disputed parliamentary polls have turned violent, with four people reported killed in a police assault on an occupied government building in the former Soviet republic. Angered at what they saw as votes rigged to elect supporters of President Askar Akayev, protestors stormed administration buildings in several southern cities in the Central Asian state following the March 13 elections".

Minimum wage fraud: "In the United States, federal and state politicians are eager to raise the minimum legal wage -- again. They have raised the minimum legal wage a dozen times before, but they complain that it is never enough. The prices of food, clothing, and shelter keep going up faster than wages. So politicians offer to solve this problem with a new law to raise wages. Don't fall for it. Politicians are the cause of the problem, not the solution."

Corrupt Arabs: "The Palestinian Authority's decision to purchase more than 100 new vehicles for all members of the Palestinian Legislative Council and the new cabinet has drawn sharp criticism from some Palestinians. The PA's 24 ministers will each receive a German Audi A-6 car, which costs $76,000. The 86 lawmakers will be given the cheaper version of Audi, the A-4, which costs an estimated $45,000. Palestinian columnist Yahya Rabah on Thursday attacked the decision to buy the expensive vehicles at a time when the PA is cutting expenditure in many fields, and can't pay police salaries."

Far-Left ACLU: "The American Civil Liberties Union has long trumpeted itself as the protector of America's freedoms. But in a bizarre tactical decision, it has decided to abdicate that self-appointed role in exchange for membership in the shrill chorus of Bush administration opponents. The decision to file suit against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in connection with the alleged abuse of foreign detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan places the ACLU outside of its stated mission. It also places the group firmly in opposition to an organization -- the US military -- that is actually working for what the ACLU purports to be about -- the protection of American freedoms".

Black racism OK? "At Tolliver's, a South Central barbershop where the political debate flies as fast as the haircutters' scissors, Eddie Ford bitterly denounces "Mexicans" and says he won't vote for Antonio Villaraigosa for mayor. Seated across from the 82-year-old barber, customer Tony Wafford argues for Villaraigosa over Mayor James Hahn in the May 17 runoff election. "Antonio will help bridge the gap and help break down some of this foolishness of blacks against Latinos and Latinos against blacks," the 48-year-old community activist said. From the debates in the city's barbershop to the gang warfare in the streets, friction between these two groups has been part of life in South Central since immigration transformed this predominantly African American community into one dominated by Latinos nearly two decades ago".

They are even saying it in the Sacramento Bee: "The success of January's elections in Iraq, new flashes of democracy in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and massive rallies in Lebanon are causing some critics of the Iraq war to reconsider their skepticism of President Bush's Middle East strategy. A few are pondering a question they once would have found unthinkable: Could Bush have been right about the war?"

A nice story here about one German who still feels gratitude to America. He paid a bundle to put a big American flag in the middle of a Left-wing newspaper.

My latest posting on MarxWords marks the end of the material I have to put up there. So I summarize what I see as the underlying theme in Marx's writing. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" takes a Christian look at the Greens.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/21/2005 09:21:00 PM

Sunday, March 20, 2005

 
THE U.N. MAFIA FIRES AN HONEST MAN

"A former United Nations monitor of the organization's oil-for-food program in Iraq told a congressional committee Thursday that the program had 'gaping holes' and that large amounts of aid never reached the Iraqi people. Rehan Mullick testified that by his estimate more than 20 percent of the shipments to Iraq, worth $1 billion a year, were not distributed properly, with many goods pilfered by the Iraqi military. 'A fourth or fifth of the supplies were not distributed,' he said."

Mullick worked for two years in Iraq as a data analyst for the program designed to permit Iraq, while under international economic sanctions stemming from its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, to export a limited amount of its crude oil reserves and import food, medicine and supplies screened by the United Nations. "Soon after I started my job, it became amply evident that there were gaping holes in U.N.'s efforts to meet [its] objectives," Mullick told the committee... The United Nations would routinely send contract information for approved imports to Baghdad, and U.N. staff in Iraq were expected to ensure the goods reached their destination. But Mullick said "Saddam loyalists" with jobs at the U.N. mission corrupted the program's data. "A lot of items that were held back or redirected by the government of Iraq were never observed," Mullick's statement said.

Mullick told the subcommittee that he repeatedly alerted U.N. officials of problems he observed but was rebuffed. "Each suggestion resulted in my supervisors reducing my job responsibilities," Mullick said. "This continued to occur until my only job was to run the slide projector at staff meetings." Mullick said he eventually submitted a 10-page report to U.N. headquarters in 2002 reporting that 22 percent of supplies imported under the program never reached Iraq's 27 million people. "I heard nothing," Mullick said. "Finally I was contacted and told my contract was not being renewed."

Mullick described the United Nations as having "old mafia-style management." He added in his statement, "Had the U.N. chosen to listen to and offer protection to those who blow the whistle on bureaucratic injustice and corruption, a program like oil for food would have worked more in the interest of the impoverished Iraqi people rather than their detractors."

More details here. There is a site here devoted to getting America to withdraw from the U.N.

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

ELSEWHERE

An email from one of my medical correspondents about Terri Schiavo: "The court record for Terrri Schiavo says she has "no cortical function" -this means that her brain waves show a flat electroencephalogram (EEG). A neurologist - a very trustworthy man - told me that this means that she has no cognitive function or awareness; The "following the balloon" test is meaningless - it can't be reliably reproduced; and even patients with only lower brain (brainstem) function do it sometimes. And such patients also show some reaction to sounds and touch. If this is true, there just isn't much to save. And Terri is NOT awake. And she is NOT going to "get better", as her parents have said. Terri's condition is NOT the same as the lady who "woke up" and "talked" after being in a coma for 20 years. The neurologist described this as a "locked in" syndrome. This is often the result of damage to the brainstem without "cortical" damage - this is caused by mechanical injury or stroke or bleeding. Terri, in contrsast, suffered "ischemic" damage - lack of flow of blood and oxygen to the brain - the cortex (thinking, consciousness, pain) is the first to be damaged - the most sensitive part of the brain to oxygen lack. The "locked in" patients may have normal brain function and be alert, as noted by EEG studies - which may demonstrate changes with stimulation and sleep patterns etc.. To the untrained eye, these two may look similar. Terri's condition is NOT the same as those who report "waking up" after years in a "coma". I believe a lot of well meaning people are sorely misinformed about Terri's condition".

Antiwar movement runs out of puff: "MoveOn.org, the Berkeley-birthed online hub that fueled anti-Bush sentiment before the invasion and now boasts 3 million members, has moved on. Critics on the left complain that it is spending too much energy on such issues as Social Security reform and Bush's judicial appointments, and not enough on opposing the occupation. MoveOn.org Executive Director Eli Pariser told liberal-leaning media critic Norman Solomon recently that the group "is seeing a broad difference of opinion among our members on how quickly the U.S. should get out of Iraq. As a grassroots-directed organization, we won't be taking any opinion which a large portion of our members disagree with."

Still some opposition to homosexuality: "Warning of divine retribution and possible violent protest, evangelical Christians and rabbis from the United States have joined forces with ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel to fight plans to hold an international gay festival in Jerusalem this summer. The WorldPride Parade, last held in Rome in 2000, is a 10-day event including street parties, workshops and a gay film festival. Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jewish mayor, Uri Lupolianski, says he is powerless to interfere, as public events are licensed by the police, not City Hall. At a news conference Wednesday, California pastor Leo Giovinetti said hosting the 10-day World Pride event could bring divine retribution upon Jerusalem, citing the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorra as a precedent."

Muslims kick out Christians: ""Christian groups and some other private relief agencies are being asked to halt their work in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh and leave the area by March 26, Indonesia's defense minister said yesterday. The decision likely will target Western and smaller church groups as the government moves to tighten control over reconstruction work in Aceh, the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency. 'We want each of the relief agencies to be transparent in their programs: Some of them are not clear about their mandates,' said Juwono Sudarsono during an interview in a Washington hotel. 'Aceh is mostly Muslim, and some church groups from Australia and the United States are too eager to be there and do their part,' he said. Sudarsono said his government had set March 26 some weeks ago as a target date for moving from the disaster-relief phase of post-tsunami operations to the reconstruction phase."

Israel does its part: "Israel handed control over security in this quiet desert town back to the Palestinians yesterday after weeks of haggling, highlighting the improving relations between the two sides but also the lingering suspicions after more than four years of fighting. The Israeli army dismantled the westernmost of three checkpoints surrounding Jericho and eased travel restrictions in and out of the West Bank town, but kept troops poised along a main highway nearby. ... A number of Palestinian checkpoints were erected following the Israeli moves. The handover, complete with a small signing ceremony and the lowering of an Israeli flag at the checkpoint west of Jericho, marked one of the first practical steps toward restoring Palestinian security control over the West Bank since Mahmoud Abbas was elected Palestinian president two months ago."

Well, it is clear now that Saddam DID have WMDs. Even the NYT admits it. GWB vindicated yet again. But as Christopher Hitchens asks: "This Was Not Looting. How did Saddam's best weapons plants get plundered?"

Wicked Thoughts now has a second blog -- called "Strange Justice" -- which records some of the more appalling miscarriages of justice that are happening. Very disquieting reading.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes again Engels showing his contempt for Russians. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" deals with the Bible view of the death penalty.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/20/2005 07:49:00 PM

Saturday, March 19, 2005

 
"MASS TRANSIT" -- ANOTHER STUPID ANTI-INDIVIDUAL IDEA

Boring, inconvenient, slow old buses and trains are still boring, inconvenient, slow old buses and trains no matter what you call them. And the "liberals" who advocate them ride around in SUV's, funnily enough. At least they mostly seem to have given up calling it "Rapid Transit", as rapid is exactly what it wasn't most of the time

"The new transportation bill, currently working its way through Congress, will provide more than $52 billion for mass transit.... There are just two problems with mass transit. Nobody uses it, and it costs like hell. Only 4% of Americans take public transportation to work. Even in cities they don't do it. Less than 25% of commuters in the New York metropolitan area use public transportation. Elsewhere it's far less--9.5% in San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, 1.8% in Dallas-Fort Worth. As for total travel in urban parts of America--all the comings and goings for work, school, shopping, etc.--1.7 % of those trips are made on mass transit.

Then there is the cost, which is--obviously--$52 billion. Less obviously, there's all the money spent locally keeping local mass transit systems operating. The Heritage Foundation says, "There isn't a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides." Heritage cites the Minneapolis "Hiawatha" light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price".

More here:

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

ELSEWHERE

A good article here showing that capitalism in fact ended slavery rather than being founded on it. Excerpt: "I pointed out that slavery had been an ever-present institution throughout human history until just about 200 years ago. Why didn't slaveholders of 2,000 years ago in Europe or 500 years ago in Asia accumulate wealth that triggered economic growth comparable to ours? Why is Latin America so much poorer today than the United States, given that the Spaniards and Portuguese who settled that part of the world were enthusiastic slavers? Indeed, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil -- in 1888, a quarter-century after U.S. abolition. By American and western European standards, Brazil remains impoverished. And why, having abolished slavery decades before their Southern neighbors, were Northern U.S. states wealthier than Southern states before the Civil War? .... The fact is that slavery disappeared only as industrial capitalism emerged. And it disappeared first where industrial capitalism appeared first: Great Britain. This was no coincidence. Slavery was destroyed by capitalism".

"The poor" -- in what sense? "Wealthier is healthier -- and more educated, more equal for women, more electrified, automotive, and computer-literate. So the conventional wisdom in development economics has long been that to boost the prospects of the world's poor, one needs to boost their incomes. This is still true, but as World Bank economist Charles Kenny points out in a provocative article titled 'Why Are We Worried About Income? Nearly Everything that Matters is Converging,' income growth does not tell the full story. Even though some of the world's poorest people are not earning much more than they were two generations ago, they're still living much better than they were. In fact, many quality of life indicators are converging toward levels found in the richer countries."

It's true about male flight attendants: "Most studies of gays stem from a sample of convenience because the universe of the homosexual population is unknown. The flight attendants were chosen for study due to the large population of gay adult men within the profession. Men in the profession of male flight attendants are considered to be members of an underrepresented social-political group and are reported to be stigmatized. Until 1972 when men first entered the profession, flight attendant jobs were traditionally staffed by women. The findings reported in this dissertation research project indicate that the men's job selection of flight attendant reflected a choice to integrate their needs as gay men with work. The job of flight attendant was reported by many of the men as a vehicle for movement into a large group of gay men with some hope of finding companionship, sexual relationships, and in some cases, a long-term partner. The job of flight attendant was also sought as a means of escape from either family, a community, or a job that stifled being gay. Many of the participants reported that both before and after taking the job, the working atmosphere of a flight attendant was perceived as being safe for a gay man"

Consensual sex = abuse? "A bill that seeks to overhaul Missouri's child abuse reporting laws could require teachers, doctors, nurses and others to report sexually active teenagers and children to the state's abuse hot line.... Perhaps the most controversial provision of the bill is one that many say would require educators, medical personnel and other professionals to report "substantial evidence of sexual intercourse by an unmarried minor under the age of consent." Critics say the language would, in essence, require child abuse reports even of cases of consensual sex between two teens. Byrd claims the bill seeks only to target sex by children under the age of 15".

The "Arab street" turns out to be pro-democracy: "Middle Easterners in general have every reason to be inspired by what the so-called "Arab street" can accomplish. Military support from a superpower isn't necessary always and everywhere. It's only really required in countries like Iraq, where a Stalinist political system makes revolution impossible. In weaker "merely" authoritarian countries it's now a demonstrable fact that people-power can work. Right now we're seeing two revolutions at once: a literal revolution by the "Arab street" against a dictatorship, and an intellectual revolution in the West about what "Arab street" means in the first place.... The "Arab street," said the propaganda ministries of these same despicable tyrannies, was supposed to rise up against America, against the West in general, and against any so-called "moderate" pro-Western Middle East governments in particular. What else would you expect them to say? They want nothing more than to channel the rage of their own brutalized subjects toward anyone but themselves. But that's not what happened. Surprise, surprise. The Arab street -- at least in one country -- took its cue not from Osama bin Laden's jihad but from Ukraine's Orange Revolution instead".

Pretty accurate: "Liberals, and the left in general, are parasites on human society. Without the power to compel others to materially support them the members of the left would be compelled either to become rational and productive beings or literally die off".

Astute Blogger has a good post on "ignorance, arrogance and the Left"

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Engels was paranoid about the Slavs. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" deals with the Greenie influence among evangelicals.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/19/2005 07:12:00 PM

Friday, March 18, 2005

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

Consumer confidence and consumer spending equal twaddle Every day in some paper or other an economics commentator will solemnly write about the state of consumer confidence or spending
Australian economy: how high must interest rates go to stop the boom? The policy of unleashing an avalanche of credit into the economy triggered off an inflationary boom which eventually forced interest rates to rise
Keynesianism and interest rates Still lurking in the Keynesian woodshed is the myth that interest is a monetary phenomenon that is artificially keeping capital scarce
The myth of the neutral interest rate policy It is widely accepted that by means of suitable monetary policies the US central bank can navigate the economy towards a growth path of economic stability and prosperity. This view is false.
Phillip Adams: keeping the red flag flying and other media delights The far left's most embarrassing spruiker, Phillip Adams, is entering a twilight state of advanced, ossified senility

Details here

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

ELSEWHERE

Surprise! Leftist intellectuals back Cuba: "About 200 intellectuals, activists and artists from Latin America and elsewhere issued a letter Monday urging the top United Nations human rights watchdog to side with Cuba in an expected battle over the communist country's rights record..... Nobel Peace Prize laureates including Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina and Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala signed the letter, as did South Africa's Nadine Gordimer and Portugal's Jose Saramago, both recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among American signatories were actor Danny Glover, author Alice Walker and historian and activist Howard Zinn." [Leftists like Castro because when they meet him he sounds just like them. And he sounds just like them because he IS like them. The only difference is that he is in power]

Non-existent airline security again: "Federal agents arrested 27 illegal immigrants at the Piedmont/Triad International Airport in Greensboro, North Carolina. What were these guys doing when they were arrested? They were working on commercial jet airliners! You know, like the ones that al Qaeda terrorists flew into the Twin Towers on 9-11. This strikes me as a pretty lax approach to national security. These 27 men originally came from a variety of countries, including Sudan, Chile, Peru, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Venezuela, Mexico, and Laos. But they had one thing in common: they almost all possessed valid North Carolina driver's licenses - as well as other documents including airplane-repair licenses, phony Social Security documents, counterfeit green cards, and even a falsified passport".

Border security bill added to war spending plan: "The House today added a bill aimed at tightening border security to the $81.3 billion war spending package, a politically charged measure that has drawn criticism from Mexico but praise from some lawmakers for thwarting terrorism. By voice vote, the House attached the bill that would require states to verify they aren't giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses, would give judges broader power to deport political asylum seekers whom they suspect may be terrorists and would allow the completion of a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border."

Another female columnist comments on Estrich: "Take Susan Estrich, the fiftysomething American feminist law professor and commentator, and her battle with Michael Kinsley, opinion page editor of the Los Angeles Times.... Entertaining as it is, the now-famous email exchange (at http://www.dcexaminer.com) exposes two things: that Estrich doesn't deserve a column in the Los Angeles Times because she can't write coherently; and that what "popped her cork", to use Kinsley's phrase, was actually a Los Angeles Times opinion piece ... written by a woman. Only it was the wrong sort of woman, a conservative. The catalyst for Estrich's rage was an article, headlined, "Feminist Fatale: Where are the great women thinkers?", which claimed that ideological feminism had "ghettoised and trivialised the subject matter of women's writing" and "tried to systematically shut out - and shout out - dissent". The article was by Charlotte Allen, an elegant writer who edits the inkWell weblog for the Independent Women's Forum, an American pro-woman organisation run by women, established "to combat the women-as-victim, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism".... Estrich wanted a column in the Los Angeles Times and thought she could bully her way into one. Her brand of feminism is reserved only for women like her, which is probably why it has lost its appeal".

Peace freak: "A member of an evangelical church that preaches non- violence pulled a gun at a weekly service and fatally wounded seven parishioners before killing himself. The man, identified as Terry Ratzmann, 45, shot 11 people as he walked down the aisle through the 80-person congregation of the Living Church of God at a suburban Sheraton hotel on Saturday, then turned the gun on himself.... Neighbours said that Ratzmann was a computer programmer and avid gardener who had built a garage, a greenhouse and a filtration system that collected rainwater for fish tanks, in which he raised trout. One neighbour described him as so gentle that when rabbits got through his fence, he snared them in humane traps and drove miles to release them. "He was the quietest guy in the world, the nicest," he said".

That "diverse" old Philadelphia: "Police and prosecutors concerned with a spate of killings in the city begged the public for more help identifying murderers. District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham vowed that her office will protect witnesses, even if it means sending a moving van to their home to take them to safety the day they come forward. "We cannot only move you out of the city, we can move you out of the state; we can move you across the country," Abraham said. Within the past eight days there have been 21 homicides in Philadelphia, including three in the late-night and early morning hours after the prosecutor made her appeal Monday. The latest deaths brought Philadelphia's 2005 murder total to 78, up from 66 at the same point a year ago, police said. Homicide Capt. Richard Ross said police have had to solve most of the crimes without the public's help."

Abortion: Britain's Conservative leader has come out saying that he wants abortion to be more restricted than it now is (One in four London pregnancies now end in abortion). He has won the endorsement of the Catholic Church over his remarks but whether he will have the guts to campaign on it in the forthcoming election remains to be seen. Details here

Israeli cabinet minister and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky is very popular in the White House so the Left loathe him. Steven Plaut has the story.

Michael Darby has re-emerged with lots of information about the state of play in disastrous Zimbabwe plus other posts on China, East Timor and slavery. See here (PDF).

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

My latest posting on MarxWords shows Marx's contempt for Disraeli. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" deals with the "missing" resurrection appearances in Mark.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/18/2005 07:46:00 PM

 
On behalf of all my Irish ancestors, a happy Pat's day to all!




WHAT IS CONSERVATISM?

I am always amused at how well Disraeli's propaganda has lasted. Although the idea was not original to him, it is mainly Disraeli whom we have to thank for rebranding the British Tories in the 19th century as the "Conservatives". And the reason Disraeli did that is a very modern one. Under his leadership, the Tories became a great party of reform. It was Disraeli who introduced some of Britain's first worker protection laws and who extended the vote to many working class people who had never had it before. So he named his party according to what it WASN'T in order to confuse his opponents and reassure his allies. Communists do the same thing when they label their governments as "Democratic".

So why did Disraeli lead the Tories so far down the road of reform? Because he saw that the pressure to give the vote to the workers would in the end be irresistible. There had long been agitation for it and that agitation was getting ever more energetic. So what he wanted to do was to avoid another French Revolution. He wanted the transition to majority rule to be peaceful, orderly, non-destructive and non-tyrannical. He succeeded brilliantly. He succeeded in moving the Tories away from being a party of the rich to being a party for all Englishmen and he rightly saw that working class Englishmen could be relied on for patriotism and good sense just as well as more prosperous Englishmen could be. And that is true to this day.

So while it is true that Disraeli wanted to conserve what was best from the past, conserving anything was for him no more than a means to an end. And if that end needed reform to achieve it, that was fine too. So what was he aiming at achieving by his reforms? Unlike Leftists, he was not aiming at equalizing everybody or creating the worker-led tyranny that his contemporary, Karl Marx, was advocating. He was aiming at the opposite of that. He wanted to preserve civility and avoid tyranny. He wanted people to be free to get on with their lives without interference from other people or from the State. He was part of that great tradition in English politics that values individual liberty and suspects the State. And that tradition goes back a long way in England -- right back to the time when Britannia became England about 1500 years ago. The advocates of the individual versus the collectivity have not always been called conservatives but in England they have always been there -- as I set out at length here

Even conservative intellectuals these days still sometimes fall for Disraeli's old propaganda trick (see e.g. here) and assume that the prime aim of conservatives is to conserve -- but in so doing they simply show their ignorance of history. Liberty for the individual is the prime aim of conservatives -- everything else is secondary to that. And present day politics are much like the politics of Disraeli's day. Conservatives don't want to conserve our disastrous educational and social welfare systems, they want to reform them. And they want to reform them by empowering the individual -- just as conservatives have always done.

The most loved and most influential conservative leader of the 20th century knew what conservatism was about, of course. He said: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism..... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom". And if Ronald Reagan did not know what conservatism is, who would?

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

ELSEWHERE

Why liberty is necessary for morality: "A sad result of so explaining the merits of a free society is that it begins to look like liberty is the enemy of morality. And it is just this way that a good many people have understood the Western tradition of liberalism. They have come to believe that if you accept the Western idea of a free society, you must not care about morality at all. Indeed, arguably a great many enemies of the West hold such a view. Love the West, reject morality; love morality, reject the West. Yet this is completely wrong. In point of fact precisely the opposite is true. The reason the Western idea of a free society makes a great deal of sense is that unless people make their moral choices and act on them freely, there cannot be anything morally praiseworthy in what they do."

Scientists still prefer to work in America: "As a result, scientists once again are headed to the United States. "If you are talking about the applied sciences, like semiconductors or computing, the employment opportunities are generally considered much better in the United States because there are relatively few companies doing that kind of research work in Europe," Lynch told United Press International. The pay also is better in the United States, agreed experts who talked to UPI. "There are big pay differentials; there are (job) security, tenure-type differentials. If you are talking about pure academics then the big problem in Europe is often that the positions offered to young academics are a year long, no more. And that means, again, they have a real difficulty with having any sort of security of the position," Lynch said. That makes it difficult for young professionals who want to start a family, he added.... The higher pay reflects a more positive American view of science, Lynch said, a part of a larger world of possibilities that attracts skilled scientists and engineers to the United States. "There is a can-do attitude in the U.S. which is very positive and very encouraging to the scientific mindset".

Leftist union backs down: "It's amazing what a lot bad publicity can accomplish in less than 24 hours. On Sunday, the Scribe Journal noted that the Detroit News released a statement from the UAW in reference to Marine Reservists using their parking lot. The UAW banned the Marines if the drove a foreign car, or supported President George W. Bush. That was a very poor choice and must driven the unions' image into the dirt very quickly. Monday night, another statement was released by the UAW reversing the ridiculous policy. It was penned by UAW President Ron Gettelfinger".

Canadian taxes drive out investment: "Canadian direct investment in tax havens and other offshore financial centres has soared eight-fold since 1990 to $88-billion in 2003, says a report that has renewed calls for lower taxes to spur investment in this country.... "From 1990 to 2003, Canadian enterprises invested substantial and growing amounts in countries known as 'Offshore Financial Centres,' many of them in the Caribbean," StatsCan said. "These centres include countries that are often referred to as 'tax havens,' as well as those which have important financial sectors, such as Switzerland, but also Ireland."... John Williamson, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said yesterday the inclusion of Ireland among the top five should send Ottawa a message. "That is a country that Canada could learn so much from. They pursued a policy of lower taxes to stimulate economic growth and have succeeded to the point that not only is their economy strong, but it is attracting Canadian capital," he said."

My latest posting on MarxWords shows again that Marx, like Hitler, saw war as being beneficial. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" deals with the two stories of creation in Genesis.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/18/2005 12:52:00 AM

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

 
THE READER'S DIGEST

I bought my first subscription to the Reader's Digest out of my pocket-money in 1956 when I was 13 so I appreciate the truth of the comments below. The only downside is that I am still getting mail from them!

"Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman," said the late Susan Sontag in 1982. "Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?"

These were surprising words, spoken by a surprising source. Supposedly high-brow intellectuals such as Sontag weren't supposed to credit the supposedly low-brow Reader's Digest with anything - and especially not moral clarity. Indeed, Sontag's remarks ignited a firestorm of controversy on the Left, whose guardians of political correctness usually viewed condemnations of Soviet totalitarianism as provocative and suspicious.

Sontag's remarks were possible because her enemies were right, and Reader's Digest was a bastion of anti-Communism during the Cold War. Friedrich Hayek once credited the popular success of his book The Road to Serfdom to the fact that the Digest had published a condensed version of it.

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

ELSEWHERE

Sometimes American conservatives can be utterly ignorant. Jim Kalb insults all conservatives who are not religious: "Can there be a secular conservatism? My answer is no, at least if conservatism is to be more than the view of a few comfortable intellectuals. "Conservatism" can mean many things, but it always involves a sense that in the most basic ways life can't be understood or controlled. At bottom, we have to accept and cooperate with things as they have been given us by God, nature, history or chance". [How then does he explain that Australia is at once one of the world's most irreligious countries and also one of the world's most conservative countries?. More on this issue here]

The New York Times rediscovers race: "Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist. The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." ... Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong."

Hot climates cause poverty? Groan! Nobody told the Singaporeans or Northern Australians: "Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent US economist and a special adviser to the UN secretary general, argues in a new book that extreme poverty could be eradicated by 2025.... Professor Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the head of the UN's Millennium Project, formulating anti-poverty goals. In an excerpt from his book published in Time magazine, he says there is little evidence that corruption has been the main obstacle to development in Africa, where extreme poverty is concentrated. Rather, he blames the geographical and climatic conditions that have contributed to drought and disease..."

VAWA ignores epidemic of violent women: "In the past few weeks newspapers all over the country have been brimming with accounts of women who engaged in monstrous crimes. To avoid giving offense, I provide only the sketchiest of details here: Dena Schlosser severed off both of her daughter's arms with a knife. Nathshay Ward starved her three children to death. Kim Tran mutilated her boyfriend in a gruesome act of revenge. These women don't exist, and these gruesome crimes never happened. At least that's what the Violence Against Women Act would have us believe."

"DEAth" for disabled pain-sufferers: "Question: What is the greatest barrier to proper healthcare for most people suffering from chronic pain or debilitating injuries? Answer: The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Picture if you will: You were born with some genetic malformations [and] bad hereditary traits. ... Then, from your late teens into your early thirties, you've [had] excruciating headaches and other pains, and have spent your life since mostly searching for some relief for either. [Y]ou finally discover a pain-management specialist truly worthy of the name. ... Enter the DEA: Your doctor can only prescribe so large a dose, [or] be ... investigated for 'drug-trafficking'! ... Moreover, all your prescriptions are tightly controlled ... each two-week/one-month period they may not be refilled until the day after the previous ones run out. If there is any delay in [procuring them] ... you must go without until it (or they) arrive(s)."

The Palestinian pathology: "Terrorism is a Palestinian tradition that must end. But in order to bring about this desperately needed change, not only must the Palestinian people cease to show sympathy with their indigenous terrorist organizations, so too must Westerners, both in Europe and in the United States. Sympathy with the Palestinian people is in order, but not sympathy for the institution that has held them back from all progress toward a genuinely responsible civic polity. For that is what terrorism has become among the Palestinians -- it is their peculiar institution, the way slavery was the peculiar institution of the American South in the nineteenth century. For, like the slave system, terrorism, deployed as a means of achieving political goals, ends by poisoning the society that permits it to flourish in its midst".

Hollywood dummos as heroes: "Arguably, the biggest problem in American culture today is the fact that mere entertainers are its heroes.... Prior to the rise of American popular culture, entertainers could never even dream of being the most important members of a society, engaged as they were in a frivolous past-time that helped the folks escape their solemn responsibilities for a short time. In our time, however, the incredible has happened. The court jester has become the king. Those who play the heroes have become the culture's actual heroes. Those who direct fantasy movies are directing the direction of our youth. And with entertainers as the principal people we look up to, so much of our society has become silly and trivial..... The consequences for the elevation of people who perform inconsequential tasks to the center of national attention are enormous. Even if our Hollywood celebrities were not the most damaged people in our society - drugged up, divorced, with even their kids in rehab - the results would still be tragic. By making fashion models our role models, Hollywood heroines our heroes, and singers into saints, we have created a shallow and vain society, distinguished not by sacrifice, but by indulgence. We have created a culture known not for virtue, but for vanity."

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx despised even his fellow Germans. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" has more on the day of judgment.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/16/2005 09:16:00 PM

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I take apart the Leftist claim that American Christians are "Nazis".

On Political Correctness Watch I note the self-contradictory nature of the "precautionary principle".

On Greenie Watch I note one example of Greenies losing a round.

On Leftists as Elitists I note that the Leftist academic elite is getting challenged

On Socialized Medicine I note that Britain's public hospitals have big dangers that private hospitals do not

On Education Watch I note that Harvard has in effect joined the USSR

On Gun Watch there are some lessons from the death of a Texas hero

On A Scripture Blog I look at two views of the afterlife

On MarxWords I note that, like Hitler, Marx saw war as a healthy influence.

On Majority Rights I explain neo-Nazi thinking

On Blogger News I point out that the recent slayings in an Atlanta courthouse were the result of political correctness

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

ELSEWHERE

Good one! "A nationally syndicated columnist who is openly homosexual is offering what he calls "a truly radical step" to curb unsafe sex -- forcing HIV-positive homosexual men who knowingly or negligently spread the virus to be financially accountable to their affected sexual partners"

Leftist journalists let themselves off the hook: "Media coverage of the Iraq war by the American media was not biased in favour or against the war, according to new research, despite claims the coverage was generally biased and negative. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington think tank affiliated with Columbia University's school of journalism, looked at more than 2000 stories in newspapers and on television and websites. Most were "straight" news reports, according to the survey's director, Tom Rosenstiel, with 25 per cent of the stories positive and 20 per cent negative. The rest could not be classified one way or the other". But some things were too blatant to be glossed over: "The report also looks at coverage of the presidential election campaign last year. It found 36 per cent of stories on Mr Bush were negative compared with 12 per cent for John Kerry, with 20 per cent of stories positive for Mr Bush, compared with 30 per cent for Senator Kerry. Mr Rosenstiel said these figures did not necessarily reflect bias"

British disgrace: "The British military "tolerates" bullying in its ranks, a long-awaited report said today following an investigation triggered by the deaths of four young army recruits. The report by a parliamentary defence committee said the military - particularly the army - failed to block abuse of its soldiers and called for an independent commission to evaluate future complaints of bullying and harassment.... The inquiry was launched in November after new allegations emerged over abuses at the Deepcut training camp in Surrey, southeast England, where four recruits, aged 17 to 20, died from gunshot wounds in mysterious circumstances between 1995 and 2002. A police inquiry released last year into their deaths revealed more than 100 claims of gang rape, sexual harassment, racism and systematic bullying at Deepcut.... it slammed the "lack of transparency in the investigative process" following the deaths, and said that military and police investigators should "think murder" instead of writing off some deaths as suicides. Relatives of the Deepcut four have rejected army explanations that the soldiers killed themselves - one recruit suffered two bullet wounds to the head - while police have said no evidence of murder could be found."

Nathan Tabor is continuing his campaign of using the internet for consumer protection. All libertarians will approve. Nashville, Tennessee is the problem spot today.

More attention-seeking behaviour "Those fish-lovers at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have added Vice President Dick Cheney to the public figures on their most-wanted list. Just a few weeks after they asked former President Jimmy Carter to turn in his rod and reel, they are urging Cheney to give up fishing. "We hope," says PETA's Karin Robertson , "that you will agree that tormenting these sensitive animals is a pastime that belongs in the past.""

Logical Meme has some good comments about a recent study that seems to show that watching TV makes you more conservative! I think that watching TV probably does have some tendency to make reality more vivid and reality is certainly the enemy of Leftism. People would still believe in Communism if they didn't know how it pans out in reality. No wonder Leftists keep trying to tell us that there is no such thing as reality!

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx welcomed economic depression. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" has a few more comments on the NT teachings about the day of judgment.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/15/2005 07:52:00 PM

Monday, March 14, 2005

 
NEO-NAZIS AS OUT-OF-FASHION THINKERS

I have already pointed out at length elsewhere that Hitler was a Leftist in terms of the Leftism of his day and that practically all of his thinking was prefigured in the thinking of Marx & Engels.

If he was so Leftist, however, how come that Hitler's few remaining admirers in at least the Anglosphere countries all seem to be on the political far-Right? This tiny band even refer to themselves as "The Right", in fact. How do I know that? I know that because I in fact happen to be one of the very few people to have studied neo-Nazis intensively. And I have reported my findings about them in the academic journals -- see here and here.

Initially, however, I must point out that the description "Far-Right" is a great misnomer for the successors of Hitler in modern-day Germany. As I have pointed out elsewhere, modern-day German neo-Nazis are demonstrably just as Leftist as Hitler was. So are American, British and Australian neo-Nazis also Leftist in any sense?

The answer to that is a simple one: They are pre-war Leftists, just as Hitler was. They are a relic in the modern world of thinking that was once common on the Left but no longer is. They are a hangover from the past in every sense. They are antisemitic just as Hitler was. They are racial supremacists just as Hitler was. They are advocates of discipline just as Hitler was. They are advocates of national unity just as Hitler was. They glorify war just as Hitler did etc. And all those things that Hitler advocated were also advocated among the prewar American Left.

That does however raise the question of WHY such thinking is seen as "Rightist" today. And the answer to THAT goes back to the nature of Leftism! The political content of Leftism varies greatly from time to time. The sudden about-turn of the Left on antisemitism in recent times is vivid proof of that. And what the political content of Leftism is depends on the Zeitgeist -- the conventional wisdom of the day. Leftists take whatever is commonly believed and push it to extremes in order to draw attention to themselves as being the good guys -- the courageous champions of popular causes. So when the superiority of certain races was commonly accepted, Leftists were champions of racism. So when eugenics was commonly accepted as wise, Leftists were champions of eugenics -- etc. In recent times they have come to see more righteousness to be had from championing the Palestinian Arabs than from championing the Jews so we have seen their rapid transition from excoriating antisemitism to becoming "Antizionist".

But the thinking of the man in the street does not change nearly as radically as Leftists do. Although it may no longer be fashionable, belief in the superiority of whites over blacks is still widespread, for instance. Such beliefs have become less common but they have not gone away. They are however distinctly non-Leftist in today's climate of opinion so are usually defined as "Rightist" by default. So the beliefs of the neo-Nazis are Rightist only in the default sense of not being currently Leftist. They are part of the general stream of popular thinking but that part of it which is currently out of fashion. I say a little more on that elsewhere.

And so it is because the old-fashioned thinking of the neo-Nazis is these days thoroughly excoriated by the Left that they see themselves as of the Right and reject any idea that they are socialists. I can attest from my own extensive interviews with Australian neo-Nazis (see here and here) that they mostly blot out any mention of Hitler's socialism from their consciousness. The most I ever heard any of them make out of it was that, by "socialism", Hitler was simply referring to national solidarity and everybody pulling together -- which was indeed a major part of Hitler's message and which has been a major aim of socialism from Hegel on. And things like autarky (national self-sufficiency) and government control of the whole of society were attractive to them too so they were in fact far more socialist than they would ever have acknowledged. They don't realize that they are simply old-fashioned Leftists. Since most of the world seems to have forgotten what pre-war Leftism consisted of, however, that is hardly surprising.

And the neo-Nazis are assisted in their view of themselves as Rightist by Hitler's anticommunism. The falling-out among the Nazis and the Communists was in Hitler's day largely a falling-out among thieves but the latter half of the second world war made the opposition between the two very vivid in the public consciousness so that opposition has become a major part of the definition of what Nazism is. And Marxism/Leninism was avowedly internationalist rather than racist. Lenin and the Bolsheviks despised nationalism and wished to supplant national solidarity with class solidarity. Given the contempt for Slavs often expressed by Marx & Engels, one can perhaps understand that Lenin and his Russian (Slavic) Bolsheviks concentrated so heavily on Marx & Engels's vision of international worker solidarity and ignored the thoroughly German nationalism also often expressed by Engels in particular.

That class-war was the best way to better the economic position of the worker was, however, never completely obvious. The Fascists did not think so nor did most Leftists in democratic countries. Nonetheless, the internationalist and class-based (rather than race-based) nature of Communism did have the effect in the postwar era of identifying Leftism with skepticism about patriotism, nationalism and any feeling that the traditions of one's own country were of great value. The result of this was that people with strong patriotic, nationalist and traditionalist feelings in the Anglo-Saxon countries felt rather despised and oppressed by the mostly Leftist intelligentsia and sought allies and inspiration wherever they could. And Hitler was certainly a great exponent of national pride, community traditions and patriotism. So those who felt marginalized by their appreciation of their own traditional values and their own community must have been tempted in some extreme cases to feel some sympathy for Hitler.

And if anybody thinks that all this talk about Hitler is harking back to a past that is now so distant as to be irrelevant, just look at what the book of the month is in Turkey! Islamic thinking is lost in the past too.

(An earlier version of this post appeared on Blogger News)

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

ELSEWHERE

The Leftist embrace of racism continues: "The proposed legislation would ordain a Native Hawaiian Governing Entity cobbled together by Native Hawaiians meeting a threshold of Native Hawaiian blood. The Entity would negotiate with the United States and the State of Hawaii for lands, natural resources, civil and criminal jurisdiction, and other matters within the customary purview of a sovereign. It would be a race-based state within a state: a government of Native Hawaiians, by Native Hawaiians, for Native Hawaiians"

What a disgrace in Atlanta! Several people had to die because of political correctness. A big black male prisoner is unhandcuffed and escorted by a little old female "guard". Was that asking for trouble or not? Here is what happened: "Brian Nichols, 34, is taken from the Fulton County Jail in northwest Atlanta to Fulton's new Justice Tower downtown. The tower backs up to the old courthouse. In a holding cell, Nichols' handcuffs are removed so he can change from his jail uniform to civilian clothes for his rape trial before Barnes. Sheriff's Deputy Cynthia Hall, 51, of Jonesboro is escorting him..... In or near the holding cell, Nichols attacks Deputy Hall. They struggle for at least three minutes. Nichols slams the deputy into the wall, takes her handgun and shoots her in the head. He flees with her weapon. Nichols crosses the 8th-floor skybridge linking the Justice Tower to the old courthouse. He takes three people hostage and enters the judge's private chambers. He rips out the telephone and searches the three for cell phones. He pops in and out of the office, returning with another deputy at gunpoint. He has taken the deputy's gun. Nichols handcuffs the deputy and pulls him into a closet. He then leaves. Moments later, shots are heard by his three captives. Witnesses say Nichols entered the courtroom from a door behind Judge Barnes' bench and shoots the judge in the back of the head. He then shoots court reporter Julie Ann Brandau of Snellville. Neither survive". [Because of "diversity" some of the guards have to be female of course and age cannot be mentioned. How "correct"! Because of "respect" for criminals, he was not handcuffed when taken into court. How "sensitive"!]

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx thought war was a healthy influence. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at two views of the afterlife.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/14/2005 08:02:00 PM

Sunday, March 13, 2005

 
CASTRO: NEW BOOK FROM REGNERY

Castro is the "charming and idealist" dictator loved by Hollywood, academia, and the liberal media. However, what The New York Times doesn't tell you is that behind his charisma lies a merciless dictator and mass murderer who outnumbered the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate during his first three months in power. In Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, journalist, acclaimed author, and Cuban emigre Humberto Fontova shatters the myths and exposes the truth about the liberal elites' love affair with Castro-revealing the propaganda of media inaccuracies of the past forty-three years.

Fidel is a shocking confirmation of how one dictator has murdered, impoverished, and tyrannized a country that once had the eleventh highest living standard in the world-yet remains American liberals' favorite dictator. In hundreds of interviews with former Castro regime officials, anti-Castro freedom fighters, and Castro's political prisoners, Fontova reveals the truth about "Cuba's President." Fidel discloses horrific tales of the Castro regime, including his failed terrorist plot on New York City, atrocious human rights record, and blood-drenched Cuban Revolution.

More details here

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

ELSEWHERE

I am still getting mail about my recent posts pointing out that Hitler was a socialist. Most of it is from Leftists who have obviously not read a single link that I put up in that connection but the following email from a regular correspondent gave me a bit of a laugh: "Your recent post about Leftists not accepting the fact that Hitler was a socialist raises a question that has puzzled me for a long time: just what do socialists think socialism is? In the broadest strokes I think their reasoning is essentially something like this: "socialism is all that is good and lovely. Hitler was not good and lovely. Therefore Hitler cannot be a socialist." Sometimes I think it's no deeper than that, really.... But on a deeper level I think there is something else at work here: the Nazis were too organized and far too snazzy dressers to be contemporary leftists. Contemporary leftists these days seem to have a built-in suspicion of things like cleanliness and order and a weird worship for the criminal, the nutcase, the generally messed-up".

The new bankruptcy bill, which now looks like becoming law, has attracted enemies among both Leftists and Rightists (see e.g. here and here and here and here and here). There seems to be a general view that it is too harsh. I disagree. I think it is not tough enough. I do not see why anybody should EVER be discharged from bankruptcy until they have paid their debts. Why should anybody be legally allowed to thumb their nose at people who have provided them with goods and services in good faith? Debtors should work to repay their debts -- even if it takes years. Though I would exempt debts arising through tort law as such debts are largely random hazards these days and usually arise without any benefit being received by the debtor. One of my readers has written in on this subject too. See here. Bring back personal responsibility!

The usual Leftist substitution of abuse for discussion still seems to be going strong at Columbia University -- where far-Leftists are defending Islamist professors against student attempts to get balance into the classroom.

What a klutz English journalist Simon Jenkins is! He is best known for publishing an article claiming that there was no terrorist threat to Europe just a day or two before the Madrid bombing. Now he has published an article in The Times saying how ignorant and uninformed bloggers are compared to wise print journalists like himself. But he totally undermines his own case by showing his complete ignorance of blogs and blogging. The howlers in his article are innumerable. His article demonstrates exactly the OPPOSITE of what he asserts -- he shows by example that it is the print journalists who are the ignoramuses. Scott Burgess has the sorry details.

Young women yearn for 1950s role as stay-at-home mums: "They are the generation of women who grew up expecting to have it all. No longer forced to choose between children and a career, they were set to embrace superwomanhood by doing both - while holding down a perfect relationship and keeping a spotless home in their spare time. But modern woman has taken a reality check. The average 29-year-old now hankers for a return to the lifestyle of a 1950s housewife. The daughters of the "Cosmo" generation of feminists want nothing more than a happy marriage and domestic bliss in the countryside, according to a survey. Research into the attitudes of 1,500 women with an average age of 29 found that 61 per cent believe "domestic goddess" role models who juggle top jobs with motherhood and jet-set social lives are "unhelpful" and "irritating". More than two-thirds agree that the man should be the main provider in a family, while 70 per cent do not want to work as hard as their mother's generation. On average, the women questioned want to "settle down" with their partner by 30 and have their first child a year later".

Black-white gap in death rate: " Middle-age black men are dying at nearly twice the rate of white men of a similar age, reflecting lower incomes and poorer access to healthcare, a study says. But mortality among black infants is dropping. While overall longevity for both black and whites has improved during the past 40 years, the gap between the races has narrowed little, former Surgeon General David Satcher said in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs ..... One reason for the differences is that gains in healthcare access generally have not included black men unless they were older or disabled, Satcher said. For example, when Medicare became law, the average black man did not live long enough to become eligible, he said. Other factors include the relatively low incomes of black men compared with whites, a rise in gun-related deaths among blacks, their disproportionately high death rate from AIDS, and higher rates of heart disease and diabetes, Satcher said..... ''Strikingly, the homicide rate of black males in the highest education category exceeds that of white males in the lowest education group,'' Jackson and Williams wrote." [Looks like it's not all the fault of whites this time!]

America's Ayatollahs: "It is painfully ironic that we should be promoting the spread of democracy abroad when democracy is shrinking at home. Over the years, the outcomes of our elections have meant less and less, as judges have taken more and more decisions out of the hands of elected officials. Judges have imposed their own notions on everything from school administration to gay marriage, and have ordered both state and federal agencies to spend billions of dollars to carry out policies favored by the judges or have even ordered a state legislature to raise taxes. This naked exercise of judicial power has been covered by the fig leaf of pretense to be "interpreting" laws and the Constitution by stretching and twisting words beyond recognition.... While people in various countries in the Middle East are beginning to stir as they see democracy start to take root in Iraq, our own political system is moving steadily in the opposite direction, toward rule by unelected judicial ayatollahs, acting like the ayatollahs in Iran".

Wayne Lusvardi points out the junk science behind the latest claim that passive smoking causes breast cancer.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx ripped off his own father. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" has a bit more on the Anglican churches.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/13/2005 07:02:00 PM

Saturday, March 12, 2005

 
AN AMUSING "LEFTIST EVANGELICAL"

There is an interview with Jim Wallis the editor of Sojourners in the Leftist Mother Jones magazine in which Wallis tries to explain why Christians should be Leftists. Being a scripture blogger, I would have to write a very long article to point out all the dubious theology in the interview but I thought I might point out a couple of points that amused me. Some excerpts first:

"The Right is comfortable with the language of religion, values, God talk. So much so that they sometimes claim to own that territory. Or own God. But then they narrow everything down to one or two issues: abortion and gay marriage. I am an evangelical Christian, and I can't ignore thousands of verses in the Bible on [another] subject, which is poverty.... Jesus didn't speak at all about homosexuality. There are about 12 verses in the Bible that touch on that question. Most of them are very contextual. There are thousands of verses on poverty. I don't hear a lot of that conversation"

Notice how he just changes the subject on abortion. He says he can't ignore thousands of verses about poverty but he can apparently ignore verses relevant to abortion. And how about this verse? How does this fit in with the Leftist crusade to eliminate poverty? "For ye have the poor always with you" (Matthew 26:11). I guess that one can be ignored too. And how is the context going to change the meaning of Romans 1:26-32 or 1 Corinthians 6:9? Both scriptures make perfectly clear that homosexuality bars one from entering Heaven so it would take a real priest of the Devil to advise people to ignore such scriptures, would it not? If you can only be a Leftist by ignoring half of the Bible I think that speaks for itself. I also have a couple of posts on my scripture blog relevant to the Wallis misrepresentations. See here and here.

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

ELSEWHERE

There is an article here, by disgraced Australian Leftist Richard Butler, that is apparently very popular in Leftist circles at the moment. He argues with remarkable logic that America and Israel should "[keep] their side of the bargain" as promised in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Since Israel was never in the treaty, it is a great mystery to figure out what bargain Butler is referring to. The treaty is however a cold war relic so should probably be re-negotiated if time permitted. The Iran problem is an imminent one however. And only someone as strange as Richard Butler (or perhaps Jimmy Carter) would suggest that America could stop Iran from developing nukes by itself demolishing its nukes. America has shown its responsibility and restraint with nukes by not using them for 60 years. Anybody who sees signs of responsibility and restraint in the Islamists is living in cloud-cuckoo land.

Wonders will never cease! The BBC has just broadcast a TV program that tells it like it is about Britain's immigration problems and it looks like the Dutch have gone off the whole EU idea.

Leftist persuasion methods have not changed much since Stalin: "Police say Michelle Fernandez, 35, was chased for miles Tuesday by an irate 31-year-old Tampa man who cursed at her as he held up an anti-Bush sign and tried to run her off the road. His sign, about the size of a business letter, read: Never Forget Bush's Illegal Oil War Murdered Thousands in Iraq. "I guess this was a disgruntled Democrat," Tampa Police spokesman Joe Durkin said. "Maybe he has that sign with him so he's prepared any time he comes up against a Republican." Police arrested Nathan Alan Winkler at his home on N Cleveland Street near Hyde Park within an hour of the incident...."I was just almost run off the road by a man," she told the dispatcher.... "He told our officers that he just got mad at her, so he went after her," Durkin said.... "This could have been tragic, for her and her children and for other people on the road as this was going on," Durkin said. ..... Records show Winkler has been registered as a Democrat since 1996 .... Michelle Fernandez said Wednesday night, her nerves still frayed. "But here he is protesting the war and lost lives, and he is going to put me and my children in danger?"

U.N. still the terrorists' friend: "The United Nations must recognize Hezbollah as a force to be reckoned with in implementing the U.N. resolution calling for the withdrawal of all Syrian forces from Lebanon and the disarmament of the country's militias, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday.... Annan said the world needs to accept that in every society different groups may hold different views.... "But even the Hezbollah - if I read the message on the placards they are using - they are talking about non-interference by outsiders ... which is not entirely at odds with the Security Council resolution, that there should be withdrawal of Syrian troops," Annan told reporters".

Paradox of Illinois Laws: "No kids, stop playing video games!! You should be having sex and getting abortions! Yes, that's right. In Illinois if you are under 18 you can't get your ears pierced, take medicine in school, open a bank account, get a job, or for the most part go to the bathroom without your parents permission. Now you can't buy video games (and this is NOT a defense of those games), but you can get an abortion. You can't be trusted with Grand Theft Auto but you can be trusted to make life or death decisions without a parent. This is the logic of a blue state".

The Alamo: Something Leftists will never understand: "It is that time of year for me to remind my readers about the magnificent stand by the defenders of The Alamo back in 1836. The Alamo fell on March 6 of that year. For more than 13 days, 186 brave and determined patriots withstood Santa Anna's seasoned army of over 5,000 troops. To a man, the defenders of that mission fort knew they would never leave those ramparts alive. They had several opportunities to leave and live, yet they chose to fight and die. How foolish they must look to this generation of spoiled Americans! It is difficult to recall that stouthearted men such as Davy Crockett, Will Travis and Jim Bowie really existed. ... There was something different about them, however. They possessed a commitment to liberty that transcended personal safety and comfort."

Bigoted NAACP: "Doesn't anyone wonder why the NAACP does not have events celebrating the first black woman secretary of state? Why does an organization whose mission is to advance the lot of blacks not celebrate Clarence Thomas, our black Supreme Court justice?"

The poor old Leftists! Still answering arguments with abuse: "a large part of the conservative blogosphere is nothing more than old style slime artists with a shiny new medium to abuse, while another large part either wittingly or unwittingly passes along their swill as a supposed groundswell of grass roots outrage. Peek underneath the rock and it's not a pretty sight".

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx lived high on his father's money. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" has some comments and challenges from a Christadelphian.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/12/2005 06:43:00 PM

Friday, March 11, 2005

 
THOSE NAZI AMERICAN CHRISTIANS AGAIN

My brief derisive comment of a couple of days ago about a post on Daily Kos comparing American Christians to Nazis was taken up by Salon's Daou Report so got a few Leftist readers. It evidently hit a nerve as I got quite a few emails from Leftists about it. So although I would not normally dignify such febrile accusations with a serious attempt at reply, I feel I should mention the points raised in the emails and say why they are wrong.

The most common claim was that just because Hitler called himself a socialist does not mean that he really was one. I have no knowledge of any party calling itself socialist that is/was not in fact socialist but the essential point is that Hitler was a socialist as judged by his deeds too. He put all German industry under tight government and party control. There was a Nazi party commissar in every factory to make sure that the State's will was done. If that is not socialism what would be? For fuller details of just how socialist the Nazis were see here.

The second point raised was that Hitler did in his speeches from time to time claim to be a Christian. So therefore all Christians are Nazis? To say so is of course a gross logical fallacy -- rather like saying that all Chihuahuas are dogs therefore all dogs are Chihuahuas. But again the essential point is that Hitler should be judged by his deeds. He did nothing pro-Christian that I am aware of and sent to the camps heaps of people who WERE faithful Christians. He also promoted Nazism as an alternative to Christianity with ceremonies and beliefs that went back to pre-Christian paganism. He was as much a fake Christian as he was a real socialist. Like Leftists today, he had no time for real Christianity, only Christianity that parroted the Party line.

A third point made by one writer was that the Serbs are 20th century Christians who carried out mass murder. Again we have the Chihuahua fallacy of course but aside from that the point is that the Serbs themselves referred to what they were doing as ETHNIC cleansing. It was an ethnic war, not a religious war. To outsiders all Yugoslavs look much the same but that means nothing. To outsiders Canadians and Americans look and sound the same too but try telling almost any Canadian that he is just the same as an American and see what reply you get! So ethnic or other differences do not have to be great to be deeply felt. And comparing American Christians to the Serb butchers is as inaccurate and as grossly offensive as comparing them to the Nazis of course. What the Serbs WERE is socialists. Their leader, Milosevic, was in fact one of their previous bosses under Communism.

A point I have not mentioned so far is that the Daily Kos post I initially commented on is part of a constant round of claims on Leftist sites about how Fascist America in general has become under Republican rule (e.g. here). The old Laurence Britt 14-point definition of Fascism -- which conspicuously omits Fascism's socialist characteristics -- seems to be enjoying a new round of popularity, and a sermon incorporating it by Davidson Loehr has been reproduced on Leftist blogs ad nauseam. I have had a couple of shots at that sort of nonsense already recently (see here and here) so will not go over old ground again but I do want to draw attention to a pretty good deflation of the idea from a Leftist source: See Frameshop. There is also an impassioned reply to the original Britt article here. And for a comprehensive account of what historical Fascism actually was see here. And for an account of the time when America DID go close to Fascist rule see here.

(An earlier version of this post appeared on Blogger News)

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

ELSEWHERE

Ethics: Keith Burgess Jackson has just put up a simplified taxonomy of metaethical positions which divides them into either consequentialist or deontological ones. Since I regard ethical statements as being usually translatable into ordinary empirical statements, I suppose it is no surprise that I do not feel comfortable with that classification. I think that most "is right", "is good" or "ought" statement boil down to "leads to generally desired long-term consequences" statements so, while I am clearly a consequentialist in that regard, I also think such statements have truth value -- they can be tested -- so that makes me a sort of deontologist too, I think. So I utterly reject moral relativism -- because it denies that moral statements can be tested or have truth value. I think, for instance, that "honesty is right" is not only true but testably true (i.e. one can at least in theory test whether or not honesty does usually lead to generally desired long-term consequences) and that anybody who denies that such a statement can be evaluated or compared in any way is not being serious. I am happy to concede however that people can use moral language in ways other than what I have just described and I say more about that here.

China pisses into the wind: "Chinese officials have recently demanded that the Australian government "review" its 50-year-old treaty with the United States. Australia "needs to be careful," Beijing Foreign Ministry official He Yafei reportedly warned, lest it wind up in a confrontation with China as part of its treaty obligations to the United States"

I have just put up here an article by a disillusioned black Democrat who details the very long history of oppression of blacks by Democrats. A very curious thing about this article is that it has been taken down from everywhere where it originally appeared -- perhaps because it uses the "n" word -- as blacks are wont to do. The High Court of Australia has recently ruled that the "n" word is not offensive in Australia so I will re-post the article on an Australian site if need be.

Scott Hogenson has some choice comments about the hypocritical silence from the Left about an inexperinced blogger being given access to White House press briefings -- after they howled blue murder about an inexperienced conservative journalist being given access.

Zacht Ei has the background on the dummo Italian journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq and then came under U.S. fire. She was sure that the Islamists would welcome Communists!

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx was hopeless with money. No wonder he was such a naive economist! My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at the Ascension.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/11/2005 07:18:00 PM

Thursday, March 10, 2005

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

War, destruction and Keynesian madness Keynesians are making the insane argument that wholesale destruction leads to greater and more advanced investments and thus raises living standards
Syrian Intellectuals call on Syria's President Al-Assad to withdraw from Lebanon Syrian Intellectuals call on Syria's President Al-Assad to withdraw from Lebanon
Bastiat's "Unwanted Goods" Bastiat was a fairly dry-witted writer, but his criticisms of 19th century France's policies are integral to today's world
Do not believe any of the news about Israel that's fit to print Folks, it pains me as a newspaper columnist to say this, but, you really should not believe anything you read in those lying newspapers
Castro proves embargo foes wrong Free-market wizards' theorems and equations don't allow for variables like "Castroism". So they keep plugging in China, Vietnam, Poland, etc

Details here

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

ELSEWHERE

Kos is once again trying to tip things on their ear. He seems to agree with GWB over his attempts to cut out government pork for cotton farmers (put in place by Democrats -- including "Great Society" LBJ) but at the same time seems to think the whole thing discredits Republicans! Go figure! I would have thought it shows GWB's political courage and sincerity about cutting out waste.

Poor old Liberal Avenger is still smarting about the time I pointed out his hypocrisy. Though he has nothing other than abuse to offer: No reference to the facts at issue or rational argument of any kind. He has obviously learnt from Engels. And he still can't spell either. Maybe someone should tell him what those wiggly lines in his word processor are for.

Britain's Independent (One of the world's most misnamed papers) has joined the "Was Bush right?" chorus: "But however circumscribed, the first phase of Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon is another sign of change across the Middle East.... It is barely six weeks since the US President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of "ending tyranny in our world". Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of "regime changes" imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President's opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right" And Publius Pundit details some pro-democracy demonstrations in Kuwait and other places we don't normally hear much about. There are even signs of hope in Vietnam. Daniel Pipes is right to be cautious about it all but GWB does seem to have made absolute monkeys out of his critics now. Those of us who have supported him throughout are certainly laughing.

Fake rally: "The giant Hezbollah rally that drew nearly half a million purported supporters of Syria's occupation of Lebanon actually was a staged hoax with non-Lebanese citizens, Syrian workers, students and municipal employees coerced into joining the protest, former Lebanese Prime Minister Michel Aoun told WorldNetDaily in an exclusive interview this morning".

Amusing: The NY Review of Books is making a new attempt to explain last November's Republican victory. All that they have come up with, however, is the old George Lakoff nonsense that Bush portrayed himself as "masculine" and Kerry as "feminine". Since there are more female voters than male ones that should have been a LOSING strategy but our Leftists wiseheads don't seem to have thought of that! Nor do they explain how GWB split the male/female vote roughly 50/50. If his appeal was just masculine, shouldn't a preponderance of men have voted for him? They don't even consider that.

Good news from California: "Three more Newcastle residents have been arrested in connection with the attempted firebombing of a Lincoln residential construction site in a plot the FBI says was hatched at a Christmas Eve party.... The three are accused, along with Ryan Daniel Lewis, 21, of conspiring to plant firebombs at two home construction sites on Flores Court at the Twelve Bridges development, one of a string of incidents the FBI believes is the work of the radical Earth Liberation Front".

Dutch flight: "Some 49,000 people emigrated from the Netherlands last year, the highest figure since 1954, Statistics Netherlands said on Monday..... But besides the sluggish Dutch economy, immigration and integration concerns are reportedly contributing to pessimism about the future of the Netherlands. This is in turn reportedly leading to a white Middle Class flight away from the Lowlands. And despite the fact that, emigrants rarely cited a fear of militant Islam as their main reason for packing their bags, the killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a fierce critic of fundamentalist Islam, last November seems to have been a catalyst, The New York Times reported last month. The number of visitors to the website www.emigratie.nl jumped sharply after the assassination. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand diplomats in the Netherlands told The New York Times that while immigration papers were processed in their home capitals, embassy officials in The Hague had been swamped by inquiries in recent months".

Wow! The times sure are a-changing a lot faster than Bob Dylan ever envisaged: The first blogger has now been admitted to a White House news briefing.

Arnie is doing well at fundraising for his 2006 run to be returned as California Governor. A lot of his contributions are coming from the East Coast even. A very popular man -- surely a shoo-in for 2006.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots to read.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Engels was looking forward to a time of revenge. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at whether Jesus existed or not.

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

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

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

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/10/2005 07:32:00 PM

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

 
SO MUCH FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Another of the Left's routine policy failures

A batch of new studies suggesting that black males in the United States are falling ever further behind other groups in health, education and employment has ignited a debate within the black community about who is to blame and what can be done. "There's a major discussion within the community about what we need to do about black males," said Peter Groff, a Colorado state senator and director of the Center for African American Policy at the University of Denver.

Traditionally, many black leaders have blamed the legacy of slavery, institutional racism and poverty for the problems faced by blacks in general and men in particular. But comedian Bill Cosby rejected that approach in two provocative speeches last summer, in which he called on fellow blacks to stop blaming society for their troubles and start looking at themselves. Attacking urban "hip hop" culture and the collapse of the two-parent family, Cosby challenged those within the black community who opposed "washing their dirty laundry in public." "Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other nigger as they're walking up and down the street. They think they're hip. They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere," Cosby said.....

Whatever the causes, the latest figures paint a bleak picture. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in December that 51 percent of all HIV diagnoses were among blacks, who make up less than 13 percent of the population..... Black men live an average of 7.1 years less than other racial groups and experience disproportionately higher mortality in every single leading causes of death..... Over the past decade, the high school graduation rate for black men has fallen to 43 percent, while that of black women has risen to 56 percent..... A report in June for the Alternative Schools Network found that in 2002 one in every four black men in the United States was permanently unemployed, a rate double that of white men and 70 percent higher than among Asian and Hispanic men.... In its most recent report on the nation's prison population, the Department of Justice found that at the end of 2003, over 9 percent of all black males aged 26 to 29 were incarcerated, compared to 2.6 percent of Hispanics and 1.1 percent of whites.

And nobody mentions that welfare might be part of the problem. See here

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

LEFTIST REALITY DENIAL AGAIN

There is a popular post on Daily Kos at the moment by a descendant of a Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. His conclusion about what gave rise to those camps?

"Now when I see the hate and bigotry that comes out of those that call them "Christians" or "Moral People", I know that this is how it began seven decades ago in Europe. It was too late, when people finally woke up, millions had been carted away in cattle cars to their deaths. I don't want to see that here or anywhere else. I do not want there to be cattle cars filled with people that these hate mongers scream out against. I do not want to see gays, liberals, Mexicans, hippies, Hollywood Actors or anyone else have to be tattooed with a number".

So the Christians were responsible for Hitler and the current group most similar to the Nazis are Christians. The fact that Hitler was a socialist and that he persecuted Christians is not admitted. The fact that Leftists from Marx & Engels onwards have been filled with hate for vast sections of the human race is not admitted. The fact that Christians had NOTHING to do with any of the vast genocides of the 20th century is not admitted. The fact that no Christian group has sent or tried to send any gays, liberals, Mexicans, hippies or Hollywood actors to concentration camps is not admitted. That's quite a delusional system he's got there but reality is so pesky for Leftists that they need such delusions.

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

ELSEWHERE

A great victory for jobs: "The Senate defeated dueling proposals Monday to raise the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage one backed by organized labor, the other salted with pro-business provisions in a day of skirmishing that reflected Republican gains in last fall's elections. Both plans fell well short of the 60 votes needed to advance"

Syria's friend: "Responding to three weeks of anti-Syria demonstrations, a massive, Hezbollah-organized rally filled a central Beirut square Tuesday to show support for Syria and reject a U.N. resolution that calls for complete and immediate withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon".

V.D. Hanson: "The invasion of Iraq was not to loot its oil treasure, but more likely to cease the recycling of its petrodollars that went to terrorists and weapons procurement..... Those who scream ``no blood for oil'' would do better to chant ``no oil money for bloody terrorists and dictators.''

Leftist false prophets: "While liberals clung to the peculiar notion that Arabs don't mind being oppressed, so long as they are being oppressed by dictators who hate the United States, Bush believed Muslims would embrace liberty and democracy if the tyrants' boots were removed from their necks. He then proceeded to remove those boots in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now the "Arab street" has spoken in a manner liberals never expected.... Liberals underestimate what can be accomplished by courage and resolve because these are not qualities they possess."

There is a very touching story here from the son of a survivor of the Armenian genocide who found refuge in America.

The usual Leftist exhibitionists: "Prince Charles rebuffed bare-breasted protesters, ignored abusive anti-monarchists and battled a cold blast on a whirlwind visit to Wellington yesterday. Two women were arrested after a topless display before the prince in Civic Square as they protested against colonisation and for the right to breast cancer screening.... Protesters Hanah Plante, 22, and Holly Emma Goldman were arrested after exposing their breasts. Plante had "Get your colonisation shame off my breasts" written across her chest and later said she was protesting against colonialism, which meant women could no longer go bare-breasted."

There is an interesting email on Gun Watch about the various weapons being used in Iraq.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Engels advocated abuse a method of argument. Leftists have certainly learnt THAT lesson! My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks again at why Jesus was not recognized after his resurrection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/09/2005 09:51:00 PM

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I have some comments about fake compassion and its motives

On Political Correctness Watch I note an intolerant and uncompassionate peacenik church

On Greenie Watch I note a huge Greenie blunder over depleted uranium munitions

On Education Watch I note the lockstep Leftists at UNC Chapel Hill

On Gun Watch I have the story of a Texas hero

On Socialized Medicine I note evidence that American medicine is better for you than British medicine

On A Scripture blog I ask why Jesus was generally not recognized after his resurrection

On Leftists as Elitists I note how the media elite are hiding good news from Iraq

On MarxWords I note that Marx mocked ideals of freedom, justice and equality

On Majority Rights I note the decay of the British police force.

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

ELSEWHERE

It's all coming out now about the Communist Italian journalist who was released by the terrorists and then shot up by U.S. forces. The car WAS speeding and Italy DID pay a huge ransom, thus encouraging more kidnapping.

Australia deports its illegals: "Seventy-four illegal migrant workers have been deported on a charter flight after a series of raids in regional Victoria. Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said the 57 Malaysians and 17 Thais had been found over the past three weeks, most of them working on farms in the Goulburn Valley. The 48 men and 26 women were flown out on a charter flight to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok yesterday. Senator Vanstone defended the use of a charter flight as the most cost-effective option given the size of the group. "The success of operations such as this, completed yesterday, should send a strong message that the government does not tolerate people living and working illegally in this country," she said."

The usual Leftist attack on jobs: "Asking Democrats if they favor an increase in the minimum wage is like asking Martha Stewart if she'd mind sharing some decorating ideas. There are few things they'd rather do, and Sen. Ted Kennedy thinks it is high time. The Massachusetts Democrat is offering a measure that would boost the wage floor from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. .... Although you can force employers to pay their workers more, you can't force them to employ people. If you raise the tax on cigarettes by $2.10 a pack, people will smoke fewer cigarettes. The minimum wage functions as a tax on hiring low-wage workers, which means companies will look for ways to do without them. Economists have always taken this effect as an unfortunate reality. But a few years ago, ardent proponents of wishful thinking hailed a study that seemed to confirm their hopes. Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger looked at what happened in New Jersey when it raised its minimum wage and neighboring Pennsylvania didn't. Far from losing jobs, they reported, New Jersey enjoyed a boom in hiring compared to its neighbor.... As it happens, the study fared poorly under scrutiny. Economists David Neumark of Michigan State University and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board got more comprehensive data and found that actually, New Jersey didn't gain jobs compared to Pennsylvania--it lost them".

Bush gets it right again: "The economy is on a tear. You might not know this from coverage in the mainstream media, which may have a built-in bias against George W. Bush. Sure, some big outlets like the New York Times have come around at least somewhat on the president's freedom-and-democracy revolution in the Middle East. But they're not about to concede on the economic power of lower marginal tax-rate incentives. Too bad, because the evidence is overwhelming that the supply-side tax cuts enacted in the spring of 2003 have triggered an economic boom. Yes, I will call it the Bush boom..... Since May 2003 - which not coincidentally was the debut period for Bush's tax cuts on personal income, dividends, and capital gains - the economy has generated 3 million new jobs. Using the Labor Department's household survey, 2.6 million more people have been employed since the tax cuts. The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.4 percent from 6.3 percent. Weekly unemployment claims have fallen to 300,700 - the lowest since late 2000". See also PoliPundit.

Moscow Moved Weapons to Syria and Lebanon : "According to a former top Bush administration official, Russian special forces teams moved weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq to Syria. "I am absolutely sure that Russian Spetsnatz units moved WMD out of Iraq before the war," stated John Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary for international technology security. According to Shaw, Russian units hid Saddam's arsenal inside Syria and in Lebanon's Bekka valley. "While in Iraq I uncovered detailed information that Spetsnatz units shredded records and moved all WMD and specified advanced munitions out of Iraq to Syria and Lebanon," stated Shaw during an exclusive interview. "I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives"."

There is a good debunking here of the many nutty conspiracy theories about 9/11.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx saw people as "debris". My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at predestination and the 39 Articles of the Church of England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/08/2005 06:56:00 PM

Monday, March 07, 2005

 
DO-GOODER PATERNALISM DISASTROUS FOR AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

The Centre for Independent Studies has just issued a seminal paper. It's called A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities. It makes out a compelling case that the existing deal is a disaster and that the main beneficiaries of the present arrangements are a parasitic and incompetent class of whites in the so-called caring professions..... In the process, they provide the basis for a long-overdue revaluation of the policies of H.C. (Nugget) Coombs.

Coombs, a former governor of the Reserve Bank, was the principal author of a paper called A Certain Heritage, published in 1983. Hughes and Warin call it "a blueprint" for "a socialist experiment - advocating communal land ownership, supported by substantial welfare transfers". Its aim was "to create an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander hunter-gatherer utopia that would culminate in a nation independent from the rest of Australia". Put as baldly as that, the whole notion sounds ridiculous. Part of the authors' point is that it always was ridiculous. The tragedy, as they see it, is that too few of the sensible people on the Left or the sceptics on the Right have had the courage to speak freely about dreadful social policy that has had such dire consequences for an already vulnerable underclass.....

As Hughes and Warin put it: "Nowhere in the world has communal land ownership ever led to economic development. Attempting to replicate hunter-gatherer groups in fixed locations created remote, fragmented communities that cannot support jobs and incomes." As a result, education, health, life expectancy, housing and related gaps between remote community dwellers and other Australians have widened. Alcoholism, substance abuse and crime have escalated. They conclude that "any group, regardless of ethnic origin, subjected to this experiment, with all energies deflected from economic to cultural activities, would have been condemned to the same fate". .....

I asked Hughes to expand on the paradox of a man of palpably good intentions being the source of so much misery. She explains it largely in terms of the millennial fantasies about noble savages that were such a pronounced feature of the times. "Coombs's compassion is very understandable," Hughes says. "It is not, however, understandable how a professional economist could formulate a utopian dream of hunter-gatherers living in remote communities, far away from the centres to which Aboriginal people were being attracted by access to education, health and improved housing.....

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

"Liberals" still love Commos: "Why has John Kerry sponsored a Senate resolution honoring a Stalinist who championed racial separatism? The Soviet Union awarded W.E.B. Du Bois the Lenin Peace Prize. Maoist China staged a national holiday in his honor in 1959. Now, for reasons unexplained, the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nominee seeks to honor Du Bois too. Kerry's efforts to honor Du Bois have been joined by fellow Bay State Democrat Ed Markey, who, along with more than three-dozen colleagues, has advanced a similar resolution in the House of Representatives."

Childish Europeans: "One reason that Europe understands so well the braggadocio and sense of inferiority of the impotent Muslim world is that it suffers precisely from some of these same maladies in its own problematic relationship with the United States. A Muslim in Europe who puts a picture of bin Laden on his wall is the equivalent of a European chanting that Bush is Hitler"

Theodore Dalrymple on bureaucratic Britain: "I think we are less free than we used to be. The weight of the state is making itself everywhere felt. In my former professional life as a doctor, for example, I was obliged more and more to obey the dictates of ministers, rather than those of my medical beliefs. Whereas when I started out on my career all that was necessary to continue in practice was that I should be qualified and that I should refrain from behaving in an egregious or outrageous manner, by the time I retired this year I had to fulfil all sorts of requirements, all of which (in this age of evidence-based medicine) were quite without evidence of use or efficacy. But that is not the real point of such requirements: they are not there to improve the quality of medical practice; they are there to let us all know who is boss. And even if they were effective, which is intrinsically very difficult to prove, they would still represent a loss of liberty. The fact is that the requirements laid down by ministers and their bureaucrats now take up fully half the time of senior doctors, when they could be doing clinical work, and this at a time of shortage of medical manpower."

The Leftist aim is destruction: "The atheistic socialist intellectual elites have been trying to destroy Western Civilization since they fomented the Counter-Culture Revolution in the 1960's; (I know: I was part of it!). They have the same aim now, only now they're trying to use the courts to accomplish what they could not by popular revolution. The Left's basic anti-Western attitude is why they've had such a hard time joining in with Bush and attacking the neojihadists; in the neojihadists the Left saw a powerful ally in their long-standing effort to destroy America, and with America the West and Western traditions. It's also why they would rather align themselves with Third World dictators like Fidel and Chavez and Mugabe.... The Left knows that they could never get any Amercian legislature to ban religious symbols and references to the Creator from all government auspices, events, objects, etc. That's why they've taken the issue to the courts: this is the Left's last chance at inflicting their atheistic anti-traditional program on to all Americans"

More evidence that the "Hobbits" were just pygmies: "The 18,000 year old human skeleton unearthed in Indonesia last year is in the spotlight once again. In the latest report published in the online edition of Science, researcher paleoneurologist Dean Falk said the skull has advanced features more like those of modern humans. Earlier he had expected to see a chimpanzee skull".

Wal-Mart: A big business with a backbone: "Hi, my name is Andrew and I'm a Wal-Martaholic. That may sound silly, but to many of my friends, shopping at Wal-Mart is something to be ashamed of, a personal weakness like alcoholism or lecherousness. It needn't be so. Wal-Mart's only 'crime' is doing its job -- selling goods to consumers -- so well that it has come to dominate the retail market. It did that by outmaneuvering and underselling its competitors for decades, thereby earning its station as the top global retailer."

I have just put online a set of notes I prepared whilst I was teaching survey research methods at the University of New South Wales many moons ago. They form an introductory course in how to use surveys to assess people's attitudes. See here. They do form the core of a university course, however, so are not for the everyday reader. Some of the matters I cover even seem to be beyond the grasp of a lot of my academic colleagues.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes how Marx advocated bloodshed. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at the post-resurrection Jesus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/07/2005 08:34:00 PM

Sunday, March 06, 2005

 
FROM BROOKES NEWS

What is causing the falling dollar? Once the gold standard was abandoned and Keynesianism took hold it was guaranteed that the world would be subjected to volatile exchange rates, depreciating currencies and recurring international financial crises
Social security: why private accounts will work Why private accounts are superior to the present social security system
Social security: what the Democrats won't tell you If the Democrats win on social security Americans can kiss their `assets and incomes' goodbye
Edward D. Wood Jr, the threat of climate change, and left-wing credulity The greens' climate change arguments have more in common with the films of Edward D. Wood Jr than anything to do with science
No such thing as a no-strings-attached welfare state The Irish State has been taking pensions off old folk who were in public nursing homes, since 1970.
Green economic illiteracy, money-grubbing CEOs and windmills Victoria's Labor Government is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on windmill farms. These economic and scientific illiterates have been conned into this insanity by a bunch of fanatical greens and money-grubbing CEOs
US economy, free trade and jobs Some commentators are still echoing Paul Craig Roberts' concerns about the effects of free trade policies on the US economy

Details here

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

ELSEWHERE

Hooray! The taxpayer wins for a change: "A World Trade Organization decision yesterday saying the U.S. illegally subsidizes its cotton farmers could threaten millions of dollars paid to wheat growers in Washington, and possibly affect other farm subsidies here as well. The case, brought by Brazil, is the first successful challenge to U.S. domestic farm aid under WTO and is likely to spur challenges to support for other crops, analysts said."

LOL: "Atheism as a theoretical position is in decline worldwide," Munich theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg said in an interview. His Oxford colleague Alister McGrath agrees. Atheism's "future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its habitat," Mr. McGrath wrote in the U.S. magazine, Christianity Today."

There is a good account here of the massive and useless bureaucratic mess that is the CIA. Largely because of Clinton, its only achievement is in being "diverse".

A place for race in medicine? "Ever since the fall of the Nazis, the world has tried to keep the biology of racial disparity under wraps. It has been acceptable to link racial differences to social and cultural factors. One race might underperform another because of upbringing or poverty. But suggesting biology as the cause for those differences -- like 'The Bell Curve' did a decade ago when it looked at academic achievement -- was strictly taboo. Now, a new and unexpected force -- medicine -- is pulling back the covers. By taking a close look at minute differences in people's genetic codes, researchers and drug companies are beginning to create racially based drugs and treatments. Given the prospect of targeting treatment, some scientists argue that the subject at least ought not to be taboo."

Another attack on the military: "A group of more than 50 House members filed a bill yesterday that would reverse the 12-year-old 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy and allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in uniform, arguing that the ban against them undermines national security at a time when the military is struggling to recruit soldiers. The bill represents the first major congressional effort to repeal the policy since it went into effect in 1993, under a compromise brokered by President Clinton. It also reflects an attempt by Democrats and gay-rights advocates to reframe the debate over the rights of gays and lesbians, in an era when Republicans have used the controversial same-sex marriage issue as a political club against Democrats. The measure's sponsors argue that national security demands that gay and lesbian soldiers be allowed to serve."

Further paradoxes of full equality: "What would be needed to make everyone equally well/badly off? A police state, that's what. The late Harvard political philosopher Robert Nozick made this point a crucial element of his classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974). He postulated the aggressive public policy of equalization, combined with the measure of liberty no one can reasonably consider giving up, namely, people spending their left over income -- after the Draconian taxation such equalization would require -- as they choose. So, millions of them would spend a bit on seeing Kobe Bryan play basketball -- or Clint Eastwood direct a movie or Britney Spears perform on stage -- which would immediately create enormous inequalities. To remedy this, what is needed? Nothing less than a massive police operation that removes the unequal wealth from these favorites and redistributes it all on a daily basis."

Saudi terrorism: "The predominance of Saudis in Iraqi terrorism also goes a long way toward explaining the other fact that Western media and government have been reluctant to admit: the role of Wahhabism as an inciter of violence against Shias. Wahhabis hate Shias even more than Christians and Jews, because, as Saudi schools (including those like the Islamic Saudi Academy in the United States) teach, Christians and Jews have their own religions that are openly opposed to Islam, but Shias want to "change Islam," which the Wahhabis consider the personal property of the Saudi rulers. Few in the West seemed to notice earlier this week when 2,000 people assembled in Hilla, near Baghdad, to protest a car bombing that killed at least 125. The demonstrators chanted "No to terrorism! No to Baathism and Wahhabism!"

Leftist lamebrain. Has he noted that Osama is a billionaire? "In the opening address of a University conference on world hunger, former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern urged U.S. officials on Thursday to fight the war on terrorism by feeding the starving people of the world. Speaking to an audience of scholars and students in Dodds Auditorium, McGovern said humanitarianism constitutes a counterterrorism strategy because it eases discontent in developing nations. "Instead of going to war in Iraq and smashing that country," McGovern asked, "would we have done better . . . if we had spent that money on reducing hunger?""

My latest posting on MarxWords notes again what an idealist Marx wasn't. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks again at whether Christ died on a cross.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/06/2005 06:19:00 PM

Saturday, March 05, 2005

 
SOME ECONOMICS

Kudlow on the booming U.S. economy: "Private-sector domestic output -- what Economics 101 students might remember as consumption plus investment (or C+I) -- came in at an outsized 5.5 percent growth. So what did the New York Times do with this upbeat economic story? It buried it. Rather than place the news on the front page of the business section, the Times editors shoved it on page B4. Instead of carrying a senior reporter's byline, the copy came from Reuters News Service.... The Bush-bashing New York Times just won't get honest about America's economic health and the merits of the Bush policies that have led to such strong economic performance. Even more, the Paul Krugman-influenced Times refuses to concede the economic growth power of lower marginal tax-rate incentives. These have got to be angst-filled days over at the Times. It's turning out that Bush has been just as right on the economy as he has been on the spread of freedom and democracy in the Middle East."

Truth trumps outsourcing hysteria: "'Show us the jobs!' chanted union workers at an AFL-CIO rally protesting outsourcing. They were angry that 'their' jobs were going overseas. So let's go look for the jobs that have disappeared. My colleagues at ABC News asked the AFL-CIO for its best examples of workers who lost jobs because of outsourcing. The first people they told us to talk to were Shirley and Ronnie Bernard. The Bernards used to work at a Levi's factory in Knoxville, TN. But then, Levi's sent jobs to Mexico and closed that plant. It 'tore a lot of people up because some people have been here since they were 16 years of age, and they've been here like 20-something-odd years,' one woman told the local ABC affiliate. People 'were in tears,' said a man. ... But it's restricting outsourcing that would be un-American and stupid. Outsourcing benefitsthe middle class by bringing lower prices."

A British outsourcing success: "Mr Dyson ... caused something of a stink a couple of years ago when he announced that he was moving production of his cleaners from Wiltshire, not to euroland but to Malaysia. The move cost 865 jobs, and was seen (by the union officials in particular) as another nail in the coffin of British manufacturing. Well, better that than the business failing altogether, is the obvious riposte. But look what's happened since. Manufacturing costs have come rattling down, with the concomitant impact on profits. Those profits have allowed Dyson to employ 100 extra people in Britain, not simply screwing his machines together, but doing the altogether more rewarding and valuable work of developing new products. In addition to employing 1,200 people in Malmesbury, the lower production costs mean the company pays more corporation tax for our dear Chancellor to squander on more hospital administrators (or whatever)".

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

ELSEWHERE

Keith Burgess Jackson is still pretty steamed about anonymous bloggers and commenters. I myself am not bothered by that at all and I cannot really see why he is, even after reading his comments and links on the matter. As a conservative I expect human nature to be "fallen" and I go along with the Christian view that faults such as cowardice are more to be forgiven than excoriated. And I think that needing to know the author of an argument is only a whisker away from the ad hominem fallacy, in fact. And if anonymity enables someone to blog who might otherwise (say) lose his job by expressing his views publicly, is that not a plus? Jobs are not easy to come by and if you have a mortgage and a family to support, you cannot afford to take many risks. Iain Murray lost his job because of his blogging so it does happen. Good to see that Iain is blogging again too. He describes himself as a combination of a classical liberal with a Burkean conservative -- which is pretty close to what I am.

A good comment: "The real disgrace in the Lawrence Summers affair is that few biologists or biologically trained social scientists have come to his defense. There is ample evidence that male and female brains differ and that these differences manifest themselves in various ways, including choice of occupation. See here. (If you get a blue screen, click "Refresh.") Also, see here and here. Leftists love to criticize the scientific illiteracy of religious people. When can we expect to hear them criticize the scientific illiteracy of feminists? It's a disgraceful double standard: criticize those you dislike; remain silent about those you like."

Hugh Hewitt notes the almost incredible fact that the L.A. Times is trying to whitewash North Korea: "Have the editors no conscience and no shame? Promoting the left at home is one thing, and an aggravating thing at that, but pimping for a ruthless killer regime that exports nuclear technology and murders hundreds of thousands?" The article that Hugh is commenting on is here. And Powerline has an update.

Value for money: "Britain has paid 100 BILLION pounds to Brussels over 18 years, MPs revealed last night. A staggering 37 billion pounds of that was paid to other EU states or swallowed up by European Commission bureaucracy or projects. Eurocrats returned 63 billion pounds to the UK between 1986 and 2003 through costly schemes - many of them "corrupt, flawed or wasteful". Billions were given to UK farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy. Shadow Europe Minister Graham Brady said: "A great deal of this money could have been spent better by Britain. We want to see powers brought back from Brussels and the EU's bureaucracy slimmed down. British taxpayers have been subsidising Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Belgium - which all receive more from Brussels coffers than they pay in. Meanwhile, the National Audit Office has rapped Brussels after the European Court of Auditors failed to give EU accounts a clean bill of health for the tenth year running.""

Biased BBC: "The BBC's reputation for fair and balanced reporting was at risk last night after top broadcaster James Naughtie blurted out his pro-Labour sympathies. In a live chat with ex-Treasury chief Ed Balls - weeks before the May 5 election - he asked: "If WE win the election, does Gordon Brown remain Chancellor. He struggled to recover, saying: "If YOU win the election." The blunder came on Radio 4's flagship Today programme. Mr Naughtie has frequently given Conservatives a rough ride in interviews while apparently giving Labour frontmen an easy time.... The slip-up is particularly embarrassing after the Beeb found its newsmen had swallowed pro-EU propaganda without finding out the facts about Europe. The Tories are already at war with the Beeb over its allegedly one-sided coverage of the 1980s miners' strike in last week's BBC1 film Faith. And it follows Lord Hutton's bombshell report last year criticising the BBC's Iraq war coverage."

My latest posting on MarxWords notes what an idealist Marx wasn't. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" discusses whether or not there are bodies in Heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/05/2005 08:09:00 PM

Friday, March 04, 2005

 
WE ARE LIVING IN A REVOLUTIONARY AGE

But the revolutions are not the Leftist type, fortunately

"We are living in a revolutionary age, that started more than a quarter century ago in Spain after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. At that time, hardly anyone believed it possible to go from dictatorship to democracy without great violence, and most Spaniards feared that the terrible civil war of the 1930s - which ended when Franco seized power and installed a military dictatorship - would begin anew. Instead, thanks to a remarkable generation of political leaders, some savvy priests, and the grossly underrated King Juan Carlos, Spain passed smoothly and gracefully into democracy.

It was the beginning of the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution. Spain inspired Portugal, and the second Iberian dictatorship gave way to democracy. Spain and Portugal inspired all of Latin America, and by the time Ronald Reagan left office there were only two unelected governments south of the Rio Grande: Cuba and Surinam. These successful revolutions inspired the Soviet satellites, and then the Soviet Union itself, and the global democratic revolution reached into Africa and Asia, even threatening the tyrants in Beijing.

The United States played a largely positive role in almost all these revolutions, thanks to a visionary president - Ronald Reagan - and a generation of other revolutionary leaders in the West: Walesa, Havel, Thatcher, John Paul II, Bukovsky, Sharansky, among others.

During the Reagan years, the revolution began on the periphery of the major conflict, in Iberia. Following 9/11, the revolution was brought violently to the periphery of the Middle East, in Afghanistan. It swept through Iraq, taking time to liberate Ukraine (against whose independence Bush the Elder spoke so shamefully), and now threatens Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, if not the Syrian regime itself, and has forced the Egyptian and Saudi regimes to at least a pretense of democratic change....

Our most lethal weapon against the tyrants is freedom, and it is now spreading on the wings of democratic revolution. It would be tragic if we backed off now, when revolution is gathering momentum for a glorious victory. We must be unyielding in our demand that the peoples of the Middle East design their own polities, and elect their own leaders. The first step, as it has been in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is a national referendum to choose the form of government. In Iran, the people should be asked if they want an Islamic republic. In Syria, if they want a Baathist state. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Libya, if they want more of the same. We should not be deterred by the cynics who warn that freedom will make things worse, because the ignorant masses will opt for the fantasmagorical caliphate of the increasingly irrelevant Osama bin Laden. Mubarak and Qadaffi and Assad and Khamenei are arresting democrats, not Islamists, and the women of Saudi Arabia are not likely to demand to remain shrouded for the rest of their lives.

Faster, please. The self-proclaimed experts have been wrong for generations. This is a revolutionary moment. Go for it".

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

The recent multiple signs of democratic change in the Middle East and the emphatically pro-American revolution in Ukraine have now got a lot of Leftists really on edge. They are having to face the possibility that the man they call "Chimpy" may in fact be one of the great American Presidents. As someone who has never wavered on the rightness of the Iraq intervention and as one who cheered GWB's re-election, I think I am entitled to membership of the "I told you so" brigade. Here is a small excerpt from a grudging admission in The Guardian: "This leaves opponents of the Iraq war in a tricky position, even if the PM is not about to rub our faces in the fact. Not only did we set our face against a military adventure which seems, even if indirectly, to have triggered a series of potentially welcome side effects; we also stood against the wider world-view that George Bush represented. What should we say now? First, we ought to admit that the dark cloud of the Iraq war may have carried a silver lining.... But we should be big enough to concede that it could yet have at least one good outcome. Second, we have to say that the call for freedom throughout the Arab and Muslim world is a sound and just one - even if it is a Bush slogan"

Thousands Cheer Guard Unit's Return Home : "As Staff Sgt. Nicholas Rose cradled his 3-month-old son against a late-winter chill Tuesday, his thoughts drifted back to the sometimes deadly missions his unit endured during a year in the deserts of Iraq. "It's great to be back. I just wish everybody was back with us," the 26-year-old said after the Army National Guard unit received a hero's welcome that drew about 5,000 people to this small southeastern Illinois city near the Indiana border.... Delivering supplies and mail around Baghdad, the 160-member unit drew more than 100 mortar attacks and came under enemy fire 60 times, sustaining injuries that earned 32 Purple Hearts, said company commander Brandon Tackett. Crowds stood up to 10-deep along flag-lined streets as three charter buses dropped off soldiers for the long-awaited homecoming. In desert camouflage, guardsmen paraded past pole-mounted signs bearing their names as people cheered and cameras clicked. Two fire department ladder trucks draped a massive flag across Main Street. "They told us to expect a crowd, but I didn't expect anything like this," said Lt. John Harvey, 26. "It's overwhelming."

Constitution killers: "The Supreme Court's judicial activists are cutting off the branch on which they sit. By rejecting the law and putting their personal opinions in its place, the justices invite the people to imitate them and disregard their decrees with the same willfulness they disregard the Constitution. If Anthony Kennedy isn't bound by the framers' words, why are the people bound by his? The authority of Supreme Court justices derives from the authority of the Constitution: once they deny its authority, they deny their own. The Roper v. Simmons decision is a stunningly stark illustration of this despotism that masquerades as jurisprudence."

Interested Participant notes some whining about being ignored from the Canadian ambassador. Since Mr Ambassador does not seem to know the difference between imprecations and implications, perhaps his being ignored is inevitable.

I have recently received an interesting email about the nature of Leftism which I have posted here

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with much to read.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes Marx's contempt for democracy. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" discusses the book of Ecclesiastes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/04/2005 06:28:00 PM

Thursday, March 03, 2005

 
FAKE COMPASSION AND ITS MOTIVES

Some excerpts from a book review by Roger Sandall

In his 2003 book Conspicuous Compassion Patrick West argues that today's extravagant displays of public grief, concern, and sympathy are "about feeling good, not doing good, and illustrate not how altruistic we have become but how selfish." So it's the insincerity of the emotion displayed at events like Diana's funeral- the outright fraudulence- that deserves to be scathingly denounced. In his view what's going on is moral posturing, theatricalised compassion, public displays of cheap sentiment illustrating Wilde's remark that "a sentimentalist is someone who wants the pleasure of an emotion without paying the price for it." And in the case of conspicuous compassion, the moral kudos that goes with being seen to care......

Compassion is about helping the distressed. Conspicuous compassion is about showing off-not about results, not about feeding the hungry or bandaging those who bleed, but about various forms of moralistic self-display indulged in for their own sentimental enjoyment. In the wake of the tsunami it's important that the distinction be understood, for what Patrick West attacks is the second, not the first. In his introduction to the Australian edition of West's book Paul Comrie-Thomson helpfully contrasts the two, noting that compassion entails a commitment to alleviate a problem, while "sentimentality does not entail a commitment to do anything." Sentimental acts, he says, are accompanied by public announcements that one is `doing good'; but what the sentimentalist is mainly doing is `feeling good'.....

West's book is a useful study of moral pathology. It may well be true that the phenomenon of "recreational grief" he describes is increasingly expressed in much the same spirit as rather more mundane public events. Despite its solemn rubric, Australia's annual National Sorry Day on behalf of the Aborigines is an orchestrated apology that has now turned into a picnic outing where solidarity prevails, camaraderie overflows, and everyone has a jolly good time feeling morally superior to the rest of the world. Amidst a plethora of T-shirts, reconciliation badges, and Sorry Postcards, the masochistic appeasement of white guilt is what it is mainly about: it is most unlikely that Black Australia benefits in any way. In the theatrics of National Sorry Day, white, middle-class, feelgood politics is classically embodied.....

Yet human psychology is complicated, and I suspect that rather more is going on in displays of conspicuous compassion than author Patrick West admits. Our motives are seldom pure. They usually bring a variety of emotions and moral feelings into play. This is obvious enough in the remark of U2's Bono that "As a pop star I have two instincts. I want to have fun. And I want to change the world." And it is even more explicit in Doris Lessing's admission that "few things are more enjoyable than marching, picketing, striking, rioting; to be part of a large crowd high on singing, chanting, slogans. To be, by definition, with the forces of good against evil."

We are given to such displays of empathy because we want to be loved ourselves. Despite being healthier, richer and better-off than in living memory, we are not happier. Rather, we are more depressed than ever. This is because we have become atomised and lonely. Binding institutions such as the Church, marriage, the family and the nation have withered in the postwar era. We have turned into communities of strangers.....

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

ELSEWHERE

Opinion Journal has some pretty pungent comments on the latest bit of legislation emanating from the U.S. Supreme Court. That those guys can get away with making the law up as they go along cries out for a remedy. They are only supposed to interpret the law, not dream up new laws out of thin air. This will certainly encourage use of the "nuclear option" (a Senate rule change) if the Dems try to filibuster any of GWB's Supreme Court nominees.

Those wise German socialists again: "More than 5.2 million Germans were out of work in February, new figures show. The figure of 5.216 million people, or 12.6% of the working-age population, is the highest jobless rate in Europe's biggest economy since the 1930s. The news comes as the head of Germany's panel of government economic advisers predicted growth would again stagnate. The growth warning triggered anger even from government supporters, who said the Social Democrat-Green administration of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had to do more. "We are not going to create more jobs with growth of 1%," Harald Schartau, head of the Social Democrats in the northern state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told ZDF television. The German government insists its efforts to tackle the stubbornly-high levels of joblessness with a range of labour market reforms are only just getting under way. The core is the "Hartz-IV" programme introduced in January to shake up welfare benefits and push people back into work - even if some of the jobs are heavily subsidised" [Maybe they need some "cowboy capitalism"!]

The "Arab street" turned out to want democracy! "The return of politics to Iraq has had many blissful secondary consequences, one of them apparently minor but nonetheless, I think, important. When was the last time you heard some glib pundit employing the phrase 'The Arab Street?' I haven't actually done a Nexis search on this, but my strong impression is that the term has been, without any formal interment, laid to rest. And not a minute too soon, either. In retrospect, it's difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns."

Britain toughening up? "Britain's Counter-Terrorism Minister warned the Muslim community last night that it must face the reality of being targeted by the police because of the threat from an extreme form of Islam..... Ms Blears's comments appear to conflict with the commitment by the police not to target suspects because of their race, a key recommendation of the 1999 inquiry by Sir William Macpherson into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager. She said yesterday that Britain's 1.5 million Muslims should accept as a reality that people of Islamic appearance are more likely to be stopped and searched. "At the moment the threat is more likely to come from those associated with a most extreme form of Islam or who are falsely hiding behind Islam," she told MPs. "It means that some of our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by people in the Muslim community. There is no getting away from the fact." ... She said later that because the current threat came from people masquerading as Islamists, police would have that in mind when using stop-and-search powers. "That is the reality. I do not think it should go unsaid."

Moderate Dems switching: "Citing his dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and its liberalism, Tippah County, Miss., Sheriff Brandon Vance switched parties Tuesday. "Howard Dean taking the chairmanship of the Democratic Party brought home to me that I was no longer comfortable in the Democratic Party. Dean's and the Democratic National Committee's values and beliefs are too far on the fringe for me," Vance said. Vance's decision to join the GOP continues a trend that picked up steam after Mississippi Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck switched parties prior to her successful bid for re-election. State Republican officials said four state senators, five state representatives, Public Service Commissioner Michael Callahan, and several county and municipal officials have followed Tuck since she crossed the aisle in 2003".

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Engels despised non-Germans. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Revelation 5 and a lamb with 7 horns and 7 eyes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/03/2005 08:03:00 PM

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

 
WHAT'S RIGHT WITH AMERICA?

Catholic writer, James Nuechterlein follows on from Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" with a long survey of the current American political scene that makes some good points. A few excerpts:

"Why did the Democrats lose in 2004 and what can they do to turn things around? On the latter point, perhaps the most telling comment is that attributed to former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder in response to the string of Republican presidential victories in the 1980s: "There are three things Democrats must do to recapture the White House. Unfortunately, we don't know what any of them are."...

Kerry did, to be sure, have a message problem, but that problem was and is not just his, but his whole party's. To sum up in a phrase: the Democrats are a center-left party in a center-right nation. They stumble over their message because if they clearly say what they most deeply believe it gets them in political trouble. Consider the contrast with their opponents. Republicans are conservatives who are proud to say so and who do not fear that saying so will hurt them. Democrats are liberals who, in a correct analysis of their political situation, assiduously avoid using the word that most commonly describes them. Their label discomfits them and their positions give them an edgy relation with the majority of voters.....

At its deepest level, this is a war of religion. Secularists vote heavily Democratic; those most regular in their religious observance vote disproportionately Republican. But that, as liberals point out, distorts the issue. Most secularists are Democrats, but most Democrats are not secularists. America is a religious nation, and our differences are not so much of religion vs. irreligion as they are of divergent understandings of what our religious commitments require of us politically. That is a complicated matter that defies easy summary, but it is a serviceable generalization that here, as in the culture at large, we pit liberal, mostly Democratic, modernists against conservative, mostly Republican, traditionalists.....

America's poor and relatively poor are not in fact voting, whether rationally or irrationally, for Republicans. According to exit polls from last November, a majority of those whose incomes are less than fifty thousand dollars per year preferred Kerry to Bush. It seems that Frank wasted a book explaining something that needs no explaining because it is not true. It's not that the poor don't vote for Democrats-- it's that there aren't enough poor to allow Democrats to win.

Democrats go wrong not because they have forgotten the lessons of FDR and the New Deal, but because they have not sufficiently put those lessons behind them. Ours is the least class-ridden society in the Western world. The political economy of the 1930s is not America's historical paradigm; it is its great exception. Democrats, of course, are not entirely ignorant of that. They now address themselves to middle-class interests, but their middle class is still a working class that simply has a few more dollars in its pocket. They have not fully learned the lesson of exceptionalism: that America is the quintessential bourgeois society. We are, for better and worse, middle class and middlebrow right down to our bones. And their failure to see that is what's the matter with the Democrats"

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

ELSEWHERE

Foreign aid mostly wasted: "Red tape, inefficiency and nepotism mean that only one fifth of international aid actually gets to the people who need it, aid agencies said Monday. Not only that, but 40 percent of international aid is spent buying overpriced goods and services from the donors' own countries, Action Aid and Oxfam said in a joint report calling for urgent reform of a politically compromised system".

Impotent Canadians: "For all our talk of exporting "Canadian values," the reality is that long-term neglect of our international responsibilities has left Canada a bit player. The recent deployment of our Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to tsunami-stricken Southeast Asia was a telling example. Our deployment was tiny and came almost two weeks after the Americans and Australians sent in their own larger forces. The spectacle mocked the government's boast that "Canada is among the most generous international donors to respond to this disaster with humanitarian and early recovery assistance."... Indeed, if we are to apply Mr. Pettigrew's formulation that foreign policy "expresses the personality of a country," then Canada might well be described as a braggart who is all talk, no action. Consider this past week's grandiose promise by the Prime Minister to do "whatever is required" to end the humanitarian crisis in Darfur -- as if Canada had the capacity to do even a small fraction of what is needed in war-torn Sudan. A similar boast from Hungary or Latvia would have been more credible".

Leftist obfuscation: The word "hegemony" has become an essential part of the jargon of the anti-American left. Followers of Noam Chomsky, for example, use the word as often as possible. For most of them, hegemony has become a synonym for empire, and its frequent use a badge of intellectual sophistication..... But what exactly does hegemony mean? The word is Greek: it means the leadership of a coalition or an alliance.... few users of the English language felt any need to rescue this word from its moldy niche in the Greek lexicon until the mid 1840's when the English radical and banker George Grote began publishing his monumental History of Greece.... Curiously enough, in light of its current usage, the reason Grote decided to revive the Greek word hegemony was in order to distinguish it sharply from the Latin-derived word with which it has now become inextricably muddled, namely, the word empire. Hegemony, according to Grote, was emphatically not empire."

Einstein not so original? "It is easily proven that Albert Einstein did not originate the special theory of relativity in its entirety, or even in its majority. The historic record is readily available. Ludwig Gustav Lange, Woldemar Voigt, George Francis FitzGerald, Joseph Larmor, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Jules Henri Poincar,, Paul Drude, Paul Langevin, and many others, slowly developed the theory, step by step, and based it on thousands of years of recorded thought and research. Einstein may have made a few contributions to the theory, such as the relativistic equations for aberration and the Doppler-Fizeau Effect, though he may also have rendered an incorrect equation for the transverse mass of an electron, which, when corrected, becomes Lorentz' equation" [Anybody who still believed in Marxism in 1949 cannot have been too bright]

It is finished! At last the WHOLE of my big 1974 book Conservatism as heresy is online. See here or here. I put the chapters that I wrote myself up about a year ago but I have now also put online all the chapters contributed by others. Some chapters are now of course rather out of date but a lot could have been written yesterday. Leftists habits of distortion and expediency will always be with us, I fear. The book also serves well as a record of the Left/Right debate in the era of the Vietnam war. Note here (or here) how Democrats in the U.S. Congress DELIBERATELY sold out the South Vietnamese and in effect handed them over to the Communists.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes more of Marx's derogatory comments about Jews. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Zionist Christians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/02/2005 08:42:00 PM

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I note how fraud-prone anthropology is.

On Political Correctness Watch I note that England's patron Saint is now incorrect in England.

On Greenie Watch I note that Greenie policies cause suffering and death to dairy cows

On Education Watch I note how students are rebelling against academic bias

On Socialized Medicine I note how a little British girl had to go to America to get an oppressive "National Health" diagnosis overturned.

On Gun Watch I note how a pro-gun plate on a car caused a lot of fuss at a school

On A scripture blog I note that Christ probably did not die on a cross

On Marx Words I note that Marx despised poor people

On Leftists as Elitists I note that the British Left support keeping the poor "in their place"

On Majority Rights I put up a salvo aimed at the hopeless British Tories

On Blogger News I note the cleverness in Australia's committment of more troops to Iraq. (Note: To get to the Blogger News homepage, you have to click the banner at the top).

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

ELSEWHERE

South America's lurch to the Left now seems to be just about complete with the election of a new Leftist government in Uruguay. But that's democracy. If people want to make stupid choices that is up to them. Anyone these days who thinks that socialism leads anywhere must be a bit missing somewhere, though. Perhaps Latinos really are stupider on average.

Nathan Tabor has a quarrel with General Motors. If GM keep selling junk, more and more people will want to "outsource" their vehicle purchases to overseas companies.

Maureen Dowd sure gave me a laugh with this gem: ""We are torturing people, we're outsourcing torture, the administration is trying to throw journalist in jail and basically trying to replace the whole press corps with ringers, including male escorts."

The magic of monarchy: "The allure of rubbing shoulders with royalty was too much to resist even for some of Sydney's best-know republicans yesterday as the city's great and good turned out for lunch with Danish Crown Princess Mary and her husband, Prince Frederik. Republican NSW Premier Bob Carr played host as Princess Mary and Prince Frederik sat at the same table as Gough and Margaret Whitlam - both firm republicans. The 140 hand-picked guests at the lunch at Sydney's Governor Macquarie Tower also included Sydney's republican archbishop, George Pell. Mr Carr told guests it was not surprising the 33-year-old princess had married into a royal family, given her home state's support for the monarchy at the 1999 republic referendum".

Dutch deserting their sinking ship: "Leave this stable and prosperous corner of Europe? Leave this land with its generous social benefits and ample salaries, a place of fine schools, museums, sports grounds and bicycle paths, all set in a lively democracy? The answer, increasingly, is yes. This small nation is a magnet for immigrants, but statistics suggest there is a quickening flight of the white middle class. Dutch people pulling up roots said they felt a general pessimism about their small and crowded country and about the social tensions that had grown along with the waves of newcomers, most of them Muslims."The Dutch are living in a kind of pressure cooker atmosphere," Mr. Hiltemann said..... There are no precise figures on the numbers now leaving. But Canadian, Australian and New Zealand diplomats here said that while immigration papers were processed in their home capitals, embassy officials here had been swamped by inquiries in recent months.... "When I grew up, this place was spontaneous and free, but my kids cannot safely cycle home at night," said Mr. Konings, 49. "My son just had his fifth bicycle stolen." At school, his children and their friends feel uneasy, he added. "They're afraid of being roughed up by the gangs of foreign kids..... Immigrant youths now make up half the prison population. More than 40 percent of immigrants receive some form of government assistance, a source of resentment among native Dutch".

But the Dutch ARE cracking down on Muslims at last: "The consensus has shifted across the board. In a country that can still seem a parody of itself - a magistrate ruled recently that an armed robber was entitled to a tax rebate on the cost of his gun as a tool of his trade - even the leader of the Green party has called for it to be illegal for Muslims to import spouses through arranged marriages. Integrated teams, drawn from the police, social welfare and housing offices, are used to locate and arrest illegals. Social welfare knows who is drawing benefit, housing offices have addresses, and police check for criminal records. The number of asylum seekers has been slashed from 43,000 to 10,000 a year, nine-tenths of whom have their applications rejected".

Keith Burgess Jackson is pretty cheesed at the way abusive commenters on his blogs hide behind anonymity. He calls them cowards.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Engels said that government exists only to oppress political enemies. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" notifies a possible hiatus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 3/01/2005 06:40:00 PM