Friday, March 31, 2006

 
CALIFORNIA CONFUSION ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Comment lifted from Stephen Frank

Yesterday, the Governor [Schwarzenegger] in an L.A. Times Op-Ed piece said this, "As our nation begins a national debate on immigration, I propose that we lower our voices and lift our sights. We need a debate that attacks the issue without attacking individuals. And we need a comprehensive new law that respects immigrants and protects our nation. Frankly, the debate in Congress thus far has focused too much on politics and too little on principles. Ever since I first ran for office, I've talked about the importance of having a comprehensive immigration policy. Now the moment has arrived."

The truth is, the debate in Washington has nothing to do with immigration policy. The debate is what to do about those who have violated our immigration laws--illegal aliens. Few are talking about ending legal immigration, few are talking about totally open borders. The legislation, Frist, McCain-Feingold, Kyl, Sensebrenner, all deal with the disposition of those who have entered our nation illegally and now take jobs from honest citizens, employers that use illegal aliens as a means to hold down wages and the overcrowding of our schools and health care facilities by the illegal aliens.

The Governor is mixing two separate, and important issues. The issue today is about those violating our immigration laws, period.

He goes on to say, "Criminalizing immigrants for coming here is a slogan, not a solution. Instead, I urge Congress to get tough on those illegal immigrants who are a danger to society. If an illegal immigrant commits a serious crime, he must leave the country ? one strike and you're out. No excuses, no delays."

No one, not a single GOP or Democrat member of Congress, not a single member of the Minutemen or the ACLU has even suggested that immigrants be criminalized. That is just a silly statement. No one wants those who have played by the rules, like the Governor himself, to be considered a criminal. Instead, those who have violated our immigration laws, by their own voluntary actions, have become criminals. Let's not allow these straw man arguments to hide a simple fact: sneaking into the United States, in violation of our laws, is a criminal offense. These folks know they are breaking the law. If they were abiding by the law they would come through the border at legal border crossings, not in the middle of the night, in tunnels, paying coyotes huge fee's to outsmart our border guards. These people know they are breaking the law, and the governor knows it.

Then the Guv writes, "Granting citizenship to people who are here illegally is not just amnesty -- it's anarchy. We are a country of immigrants, yes. But we are also a nation of laws. People who want to be citizens will want to do it the right way." He is absolutely right, amnesty is anarchy. Yet, he steps on his own message by then advocating amnesty! Just before the above statement he writes, "I support efforts to ensure that our businesses have the workers they need and that immigrants are treated with the respect they deserve. We should pass a common-sense temporary worker program so that every person in our nation is documented."

Clearly, he is saying that if you can sneak into the country, find an employer willing to pay you under the table, then you can be eligible for a "common sense temporary worker program". This would be for those who violated our laws and it would be called amnesty--or anarchy as the Governor does.

The bottom line is that the Governor is trying to appeal to those who support strict enforcement of our laws and those who support any and all law breakers who can steal and bribe their way into the United States. This is so transparent a political stance, that he will make enemies of both camps. In fact, he will cause Minutemen and the ACLU to join together in a statement that the Governor "wants votes, not consistent policy".

This is an issue that is difficult. Don't make it more so by opposing amnesty, then proposing it--in the same article! That just takes away your credibility. The Governor doesn't believe that if a bank robber could sneak into a bank, steal lots of money and get 50 miles away, the robber should keep the money? Nor does he believe that if a student fails his exit exams he should still receive a diploma. So, why are his advisors telling him to say that if you sneak into this country and can get a job, you should get documents that legitimize your legal violations?

Debra Saunders in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle reminded us of this:

The Los Angeles Times duly reported, "Some Republicans fear that pushing too hard against illegal immigrants could backfire nationally, as with Proposition 187 (the 1994 ballot measure that sought to deny benefits for illegal immigrants, that) helped spur record numbers of California Latinos to become U.S. citizens and register to vote. Those voters subsequently helped Democrats regain political control in the state."

Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get drivers' licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.

She also noted, "While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver' licenses to illegal immigrants."

Some say this is an economic issue, that we can not afford to pay real wages to these menial workers--that is why we need illegals. It may be true that the cost of food and services would go up. At the same time we would save billions in tax dollars (net of taxes paid by the illegals) for the cost of education, welfare, health care and law enforcement costs by ending the free reign of illegal aliens in our nation. We are already paying lots more for that head of lettuce--in taxes, if not at the check out counter. Our schools would not be overcrowded and we wouldn't need $11 billion in General Obligation bonds to pay for new schools. The Emergency Rooms would be more plentiful, allowing the saving of lives of legal residents and citizens, instead of squeezing them out so illegal aliens could receive medical care.

While I am writing this about our Governor, he is not the only Republican or elected official suffering from "illegal alien schizophrenia". In the Senate Brownback, McCain, DeWine, Specter and Graham also suffer from this disease. Hillary wants our borders closed and amnesty for those already here.

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ELSEWHERE

Another phony "protest": "The leftist media have tried to portray this weekend's massive protests against House measures to curtail illegal immigration as the uprising of "The Other America": forgotten, humble, hidden Hispanic members of the working poor simply demanding their "rights." As events spanned from California to Detroit, Phoenix to Washington, D.C., the media kept up its anti-enforcement drumbeat. Although some have credited Latino DJs for the 500,000-strong illegal immigrant turnout in Los Angeles alone - and some credit is deserved - the real legwork was done by a more eclectic group of organizations: leftist labor unions, George Soros-funded agitators, Open Borders lobbyists, Roman Catholic clergy, and teachers unions.... Latino organizations did not act alone. The media has failed to report that organized labor directed the illegals and minors. The L.A. Times revealed the rally's "security" was handled by a union identified only as "Local 1877." That would be local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the far-Left union founded by New Left radical Andrew Stern"

Immigration backdown in Senate: "The Senate Judiciary Committee approved sweeping election-year legislation today that clears the way for 11 million illegal aliens to seek U.S. citizenship, a victory for demonstrators who had spilled into the streets by the hundreds of thousands demanding better treatment for immigrants. With a bipartisan coalition in control, the committee also voted down proposed criminal penalties on immigrants found to be in the country illegally. It approved a new temporary program allowing entry for 1.5 million workers seeking jobs in the agriculture industry."

Radioactive matter gets into US in test : "Undercover investigators slipped radioactive material -- enough to make two small 'dirty bombs' -- across U.S. borders in Texas and Washington state in a test last year of security at American points of entry. Radiation alarms at the unidentified sites detected the small amounts of cesium-137, a nuclear material used in industrial gauges. But U.S. customs agents permitted the investigators to enter the United States because they were tricked with counterfeit documents."

Canada's new Conservative government gets tough on illegals: "The federal government has no plans to follow in the footsteps of the United States, which appears ready to give as many as 11 million illegal workers a chance at U.S. citizenship, Immigration Minister Monte Solberg says. Solberg bluntly rejected the U.S. proposal as a solution for Canada, saying that letting illegal workers remain in this country would send the signal that it's okay to slip in the back door. "The ideal, of course, is for people to play by the rules and to get in line like everyone else is forced to do," he said after a cabinet meeting. "If we don't emphasize that . . . you are sending the message that the way to get in here quickly is to come illegally. We don't want to send that message," he said. A U.S. Senate panel just this week approved sweeping election-year legislation that clears the way for 11 million illegal aliens to apply for citizenship without first having to return home. "We're not looking at the American model," he said. "We have our own ideas on that."

I have just put up here the reply by Prof. Andrew Fraser of Macquarie University in Sydney to accusations that he made illegally racist statements in his comments about Australia's current immigration practices.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/31/2006 09:15:00 PM

Thursday, March 30, 2006

 
"Stirring the possum" and European IQ differences

"Stirring the possum" is a common expression in Australia but I doubt that the term is much understood outside Australia so I will try to summarize what it means. For a start, Australia has lots of possums (a different species from the American opossum). I even have some living in the roofspace of my house -- as is common in Brisbane. They are however nocturnal and if you disturb one during the day it may well snarl and spit at you. And people know that. So if they DO stir a possum, they expect to be growled at.

So when Australians deliberately say something provocative but not terribly serious they will often refer to it as "Stirring the possum". Note however that such stirs are intended in good humour. Very few Australians would think of harming a possum (unlike in New Zealand, where they trap them) so stirring one is not an aggressive act. It is seen as a bit of harmless fun.

So when I referred recently to the interview in "The Times" with Richard Lynn as an example of "Stirring the possum" I was implying that Lynn was having a bit of fun with "The Times" rather than making a fully-rounded assessment of his subject -- which was national differences in European IQ. And the claim that Germans and Poles were considerably more intelligent than the English was indeed a delicious stir.

So I think I should note that on pages 21 and 22 of his recent book "Race Differences in Intelligence" (reviewed here and here), Lynn reports considerable variations in European IQ estimates: Irish from 87 to 97, Poland from 92 to 106, and Germans from 90 to 107. And if, as is common practice, one takes the median of these scores, one ends up with averages as follows: Ireland, 92; Poland 99; Germany 99. And none of that is particularly surprising.

What is slightly surprising is that Lynn's comments about European IQ were greeted and publicized without rancour -- while the vastly lower median scores found with African populations are usually ignored and sometimes execrated. But an impartial committment to truth is of course not to be expected from the media.

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Stranger than fiction

I have concluded that the "Majority Rights" blog is a perfect example of why people should be conservative. The fundamental truth that only conservatives seem able to recognize is that the world is far more complex than any theory can accommodate. More than that, reality actually makes utter nonsense of most theories. I have two favourite examples of that: The neo-Nazi guy (hello Martyn!) I knew whose best friend was a very dark Bengali and another guy I knew (the sadly deceased Brian Jackson -- a lovely man) who despised Asians but was married to a Filipina!

And something similar goes on with "Majority Rights". I put up by far the most posts on that blog even though I am a cast-iron supporter of the State of Israel and even though most other people associated with the blog are Judeophobes! Can you get more wacky than that?

And yet my posts help to keep the blog humming. About 50% of the time they generate a fair bit of discussion. Even my post about dogs was well received.

So find a theory that fits all that! The only theory that fits it is a conservative one: Truth is stranger than fiction. Though even that is an empirical generalization rather than a theory.

I suspect that my posts on MR actually give a sort of perverse pleasure to many readers there. My posts there give the commenters the satisfaction of shooting me down. I am the accessible ogre who can be dispatched with a quick reference to race-theorists such as McDonald or Salter (Hello Frank!). The fact that I don't remotely feel shot down is beside the point.

So why do I continue to post there? Easy. I just LOVE "stirring the possum". And even Christ supped with sinners.

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Brookes News Update

Keynesian nostrums still plague the US economy: That Keynesianism is still the prevailing orthodoxy among the economic commentariat is plain to see. What is not so plain is the consequences of this thinking.
France revolts against economic reason: You defy the market at your peril. France is now paying the price for her defiance. Such self-deception could only flourish in an environment dominated by economic illiteracy.
Is the Democratic Party a fifth column?: Those who believe that the Democratic Party is corrupt are absolutely right. But it is an ideological corruption that threatens America's very existence.
Black History Month ignored genuine black heroes: Eusebio Penalver suffered three times as long in Castro's Gulag as Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin's. He suffered longer than Mandela suffered in South Africa's - 28 years. He's the longest serving black political prisoner of the 20th century.
The Academy Awards are war by another name: In my more cynical moments I recognize the 'best picture' category of the Academy Awards to be nothing other than an intentional assault upon America by people who seek its destruction.
Latte leftist defends the ABC's phony independence with phony economics: Errol Simper is a typical leftist, smug, ignorant and patronizing. According to this clown the ABC is not to be held accountable to those elected by the people and whose money funds its operations.
Did Bracks and Ronnie Walker rip off a gun club?: Has the Bracks' Government committed serious crimes in its efforts to destroy common law rights?

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I have just put up on Australian Politics an interesting comparison between New Orleans and the cyclone-hit Australian town of Innisfail.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/30/2006 05:15:00 PM

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

 
A BLACK SOCIOLOGIST GETS IT HALF RIGHT

Orlando Patterson has some good thoughts on America's black underclass:

"Several recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it. The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes - its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members - and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing."

Hard to argue with that. But what does Patterson see as the ultimate cause or causes of the large and maladaptive black underclass culture? He seems not to know -- perhaps in part because his past theories have been so thoroughly taken apart -- e.g. here. If he can't ultimately blame "whitey" he is bereft of ideas.

Crazily enough, "whitey" IS partly to blame -- but not in a way that Patterson seems able to face up to. Before the welfare explosion of the ill-starred LBJ's "Great Society", blacks mostly lived in two-parent families and were in general much less mired in social pathologies. Leftist welfare schemes are certainly not the only source of black problems but it is amazing that any sociologist cannot look just a little way back into history and see in how many ways blacks were better off before such schemes.

If Patterson wanted a quick refresher course in the history of these matters, he could find it in a recent article by Kay Hymowitz. She notes that between 1965 and 1980, "the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks had more than doubled, to 56 percent. In the ghetto, that number was considerably higher, as high as 66 percent in New York City. Many experts comforted themselves by pointing out that white mothers were also beginning to forgo marriage, but the truth was that only 9 percent of white births occurred out of wedlock..."

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ELSEWHERE

Another physical basis for IQ: "Researchers at England's John Radcliffe Hospital, in Oxford, report that our brain's pH--how acidic or alkaline it is--might be a clue to our intelligence. Using a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), researchers examined the brains of 42 British schoolboys. Just as its close cousin MRI creates vivid images of a person's internal anatomy, MRS lets doctors study an organ's chemistry. When the British scientists compared the lads' IQ scores with their MRS results, they uncovered an intriguing relationship: the smarter the boy, the more alkaline his brain. Although the relationship between alkalinity and aptitude didn't hold for every aspect of intelligence, verbal skills and reading comprehension seemed especially linked to pH, the Radcliffe team reports in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

European economic stagnation: "Europe's well-intentioned model is not working because it does not pay to work after the taxman has taken his share. Europe is not innovating because it does not pay to innovate after the huge costs of complying with all the prescriptions, limitations and restrictions in all Europe's overabundant licences and autorisations. Demoralization is the real cause of Europe's stagnation. Europe's workforce is tired of being incessantly hindered in its task of producing wealth. Demoralization is the reasen why ever more engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs flee Europe's tax misery. Paradoxically, the Old Europe of the West must now learn from the New Europe of the East, where after years of disastrous socialism, low and simple flat taxes are being introduced, luring investors from all over the world."

The truth about Africa: "Africa is quite rich. As the economist Walter Williams of George Mason University wrote, "In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world's richest continent. It has 50 percent of the world's gold, most of the world's diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland as well as other natural resources." What Africa needs is not "aid," but less corruption".

Islamic barbarism increases support for Israel: "A Gallup poll released last month puts American support for Israel at near-record levels. When asked for their views on the Middle East, 59 percent of Americans say they sympathize with the Israelis, while just 15 percent favor the Palestinians. Pro-Israel sentiment rises with increased knowledge -- 66 percent of those who follow international affairs "very closely" support Israel, compared with 52 percent of those who don't pay close attention. Other findings are comparable. More than two-thirds of Americans say their overall view of Israel is favorable; only 11 percent have a favorable opinion of the Palestinian Authority."

Even "The Guardian" loves the House of Lords these days -- for good reason: "When Lord Armstrong rises to amend the government's ID cards bill in the House of Lords tomorrow, a new stage will be reached in the epic struggle between the Lords and the forces of darkness in the House of Commons... If the Lords have their way, it will mean the compulsory introduction will be delayed until 2011, well after a general election, which will give the public a second chance to examine and debate the proposals. This would not suit the government, because the public is gradually coming to understand the bill's grave consequences for personal freedom".

World Bank corrupt too: "Back in the early 1980s, Leslie Jean-Robert Pean was in a heap of trouble. Flat broke, in bankruptcy court, he had $10 in a savings account and a whole lot more debts than assets. Over the next half-dozen years, he scratched out a living in a variety of jobs. But in 1989, Pean, an economist, landed a job at the headquarters of the World Bank, in Washington, D.C. By the early 1990s, Pean and his family had bought a big house on 3 acres of manicured grounds outside Washington, and he was passing around $100 bills like so much chump change. "Our dream," the World Bank's mission statement says, "is a world free of poverty," something Pean really understood. The only trouble, bank investigators say, is that he wasn't focusing so much on helping the poor as he was on helping himself. Pean admitted to bank investigators that he had some $2.5 million salted away in a Swiss bank account, but he says it was family money. Pean's activities are now under investigation by federal prosecutors, but to bank investigators the case is far more important than the alleged misdeeds of a midlevel manager whose bank salary never exceeded $166,000 a year. Kickbacks, payoffs, bribery, embezzlement, and collusive bidding plague bank-funded projects around the world"

Chris Brand has just put up a good comment about the European IQ averages I posted yesterday.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/29/2006 03:59:00 PM

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

 
DICK LYNN IS STIRRING THE POSSUM ONCE AGAIN

A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc. "The early human beings in northerly areas had to survive during cold winters when there were no plant foods and they were forced to hunt big game," he said. "The main environmental influence on IQ is diet, and people in southeast Europe would have had less of the proteins, minerals and vitamins provided by meat which are essential for brain development."

He added that differences in intelligence across Britain could be attributed to bright people moving to London over hundreds of years. Adults in England and Wales have an IQ of 100.5, higher than Ireland and Scotland, both with 97. People living in London and the South East average 102. "Once in the capital they have settled and reared children, and these children have inherited their high intelligence and transmitted it to further generations." ...

Professor Lynn ascribes the differences between British and French intelligence levels to the results of military conflict. He described it as "a hitherto unrecognised law of history" that "the side with the higher IQ normally wins, unless they are hugely outnumbered, as Germany was after 1942".

More here



One would have to know a lot more about the data to make sense of all this. The British results could for instance have been deflated by the large number of U.K. citizens of African and rural Pakistani ancestry

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ELSEWHERE



The new pragmatic Israel: "Thirteen miles inside the Palestinian-majority West Bank, Israeli bulldozers are trying to lay out the Jewish state's new borders in concrete and razor wire. As Israeli voters head to the polls tomorrow, the ruling Kadima party created by Ariel Sharon has redrawn the political landscape and is now trying to secure its place in history by seeking unilaterally to redraw Israel's boundaries. The giant earthen scar running beneath the Jewish settlement of Ariel reflects the "separation" strategy of Mr Sharon - which is set to propel Kadima to electoral victory even though he lies comatose in a hospital in Jerusalem after suffering a massive stroke in January. Under the plan - the centrepiece of Kadima's appeal to the voters - Israel will withdraw from remote Jewish settlements outside the barrier to secure its hold on the huge settlement blocs around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that it really wants to keep".

Good speech by Tony Blair on his Australian visit: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair used a speech to Federal Parliament today to urge global unity in the fight against terrorism and warn against the "madness" of growing anti-Americanism worldwide. Mr Blair said war against terror was as much a battle about values as it was about arms, and that those values were the universal property of humanity. "(It is also) a struggle about values and about modernity, whether to be at ease with it or enraged at it," said Mr Blair, the fifth world leader to address Federal Parliament. "And to win this struggle we have to win the battle of values as much as arms.""

Pedophile Muslims in Britain: "A leading Muslim figure has called for tougher guidelines to outlaw physical and sexual abuse against children at north west madrassas. According to a report published by the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, the problem of abuse is "widespread" and that thousands of children were under risk of being abused by their religious teachers. The report warns that the Muslim community could face the kind of child abuse claims that have scandalised the Roman Catholic churches. Co-author of the report Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui said it is time the Muslim community stopped "brushing the problem under the carpet." He said: "Up to 100,000 children are taught at 700 Islamic schools, or madrassas, of which almost a half use unlawful corporal punishment to discipline pupils. "Each year at least a dozen children are sexually abused by their teachers and Imams with very few cases ever being made public."

A pinhead tries to prick Mansfield: "The sneering review in the New York Times Book Review by a novelist called Walter Kirn of Harvey Mansfield's Manliness could have been anticipated, but its obtuseness - especially when viewed alongside the subtle and supple line of argument pursued by Professor Mansfield - is unusual even for the mainstream media culture which Mr Kirn represents. He compares the professor to Hans and Franz, the German body-builders portrayed by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon on "Saturday Night Live" back in the 1990s. "Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed," he writes, "partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words `girly' and `manly' - a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans?" So now are we to suppose that the prestigious New York Times regards it as a sufficient refutation of a serious work of political philosophy to say that it isn't "hip"? There could hardly be a better illustration of the dumbing down of the culture. Thought and argument count for nothing with the truly pinheaded Mr Kirn, only fashion, "cool" and, perhaps, celebrity, which sets the tone of what is fashionable and cool. He doesn't even know that calling an idea "out of date" is only a comment on its fashionability and not on its validity."

Keith Burgess Jackson has up an excellent quote from Steven Pinker which points out that sterotypes have considerable truth value. There has long been support for that in the academic psychology literature.

I hope most readers here have added "Tongue-Tied" to their regular tour of the internet. I have just put up a really good cartoon there. I was originally going to post there on weekends only but I seem to post there pretty often during the week now too. And on days when I am not posting, the posts that Scott puts up are in my view at least as good as mine.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/28/2006 07:37:00 PM

Monday, March 27, 2006

 
TEST SOPHISTICATION

What I put up yesterday about IQ was preparatory to what I want to say today. I have been thinking about the Lynn effect -- which is usually called the Flynn effect -- after its main publicist -- James Flynn. It was however discovered by Richard Lynn. What it refers to is the fact that average IQ test scores rose steadily thoroughout the 20th century. The process may however have reached an asymptote (peaked) now.

For a long time, I accepted that the rising scores represented a real increase in 'g' (underlying general intelligence). Two of my three very minor contributions to the academic literature on IQ were based on that view (See here and here). There were good reasons for that view. Nutrition does have a (usually small) effect on IQ and nutrition did improve over the 20th century. IQ can be influenced in some ways by general health -- and medical care did improve over the 20th century -- with improved perinatal care being an obvious candidate for positive effects. And signs that people were in fact better off physically were there -- an increase in average brain size particularly. And brain size does correlate to a degree (correlation of around .40) with IQ.

BUT: It seems that I was wrong. Although scores on all sorts of IQ subtests (puzzle categories) rose, they did not rise evenly. And the scores that rose least were for those problems that loaded most highly on 'g' (See e.g. here). The implication is that scores on a perfect measure of 'g' would not have risen at all.

So how do we explain the Lynn effect? There is no general agreement but I find the commonest explanation to be pretty persuasive -- that it reflects increasing test sophistication. Kids now spend MANY more years in the educational system than they once did and although there is probably little to show for that overall, kids DO get a lot of practice in passing tests of various sorts. And practice may not make perfect but it would be surprising if test-taking skills and strategies (such as guessing when you are not certain) were not improved by many years of extra practice at taking such tests.

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Senate corruption

"Remember when Al Gore pledged to create a 'lockbox' to protect Social Security trust fund surpluses from the annual Congressional spending raid? Well last week, while voting to raise the federal-debt ceiling to $8.96 trillion, Senators had a chance to terminate this notorious money-laundering scheme. And guess what? Every Democrat in the Senate joined with eight Republicans to kill an amendment by GOP Senators Jim DeMint and Mike Crapo that would have stopped the Bonnie and Clyde budgeting...

Apparently, these Senators want the money stored in a lock box, but only on the condition that they know how to pick the lock. The DeMint-Crapo proposal would deposit surplus payroll tax dollars in personalized bank accounts for each U.S. worker. This would in effect have created more than 100 million personalized lock boxes-and as taxpayers' private property, well out of the reach of the politicians.

We're talking big dollars here. The payroll tax will collect some $80 billion more in taxes next year, and $436 billion more over the next five years, than Social Security will pay out to current retirees. Under today's law, Congress simply keeps that cash to spend itself. Under the DeMint-Crapo idea, the average young worker would be able to accumulate roughly $40,000 in tax-free wealth for retirement based on eight years of surplus tax payments and 30 years of interest. And if you want to know why Members of Congress want to keep this annual spending raid going, all you have to do is look at the budget outline for Fiscal 2007 that this ostensibly Republican Senate passed last week."

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Media bias about the economy: "Media Research Center (MRC) examined the year 2005, specifically how ABC, NBC and CBS covered employment news. In 2005, the economy created 2 million jobs. According to the MRC, however, more than 50 percent of the stories involved job losses rather than gains. Professor John Lott, economist and resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, and Kevin A. Hassett, the Institute's director of economic policy studies, examined, among other things, newspapers' economic political bias as reflected by their headlines: "We found that newspaper headlines reporting economic news on unemployment, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales, and durable goods tended to be much more frequently negative when a Republican was in the White House".

I have just put up on Australian Politics a story about a nasty little bit of Leftist bias in the Australian media too.

Left versus Right: Chimps versus cavemen?: "Wrote Tucker: "Once established, however, monogamy proved to have enormous advantages. Our ancestors were smaller, weaker, and slower than almost evey other species with which they cohabited, Their only advantage was their ability to work together. Armed with only the social compact of monogamy, they were able to survive on the savannah, learn to scavenge and hunt, make tools, tame fire, and eventually migrate to almost every climate on earth. It is a remarkable outcome for such a small social adjustment." It is conservatives, of course, who defend the ideals of monogamy. It was the lefties who promoted free love and all sorts of other tommyrot which reached fruition in the simian couplings of Bill Clinton in Little Rock hotel rooms and Oval Office ante-rooms, and (to believe the reports) of Ted Kennedy in all sorts of hideouts. Then there's the fact that gorillas and chimps are almost entirely vegetarian -- another primarily Lefty fetish".

The real tragedy of Iraq: "The tragedy of what went wrong in Iraq, therefore, is that the failure to locate WMD has made action against Iran or North Korea far harder to advance to Western public opinion. This would have been true even if Iraq, post invasion, was now a land of peace and plenty. The final tragedy is that while many will prosper within Iraq over the next three years, the price of inept peacetime policies between 2003 and 2005 is that there will be no more Iraqs in the foreseeable future. To that extent, the Stop the War coalition, assisted, ironically, by the Pentagon, will be satisfied. And what does this mean in practice? It means no more sadistic totalitarian dictators removed from office. It means no more free and fair elections for those who have never had them. It means no more openings for civic and religious liberty. It means no more chances of a cultural reawakening. Democracy might well progress in parts of the Middle East but, alas, mostly in the states that were most benign to begin with. There is little reason to suppose that the ruling elites in Damascus, Tehran or Tripoli have the cause for fear that they must have briefly felt three years ago. Nor have the people under their yoke any reason for optimism that they might yet escape servitude."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/27/2006 08:37:00 PM

Sunday, March 26, 2006

 
'g' AND ITS MEASURES

I am one of those awful people who mention IQ in public from time to time so I thought a few quick words of background on it might not go astray:

IQ tests exist because 'g' (general intelligence) exists. It just is a fact that people who are good at solving one sort of problem tend to be good at solving lots of other different problems. Some problems, however, are particularly good at detecting people who are generally good at solving problems. Researchers speak of such "good-predictor" problems as ones that "load highly on 'g'". And, pesky though it may be, the problems that load most highly on 'g' (i.e. the ones that are the purest measure of general intelligence) are also the ones that differentiate blacks and whites most strongly. As Charles Murray explains:

"As long ago as 1927, Charles Spearman, the pioneer psychometrician who discovered 'g', proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern: the size of the black-white difference would be "most marked in just those [subtests] which are known to be saturated with g." In other words, Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory.

A concrete example illustrates how Spearman's hypothesis works. Two items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as "forward digit span" and "backward digit span." In the forward version, the subject repeats a random sequence of one-digit numbers given by the examiner, starting with two digits and adding another with each iteration. The subject's score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-backward works exactly the same way except that the digits must be repeated in the opposite order.

Digits-backward is much more 'g'-loaded than digits-forward. Try it yourself and you will see why. Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder. The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward. It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income, or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant. Reluctance to "act white" is irrelevant. Motivation is irrelevant. There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting".

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ELSEWHERE

Leftists still dreaming: "Evoking other cities transformed by revolutionary leaders, like Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979, or Havana 20 years before that, Caracas is attracting students and celebrities, academics and activists, grandmothers and 1970's-era hippies - a new generation of Sandalistas, as some call them. Some, including many Americans, have come to stay. But others come for a new brand of revolutionary tourism organized by the government or by private groups. Venezuela welcomes them all"

What a world without U.S. power looks like: "At places like Davos and Harvard, the world's sages rarely stop fretting about the dangers of a too powerful America. Well, if you want to know what the world looks like without U.S. leadership, Exhibit A is Darfur in Sudan. Today's leading authority on Darfur is the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who prophesied a world "nasty, brutish and short." At least 200,000 civilians have been killed in the past three years and two million more have become refugees. The source of the problem is the Arab rulers in Khartoum, who have pursued an ethnic cleansing campaign against black Muslims in western Sudan. They've equipped the Janjaweed Arab tribesmen to do the dirty work, and that militia is now attacking civilians across the border in Chad, creating 20,000 more refugees."

Brave new world of New Zealand (Leftist government, of course): "The Government is examining a proposal to have children tagged and numbered in a central database to stem abuse and failure at school. Personal details of every New Zealand child, including welfare and health concerns, would be entered into the database, to be shared by schools, social agencies and health authorities. It would be similar to Scottish and British initiatives, with a single ID number issued for each child, enabling authorities to be alerted to potential problems."

The myth of water privatization failures: "Water distribution and sanitation have traditionally been a public responsibility. Currently, 97 percent of water distribution in developing countries is in the hands of governments. So the responsibility for above-described failures and fatalities lies with incompetent and negligent governments. And yet, in the few cases where the private sector has been given a role in water distribution, there have been large and sometimes violent outcries against privatization."

Zoning is theft: "Zoning is theft, pure and simple. In his fantastic introduction to the Austrian School, Economics for Real People, Gene Callahan correctly identifies eminent domain as a form of property theft, especially noting the use of government condemnation in order to secure rightfully owned property for commercial development. It is easy to see government as the crowbar that influence-seekers use to jimmy locks and force private property owners from their land. Here we have the clear picture of Ma and Pa Kettle and clan fighting the law and 'progress' armed only with shotguns, corn squeezing, chewing tobacco and shear grit. The flip side to eminent domain, zoning, is not so easily seen. But as Bastiat revealed, the unseen is as important as the seen."

Polygamy : "The closet is now empty. Newsweek runs a story on polygamy, "Polygamists Unite!" In the wake of the gay-marriage movement, polygamy is making its move. "'Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle,' says Mark Henkel, who, as founder of the Christian evangelical polygamy organization TruthBearer.org, is at the forefront of the movement. His argument: if Heather can have two mommies, she should also be able to have two mommies and a daddy." Charles Krauthammer has a few unsatisfying thoughts on this, once called, polygamy diversion, by so-called gay rights advocates. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...you know the rest..."

A good article on Hollywood Leftism here. Excerpt: "To this day, Hollywood still clings to the myth of martyrdom on the Left-a Left that defended Communism and today soft-pedals the terrorist threat-as Billingsley put it-"while earning, substantial fortunes in the very country they attacked as repressive and fascist." In Hollywood's land of dreams, as author Richard Grenier once said, "Capitalism is evil except for the three-picture deal with Paramount, the Malibu mansion, the swimming pool, the tennis court, and the Mercedes Benz." To which Billingsley adds, "Or, as Marx himself might have framed it: From each according to his credulity, to each according to his greed."

LOL. This link will test your sense of humour!

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/26/2006 02:23:00 PM

Saturday, March 25, 2006

 
FEMINISM BACKFIRES

The excerpt below is from an article that made my day (I know that's bad of me!). It notes that feminist-inclined admissions officers at elite colleges now feel obliged to discriminate AGAINST women! Read on:

The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today's accomplished young women. I know this well. At my own college these days, we have three applicants for every one we can admit. Just three years ago, it was two to one. Though Kenyon was a men's college until 1969, more than 55 percent of our applicants are female, a proportion that is steadily increasing. My staff and I carefully read these young women's essays about their passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place....

Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions. Last week, the 10 officers at my college sat around a table, 12 hours every day, deliberating the applications of hundreds of talented young men and women.... The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men. We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement?

The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers. Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.

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ELSEWHERE



UK: Peers inflict fourth ID card defeat on government : "The government suffered another defeat in the Lords today over its plans for identity cards. Peers voted by a majority of 36 to keep the scheme voluntary until 2011, after the next general election. It is the fourth time the government has been overruled by the Lords on the issue of linking ID cards with passport applications from 2008."

UK: ID cards a "present" to terrorists: "A national identity card scheme will be a 'present' to terrorists, criminal gangs and foreign spies, one of Britain's most respected former intelligence agents has told ministers. The warning from Daphne Park, who served for 30 years as a senior controller for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, came as the parliamentary power struggle over the identity cards bill dragged on. ... The House of Lords once again defeated the government last night. Peers backed a joint Conservative and Liberal Democrat amendment that would prevent ministers making identity cards compulsory until at least 2011. ... At issue is the 'voluntary' nature of the proposed card. Labour ministers insist that the cards will be optional, but also want to create a rule meaning that anyone renewing a passport after 2008 must also buy an identity card. Opponents argue that is 'compulsion by stealth' and question Labour's mandate for the scheme. The Labour manifesto at last year's election promised the cards would be 'voluntary at first.' ... While ministers have hinted at using the Parliament Act to force the ID cards bill through the Lords, peers insist they will continue to resist. The former MI6 agent will be a key part of that resistance."

Sounds like Spitzer is right for once: "New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has filed a lawsuit accusing a company of selling email addresses in what he described as the largest deliberate breach of privacy in internet history. The suit against web site operator Gratis Internet alleges that the company sold personal information obtained from millions of consumers under a strict promise of confidentiality. "Unless checked now, companies that collect and sell information on consumers will continue to find ways to erode the basic standards that protect privacy in the internet age," Mr Spitzer said. Gratis internet is best known for promising free iPods, televisions and DVDs to users willing to sign up for promotions offered by partners such as Citibank and Blockbuster. The promotions required a registrant to sign up five others into the program - a process which drew criticism for being nothing more than a glorified pyramid scheme. While many did receive a free iPod, they also ended up with inboxes stuffed full of junk marketing mail. Contrary to the company's assurances of privacy, Spitzer's lawsuit accused Gratis owners Peter Martin and Robert Jewell with selling access to lists of millions of Gratis customers to three independent email marketers".

Nutty Frog: "President Chirac stormed out of the first session of a European Union summit dominated by a row over French nationalism because a fellow Frenchman insisted on speaking English. President Chirac and three of his ministers walked out of the room when Ernest-Antoine Seilli�re, the leader of the European business lobby UNICE, punctured Gallic pride by insisting on speaking the language of Shakespeare rather than that of Moli�re. When M Seilli�re, who is an English-educated steel baron, started a presentation to all 25 EU leaders, President Chirac interrupted to ask why he was speaking in English. M Seilli�re explained: "I'm going to speak in English because that is the language of business." Without saying another word, President Chirac, who lived in the US as a student and speaks fluent English, walked out, followed by his Foreign, Finance and Europe ministers, leaving the 24 other European leaders stunned. They returned only after M Seili�re had finished speaking. The meeting was furnished with full interpretation services, and anyone in the room could speak or listen in any of the 20 official EU languages. Embarrassed French diplomats tried to explain away the walk-out, saying that their ministers all needed a toilet break at the same time.

Lying Leftists again: "A new study by Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer charges that the "Israel lobby" has distorted the foreign policy of the United States to the point of serious damage to U.S. interests. Perhaps anticipating that their claims might be controversial, the authors attempt to reassure any who might doubt them: "Some readers will find this analysis disturbing, but the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars". In fact, even a cursory examination of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy reveals that it is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in "serious dispute." In other words, a student who submitted such a paper would flunk.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/25/2006 04:17:00 PM

Friday, March 24, 2006

 
THE LATEST BIT OF PSEUDO SCIENCE FROM BERKELEY

I suppose I should comment on the latest version of an old Leftist tune -- summarized here for the general reader.

Starting in 1950, psychologists have been trying to prove that conservatives are psychologically maladjusted --an effort that was summarized by Jost et al. and demolished here. They never give up trying, however, and the study of 95 children from Berkeley, California by Jack Block and his wife is the latest episode. It's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to demolish the "research" concerned so I will just mention a few basics.

What the authors found was that Berkeley children who were rated as unhappy in their kindergarten years turned out as adults to be conservatives. So what do we conclude from that? Do we conclude that conservatives are intrinsically unhappy people? Hardly. The opinion polls repeatedly show conservatives to be the happiest (e.g. here). So what DO we conclude? How about saying that conservatives in ultra-Leftist Berkeley feel uncomfortable in that environment and pass on some of that discomfort to their children? But the children (as most children do) grow up to share their parents' politics so they turn out conservative in later life too. So conservative parents who were SITUATIONALLY unhappy have conservative children -- big deal!

But that is actually putting the best face on the study. It is not nearly as good as that:

1). The children concerned were not a representative sample of any known population. They may not even have been representative of Berkeley, let alone anywhere else. And if you don't sample, you can't generalize.

2). The correlation between personality and ideology was often very weak (e.g. .27 or 7% shared variance for the rating "Is self-reliant, confident") so there were nearly as many confident children who turned out Rightist as Leftist. The reported correlation could in fact have turned on the responses of just one child. That certainly weakens ALL causal inferences from the study. And many of the stronger correlations involve obvious value judgments. For instance "Is visibly deviant from peers" is said to characterize conservatives but why not turn the value judgment around and conclude that conservatives tend to be independent?

3). The measure of conservative ideology is suspect. Block does not list the actual attitude statements he used but, as I have shown elsewhere, Leftist psychologists in general don't have a blind clue what conservatism is -- and what they regard as a measure of conservatism is usually a caricature of the real thing -- generally a collection of ignorant and aggressive statements that very few real-world conservatives would assent to. That it was a caricature in this case is suggested by the fact that it showed conservatives as less intelligent. In the general population it is Leftists who are less intelligent.

I could go on to mention the Rosenthal effect etc. but what's the point? Michelle Malkin has links to various other comments on the study.

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ELSEWHERE



There is an incredible outpouring of Hillary mockery here. A small excerpt: "Listening to Hillary's views about Israel is like reading Hitler's email. Consequently she has made herself as welcome in Tel Aviv as a Scud missile. Any Jew that supports her for President is road testing the next generation of gas ovens. The inestimable W. Somerset Maugham said, "Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a full-time job". Remarkably, Maugham diagrammed that judgment without ever having met Hillary Clinton, in whom hypocrisy is more profound than just characteristic. It is her signature. She ricochets from one false image to another - wife, mother, do-gooder. Doting liberals are always enraptured when they receive a syrupy Christmas card with a picture of the Clintons gathered at the hearth with Hillary reading excerpts to Chelsea from A Girl's Life of Ilse Koch. None of this masks the essential Hillary. As a colleague observed of her - if it walks like a bitch and talks like a bitch, it's not a duck".

Bureaucracy under attack: "Corporate executives, faced with greater regulatory scrutiny and demands in the wake of corporate scandals like Enron, have for some time moaned that new compliance rules are costing them profits and manpower, as well as cumbersome and probably not that effective. Now a new lawsuit's adding another criticism: They're unconstitutional.... "Sarbanes-Oxley is a classic example of government overreaction," said Mallory Factor, chairman of the Free Enterprise Fund which recently hired former special prosecutor Kenneth Star as one of its attorneys. "We don't have a problem with transparency but we've created a class of people that are just professional bureaucrats that want a larger bureaucracy that's extraordinarily expensive and cuts down innovation." A recent study conducted by the Securities Industry Association estimated that the cost of compliance has nearly doubled in the past three years to an estimated annual total of more than $25 billion in 2005, up from $13 billion in 2002.... Factor said costs associated with Sarbanes-Oxley are prohibitively high for small and mid-sized companies that are trying to compete with larger players, creating a barrier of entry for these firms."

Some Muslim intellectuals get it: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We -- writers, journalists and public intellectuals -- call for resistance to religious totalitarianism. Instead, we call for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values worldwide. The necessity of these universal values has been revealed by events since the publication of the Muhammad drawings in European newspapers. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the arena of ideas. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations, nor an antagonism of West versus East, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats."

One size does not fit all in diplomacy : "Hooray, I finally found something on which I can agree with the Bush administration: The 'nucular' cooperation deal signed recently with India. In cutting the deal, the administration displayed some uncharacteristically nuanced thinking: A one-size-fits-all nuclear policy isn't sustainable in today's world, and when it comes to nuclear arms, India is not the same as Iran and North Korea, or for that matter, Pakistan. As someone of Indian origin, I probably don't surprise you with my thinking on this."

No Muslim dress privilege in Britain any more: "A young Muslim girl yesterday failed in her two-year legal battle to force every school in Britain to allow pupils to decide their own dress code according to their religious belief. Britain's highest court ruled to uphold the right of all schools to set uniform rules provided that they consult their local community. The Law Lords ruled that the human rights of Shabina Begum had not been breached when her school refused to allow her to wear a full-length Islamic dress to class and that Denbigh High School had not acted unlawfully. The ruling, which overturned a previous Court of Appeal decision, was welcomed by head teachers.

An interesting piece of hate-speech here from a "defender" of homosexuality.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/24/2006 07:18:00 PM

Thursday, March 23, 2006

 
A BIRTHDAY CONCERT

Last Tuesday (21st.) was the birthday of J.S. Bach -- of whom I am a great afficianado. So Anne and I went to an organ concert at a nearby Lutheran church to celebrate the occasion. Both the organ and the organist were excellent and Bach's ringingly self-confident music grabbed me from the very first notes.

The thing that inspired this post however was the prominence of East Asians on the occasion. The man selling tickets at the door was Chinese in fact. It reminded me that I have often read that the great Western classical music has a proportionately much bigger following in China and Japan than it does in the West.

I am very grateful for that. It could well be that Western culture is now decadent and much of our glorious cultural heritage stands in danger of being largely lost. I was for instance horrified to find out that, at the end of his high school years, my son had never heard of such great English poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. I promptly sat down and read him some of course. The only introduction to poetry that his school gave him was to a very minor black poet! I happen to have known the black poet concerned (Kath Walker) and can tell you that she was essentially a Leftist whiner and little more.

So our kids are being de-educated and de-acculturated and it seems possible that there will one day be very few of our own people left who will know enough to carry on the knowledge and appreciation of past cultural wonders and attainments. That Asians may keep alive what we do not is therefore some comfort to me. While there is life there is hope.

When I first heard the music of Bach at age 13 (It was a performance of the Toccata and fugue in D minor) it was an electrifying experience for me. It would be sad indeed if the generations to come never got the exposure that would introduce them also to our crowning musical achievements. But I think that lack of exposure is probably already happening in far too many cases. So if Asians keep alive our great cultural traditions it will all be to the good.

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SEX AND IQ

This looks like some independent confirmation that Richard Lynn is right and that the average IQ score for women is lower. To get men and women showing up as scoring equally (on average), the test authors deducted points from the scores of men.

I have just posted here the original Lynn & Irwing paper. The ferocity of the attack on the paper is exactly what we would expect of a genuine contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Work that overturns what has long been believed will of course be resisted. So to allow the general reader to see for himself/herself that the paper is utterly sound, I have reproduced it. Out of respect for copyright, however, I have omitted the Tables and References (Essential to serious scholars).

Most readers of the paper will be amazed to recognize nothing in it that resembles what critics like Blinkhorn have said about it. Those who know of the uneasy relationship that Leftists have with the truth will not be surprised, however.

I have posted a PDF of Blinkhorn's rant here. Blinkhorn was so desperate that he criticized an addendum to the main Lynn & Irwing paper and ignored the main paper altogether. The addendum dealt with results from groups of students and I certainly think that you can conclude nothing from such data. But the main paper was a collection of results from a large number of general population samples and criticisms such as those made by Blinkhorn were anticipated there and fully dealt with.

To tell you in a few words what Lynn & Irwing found: Most IQ test data originates from surveys of students. And from such data it is reasonable to conclude that males and females have equal average IQs. And in the past, everybody concluded that. Lynn & Irwing however submit that males are "late bloomers" and that male IQ goes on increasing beyond the age of 16 while female IQ flattens out. And when they looked carefully at all the past studies of IQ among ADULT populations, that is exactly what the data showed.

Just to be perfectly clear, I should perhaps add that Lynn's finding is in addition to the long-known finding that males have a greater variance in their IQ scores. Female IQ scores cluster much more tightly around the average for their sex than the scores of men do. So there are not only more very bright men than women but also more very dumb men than women.

I have written a fair bit in approval of Lynn's work so in case anybody thinks that I am incapable of being critical of him, I should perhaps point out that I have criticized some of his early work in another field.

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ELSEWHERE

High-taxing Britain: "Gordon Brown is about to raise Britain's tax burden to its highest-ever level, raking in nearly one milion pounds a minute. An analysis by the accountants Ernst & Young, based on the Treasury's own figures, shows the chancellor will match the record high for the tax burden this year and rise above it next year. That means it will be higher than in the 1970s under Denis Healey, when the top rate of income tax was 83%, and the early 1980s, when it was 60%. The Ernst & Young analysis shows that the tax burden excluding North Sea oil revenues, the best measure of the load faced by families and businesses, will be 37.6% of gross domestic product this year, close to the 37.7% peak reached in the early 1980s."

More EU stupidity. A lot of EU countries are in a panic about their slow economic growth. So what are they doing about it? Instead of freeing up business to grow, they are erecting the selfsame economic barriers between themselves that it was the whole idea of the EU to overcome.

London's far-Left antisemitic mayor again: "Ken Livingstone was embroiled in a further dispute last night after suggesting that the billionaire Reuben brothers, who are involved with the 2012 Olympics, could "go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs". ....Conservatives on the London Assembly said that the brothers were not Iranian but born in India of Iraqi Jewish parents. Brian Coleman, assembly member for Barnet and Camden, said: "This is the latest anti-Semitic remark by Livingstone."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/23/2006 09:59:00 PM

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

 
In memoriam

A very sad announcement below just received from Sean Gabb. I knew Chris Tame personally and find it hard to realize that someone of his vitality is gone. His good cheer and positive attitude together with his unflinching libertarianism was truly memorable

"It is with the deepest regret that I must announce the death of Dr Chris R. Tame, Founder and President of the Libertarian Alliance. Chris founded the Libertarian Alliance in the early 1970s. During the next 30 years, he worked tirelessly to recover the British libertarian tradition as a seamless heritage of freedom. He took issue with those Conservatives who saw freedom in terms purely of pounds and pence - and often not even as that. He took issue also with those who demanded freedom in all matters but those involving the getting and spending of money. He believed that freedom should be defined in the traditional English sense, as the rights to life, liberty and justly acquired property.

In July 2005, Chris was diagnosed with a rare and very aggressive form of bone cancer. Though only 55 at the time, and though he had avoided all those vices commonly believed to be dangerous, he took this diagnosis with great calmness. During the next eight months, he faced his approaching end with a fortitude and good humour that was an inspiration to those around him. To the very end, he retained a keen interest in public affairs and in the welfare of his friends and loved ones. On his last day, he made sure to check his e-mails.

Chris died peacefully in his sleep at 3:37pm GMT on Monday the 20th March 2006. He was never alone during his last six days. Mrs Helen Evans and Dr Sean Gabb were by his side at the end. Chris was married and divorced twice. He left no children. Dr Gabb will make a further announcement in the next few days of the funeral arrangments."

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Brookes News Update

The US economy and the Fed's credit binge: what does it mean for Americans?: So long as economists confuse GDP with growth, argue for a "stable price rule", teach that money is neutral and that it is possible for central banks to calculate a "neutral rate of interest" economies will be plagued by the so-called boom-and-bust cycle
Australia's term of trade boom and recession: Our unsustainable housing and consumption boom was not the result of a surge in the terms of trade but a surging money supply the consequences of which have yet to work their way through the economy
George Clooney's moral grandstanding and the viciousness of the Hollywood left: Celluloid intellectual George Clooney is out of touch with history as well as mainstream America. Hollywood's vicious leftists have betrayed their country more than once, not that Clooney cares
Australian protectionists do not even know what they are talking about: Some of our protectionists obviously do not know what they are talking about. Nevertheless, the media still publishes them
Leftist revisionism calls Crusaders 9/11 terrorists: It has been open season on Western civilization and Christianity for some time and now it's getting worse with leftist propaganda in our schools being used to rationalise Islamic terrorism
Bracks' Bill of Rights is an attack on basic rights: The Bracks' Government intends to use its phony Bill of Rights to undermine the common law and basic right by transferring power from the legislature to activist judges with a leftist bent. So where is the Victorian Liberal Party on this issue?
Can money supply be an economic indicator?: Regardless of the demand for money, once the money stock increases it sets in motion an exchange of nothing for something and thus economic impoverishment

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ELSEWHERE

On Australian Politics I have just put up a coverage of the recent big cyclone in North Queensland, Australia -- a big blow that was bigger than the Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans in the USA. Guess how many people died in the Australian big blow? Hint: There was essentially no underclass in the area of Australia concerned.

An Afghan man is facing the death penalty for becoming a Christian: "Abdul Rahman was arrested last month after his family went to the police and accused him of converting from Islam. He has gone on trial for rejecting Islam - an offence punishable by death under Shariah law. During the hearing, the defendant allegedly confessed that he converted from Islam to Christianity 16-years-ago. He had been working as a medical aid worker for Afghan refugees in neighbouring Pakistan. The judge said: "We are not against any particular religion in the world. "But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law. "It is an attack on Islam. The prosecutor is asking for the death penalty."



Since when does an Anglican Archbishop care about the Bible anyway?: "The Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, says he does not believe creationism -- the Bible-based account of the origins of the world -- should be taught in schools. "I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there has just been a jarring of categories," Dr Rowan Williams told The Guardian newspaper. "My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," the most senior clergyman in the Church of England added."

France bewails British invasion: "the Duke of Westminster's purchase of a famous Paris flea market is the latest rout in what is being decried on the French side of the Channel as a British invasion. "Not only have you stolen `our' Olympic Games, you are also shamelessly occupying our towns and countryside," writes Jos,-Alain Fralon, author of Help, the English are Invading Us, which is shortly to go on sale. "The English . . . have their own airports, their newspapers, their pubs, their lawns, their grocer, sometimes their own French wife." He suggests that the influx of Britons is causing profound damage to relations between the two nations: "How the Entente Cordiale is fading in our own beautiful countryside." He has a point: in Dompierre-les-Eglises, a village of 400 inhabitants situated 30 miles from Limoges in central France, 54 British families have bought houses."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/22/2006 07:41:00 PM

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

 
EVIDENCE FOR WHAT THE LEFT HAVE CONSTANTLY DENIED

Documents seized in Iraq immediately after the US invasion in 2003 point to the presence of al-Qa'ida members in the country before the war, and show there had been moves to hide traces of "chemical or biological materials" from UN weapons inspectors. The documents have been posted on the internet as part of a rolling program by the US Government to make public the contents of 48,000 boxes of untranslated papers and tapes relating to the workings of Saddam Hussein's regime. Saddam is said to have routinely taped talks with cabinet members and intelligence chiefs.

US director of national intelligence John Negroponte was ordered by President George W. Bush to release the material. Hundreds of thousands of previously unseen documents and hundreds of hours of tapes will be placed on the web in the coming weeks. The first documents to be released offer tantalising clues to possible Iraqi contacts with al-Qa'ida. An Iraqi intelligence report dated September 15, 2001 -- four days after the attacks on the US -- says Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were in contact with Iraq, and al-Qa'ida members had visited the country. It claims the US had proof that the Iraqi government and "bin Laden's group" had agreed to co-operate to attack targets in the US and that the Americans might strike Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation.

However, the information comes from an unidentified Afghan informant who states merely that he heard it from an Afghan consul, also unnamed. According to ABC News, which translated the tapes, the claims are "sensational" but the sourcing is "questionable". Another document from a "trustworthy" source and dated August 2002 claims people with links to al-Qa'ida were in Iraq. There is a picture a few pages later of the Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But the papers suggest Saddam's agents were trying to verify the presence of al-Qa'ida rather than colluding with it.

Documents from 1997 confirm that Saddam was giving UN weapons inspectors the runaround by removing correspondence concerned with "prohibited weapons" and clearing "labs and storages of any traces of chemical or biological materials". The transcript of one tape recording shows an official named as Comrade Husayn expressing concern to Saddam that outsiders would find out about imported material, including some from the US, apparently for chemical weapons. "They have a bigger problem with the chemical program than the biological program," he tells Saddam. "We have not told them that we used it on Iran, nor have we told them about the size or kind of chemical weapons that we produced and we have not told them the truth about the imported material."

In another taped conversation from the mid-1990s, a man called al-Sahhaf -- possibly a former information minister -- says: "On the nuclear file, sir, are we saying we disclosed everything? No, we have uncleared problems in the nuclear field." Apparently confirming that the nuclear program had been abandoned, he adds: "Everything is over. but did they know? No, sir, they did not know, not all the methods, not all the means, not all the scientists and not all the places."

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

Vatican stops apologizing for the Crusades: "The Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the "noble aim" of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day "jihad against the Jews and Crusaders".... At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were "a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places".... Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II. He said that the Crusaders were "martyrs" who had "sacrificed their lives for the faith". He was backed by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, who said that those who sought forgiveness for the Crusades "do not know their history". Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott's recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as "utter nonsense". Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was "historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."

Former peacenik David Aaronovitch tells here how the brutalities of Serb leader Milosevic turned him off being a peacenik and made him more realistic: "What I want to do is chronicle how the Serbian leader was responsible for the invasion of Iraq. Along a line of logic that runs, crudely, no Slobo, no Bosnia, no Kosovo, no fashion for intervention, no Iraq."

More wacko antisemitism from America's Leftist academe: "A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke. The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization. But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, "pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and "neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will".

Max Boot rather wittily points out how some George Clooney films make the case for a neocon foreign policy.

Amazing! The mega-incorrect blog "Majority Rights" has logged a million hits in just the last 4 months. It is a blog devoted to the frank discussion of racial matters so the success of the blog does I think show that, despite all the Leftist propaganda, people can see that some racial differences are real and important and want to talk about that -- and generally have few opportunities to do so. Because I am a libertarian, my posts there are founded on the view that people must be judged on their individual characteristics and behaviour -- but that does not mean we have to deny reality. A lot of the other people who frequent the site are always grumbling about how far-Left I am however!

I am rather pleased to see that this blog has made the Hot 500 at blogrolling.com (no. 438 at the moment). To be in the top 500 out of about 30 million blogs (according to Technorati.com) seems pretty good to me. NZ Bear is only a little less cheering -- putting this blog at no. 505 at the time of writing. What it all means is that you are reading stuff that lots of other bloggers approve of or find interesting.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/21/2006 04:28:00 PM

Monday, March 20, 2006

 
MEDIA LIES ABOUT IRAQ

(Excerpt from Miranda Devine)

A soldier friend stationed in Baghdad for the past two months has been sending me emails with such arresting lines as: "It's late here and I [have] to get the Chief of Staff back to the Palace." From his office in the fortified military and government area, the Green Zone, he scans the web for news about Iraq and compares it with his reality. "Baghdad is not burning down around my ears," he wrote last week. "Things were tense a while back, but violence was within limits. Callous thing to say, but that is the reality around here." The only "quagmire" he sees is "the soft patch of ground out by the rifle range and no civil war in sight".

He exhibits a soldier's sang-froid. "We are expecting to be very busy the next few days. The terrorists are extremely media savvy (it's the only area they get to win) and will be looking for big headlines. End of religious festival, big crowds and convening of new government." But with the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion tomorrow, he says, "the only people who seem to have lost both their grip on reality and their nerve are the western media".

His reality is quite different: "I am more and more impressed with the Iraqis every day. There are problems, to be sure, but I do not know of any country that has gone through the sorts of upheavals that this one has without any problems. "One just has to remember the catastrophes of the French Reign of Terror, or the Russian and Chinese revolutions, not to mention the disasters that were Vietnam and Cambodia."

He also sent me a letter which has been circulating among soldiers for a month, from the mayor of Tal 'Afar, near the Syrian border, praising the "lion hearts" of the US 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment who have changed the city from "ghost town in which terrorists spread death and destruction to a secure city flourishing with life".

The violence of revenge attacks on Sunnis across Iraq, after last month's bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra, led many commentators to declare the civil war they have been predicting for three years had arrived. But others point to signs the crisis has spurred Iraq's political leaders to sort out their differences and work to form a national unity government, three months after their third successful election. And as Sunni politicians engage in the process, there are encouraging reports of infighting among Sunni insurgents.

Last Thursday Iraq's new parliament was sworn in and 82-year-old Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi told its first short session: "We have to prove to the world that a civil war is not and will not take place among our people. The danger is still looming and the enemies are ready for us because they do not like to see a united, strong, stable Iraq."

"I think it is right that we are here," wrote my friend last week on his 39th birthday, "and that we support these people against the thugs, criminals and terrorists who would try and turn back the clock on them".

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ELSEWHERE

Another crooked Bush-bashing poll. We read the following on CNN: "Although Americans don't believe the country faces an imminent energy crisis, most believe there are "major problems" --- from potential oil shortages to possible terrorist attacks -- and they are harshly critical of the leadership on the issue from the White House, according to a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.". In other words, Gallup asked the (slanted) questions CNN paid for. But as Stolen Thunder notes, however, nowhere are the details of the actual questions given, let alone the frequencies of the different responses to each question. I don't think we need to guess why.

Good point from Newsbusters: "Have a look at the chart at the bottom and answer one simple question: what's the biggest gasoline-price story over the last six months? Sure looks as if it was the way gasoline prices nose-dived about 80 cents from September to November. Remember all those MSM stories highlighting the plunge? Neither do I. But let market fluctuations push prices up about fifteen cents in the last month, and you can be sure that the MSM will start bemoaning 'soaring gas prices.'"

Poli Pundit is pretty outraged at the recent extensive service outages at blogger.com, which is a branch of Google. That certainly is one arrogant organization. What would it harm them to talk to their customers?

Good comment from Betsy: "I see that people are gathering around the world to protest the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. I guess they wish that Saddam Hussein were back in power and they support the terrorists in Iraq who are killing innocent civilians on an almost daily basis. These people would never gather around the world for a day of protests against tyranny in say, Iran, or genocide in Sudan. Nope, that's not the sort of thing that gets these people out into the streets, is it?"

Peaceniks getting bored: Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets around the world Saturday, marking the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with demands that coalition troops leave immediately.... Protests also were held in Australia, Asia and Europe, but many events were far smaller than organizers had hoped. In London, police said 15,000 people joined a march from Parliament and Big Ben to a rally in Trafalgar Square. The anniversary last year attracted 45,000 protesters in the city.

The colour of crime gets a rare mention in Britain: "A dog walker made no attempt to stop his pet savaging a 34-year-old woman in the street, police have said. The woman was left with serious leg injuries after the dog attacked her in Roseberry Street, Liverpool. The dog, which was believed to be a Staffordshire bull terrier or a pit bull terrier, was one of two being walked by the man, Merseyside Police said. A police spokesman appealed for information from the public over the attack. He said the man was described as black, 6ft and aged in his late teens or early 20s. One of the dogs was described as tan-coloured while the other was black, he added."

GOP failure is Donk opportunity: "Have America's entrepreneurs and corporate leaders found a new voice of regulatory sanity in, of all people, Nancy Pelosi? Apparently so, and that should be a wake-up call to Republicans -- because like everything else in the free market, the free enterprise agenda is up for grabs. In the recent "Innovation Agenda" that the House Democratic leader and her party unveiled, Ms. Pelosi acknowledges specifically the need to "ensure Sarbanes-Oxley requirements are not overly burdensome," and endorses reform. Meanwhile, the scourge of Wall Street, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, is criticizing Sarbanes-Oxley's "unbelievable burden on small companies" and its possible role in "preventing some initial public offerings.""

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/20/2006 03:47:00 PM

Sunday, March 19, 2006

 
Privileged French students demonstrate to preserve their entitlements

The French government wants to make all young people more employable by making it easier to fire duds, but .....

The current demonstrations by students of French universities against a proposed liberalization of the labor laws, so that it will be easier for French employers to hire and fire young people, remind me very much of the strike by miners on the Witwatersrand in South Africa in 1922.

The demonstrators in France and the strikers in South Africa are and were supported by their respective national communist parties. The miners went on strike because the mine-owners proposed to replace expensive white labor with cheap black labor, hoping to increase profits. This move provoked one of the most bizarre political slogans of all time, promoted by the communist party: Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa!

What are the French university students demonstrating for? By opposing the proposed law of Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, they are in effect demanding that the children of Maghrebin and African immigrants stay exactly where they are, in the dismal and dispiriting housing projects that surround all French towns and cities, and accept their state of dependency on handouts derived from the taxes of their elders and betters.

The students are demonstrating for the continuation of their own protections and privileges once employed, as most of them soon will be. They do not wish employers to have the freedom to sack them, except at the cost of huge redundancy payments that the law currently grants them. Obliviously, of course, they are in effect also demonstrating for the continued segregation of the Arabs and the Africans.

And you can be sure that the "principled" young Frogs demonstrating are all Leftists. (Excerpts above from Theodore Dalrymple)

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ELSEWHERE

About time! "The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston said today it had defrocked seven priests accused of molesting children, as it cleans house following a 2002 scandal over paedophile priests. The seven included Rev Monsignor Frederick Ryan, a former vice-chancellor of the archdiocese accused of abusing two teenage boys and photographing them naked about 25 years ago in his quarters at the archdiocese's chancery. Ryan was placed on administrative leave in March 2002. "This moment provides an opportunity to express to the survivors of clergy sexual abuse and to their families my deepest sorrow for the grievous harm done to them," Archbishop Sean O'Malley said. The Boston Archdiocese, faced with an $US93 million ($126.23 million) bill to settle cases involving about 1000 sex-abuse victims, has shut more than 60 churches to raise money since the scandal erupted in Boston in 2002 and spread nationwide. The seven men are no longer allowed to perform any public ministry in the church and can no longer receive any financial support from the archdiocese."

Wrong target: "Last week, invoking national security concerns, members of Congress hastily acted to prevent a company from the Persian Gulf nation Dubai from taking ownership of facilities at several American ports. This Wednesday Dubai Ports World announced that it plans to sell all its United States operations, presumably including the Port of Miami facility it has run for years without any problem, to an American-controlled company within the next six months. Longshoremen union members will continue to handle packages at America's ports, no matter who owns the facilities. Oddly, none of these same members of Congress have called for inspecting the disturbing history of these unions. At least three aspects of Longshoremen history suggest that these union members at our ports might pose a risk to national security. They have been associated with organized crime, specifically the Mafia. They have a history of anti-American radical politics and have committed acts of violence. But the Longshoremen have been shielded from scrutiny by their high-placed political allies - including Hillary Clinton"

Official Canadian thugs: "A Nova Scotia couple facing an $800 municipal bill for refusing to shovel the snow from their sidewalk have paid half that amount to save their home from being sold by town officials. John and Rona McQuillan of Guysborough have refused to shovel the 20 metres of sidewalk in front of their house since the municipality introduced a snow-clearing bylaw five years ago. The municipality told the couple they would have to pay at least $400 by Friday or face losing their home in a tax sale -- a demand the McQuillans called blackmail. ... 'It gives people four hours after the end of a snowfall to clear their snow, and an awful lot of the people work outside of Guysborough,' said McQuillan. 'It was a bad bylaw and we took on the job of objecting to it.'"

Direct from Iraq: "General John P. Abizaid, commander, United States Central Command, puts out an annual statement on the posture of the United States Central Command. The 2006 posture statement that discusses various topics on the Global War on Terrorism is now out. Some of the topics include "Nature of the Enemy", "Situation Overview in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa", "Other Regional Partnerships" and "Iran and Syria."

Palestinian parasites to feel cuts: "If Israel withholds revenues from a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and donor countries reduce aid, the Palestinians would be thrown into a deep depression, with personal incomes dropping 30 per cent this year alone. A new World Bank study says the Palestinian economy would shrink by 27 per cent in 2006 - a one-year contraction that compares to the 1930s Depression. Unemployment would nearly double, to 39.6 per cent, and two-thirds of the population would be living below the poverty level."

The useless TSA again: "Security screeners at 21 airports across the United States failed to detect materials that could be used to make bombs in recent tests by government agents, US legislators said overnight. "The fact that government investigators were able to pass through TSA's (Transportation Security Administration) screening at 21 major airports with bomb-making material is frightening," representative Bennie Thompson, a member of the Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. "It's like the story of the Trojan Horse," he added. "TSA has spent so much time telling people to take off their shoes and belts, that they have missed the bomb-making materials." The tests were conducted last year by the General Accountability Office (GAO), the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security at the request of US Representative John Mica, a Republican".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/19/2006 06:07:00 PM

Saturday, March 18, 2006

 
SOME OF THE ARTICLES CURRENTLY UP ON "THINK ISRAEL"

FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE "DISENGAGEMENT" -- A STATUS REPORT by Dror Vanunu

ORTHODOX AND ISRAELI: WHEN THE TWO DON'T MIX by Avraham Shmuel Lewin

THE IDF: AN UNCOMFORTABLE ANALYSIS by Moshe Feiglin

THE FICTITIOUS 'THIRD WAY' by Caroline Glick

WHERE OLMERT LEADS, ISRAEL MUSTN'T FOLLOW by Caroline Glick

THE RISE OF HAMAS AND THE DECLINE OF ISRAELI DETERMINATION by Steven Plaut

AL-QAEDA INFILTRATION OF GAZA: A POST-DISENGAGEMENT ASSESSMENT by David Keyes

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, THE NAZIS AND AL-QA'IDA by John Loftus

WILL THE NEXT GENERATION OF (ARAB) PALESTINIANS MAKE PEACE WITH ISRAEL? by Justus Reid Weiner and Michael Sussman

JERUSALEM: A PREFERRED TARGET FOR PALESTINIAN TERRORISM IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS by Dr. Reuven Ehrlich

"PRAGMATIC HAMAS" - NOT VERY LIKELY by Gerald M. Steinberg

THE MYTH OF A MODERATE HAMAS by Barry Rubin

THE SOLUTION TO TERRORISM by Yoram Ettinger

ISRAELI VICTORY WITHIN GRASP by Richard H. Shulman

THE NEW MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM: Exploring Novel Avenues of Hatred by Raphael Israeli

THE SABEEL CENTER'S ONE-STATE AGENDA by Dexter Van Zile

THE PHANTOM ARAB MODERATE by Shmuel Katz

THE PERILS OF ISLAMIC OBSCURANTISM by Babu Suseelan

PEACE CRIMINALS by Jack Berger

HOW TO RECOGNIZE UNFAIR REPORTING ABOUT ISRAEL by Lee Green

THE LION THAT ROARS FOR PEACE by Kate Wright

THE LAMENTABLE CASE OF JOAN SCOTT by Phyllis Chesler, Judith S. Jacobson and Richard Landes

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ELSEWHERE

The BBC has just given a reasonably fair account of the controversy over the "racist" views of Frank Ellis, a lecturer at Leeds University. I was amused at this sentence, though: "The Students' Union claim Dr Ellis has breeched requirements for staff to promote equality and want him sacked.. Is the BBC telling us that Dr Ellis has put trousers on certain requirements? I suspect that they meant to write "breached" but did not know how to spell it. Homophones are deadly for people who rely on spellcheckers. One would have thought that the BBC had some fully literate proofreaders on staff, though. The BBC definitely "ain't what it used to be".

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on his usual themes, including some comments on the Frank Ellis affair.

I have just put up a story on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE that is a REAL black eye for the Left. Conservatives everywhere should be talking about it.

Blogger.com is still having a lot of service outages. Keith Burgess Jackson's blog about Brian Leiter is one of those affected. The site has been down for over a day, now, I think. Keith is fed up and is going off blogspot. His new anti-Leiter site is here.

Google are getting worse all the time. They have just declared that a conservative Christian site is "hate speech". The site concerned has a copy of their letter up. I do myself excerpt content from that site from time to time and I have never seen any "hate speech" on it. Like a lot of Christian sites, it is passionately anti-abortion but if that is hate-speech, a huge slice of America is equally guilty. I suspect that it is their criticism of homosexuality that has got them into trouble. But if that is so, the Bible is hate-speech! See, for example Romans 1: 22-32, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and 1 Corinthians 6: 9-19.

Saddam lied. People died: "As thousands of captured Iraqi documents are translated, it becomes clearer why all the world's intelligence services were misled about Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A decade of UN WMD inspections did indeed destroy Saddam's WMD arsenal. But Saddam believed that he could not outright say he did not have any WMD. He believed that Iran would come after him if they believed Iraq did not have WMD. During the 1990s, the Iraqi armed forces gradually fell apart because of the UN sanctions. So Saddam needed something to make Iraq look stronger than it actually was. But why didn't the truth get out of Iraq? That's because many senior Iraqi officials believed Saddam's deception. To contradict Saddam could get you killed"

I have just put up a new recipe for Hungarian Liptauer cheese spread on my recipe blog. Highly recommended. Recipe blog mirror here.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/18/2006 04:33:00 PM

Friday, March 17, 2006

 
ACCESS PROBLEMS

There have been quite a few problems accessing sites lately. With some blogspot blogs you get this notice: "Blog under maintenance. This blog is temporarily not viewable. Please try again after some time. For more information, click here". And when you click "here" you are told that the maintenance is complete!! Another problem with blogspot blogs is that you occasionally get the message: "You are not authorized to view this page". And you can also get a general "Site down" message.

A fix that works most of the time is simply to try again or to hit the refresh button. Hitting Ctrl+F5 (cache bypass) also sometimes helps.

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

Brookes News Update

How the Fed's price rule triggers recessions: The thought that there is a connection between the manipulation of rates and the so-called boom-and-bust cycle is rarely given any consideration in the US media
The Commonwealth Games is a looming financial disaster for the Bracks' Government: The economics of state-sponsored sports, including the Commonwealth games and sports stadiums, are complete rubbish. Meanwhile, the Victorian Liberal Party finds itself unable to challenge Bracks' reckless spending program
Bush is a victim of America's political civil war: The Bush presidency has revealed the enormous ideological rift that has been developing for more than forty years in America, and yet the vast majority of Americans are still not fully aware of it
Bracks' energy policies are pricing families out of the housing market: Bracks' greenie policies are pricing thousands of families out of the housing market. (Similar policies have had the same disastrous effects in California). So why isn't the Liberal Party attacking him?
Catholic thinking backs labour market reform -- but the Liberal Party doesn't know it: It's time the Liberal Party learned that despite the chatter of leftwing clergymen Christian doctrine actually supports free labour markets
Simon Crean's Gosplan mentality: Crean is still wedded to the discredited and dangerous idea of industry policy
America is waking up to the Islamic menace: It's taken a few years, countless deaths and immeasurable suffering, but mainstream America finally seems to be waking up to the Islamic menace

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ELSEWHERE



A North Korean Musical! "As far as musicals go, seeing people break into song on subjects such as starvation and public executions in North Korea may be one of the most unlikely concepts for stage entertainment in several years. Producers held a preview in Seoul yesterday of the musical called Yoduk Story that features goose-stepping North Korean soldiers and deprived prisoners wondering if they can survive into the next day. The musical is about a North Korean woman's fall from a dancing revolutionary hero to a tortured inmate along with her family at Yoduk prison camp, where she bears a guard's child, and learns to forgive her brutal captors. The production is meant to be an irony-free look at life in a North Korean prison camp that could change the way the North is depicted in South Korean entertainment. Songs in the musical include You are just like germs and All I want is rice. The producers hope audiences can find beauty in the misery of life in the prison camps."

Equality for men sought: "Who controls human conception ... and when should that control be asserted? That's really the bottom-line question surrounding the abortion issue, and nothing makes that any clearer than the recent filing of a lawsuit by the National Center for Men, 'on behalf of a man's right to make reproductive choice to decline fatherhood in the event of an unintended pregnancy.' The case is a Michigan dispute, involving one Matt Dubay and his court-ordered levy for child support, for a child he had never intended to father; since he had been informed by his now ex-girlfriend that she was physically incapable of conceiving, he had not taken further precautions against such an event occurring. They even have a pet name for the case: 'Roe v. Wade for Men,' and they're asking the court to grant 'equal protection' for a man's right to decide about fatherhood. The specific issue has more to do with later (and long-term) liability for child support for unintended offspring, in the event the man in question had neither intended to impregnate his partner, nor had expected she was able to conceive (and thus failed to avail himself or her of precautionary devices)."

No free speech for churches? "The IRS wants to strike the fear of God into priests, ministers and rabbis who venture too far into politics and activism. In a Feb. 24 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson announced that nearly three-quarters of the 82 churches and charities that the IRS investigated recently for alleged political and electoral improprieties turned out, in the IRS' view, to be violators. Among the 'offenses': Allowing candidates to speak on church premises, preachers delivering remarks from the pulpit interpreted to endorse candidates and the posting of Web links to the Web sites of candidates for office. Interest is boiling over in Ohio: There, two ministers are accused of getting too close to Ken Blackwell, the Republican secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate, as well as letting their preaching get too political (the reverends deny the charges). At issue is whether the IRS should more actively sanction or even revoke the tax-exempt status of churches and charities it believes have gone too far."

Shelby Steele on the black problem: "By accepting the idea that government is somehow going to take over the responsibility that only we can take, we relinquished authority over ourselves. We became child-like, and our families began to fall to pieces. Welfare-which promised a subsistence living for the rest of your days for doing absolutely nothing-provided a perfect incentive to not get married, yet still have babies. Then the babies will be state wards, and their babies, and so forth. The incentive is just to stay in that rut. And so the goodwill of America finally did do to us what slavery and segregation failed to do. It destroyed our family, destroyed our character, and now black America is in a struggle. We struggle to stand up like men and women and take charge of our lives, and become competitive with other people in the modern world. If we don't do this, we'll always be behind. But if we do take charge of our own lives, we'll be men among men." [HT Peg Kaplan]

There is an excellent (and sarcastic) response here to the many Leftist critics of America's armed forces.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/17/2006 07:22:00 PM

Thursday, March 16, 2006

 
LEFTIST ATTACK?

Dick McDonald reports that he has been blocked by blogger.com from posting on his blog. Apparently they think it is a spam blog.

I am going to log on there myself now to see if I can help but I am posting this in case I too get hit in some way as a result of doing so. Remember: my mirror sites will remain active!

Update

OK. I have just checked and below is what appears when you try to post on Dick's blog:

"This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts.

Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what's going on and how to get your blog unlocked."

I have sent in an unblocking request and blogger.com say that such requests are normally heeded within 24 hours. So I am pretty sure Dick will be back to normal soon.

The total blocking of Dick's blog was very aggressive, though. Normally, they respond to a suspected spamblog simply by putting up a "copy the letters" task -- which should stop any auto-spamming.

I suspect that the aggressive response means that lots of Leftists have been flagging Dick's blog as a spam blog.

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

THE "CLEVER" ERNEST PARTRIDGE

Ernest Partridge is employed as a philosopher by an American university but he seems to be more in the mould of a French philosopher -- in that his aim seems to be cleverness and paradox rather than clarifying anything. He says that he is a "progressive" but says that progressivism is conservative. Those who would normally be described as conservatives in modern politics he terms "regressives".

I am not really sure it is worth commenting on such superficial cleverness. The last amusing practitioners of it in the English-speaking world were people like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw about a century ago. Derrida and his ilk of course have provided similar entertainment to the French in much more recent times but that is probably little more than a comment on the way French intellectual life is stuck in the past -- in the Marxist past, in particular.

As a boring old Anglo-Saxon philosopher, however, I aim to clarify things as far as I can so I will mention just a few points about the Partridge claims that might help to put them into perspective. With that boring attention to detail that charaterizes most Anglo-Saxon philosophers, I will just look at Partridge's definition of what he believes in:

""Progressivism" is essentially the "liberalism" of most of the twentieth century, as promulgated by both Roosevelts, by the Kennedy Brothers, and by many Republicans, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Jacob Javits and Earl Warren. "Progressivism," to put it simply, is "liberalism""

At first blush, that is a fairly unremarkable statement but on closer examination it betrays either Partridge's typically Leftist ignorance of history or a rather surprising admission of Fascist inclinations. Let us for a start have a look at the two Roosevelts whom Partridge puts first in his list of admirables. Let us start with a quote from a Fascist to give us some context:

"If we are to go forward we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because, without such discipline, no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good".

Now that's mainstream Fascism, isn't it? Totally submerging the individual into an army that works only for the common good rather than individual good. The trouble is that it was not in fact a speech made by Mussolini or his ilk. It is an excerpt from the First Inaugural Address of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Hegel on, Leftism has gone under many names and many disguises but the basic desire to reduce people to an antlike status remains.

And we DO remember FDR's infatuation with Mussolini and his ideas, don't we? It was after all FDR who referred to Musso as "That admirable Italian gentleman". And we surely DO remember how in 1939, a German ocean liner, the SS St. Louis, with 1,000 Jewish refugees aboard, got so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami -- but FDR would not let them land. They returned to Germany to be exterminated by Hitler. So much for FDR. A strange man to admire.

What of the other Roosevelt -- TR, founder of the "Progressive" party and a man who of course, "entirely" agreed that as a race negroes are "altogether inferior to the whites."

No doubt TR's putting his trust in battleships is admired by Partridge and TR's view that war was needed to "cleanse" the national spirit would also be assented to by Partridge. And, of course, sending troops to take over foreign countries would also be warmly approved of by Partridge. TR certainly did that, as the slightest knowledge of American history would tell you.

What I have just said is of course only the quickest indication of what the 20th century Progressivism that Partridge so admires was all about. There is much more detail here.

Clearly, however, Partridge is either a Fascist or an ignoramus. In either case he is certainly an intellectual lightweight -- which fits in with the generally low intelligence that goes with Leftist attitudes.

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

ELSEWHERE

We read here that the DNC is pushing Hillary Clinton as their POTUS candidate for 2008. Good. There is a summary here of Hillary's past which rather boggles the mind. So if she DOES become the Donk candidate for the Presidency in 2008, her past should undo her.

Liberty Corner has really got the message that it is the Left of politics who have most in common with the Fascists of history. Just the fact that FDR was an open admirer of Mussolini would make most reasonable people think if they knew of it.

The enviers can rest. The rich blow it anyway: "Whenever Rodney Zeeb gives talks on financial planning, he asks his audiences if they know the perils that arise when heirs are ill-prepared for an inheritance. Each time, nearly all heads nod, and hands shoot up: Yes, yes. 'Almost everybody knows a family or has seen a case where the money hurt somebody in the family, or the kids or grandchildren blew it all,' says Mr. Zeeb, an attorney and coauthor of 'Beating the Midas Curse,' a reference to the destructive relationships with money that splinter some families. So widespread is the problem, that 6 out of 10 affluent families will lose the family fortune by the end of the second generation, Zeeb says. And 9 out of 10 will have depleted the family wealth by the end of the third generation."

There is an article here showing that for most of its history Iran (Persia) has been good for the Jews. It is only the mad mullahs who are the problem.

Grumpy old Sod has this excellent piece of wisdom: "Australian Politics is a new, highly articulate and well-organised blog which highlights the ridiculous, the unfair and the plain dishonest in modern Australia". He deserves a link for that!

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/16/2006 05:24:00 PM

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

 
Why the West will attack Iran

Excerpt from an interesting article from last January that now seems to be not far from coming true

Why did French President Jacques Chirac last week threaten to use non-conventional - that is, nuclear - weapons against terrorist states? And why did Iran announce that it would shift foreign-exchange reserves out of European banks (although it has since retracted this warning)? The answer lies in the nature of Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventional military means.

Iran's oil exports will shrink to zero in 20 years, just at the demographic inflection point when the costs of maintaining an aged population will crush its state finances, as I reported in Demographics and Iran's imperial design (September 13, 2005). Just outside Iran's present frontiers lie the oil resources of Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and not far away are the oil concentrations of eastern Saudi Arabia. Its neighbors are quite as alarmed as Washington about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and privately quite happy for Washington to wipe out this capability.

It is remarkable how quickly an international consensus has emerged for the eventual use of force against Iran. Chirac's indirect reference to the French nuclear capability was a warning to Tehran. Mohamed ElBaradei, whose Nobel Peace Prize last year was awarded to rap the knuckles of the United States, told Newsweek that in the extreme case, force might be required to stop Iran's acquiring a nuclear capability. German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that the military option could not be abandoned, although diplomatic efforts should be tried first. Bild, Germany's largest-circulation daily, ran Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad's picture next to Adolf Hitler's, with the headline, "Will Iran plunge the world into the abyss?"

The same Europeans who excoriated the United States for invading Iraq with insufficient proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction already have signed on to a military campaign against Iran, in advance of Iran's gaining WMD....

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ELSEWHERE



A good email from a reader about the Leftist mythology surrounding Tasmania: "In one of the latest Lonely Planet books "The cities book : a journey through the best cities in the world" there are a few pages of pictures of Hobart and a fact page. Which of the following list under Weaknesses stands out to you?: 1). Relatively expensive if good accommodation; 2). Aesthetically challenged Federation Concert Hall; 3). Tasmanian wine (more expensive than mainland wine); 4). Aboriginal massacres by the colonists. Yes, apparently tourists visiting 21st century Hobart will have to tread carefully to avoid the piles of Aboriginal bodies littering the streets. The Left just can't help themselves in reflexively accusing Australia of massacre and genocide even in the middle of a travel book".

What a disgusting racist statement!: "A complaint has been made to race relations investigators after Newcastle was described as "hideously white". The remark was made at a conference by Neil Murphy, a Government official who is working on secondment at Newcastle City Council. At the same conference, the city council's assistant chief executive, Paul Rubinstein, described the Tyne & Wear area as one of the "whitest" in the North".

Taranto on the NYT: "Tom Fox, a member of the anti-American Christian Peacekeeper Teams, has been murdered by terrorists in Iraq who held him hostage for more than three months, the New York Times reported on Saturday. On Sunday, the paper carried a follow-up report that Fox "had apparently been tortured by his captors before being shot multiple times in the head and dumped on a trash heap next to a railway line in western Baghdad." The story of Fox's death ran on page A8; the story of his torture, on page A10. So what made the Times' front page on Saturday? Yet another story about Abu Ghraib".

Taranto also has the latest installment of frothing at the mouth by the world's greatest sore loser -- Al Gore.

British justice for once: "Plans to give housewives without children the right to the basic state pension have been thrown out by ministers - but women who give up work to bring up children or care for elderly relatives will be entitled to the full state pension under new government plans.... John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has decided to stick with a pension based on contributions. However, in a radical reworking of the scheme, the Government will pay the contributions of women who sacrifice years of work to bring up children or care for sick relatives." [Why should women who have spent neither time nor money on bringing up children be entitled to support from other people's children?]

A smart Dutch initiative: "Two men kissing in a park and a topless female bather are featured in a film that will be shown to would-be immigrants to The Netherlands. The reactions of applicants will be examined to see whether they are able to accept the country's liberal attitudes. From Wednesday, the DVD -- which also shows the often crime-ridden ghettos where poorer immigrants might end up living -- will form part of an entrance test, in Dutch, covering the language and culture of Holland. Those sitting the test will be expected to know which country Crown Princess Maxima comes from (Argentina) and whether hitting women and female circumcision are permitted.... The new test -- the first of its kind in the world -- marks another step in the transformation of Holland from one of Europe's most liberal countries to the one cracking down hardest on immigration. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, known as Iron Rita, has introduced compulsory integration classes, higher age limits for marriage to people from abroad and the removal of residency permits if immigrants commit petty crimes. She has also talked of banning the burka. Applicants will sit the exam at one of 138 embassies around the world. They will answer 15 minutes of questions and those who pass the first stage will have to complete two "citizenship" tests over five years and swear a pledge of allegiance to Holland and its constitution."

The prologue to Craig Winn's book "Prophet of Doom, Terrorist Dogma, In Muhammad's Own Words" is now up on Spelled Sideways. "Winn uses the most respected Islamic sources, the Qur'an, the Hadith of al-Bukhari, the Biography of Ibn Ishaq, and the History of al-Tabari to link Islam's beginnings directly to the terror the world is experiencing today." In the book Winn "shines a bright and revealing light on Islam, Judaism, Christianity, political correctness, profiling, intelligence gathering, politics, martyrdom, the peace process, and the media's fear of the truth."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/15/2006 01:01:00 PM

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

 
Islam as a good religion for dummies

As far as I know this analysis is completely unoriginal but I feel it needs to be more widely known

IQ tests suggest that Arabs are dumb. And despite vast propaganda to the contrary, their (lack of) intellectual achievements bears that out. See here.

So why have they succeeded in imposing their brutal religion on over a billion people? That is pretty good.

Randall Parker has often pointed out the answer to that. It is because of polygamy. Under polygamy, the rich and smart guys get all the women and leave lots of young Muslim men with no female access. So what do they do with their energies? -- energies that were designed to cope with the large task of caring for a family?

They go to war. They throw their lives away. Suicide bombers are a vivid example of that but reckless aggression as troops in an army fulfils a similar function.

So polygamy makes big numbers of young Muslim males careless of their lives. And that did historically make them fearsome opponents of more traditionally motivated men. Their armies won for a long time because the individuals in those armies fought with such careless aggression and reckless abandon.

So polygamy produced virtual military robots -- destructive of the robots but effective. And most effective BECAUSE of the limited intelligence of those involved. Smarter young men would have found other ways of using their lives.

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ELSEWHERE

If you want to see some REALLY offensive cartoons, have a look at some Korean cartoons about the Japanese. Because Japan conquered and controlled Korea for many years (up to 1945), Koreans hate the Japanese. An amusing story about that: When the Koreans decided that they wanted some high speed trains, did they import the famous Japanese "Shinkansen" trains from virtually next-door? No. They imported them from FRANCE!

Another problem for Social Security: "Harry Weinstein used to think of 93 as ancient. Now that he's reached that age -- well beyond today's average life expectancy -- he's looking forward to turning 100.... People much older than Weinstein could become the norm, said Stanford University biology and demographics Professor Shripad Tuljapurkar. He believes medical advances in anti-aging technologies could increase Americans' average life expectancy in the near future from just under 80 years to 100. Society needs to consider the possibility, Tuljapurkar argues, because the implications for programs like Social Security are mind bending. Would retirement begin at, say, 85? How will we care for everyone?"

Why the Islamists have whipped up hatred of Denmark: "... the government introduced drastic measures to curb the influx of low-skilled immigrants from Third World countries. "There is no danger that Denmark will become a multicultural society, because this is not our goal," Rasmussen said before the elections. The new government introduced legislation that made it harder for immigrants to enter Denmark and to acquire Danish nationality. Copenhagen began to repatriate illegal immigrants and encouraged rejected asylum seekers to leave. It implemented stricter rules to determine who should receive residence permits. It slashed social benefit payments to newcomers, allowing them only a box of bare necessities. As a result, the number of asylum seekers in Denmark dropped from 12,100 in 2000 to 3,222 in 2004. The number of people recognized as refugees decreased from 5,159 in 2000 to 1,607 in 2004. Residence permits for family reunification dropped from 10,021 in 2000 to 4,791 in 2003. The number of people acquiring Danish nationality fell from 18,811 in 2000 to 6,583 in 2003, with Asians down from 7,844 to 1,436 and Africans from 2,371 to 312. People who wanted to become Danes had to pass a language, culture, and history test.

The VERY dubious CAIR: "The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), headquartered in Washington, is perhaps the best-known and most controversial Muslim organization in North America.... The Department of Homeland Security refuses to deal with it. Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat, New York) describes it as an organization "which we know has ties to terrorism." Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat, Illinois) observes that CAIR is "unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect." Steven Pomerantz, the FBI's former chief of counterterrorism, notes that "CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups." The family of John P. O'Neill, Sr., the former FBI counterterrorism chief who perished at the World Trade Center, named CAIR in a lawsuit as having "been part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic terrorism" responsible for the September 11 atrocities. Counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson calls it "a radical fundamentalist front group for Hamas."...."

Those evil whites again: "South Africans are worse off than they were before the end of apartheid, at least as measured by real incomes. In Incomes in South Africa Since the Fall of Apartheid (NBER Working Paper No. 11384), co-authors Murray Leibbrandt, James Levinsohn, and Justin McCrary document that decline and attempt to explain what has happened. They show that average incomes of South African men and women fell by about 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, and note that there has been little improvement since then.... Their focus is on economic well being as measured by income, rather than on other ways of evaluating social welfare, including measurement of political freedom. The change in income is most pronounced in the lower half of the income distribution and has disproportionately affected younger workers, women, and blacks".

The Dutch are slowly learning: "Dutch judges convicted nine men yesterday of belonging to a terrorist group, a landmark verdict that concludes promoting a violent version of Islam can itself be an act of terrorism. The case opens a new way for prosecutors to stop potential terrorists and for the Netherlands to tackle the broader problem of the spread of radicalism among Muslim youth... Two men received 15- and 13-year prison terms for attempted murder after a clash with police during their arrest. One received a five-year term for possessing a loaded machine gun. The convicted men, known as the Hofstad Group, included Mohammed Bouyeri, who already is serving a life sentence for the November 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. The rest were sentenced to up to two years in prison. All were found to have spread hate propaganda among their friends and on the Internet, encouraging Muslims to join a holy war against the West. Geert Wilders, an anti-immigration politician who was threatened by the Hofstad Group, said the ruling didn't go far enough. "This is a judgment befitting a banana republic: very weak and unacceptable," he said, adding that judges "don't understand the threat posed by Muslim extremism."

Both Chris Brand and I have recently put up elsewhere comments about the Frank Ellis case -- where Leeds university students in the UK are trying to get one of the teachers there sacked for "racism". See here and here.

I have just put up an excellent satire on Australian Politics, though you probably have to be an Australian to get it all.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/14/2006 03:51:00 PM

Monday, March 13, 2006

 
WHAT A LAUGH!

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose fidelity to left-wing politics never diminishes while its share of the Canadian television audience diminishes steadily, will present tomorrow and Monday its version of the man it has proclaimed "The Greatest Canadian." That man is Thomas Clement Douglas, "Father of Canadian Medicare," the leader of the first socialist government elected in North America and founding leader of the socialist New Democratic Party. A CBC contest, conducted among the 10 percent of Canadians who watch the federally funded network, bestowed the "Greatest Canadian" title upon Tommy Douglas two years ago.

Pre-broadcast reviews of the CBC's four-hour television portrait of the man - unintriguingly titled "The Tommy Douglas Story" - were far from universally ecstatic. The chief criticism was that the show is boring, the central hazard of all hagiography. It didn't need to be boring. To make it interesting, all the CBC had to do was describe the evolution of the real Tommy Douglas, instead of the legendary one. That show would have instantly become the talk of the country, while devotees of the legend would have been carted away with heart palpitations, spluttering expletives and threatening violence.

But the facts are the facts, and so far the Canadian left has been able to keep them away from the major media, which probably wouldn't run them anyway on the grounds that the legend has become unassailable. But the truth is that "the Greatest Canadian," up to his mid-30s, like many others of the Canadian and American left, was a passionate believer in eugenics. After Hitler showed the world how eugenics would work out in practice, the left made a panic-stricken flight from the cause, often adopting new organizational names, such as eugenicist Margaret Sanger's "Planned Parenthood of America."

However, some were unfortunate enough to leave inextinguishable tracks behind them, and one of these was the CBC's "Greatest Canadian." Douglas's thesis for a master's degree in sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, published in 1933, the year of his 30th birthday, reads like something out of "Mein Kampf."

Applying good eugenics doctrine to his chosen land, the Scottish-born Douglas described at length and in painful detail his solution for Canada's economic problems. Canadians must be bred scientifically, he said. People of lesser intelligence or deficient morality - natives, criminals, adulterers are specifically designated - should be sterilized. Homosexuals who persist in their perverse conduct should be incarcerated in insane asylums...."

More here. It sounds like the guy was a blood-brother to Salvador Allende. All socialists are tyrants under the skin.

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ELSEWHERE

Rocco DiPippo points out that the American peacenik recently murdered by Islamic terrorists in Iraq was the victim of his own delusions. Most Leftists know that their pro-Islam talk is nonsense. They only say it as a means of knocking GWB and the GOP. The poor twit who got murdered actually believed the rubbish.

A good comment from a Smith College student: "Dr. Lawrence Summers' comments about the possibility that women may be less inclined toward the sciences did not bother me. What did irk me was the overblown reaction to statements that were taken out of context and not spoken with sexist intention. While I was disheartened at the news of his recent resignation, I certainly do not blame him for leaving. Summers' now infamous comments regarding women and the sciences were not implying any personal beliefs of his own, but were simply meant to encourage more open thought and dialogue. Yet his free expression was met with unnecessary and exaggerated fury. Last week, I thought of this overblown reaction with some fury of my own as I listened to my Smith government professor actually give credit to the idea that conservatives have lower IQs than liberals. His comments, however, were only met with the class' sheep-like nodding of heads, and the only ones to cringe were the two Republican students in the room who, I assure you, are quite intelligent".

An old fart hungry for publicity: "Add lefty literary luminary Kurt Vonnegut to the list of notables who think comparing President Bush to Hitler is the trendy thing to do these days. According to the Columbus Free Press, Vonnegut was speaking at Ohio State University earlier this week when he offered his insights on the Bush presidency. "I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president," the "Slaughterhouse Five" author opined. Without elaborating on that insult, Vonnegut quickly segued into his next anti-Bush blast: "The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.""

Arizona border strengthened: "Gov. Janet Napolitano on Wednesday ordered more National Guardsmen posted at the Mexican border to help stop illegal immigrants and curb related crimes. National Guard troops have worked at the border since 1988, but Napolitano signed an order authorizing commanders to station an unspecified number of additional soldiers there to help federal agents. Once the funding is approved, the troops will monitor crossing points, assist with cargo inspection and operate surveillance cameras, according to the order. 'They are not there to militarize the border,' the governor said. 'We are not at war with Mexico.'"

Pierre Kandorfer says: "Almost the entire "Hate America" agenda is a carbon copy of the Euro-Trash culture. Our left-wing is almost a "victim" of their agenda and beliefs. They are Anti-American because they hate the American Way of Life, our democracy, of Bill of Rights, our morals, and our values. They hate our capitalism, our free market society, close to everything the fiber of the American Soul is made of. And they hate us because we say what we do, and do what we say. This is probably the worst thing the Euro-Trash and its US ultra-left-wing surrogate can encounter!"

Terrorist kites!: "Flying a kite in Pakistan is a dangerous pastime. Already it's banned for all but 15 days of the year but a provincial minister warned kite-flyers this week that any who cause injury or death with string made from metal or coated with glass could be tried under anti-terrorism laws. The Punjabi chief minister's unprecedented threat came just ahead of the start of an annual kite-flying festival in the provincial capital, Lahore, on Sunday. Kite-flying in Pakistan and neighbouring India often involves aerial duels in which participants try to bring down each other's kites using string coated in a sticky paste of ground-up glass or metal. Every year, Pakistani media report dozens of deaths and injuries caused by kite flying, mainly of children and motocyclists whose throats are sometimes cut by metal or glass-coated string."

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/13/2006 10:09:00 PM

Sunday, March 12, 2006

 
Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Connection Between Legal and Illegal Immigration

An email from Mark Krikorian of America's CIS:

"Legal immigration good, illegal immigration bad." This is often the limit of the analysis underlying debates over immigration in Congress. Supporters of amnesty and guestworker programs often claim that if only illegal aliens were legalized, the problems they create would disappear. In addition, many of the immigration proposals currently being considered would significantly increase ordinary legal immigration; Sen. Arlen Specter's bill, for instance, would double the number of green cards issued, to as many as 2 million each year.

To add some depth to this superficial understanding of the issue, the Center for Immigration Studies has released a new report, Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Connection Between Legal and Illegal Immigration by James R. Edwards, Jr., Ph.D. Edwards, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and co-author of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform, explores the intertwined histories of legal and illegal immigration and how current immigration policy encourages lawbreaking. The report, available online here , finds the following:

* Legal and illegal immigration are inextricably related. As legal immigration levels have risen markedly since 1965, illegal immigration has increased with it.

* The share of the foreign-born population who are illegal aliens has risen steadily. Illegal aliens made up 21 percent of the foreign-born in 1980, 25 percent in 2000, and 28 percent in 2005.

* Mexico is the primary source country of both legal and illegal immigrants. Mexico accounted for about 30 percent of the foreign-born in 2000, and more than half of Mexicans residing in the United States in 2000 were illegal aliens.

* The level of illegal immigration is severely masked by several amnesties that legalized millions of unlawfully resident aliens. The largest amnesty was the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized 3 million aliens.

* Amnestied aliens to date have been fully eligible to sponsor additional immigrants. This has contributed to the ranks of immigrants, both legal and illegal (and often both).

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ELSEWHERE

Muslims oppose Voltaire: "A municipal cultural center here on France's border with Switzerland organized a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire, whose writings helped lay the foundations of modern Europe's commitment to secularism. The play, "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet," uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance. The production quickly stirred up passions that echoed the cartoon uproar. "This play ... constitutes an insult to the entire Muslim community," said a letter to the mayor of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, signed by Said Akhrouf, a French-born cafe owner of Moroccan descent and three other Islamic activists representing Muslim associations. They demanded the performance be cancelled."

A good comment on the Indian connection: "Historic is a much over-used word nowadays. But the deal concluded in New Delhi...in which George W. Bush brought India in from the diplomatic cold after decades of nuclear isolation would qualify. In effect, the U.S. agreed to tear up almost four decades worth of established counter-proliferation law and policy to accommodate a country that the president sees as one of the great powers of the 21st century. It remains to be seen how China, the other great emerging power and one of the five nuclear weapons states to have official recognition under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, will react. It was, of course, fear of China's permanent nuclear dominance over Asia that partly motivated the U.S. to accede...to most of India's wishes. There can be little doubt that Mr. Bush faces a tough battle convincing the many doubters on Capitol Hill whose approval is necessary for it to go ahead. Many will argue that the exclusion from international safeguards of India's existing fast breeder nuclear reactor-which has great fissile material-making potential-is a bridge too far. America's 'non-proliferation ayatollahs', as India calls them, are unlikely to be mollified by the inclusion of all future fast breeder reactors, since they do not yet exist."

Europe in big trouble: "The bad news from Europe is that its birth rates are low, far below the level needed to maintain the current population. The worse news is that the Europeans are not fighting it.... Germany, with the biggest economy and population in old Europe, is typical in its birthrates. The number of children per woman is currently around 1.4, or only two-thirds of the replacement rate (France and the U.K. are doing a little better, Spain and Italy a little worse). Germany's retirement age is 60, and within 25 years it is facing the prospect of three people of working age (about half actually working) supporting two people in retirement, according to the German Federal Statistical Department. Unless the Germans do something dramatic, it is unlikely that in 25 years the ratios will be even that good as emigration will be an attractive choice to the smart, overburdened young producer."

Public-sector pension crisis worsens: "While private-sector pension terminations and freezes are grabbing headlines, the situation is every bit as grave for government pension systems. Like many of the remaining traditional defined-benefit pension plans in the private sector, government pension plans are swimming in red ink. As of January 25, 2006, the National Association of State Retirement Administrators and National Council on Teacher Retirement reported an aggregate unfunded liability of nearly $296 billion for the 103 pension systems and 127 total plans in their Public Fund Survey. A 2004 analysis by Wilshire Associates put the unfunded liability as high as $366 billion."

What you always feared about charities: "A children's cancer charity that passed on less than $16,000 of more than $190,000 raised at a dinner featuring Cherie Blair has had strict conditions placed on its activities. Consumer Affairs has told the Children's Cancer Institute Australia it must inform it of any fundraising activities it intends to undertake in Victoria for the next five years. CCIA must provide full audited accounts of each fundraising effort for the next five years. The charity has also been forced to post a prominent apology on its website for the next year. It follows revelations that more than 90 per cent of money raised at the gala dinner was spent staging the event, including payment to Mrs Blair, wife of British PM Tony Blair. Multi-millionaire promoter Max Markson received $50,000. CA investigated the dinner, which was held in Melbourne in February last year, after a number of complaints. A CA spokeswoman confirmed last night that the charity had signed an undertaking to give donors accurate and timely details of its activities. The spokeswoman said that CCIA had agreed to pay a minimum of 60 per cent of money to its beneficiaries when it registered as a charity."

I have just put up a truly inspiring story on Australian Politics. If you are pro-abortion, don't read it.

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/12/2006 04:03:00 PM

Saturday, March 11, 2006

 
GREAT NEW BOOK BY JONAH GOLDBERG

Liberal Fascism : The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton Publisher's blurb follows:

Since the rise and fall of the Nazis in the midtwentieth century, fascism has been seen as an extreme right-wing phenomenon. Liberals have kept that assumption alive, hurling accusations of fascism at their conservative opponents. LIBERAL FASCISM offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg shows that the original fascists were really on the Left and that liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton, have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism.

Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that "political correctness" on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives-from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment-and rousing cheers from the Right.

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ELSEWHERE

Koran under legal attack in Germany: "At the prosecutor's office at Gorch-Forck-Wall 15 in Hamburg, an unusual letter was received Monday morning, containing an indictment filed this weekend. The indictment targeted the Quran, charging that the holy book of the Moslems, according to the accuser, is incompatible with the German constitution. The accuser is "Bundesverband der B_rgerbewegungen (BVB)", which concerns itself with, in its own words, "defending basic rights and freedoms" against Islam.... The indictment has been filed in several states, including Hamburg, Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Bayern and probably more. In several talkshows on German TV, conservative politicians have pointed out that the Quran is incompatible with the German constitution. The Turkish-born writer Serap Cileli said on January 29 this year that "the Quran must be considered a historic document. It is not compatible with our constitution and Human Rights." Now the alliance wants the matter tried at the courts.... The indictment is against the 200 verses of 114 suras (ED:chapters) of the Quran that are not compatible with the constitution, including demagoguery, incitement to murder, murder and mutilation, war, acceptance of thievery against infidels, meaning all non-Moslems. Verses are also pointed out where the equal rights of men and women are not upheld and where people of different faiths are oppressed."

Blair turns down the heat to save the planet: "Tony Blair has promised to turn down the heating in 10 Downing Street as part of a new drive to persuade people to help the fight against global warming. The Click for the Climate campaign, launched to coincide with National Science Week, which begins today, hopes to persuade people to use energy-saving lightbulbs, cut down on car journeys and use the train instead of flying. The Prime Minister said: "I will be turning down the thermostat by one degree."

Israel gets tough: "Israel will determine its border with the West Bank if negotiations with the Palestinians fail, and then it will build a wall and move all settlers to the Israeli side, acting prime minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Friday. Olmert told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper that if the Palestinians "prefer to be dragged into the axis of evil of Iran", then Israel will change the path of its separation barrier in the West Bank according to national consensus and "Israelis will not live on the other side of the barrier". Olmert also threatened to assassinate incoming Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas if he is involved in terrorism".

The Dutch crack down: "It is a lesson that Taida Pasic and her Dutch classmates will never forget. The hush of the classroom was shattered when immigration officers stormed in and snapped handcuffs on the 18-year-old pupil and took her under police escort to a deportation centre. She was four months away from taking her final exams and aspired to a place at university. Now she faces expulsion from the Netherlands and a life of uncertainty in a homeland that she barely knows... Ministers are arguing in public over the impact of the repatriation of up to 26,000 failed asylum-seekers and the Netherlands is left to consider what has become of the liberal traditions that have helped to forge the nation. Ms Pasic is one of thousands of refugees whose asylum applications were turned down and whom the Government has vowed to deport by the summer of 2007.... Ms Pasic slipped back into the Netherlands in January on a French tourist visa in an attempt to complete her education, a move that Rita Verdonk, the Dutch Interior Minister, described as fraud. And despite strong sympathy for the teenager, opinion polls suggest that a small majority of Dutch people support Ms Verdonk... Ms Pasic's lawyer has filed a final protest but said that prospects for a reprieve were dim. Her school has offered to let her sit her exams in Sarajevo".

Change among European Muslims? "As protests against the Danish cartoons fade, Europe's moderate Muslims are facing difficult choices about their faith, identity, and values. "The middle ground in Muslim communities is between a rock and a hard place," says Omar Shah, an Afghan-Danish commentator on Muslim affairs. "The moderate majority is having to decide where they stand." During a month of flag-burning protests in Europe against cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, the voices of Islamic radicals were the loudest. As the flames die down,however,it is increasingly clear that the cartoon affair has reignited difficult debates within Europe's 20-million-strong Muslim community. Though radical organizations have gained strength, new "progressive" Muslim groups are beginning to challenge traditional ideas. In Denmark, where the cartoons were first published, Muslims who want to live in a pluralistic, secular, and tolerant Danish society have formed a new group to publicize their ideals".

Restoring the melting pot : "Latin will never be a truly dead language, at least not as long as 'E pluribus unum' appears on our money. That's our national motto: 'Out of many, one. 'We've always been willing to welcome immigrants and help them become Americans. But the unity we once valued is unraveling. Once, new Americans were welcomed with a solemn ceremony that matched their commitment to their adopted homeland. Today's new citizens have no such uplifting experience. To qualify they need only pass a standardized, multiple-choice test, often given in their native tongue. In fact, they're not required to show much knowledge of English. If they can transcribe just one of two dictated sentences (correct spelling and punctuation don't count), that merits citizenship. And the greater problem is that too many people don't even go that far. Millions of foreigners live here today with no expectation of ever becoming citizens."

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

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/11/2006 08:35:00 PM

Friday, March 10, 2006

 
Brookes News Update

What's driving the US economy?: The current US boom is the strangest in US history. Despite rising consumption, investment and employment a large number of Americans are convinced that the economy is on the verge of collapse
Victorian Liberal Party becomes the Dhimmi Party: Instead of pandering to Muslim bigotry Liberal Party Minister Andrew Robb should be savaging Bracks for buying Muslim votes by suppressing criticism of Islam
Danish cartoons and Muslim fury: Why are most western countries dealing with Muslims who think they have a right to punish their hosts if they dislike something they do?
Sinai Option - the road to permanent peace in the Middle East: The Sinai option: the transfer of the Arab population from the land that used to be called "Palestinian mandate" to the Sinai peninsula, an area of land comparable with the entire Palestinian mandate
An Iraqi Mayor salutes the US 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment : A letter of gratitude from the Mayor of Tall 'Afar, Iraq, to the men and women of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and their families
Government spending and jobs - another Keynesian fallacy : The Keynesian fallacy that government spending can cure persistent widespread unemployment appears to be alive and well in some of our universities
Cost and prices: another economic fallacy : Those who argue that wages rates or oil price hikes can be inflationary have fallen into the old fallacy that costs determine prices

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ELSEWHERE



Evolutionary forces work rapidly -- even in recent times: "Providing the strongest evidence yet that human beings are still evolving, researchers have detected 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, in the past 5000 to 15,000 years. The genes include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin colour and brain function. Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny. Three populations were studied: Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favoured by natural selection. The study may help anthropologists explain the variety of distinctive appearances, even though people's genes are on the whole very similar, said Spencer Wells, the director of the genographic project of the National Geographic Society. The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not halt in the distant past, as is assumed by many social scientists. "There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago, who headed the study

Canadian Christians swing Rightwards: "Conservative Party popularity among churchgoers, and especially among Protestants, increased significantly this past federal election - driven largely by moral issues such as same-sex "marriage." Protestant churchgoers were 25% more likely to vote Conservative as compared to previous elections, according to an Ipsos-Reid Poll. And among churchgoing Catholics in Quebec, votes for the Liberal party were cut roughly in half compared to 2004. "For the first time in the history of polling, Catholics who are regular churchgoers shifted away from the lending the largest measure of their support to the Liberals (42 percent voted Conservative, 40 percent Liberal)," as reported by Faith Today. Those who attend Catholic Church services more than once weekly were even more likely to vote for Stephen Harper."

Wacko Jacko: "Michael Jackson, the king of pop, is "on the verge" of converting to Islam, CBS News reported last week. If that's true, it fits into a recurring and important African-American pattern.... Given Mr. Jackson's famous eccentricities, it is unclear what his Bahraini venture amounts to, but if he does convert to Islam, he will be following a path in place since the late 1940s, of African-Americans under stress turning to some form of Islam..."

Muslim rapists: "A Muslim rape epidemic in sweeping over Europe -- and over many other nations host to immigrants from the Islamic world. The direct connection between the rapes and Islam is irrefutable, as Muslims are significantly overrepresented among convicted rapists and rape suspects. The Muslim perpetrators themselves boast that there crime is justified since their victims were, among other things, not properly veiled".

GM selling off the family silver: "General Motors Corp.'s board met for the first time Monday with new member Jerome York, an adviser to investor Kirk Kerkorian and an outspoken critic of the company's turnaround efforts. In its one-day meeting, the board was expected to consider GM's planned sale of a majority stake in its finance unit, General Motors Acceptance Corp.... GM's board met the same day the struggling automaker announced the sale of a 17.4 percent stake in Japan's Suzuki Motor Corp. for $2 billion."

Am I a globalist? by Tibor R. Machan: "Even though the global statism of communism is no longer a widespread theme among critics of capitalism, there are plenty who still regard the classical liberal, libertarian polity misguided. The fact that it accords best with human nature, as most reasonably conceived in the tradition of such thinkers as Aristotle, Locke, von Mises, and Rand, leaves these critics unimpressed. So they have come forth with the label 'globalist' with which to tar and feather those who support freedom for all human beings in all of their communities. Well, then I must confess to being a proud globalist myself. I consider it well established that human beings, anytime and anywhere, live better if their right to liberty, including free trade and property, is widely respected and well protected."

Australia doing well on employment: "The unemployment rate has fallen to 5.2 per cent in February on the back of a surge in new jobs. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported total employment grew 25,900 during the month. The number of unemployed people fell 3700 to 554,100. Unemployment in January had been 5.3 per cent. The median market forecast was for a rise of 10,000 in employment and a jobless rate of 5.3 per cent in February. There are now 10.058 million Australians in employment. The participation rate stayed steady at 64.4 per cent. The number of people looking for full-time work, however, fell 2800 to 394,000 while there was a small fall in those looking for part-time work to 160,000. The male unemployment rate stayed at 5.2 per cent while the female unemployment rate dropped 0.1 percentage points to 5.2 per cent.

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/10/2006 05:05:00 PM

Thursday, March 09, 2006

 
FROM CATHY BUCKLE IN ZIMBABWE

"This letter is being sent out three days later than normal because I am now entering the 92nd hour with only enough electricity for lights in my home. At midday on Friday the voltage to my home crashed and the power is insufficient to heat the water geyser, run a fridge or stove or even boil a kettle. 25 telephone calls to the electricity supplier in the last four days, a personal visit to the faults office, a number of offers to provide fuel or go and collect electricians are all to no avail.

In the villages less than 15 kilometres out of Marondera there is also no electricity which means the grinding mills are not working. I was told by a friend that there are scores of people now going without food and that the atmosphere is extremely tense. This morning there is literally mud coming out of the taps in my home which means there are problems pumping water too. Zimbabwe is now entering the darkest of days. It is hard to describe how anyone is surviving now and this week I had the most amazing encounter which helped me put my own problems into perspective.

Standing at the entrance gates of a wholesaler there was a thin, gaunt, tired looking man. On the ground next to him was a small pile of empty cement bags. He bent and picked up a bag and held it towards me, asking me to buy it. An empty cement bag, turned inside out and with two crude holes cut into the top for handles. "Only thirty thousand dollars" the man said to me. This was literally just an empty cement bag, it hadn't been sewn, reinforced or even cleaned very well. I could think of no earthly reason why I would want an empty cement bag but the look in the mans eyes, the slight trembling of his hand and the thinness of his body gave me a whole lot of reasons. I gave the man forty thousand dollars and told him to keep the change. I took my cement bag and the man called out "God bless you, thank you," as I walked away. We both knew that the money I'd just handed over would buy the man just half a loaf of bread but to me, and obviously to him, selling cement bags enables a sliver of dignity to be maintained.

Please keep the people of Zimbabwe in your thoughts and prayers in these very hard times"

Source

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

ELSEWHERE

Ralph Peters reports from Baghdad: "I'm trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it. Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills. And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn't stoop in such an hour of crisis. Let me tell you what I saw anyway. Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops. All day - and it was a long day - we drove through Shia and Sunni neighborhoods. Everywhere, the reception was warm. No violence. None. And no hostility toward our troops. Iraqis went out of their way to tell us we were welcome."

Muslim aggression in India too: "India was on high alert last night after a series of explosions tore through the country's holiest Hindu city, sparking fears of renewed communal violence. The blasts struck a crowded temple and the railway station in Varanasi, leaving at least 15 dead and scores injured. Religious institutions across the country, particularly Hindu temples, are braced for further attacks. Sniffer dogs have been deployed at religious sites in leading cities and devotees were being searched before being allowed to worship. Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, appealed for calm, fearing a resurgence in violence between Hindus and Muslims. The attacks on the temple-studded city on the bank of the river Ganges came as Hindus prepared for one of their most important festivals".

Leftist principles in action: "Illinois Governor Blagojevich still continues to support a member of the racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay organization Nation of Islam for a position on his hate crimes commission. The guy just refuses to admit he made a mistake and fix it. Obviously it's absurd for somebody who hates whites, gays and Jews to sit on that panel."

Surprise! Polling hanky panky from CBS "It appears that every other day there's a new poll released on President George Bush's job approval rating.... This time we're talking about a CBS poll that showed President Bush's approval rating at an all time low of 34%.... So, in an effort to turn the findings of bloggers and talk hosts, who caught CBS monkeying with the poll numbers, into a non-story, they decided to "out" themselves on their website, albeit in the guise of explaining how polls are conducted. CBS News explained to readers what most pollsters do when they conduct their telephone surveys, and then they dropped this little bomb in the midst of their explanation: Bush's favorability poll was weighted in favor of Democrats. Bush's 34% approval rating is a result of polling 37% Democrats, 28% Republicans and 35% other or independents. One can only imagine the affiliations of that 35%. Are they Libertarians? Socialists? Communists? Are some extreme right-wing militia-types, who hate Bush as much as the left?... Also, the poll fails to differentiate between registered voters, likely voters or people who don't even know they can vote."

Prof Bainbridge explains why Vermonters are leaving Vermont: "Might it be that Vermont's problems illustrate the social cost of high taxes, extensive regulation, and low growth policies? For individuals, Vermont has the 6th highest state tax burden in the country. For business, Vermont has one of the worst state business tax climates in the country, ranking 46th out of the 50 states. And then there's regulation..."

The usual Leftist "tolerance": "The abortion debate is unusually tense on the campus of Harvard University this semester, with abortion rights advocates allegedly tearing down pro-life posters that show a baby through the several stages of development. The Harvard Right to Life (HRL) group has named the in utero child featured on the posters Elena. Along with the photos of the baby are facts scribbled on the signs as if a child had drawn them. The most recent ad shows "Elena" at 8 weeks and labels distinct body parts, including the brain, skin, intestines, fingers and "my pumpin' heart". The student organization began posting the Elena ads in mid-February, according to HRL President Meghan Grizzle. The group posts a new ad in the series every week, and Grizzle said students have to replace them "a few times a day."

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/09/2006 05:02:00 PM

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

 
Even this young Californian now knows the score:

An excerpt below from his article "Hitler was a liberal"

When liberals are not trying to pass Nazism off as "fascism," they are attempting to pass it off as an extreme form of "conservatism" and an inexorable byproduct of Christianity. In 2003, on his show ''Scarborough Country,'' former congressman and current MSNBC personality Joe Scarborough shed light on a college textbook that grouped Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as "conservatives." Now how exactly could Hitler, a man who was a strong supporter of social welfare programs, gun control, animal rights, government funding for the arts, and bans against smoking in public get away with being called a "conservative"?

The reason is simple. Liberals are such shameless liars and persistent revisionists that they will malign anyone they disagree with as Hitleresque, from the spastic Iraq war protestors comparing George W. Bush to Hitler to Sen. Dick Durbin comparing American troops to "Nazis." Perhaps this is on account of the equivalence of their deep-seated rejection of God to Hitler's militant rejection of God, which led to one of the ugliest mass murders in human history. But wait a minute, wasn't Hitler a Christian also?

Well, if being a Christian means claiming the role of God for one's self and coercing the subjects of one's rule to shake off their beliefs in Christ and pledge a new allegiance to the Third Reich, then perhaps Hitler was a Christian. But this certainly doesn't explain why the Nazis harassed, arrested, tortured, and murdered Christian clergymen for espousing their beliefs, or for that matter why during the first five years of the Nazis' rule a majority of concentration camp inmates were Christians, Jews being late arrivals for the most part, nor does it explain why on November 4, 1936, the Nazis ordered the removal of crucifixes from schools in the Oldenburg area on account of the notion that they were "symbols of superstition."

To set the record straight: Hitler was not a Christian, the Nazis were not Christians, Nazi Germany was not a Christian theocracy. It was a militant secularist, socialist regime that championed the sovereignty of man rather than the sovereignty of God. In February 1937, Hanns Kerrl, minister of religion in the Third Reich said: "The question of the divinity of Christ is ridiculous and inessential. A new answer has arisen as to what Christ and Christianity are: Adolph Hitler." University Nazis in Keil wrote in 1935: "We Germans are heathens and want no more Jewish religion in our Germany. We no longer believe in the Holy Ghost; we believe in the Holy Blood." Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth, before World War II said, "Our religion is Germany." In fact, grace before meals given to poor children by the Nazi Welfare Committee ended "For this food, my Fuehrer, my thanks I render." Maybe I'm just confused, but I can't precisely recall Jesus ever taking on the name of "Fuehrer" but then maybe I haven't reading my college textbooks closely enough....

For more on the claim that Hitler was a Christian, see here

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

ELSEWHERE

Muslim fanatic really loves the West: "A fanatical Muslim who ranted against Britain has moved back here from Pakistan - to live on benefits. Hate-filled Zeeshan Siddiqui, 26, who once called London an "organ of the devil", is enjoying life in a suburb of the capital. The Sun tracked down Siddiqui to a quiet, tree-lined road in Heston, West London, following his release from custody by Pakistani police who were probing suspected terror links. In the past he has said he wants to be an Islamic martyr, called for all non-Muslims to be killed and declared his contempt for the UK. Yet he is happy to sponge off our taxpayers to the tune of 52.60 pounds a week in Jobseekers Allowance. Siddiqui slipped back into Britain in January after eight months in prison in Peshawar.

House of Lords defends English liberties again: "Britain's House of Lords has voted for identity cards to be voluntary, defying Prime Minister Tony Blair and the House of Commons on an issue Blair says is key to combating terrorism. The unelected Lords voted 227-166 against the compromise plan approved by the lower house last month. After Blair backed down on making identification cards mandatory for all residents of Britain, the Commons backed a proposal to require them for British citizens applying for passports. Rebels in Blair's Labour Party had opposed making the cards mandatory, but critics said that despite the changes, the ID cards were still being forced on the public. Blair says the cards are crucial to the fight against terrorism and fraud. Opponents say they are likely to be ineffective and could violate civil liberties.

Dose of sanity angers French Left: "Moves to curb France's chronically high youth unemployment are at the centre of a trial of strength today between public service unions and students, who have called demonstrations across the country, and Dominique de Villepin, the embattled Prime Minister.... The CPE, just passed by parliament, will allow employers to hire under-26-year-olds for a two-year period that can be terminated at any time. Youth unemployment, at 23 per cent, is widely blamed on protective labour laws that put off employers. Jobless rates of up to 50 per cent on immigrant housing estates helped to fuel last autumn's riots. The CPE is opposed by a majority of the young and the Left, who fear employers will use it to exploit younger workers. Business leaders have given it half-hearted support, demanding a full-scale revamp of labour laws. The battle over the CPE has rallied the demoralised Socialist opposition and unions to resist what they depict as M de Villepin's drive towards "Anglo-Saxon-style" deregulation."

Why Africa is poor: "The rot starts with government, but it afflicts the entire society. There's no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There's no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there's no point being a phone company.) There's no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is underfunded and looks even harder for bribes.) There's no point getting an education because jobs are not handed out on merit. (And in any case, you can't borrow money for school fees because the bank can't collect on the loan.)"

In case you have not seen it yet, here is the Drudge Report of the latest Streisand rave -- in which she accuses GWB of being a "C student" while herself making lots of spelling errors. Those who live in glass houses...

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/08/2006 06:34:00 PM

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

 
ANOTHER INDICATION OF THE WIDESPREAD ACCEPTANCE OF THE NAZIS IN THE 1930s



Prince Philip has broken a 60-year public silence about his family's links with the Nazis. In a frank interview, he said they found Hitler's attempts to restore Germany's power and prestige 'attractive' and admitted they had 'inhibitions about the Jews'. The revelations come in a book about German royalty kowtowing to the Nazis, which features photographs never published in the UK. They include one of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms. One row back in the cortege in Darmstadt, western Germany, was his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, wearing a Royal Navy bicorn hat.

Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering. Explaining the attraction of the Nazis, 84-year-old Prince Philip told an American academic: "There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic. "I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was." The revelations are in the book Royals and the Reich

He added that there was 'a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-Communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?' Philip stressed that he was never 'conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views'. But he went on to say there were 'inhibitions about the Jews' and 'jealousy of their success'.

Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921, the youngest of five children and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. All four of his sisters married German princes and three - Sophie, Cecile and Margarita - became members of the Nazi party. Sophia's husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became chief of Goering's secret intelligence service and they were frequent guests at Nazi functions.

Philip went on to fight with distinction for the Allies in the Second World War before marrying the young Princess Elizabeth in 1947, five years before she became Queen. He served with the Royal Navy where, by 1945, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant on a destroyer and was mentioned in despatches. All of his sisters and brothers-inlaw are now dead but he keeps in contact with his German relatives. His comments on the family's Nazi connections appear in Royals and the Reich, by Jonathan Petropoulos, to be published in Britain in May.

Source

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

ELSEWHERE

Steven Pinker on Eugenics: "Contrary to the belief spread by the radical scientists, eugenics for much of the twentieth century was a favorite cause of the left, not the right. It was championed by many progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger, and the Marxist biologists J. B. S. Haldane and Hermann Muller. It's not hard to see why the sides lined up this way. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt Protestants hated eugenics because it was an attempt by intellectual and scientific elites to play God. Progressives loved eugenics because it was on the side of reform rather than the status quo, activism rather than laissez-faire, and social responsibility rather than selfishness. Moreover, they were comfortable expanding state intervention in order to bring about a social goal. Most abandoned eugenics only when they saw how it led to forced sterilizations in the United States and Western Europe and, later, to the policies of Nazi Germany".

Truth under attack again: "Students and lecturers are calling for a Leeds University don to be sacked after he said he supported a theory that black people were inferior to whites. In a row that has reignited the debate on the limits of freedom of speech, Frank Ellis, a lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies, sparked anger after stating, in an interview with the university's student newspaper, that he was an 'unrepentant Powellite' who thought that the BNP was 'a bit too socialist' for his liking. Ellis said he supported right-wing ideas such as the Bell Curve theory, which held that white people were more intelligent than black people. '[It] has demonstrated to me beyond any reasonable doubt there is a persistent gap in average black and white average intelligence.' Repatriation would get his support, he added, if it was done 'humanely'. Now students are preparing to picket his lectures, protest on campus and bombard the vice-chancellor with emails calling for Ellis to be removed from his post."

Wisdom from Berkeley: "David Brooks quotes Peter Beinart of The New Republic as saying that Harvard students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd expect from a good high school student," and that required courses can be "a hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes." But Harvard students are in most cases outstanding high school students, so they arrive with at least the core knowledge expected of a good high school student". [A false but amusing assumption. America's High Schools are now so bad that even Harvard has to give 20% of its freshman intake remedial courses in the "3rs". See here]

Catastrophic drop in births in Japan: "More than half of the women born during Japan's second postwar baby boom from 1971 to 1974 had not had any children by age 30, according to statistics released Friday by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. Coupled with an earlier prediction that the number of women of childbearing age-15 to 49-will continue to decline over the coming decade or more, the ministry is concerned that the fall in the birthrate will accelerate. "(Because) numerous women in the second baby boom generation have few children, (this) could mean the birthrate will fall at a faster rate, and the population will further decline," a ministry official said. According to a special report published by the ministry focusing on births, the share of women who had not given birth by age 30 was 18 percent among those born in 1953, and rose every year thereafter. The figure topped 30 percent among those born in 1961 and 40 percent for those born in 1967; among the cohort of women born in 1973, a year that saw more than 2 million births in total, 51 percent had not had a child by age 30."

I put up a post on Socialized Medicine yesterday that noted how low the British National Health Service has sunk. They now fund "alternative" treatments while refusing to fund some real therapies.

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/07/2006 03:41:00 PM

Monday, March 06, 2006

 
Erring Spell-Check Causes 'Sea Sponge' Invasion

Below is a true funny story with a sequel. See below for the sequel -- a sequel which I think is original to this blog

"Spell-checking on his computer is never going to be the same for Santa Cruz solo practitioner Arthur Dudley. In an opening brief to San Francisco's 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words "sea sponge" instead of the legal term "sua sponte," which is Latin for "on its own motion." "Spell check did not have sua sponte in it," said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.

That left the justices reading -- and probably laughing at -- such classic statements as: "An appropriate instruction limiting the judge's criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction." And: "It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense." The sneaky "sea sponge" popped up at least five times.

Dudley said he didn't notice the mistake in People v. Danser, A107853, until his client -- William Danser, a former Santa Clara County Superior Court judge seeking reversal of his conviction for fixing traffic tickets -- called for an explanation.

Dudley corrected the error in his reply brief, telling the court that a "glitch" caused the weird wording and instructing that "where the phrase 'sea sponge' is found, this court should insert the phrase 'sua sponte.'" The faux pas has made Dudley the butt of some mild ribbing around Santa Cruz. Local attorneys, he said, have started calling his unique defense the "sea sponge duty to instruct.""

The sequel:

The article above that reports the howler itself contains a howler. Where my heading above used the correct term "erring", the heading in the original article used "errant". This a not uncommon mistake but it is rather appalling in people who deal in Latin every day -- as lawyers still do. "Errant" is ultimately (via French) derived from the Latin infinitive "ire", which means to travel or to wander. So an errant knight is not a knight who makes a lot of mistakes but a knight who travels about rather than staying at home. The author of the article should be made errant.

Interestingly, neither Orrin Kerr and his commenters on the Volokhs nor Instapundit (both legal academics) picked up the erring "errant", though they did note the story. A legal education obviously ain't what it used to be. I learnt that stuff in High School myself -- 46 years ago.

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

ELSEWHERE

Religious comeback in China: "At least one-third of the 60 million members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) belong to a religious organization and half of these, some 10 million members, participate regularly in religious services. But the Central Committee is not standing by passively and is prohibiting party cadres from participating in religious activities and is promoting Marxism and atheism, but many members are defending themselves: "Faith is a personal matter and we will never sell ourselves to the Party."... Mrs Xue ... a CCP member who works for the national security bureau in a big city, was baptized in the Catholic Church 13 years ago. Since then, she had always attended Sunday Mass in an official church, until her colleagues found out. Her superior warned her not to attend religious activities openly. Now she attends Mass in an unofficial house church that belongs to underground Church. It seems in fact that the increase in religious practice among Party members is a phenomenon that has gone beyond the Party's control"

CA: Samoan families learn American culture: "The Malepeai family moved from Samoa to San Francisco's Hunters Point neighborhood in search of the American dream. One day in November, they faced their worst nightmare. A teacher at Malcolm X Academy spotted marks on Kennedy Malepeai, 6, and reported what she saw to the school's principal, who by law had to inform Child Protective Services. A social worker quickly arrived at Malcolm X. A tense, teary meeting between the principal, the social worker, and the boys' mother ensued. Sineva Malepeai, 35, told them she had hit her son with a belt because he had kicked his cousin -- a child-rearing strategy she believed in and learned growing up in Samoa. The social worker threatened to take Kennedy and his three siblings away from their parents and place them in foster care."

Muslims really do believe that stuff: "Coming hard upon the heels of the cartoon riots and the election of the Hamas terrorists, the destruction of the Shi'ite mosque of the Golden Dome in Samarra by Sunni jihadists, and the subsequent Shi'ite bloody retaliation, should put to rest Western delusions about the true nature of Islam. But don't hold your breath. Such displays of Islam's violent intolerance have been coming thick and fast the last few decades, and can be found on every page of history going back to the 7th century, when Islam began its expansion with the blood of several hundred decapitated Jews. Yet still some Westerners, enthralled to their own materialist assumptions and multicultural "we are the world" sentimentalism, wave away this evidence and reduce this destructive behavior to any and every cause except the one that counts: spiritual belief."

This lady KNOWS Muslims: "The West has been wallowing in a state of ignorance and denial for thirty years as Muslim extremist perpetrated evil against innocent victims in the name of Allah. I was ten years old when my home exploded around me, burying me under the rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as the perpetrators shouted "Allah Akbar!" My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the meaning of the word "infidel." I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts, but in a bomb shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness, freezing cold, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of 13 I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends--killed by Muslims. We were not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab Christians living in Lebanon".

Trade and the rise of freedom: "It is no exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. As Murray Rothbard wrote, 'The market economy is one vast latticework throughout the world, in which each individual, each region, each country, produces what he or it is best at, most relatively efficient in, and exchanges that product for the goods and services of others. Without the division of labor and the trade based upon that division, the entire world would starve. Coerced restraints on trade -- such as protectionism -- cripple, hobble, and destroy trade, the source of life and prosperity.' Human beings cannot truly be free unless there is a high degree of economic freedom ..."

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

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/06/2006 06:06:00 PM

Sunday, March 05, 2006

 
Why Tibor Machan likes the rich

(Excerpt from here)

I have never known envy in my life. Somehow the sight of greater wealth on the part of others has never lead me to desire to exchange their lives for mine. Nor, especially, have I ever felt ill will toward those who are rich. On the contrary, I have been very pleased at the existence of the rich. And there are some good reasons for my pleasure with them, even if I can hardly even think myself in their shoes.

For one, the rich remind me that if I wanted to aspire to be one of them, I would have a decent chance at it. I know some rich people and some of these started nearly as low on the economic ladder as I did. But they wanted to be well off and found a way to do this while also gaining satisfaction from their work. I know some people who are millionaires, a few who probably have a billion or so, and in each case I know that the way movies or sitcoms or best sitcoms pulp novels depict them is hopelessly inaccurate. None of these folks is mean or greedy or amoral, quite the opposite. I know that if I had wanted to concentrate my energies on securing wealth and great prosperity-e.g., by means of expertise in finance or corporate management-I could have given that a decent shot, with not too bad a chance at success.

Another reason I welcome the existence of the rich in our society-near enough to the lives of my family and friends to witness what their lives are like-is that without them we and millions of others would scarcely have a chance for occasional luxury, a taste of the finer aspects of nourishment, entertainment, decoration, art and culture in general.

Who but the rich sustain good restaurants? Who but the rich make fine porcelain or jazz clubs or beautiful rugs or fancy furniture, not to mention stunning architecture and enthralling theater possible? I cannot afford to support artists, musicians, actors, great chefs, and the other people who create and produce some of the marvelous features of our culture, nor can my equally middle level and poor income earning friends. But once in a blue moon we all manage to go to a great French restaurant, an art gallery, a neighborhood where fashionable estates are located, or a shopping center that features exquisite merchandise.

I find it disgusting how the envious among us would rather destroy the rich than witness the difference between poverty, modest wealth, and the great wealth of the rich. I find it especially loathsome how so many American politicians, who ought to know better- and some of whom are indeed among the richest people in the country- gladly capitalize on this envy and persist on using the rich as a scapegoat of their own unwillingness to do the right thing.

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ELSEWHERE

Great to hear that Christianity guides Blair: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he believes God will judge him on his decision to go to war with Iraq. In an interview with chat show host Michael Parkinson to be broadcast on Britain's ITV1 television, Mr Blair says he made policy decisions according to his conscience, which is guided by his Christian faith. Asked about joining the US-led invasion in March 2003, he said: "That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that - well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people". Pushed to clarify what he meant, Mr Blair, a devout Christian, replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well".

A surprising article from the elite Smith College of Massachusetts: "This week, John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a series of controversial statements regarding the state of the United Nations. He said that the organization is riddled with "bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions." He could not be more correct.... It is common for liberals to unquestioningly recognize the causes of the United Nations as being good, simply because this is an organization founded upon principles of basic human rights and peace, two cornerstones of idealized liberalism. However, the United Nations is more than deserving of skepticism, particularly given its track record for the past several years. The actions of the United Nations have become increasingly ineffective and often corrupt in recent years, and Bolton has been progressively more vocal on these points."

"Doing" the dog: "I have long said, that if we change the meaning of marriage, it will be the beginning of an unstoppable landslide as the Left continues to push for more and more sickening lifestyles to be ratified as normal..... In the state of Massachusetts, where the leftists have already altered the meaning of marriage to include people of the same sex, they are considering legislation (HB19) that will make it legal to have sex with animals".

Young Muslim Americans becoming a threat: "In an article published in the London Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Dr. Muhriz Al-Husseini, director of the Center for Dialogue and Research and editor of the U.S.-published newspaper Al-Minassa Al-'Arabiya, warns that religious extremism and ignorance are spreading among the young generation of Muslims in the U.S."



A bit amusing but highly commendable!: "Cricket is not a sport one normally associates with China, but the world's most populous nation has embarked on an ambitious plan to change that. China's sporting mandarins have dubbed it "the noble game", and with communist single-mindedness have plotted a five-year plan to become a cricketing nation. The Asian Cricket Council's media officer, Shahriar Khan, said China's interest in cricket was simple. It realised that the biggest game in Asia is cricket - a game that China's major rival in the region, India, happens to be rather good at. With China increasingly making its presence felt in the region, learning to play cricket makes good sense. "China very much wants to engage with Asia via this game""

There are some good pictures here of New York's recent "Support Denmark" rally.

In "The end of Fukuyama" Christopher Hitchens gives the rather idiotic Francis Fukuyama a good blast. One excerpt about the Islamists: "In the face of this global threat and its recent and alarmingly rapid projection onto European and American soil, Fukuyama proposes beefing up "the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like." You might expect a citation from a Pew poll at about this point, and, don't worry, he doesn't leave that out, either. But I have to admire that vague and lazy closing phrase "and the like." Hegel meets Karen Hughes! Perhaps some genius at the CIA is even now preparing to subsidize a new version of Encounter magazine to be circulated among the intellectuals of Kashmir or Kabul or Kazakhstan? Not such a bad idea in itself, perhaps, but no substitute for having a battle-hardened army that has actually learned from fighting in the terrible conditions of rogue-state/failed-state combat. Is anyone so blind as to suppose that we shall not be needing this hard-bought experience in the future?"

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/05/2006 05:59:00 PM

Saturday, March 04, 2006

 
THE EVOLUTION OF BLONDE HAIR AND BLUE EYES

Pigmentation loss is of itself maladaptive

J. Richards tells us very punnily that "Peter Frost has written a cool paper on the evolution of blond hair". Cool it may be but plausible it is not -- if I may use a Yiddish grammatical construction.

The theory put forward is that sexual competition was greater among Nordics and this led to a "different" appearance being favoured -- and those "different people hence reproduced more. This rather wacky theory is based on three postulates and as far as I can see, none are well-attested.

1). Nordics were particularly dependant on men for food acquisition.
2). Nordics had particularly high rates of fatality among males.
3). Nordics have always been particularly sexually liberated.

The facts as I know them are that up until the 20th century the Nordics were as sexually jealous and puritanical as anyone; that many populations and probably all primitive ones have had high rates of male fatality; that Nordics were farmers as well as hunters as far back as we know; and women doing farm work is as common as dirt in human populations.

If I am wrong in those common understandings, I would be delighted to see good evidence of it.

I prefer the traditional theory which I will very briefly restate in a moment but let me offer a small anecdote first: I was once at a conference at Oxford when I got talking to a Swedish psychologist. He was a Knight of the Northern Star, in fact, so he was a very eminent Swede (You didn't know Sweden had knighthoods, did you?). I talked to him about the emigration of Swedes out of Sweden and he commented that seeing the place was mostly in the dark for six months of the year he really didn't understand why anybody ever wanted to live there in the first place.

And that fits in with the view that loss of pigmentation (in hair, eyes, skin) is a MALADAPTIVE mutation (or set of mutations). Because of increased visibility, proneness to skin cancer etc, people with that mutation got competed out of living in desirable places and had to go to places that were at once cloudy (so less likely to allow sun-damage to fair skin etc.) and places that nobody else wanted (because of the cruel climate).

But, to survive in such a climate, abilities to think ahead had to be selected for and that gave us the higher IQ of whites. And with that higher IQ they bounced back and in effect conquered the world.

What's wrong with that account?

That the genes involved in pigment loss seem to be various is the only obvious objection but we still know very little about how genes interact so one crucial mutation could well be at the back of it.

Update:

I should of course have mentioned that, while fair skin is maladaptive to an outdoor life in most of the world (sunburn, skin cancer, visibility to prey species etc.), it is of course adaptive in cloudy climes -- being better able to use whatever light there is to make the very important vitamin D. As this article notes, even today, darker skinned people living in cooler climates can develop vitamin D deficiency diseases. It might also be argued that a fair skin is good camouflage for hunters in a snowy environment but ANY naked hunters amid snow would be distinctly unlikely!

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ELSEWHERE

For the first time since the Iraq invasion, casualties have dropped for 4 months running. Sounds like an important development to me. I'm sure if casualties were rising I would be hearing plenty about it. But no. Instead we got heaps about Cheney peppering a guy with birdshot. Coalition deaths (not including Iraqi soldiers): Oct. 2005: 96; Nov. 2005: 86; Dec. 2005: 68; Jan. 2006: 64; Feb. 2006: 57

Blacks don't care: "A Harvard University study suggests white Americans are far more likely than their black counterparts to die soon after the death of a spouse. The longitudinal study of 410,272 elderly U.S. couples indicates the "widowhood effect" -- the increased probability of death among new widows and widowers -- is large and enduring among white couples, but undetectable among black couples. That, say researchers, suggests blacks may somehow manage to extend marriage's well-documented health benefits into widowhood."

And this guy has spent his life giving other people advice! "A renowned psychiatrist from UC Irvine was duped into squandering at least $1.3 million of his family's fortune on a Nigeria Internet scam, according to a lawsuit recently filed by his son. The son, also an Orange County doctor, said his father - Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk - gave as much as $3 million over a 10-year period in response to an Internet plea that promised the doctor a generous cut of a huge sum of cash trapped in African bank accounts in exchange for money advances.... Gottschalk - who at 89 still works at the UCI campus medical plaza that bears his name - said in court papers that the losses were caused by "some bad investments.""

Deceitful media again: "Last week, the Federal Reserve released their triannual survey of family income. The press seized on the major finding, that average family income declined from 2001 through 2004 and that growth in families' net worth was the slowest in a decade. Those stats make for an easy morality tale about the Bush administration's callousness towards the poor and solicitude for the rich and the powerful. Emblematic of the coverage was a quote from an economist that ran in USA Today: "The household balance sheet is in good shape, better shape today ... but it's not improved for everybody. It's improved for the people in the top distribution of income and wealth," he said. But the headlines and the morality tale are the exact opposite of the facts only a few pages inside the Fed report. The rich didn't get richer; the rich got poorer while most everybody else did ok".

Leftist versus Leftist: "The makers of the gay cowboy flick "Brokeback Mountain" were too rough on sheep, an animal-rights group charged yesterday. In a letter to director Ang Lee, The Humane Society also complained about the way the horses and elk were treated. "The excessively rough handling of the sheep and horses leaves viewers questioning whether anyone was looking out for the safety of those animals," the letter said. "And many also wonder how the filmmakers got the elk to lose its footing and crumple to the ground 'on cue' after being shot.""

There is now a big lot of new posts up by Chris Brand -- this time including a picture of him! He covers Muslims, blacks, IQ, David Irving etc.

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/04/2006 06:33:00 PM

Friday, March 03, 2006

 
Brookes News Update

Minimum wage lies v the US economy and the Victorian Libs: The American jobs market is being used to attack the fundamental economic law that pricing any product above its market-clearing price will create a surplus
Should we be concerned with the US economy's falling savings rate?: Because it is not possible to quantitatively establish the amount of real goods and services, various data like real income, real personal consumption expenditure, or real GDP government statistics shouldn't be taken too seriously
Liberal Party implodes while Bracks' Government attacks consumers: Environment Minister John Thwaites is calling for a ban on plastic bags if retailers do not reduce their use. This is another example of ALP stupidity and ignorance
The media, Abu Ghraib and the forgotten massacres: When spoiled Western journalists cave in to Muslim thugs and abuse their positions of influence by writing lies they are deliberately spitting in the faces of real heroes who have taken terrible risks and have even made the ultimate sacrifice
Maureen Dowd's fascist slip: Maureen Dowd is the same penetrating intellect that called Florida's Cuban
community a bunch of totalitarians because they resisted Elian's illegal return to Castro's socialist paradise
Moralising lefties v. free markets: They are everywhere, lefty moralists, I mean. The ones who are forever flaunting their feelings of moral and intellectual superiority, which means nearly all of them
Right-wing hysteria v the Dubai ports deal: The world's shipping business is run by foreigners. Our brain-dead Congress has made so many restrictions on the business everyone avoids flying the American Flag like the plague
Hamas and the Palestinians: a missing opportunity: Perhaps they might notice that the Hamas leadership is a present day Nazi party and the rest of the world might think twice about funding another Reich. Or Caliphate.

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ELSEWHERE

I am posting a lot on Tongue Tied this week so I may not post as much here as I usually do. So if you are not a regular reader of Tongue Tied, maybe you should catch up with this week's offerings. There is not much overlap between what I post there and what I post here.

Fighting the world's woes with liberty: "When I began to read Fidel Valdez Ramos' column in the UN Report I receive frequently via email, I was afraid I would once again be witnessing a plea that the problems of the world should be addressed mainly by way of foreign aid. This is what so many people involved in developmental studies advocate -- for example, Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs and his celebrity partner, U2's Bono. To my surprise the essence of Mr. Ramos' pitch was different. Although he is associated with the widely respected mainstream organization, the Ramos Peace and Development Foundation, as well as with the Boao Forum for Asia, the central message Mr. Ramos aired was that one crucial means for helping the world's poor countries is to remove barriers to their entry into the world economic community."

Political boundaries ought not to be economic boundaries: "My next-door neighbor in Virginia agrees to mow my lawn for $25. He mows and I immediately give him $25 in greenbacks. Rather than spend his earnings on beer or a back massage, my neighbor uses the $25 to by a share of Microsoft. Everyone applauds. An American earns money and invests it, making 'our' economy stronger. Now consider a slightly different example in which I live, not in Virginia, but in Maine on the U.S. side of the Canada-U.S. border. My neighbor is a Canadian living in Canada. He mows my lawn; I pay him 25 U.S. dollars. While my neighbor and I are just as pleased with our transaction in this example as we are in the previous one, pundits and politicians regard the second case with much more suspicion."

A Tocquevillian in the Vatican: "Upon Joseph Ratzinger's election to the Papacy in April 2005, many commentators correctly noted that Benedict XVI's self-described theological "master" was St. Augustine. The fifth-century African bishop is widely acknowledged as a giant of the early church whose life and writings are counted, even by his detractors, among the most decisive in shaping Western civilization. Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, is full of citations and themes drawn from Augustine's texts. The encyclical's publication appears, however, to confirm that another, more contemporary thinker has influenced the way that Benedict XVI views religion in free societies and the nature of the state. That person is the nineteenth-century French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville.... What Tocqueville did not doubt, however, was religion's importance in sustaining free societies. This theme is addressed at length in Democracy in America. More importantly, it has attracted Joseph Ratzinger's attention".

William Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard, offers an amusing analogy: "Harvard is the General Motors of American universities: rich, bureaucratic, and confident--a deadly combination. Fifty years from now, Larry Summers's resignation will be known as the moment when Harvard embraced GM's fate. From now on, the decline will likely be steep. And not only at Harvard: Among research universities as in the car market of generations past, other American institutions will follow the market leaders, straight to the bottom. The only question is who gets to play the role of Toyota in this metaphor."

Why Venezuela's Chavez should make the left cringe: "The left has repeatedly condemned the right for being militaristic. It has pressed for disarmament in the region, deeming it immoral that resources should be used to buy weapons when so many people are hungry. Hugo Chavez has started the biggest arms build-up in Latin America in a long time. He is buying $2 billion plus worth of Mi-17 and Mi-35 helicopters, Mig-29 fighters, C-295 transport planes, patrol ships, and corvettes. He has knocked every door, from Brazil to Spain, from Russia to China, lusting for weapons."

Frist: Tax cuts make money: "Many people in Washington have long known a dirty little secret about tax-cut measures: When done right, they actually result in more money for the government. Ever since the Senate approved the last major tax relief bill, in 2003, revenues have increased every year. In 2004, they went up 5.5%. Last year, they rose 14.5%, the largest increase in nearly 25 years. Total government collections, in fact, increased more after President Bush's 2003 tax cuts than they did after President Clinton's 1994 tax hikes."

Another huge conservative laugh here at the embittered Leftists who have few or no children. Tomorrow belongs to conservatives.

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/03/2006 07:14:00 PM

Thursday, March 02, 2006

 
POLITICS, HAPPINESS AND GENES

The fact that political stance is highly hereditary ties the two reports below together:

Even the Left-leaning Pew Research Center is still finding that conservatives are happier than Leftists. Such results are hardly surprising. Leftist politics are the politics of grievance, complaint and whining. But I also liked the comment about Democrats by Statguy: "Anyone who consistently looks to the government for help is in for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness".

Depression: Those pesky genes at work yet again: "In a world first, researchers from NSW have discovered the gene responsible for depression. After 25 years' research, scientists have found that people who carry a particular gene are more likely to suffer depression regardless of their life experiences. The medical breakthrough will have major ramifications for diagnosis and treatment of the disease which affects one in four Australians. The study, to be published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry this week, shows that people who carry a short serotonin transporter gene are predisposed to depression. Conversely, those who carry a long version of the serotonin transporter gene would be more resilient to whatever life throws at them. Around 43per cent of the population is believed to carry the short version of the gene".

So we should perhaps feel sorry for Leftists. They are born miserable. The trouble is that they want to take all the rest of us down with them too. They hate other people being happy. That is why their policies are good at tearing down the rich but hopeless at lifting up the poor. The results of their policies uncover what their real priorities are -- hurting rather than helping. Stalin and his ilk were no accident.

Update:

There is another report on the genetics of depression here.

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ELSEWHERE



Well-deserved: "The sharp drop in the price of Google's shares may portend a long-awaited pullback in the broader stock market, technical analysts said. Google closed on Nasdaq at $US362.62 ($488.11), down $US27.76 ($37.36) for the day, after earlier falling as low as $US338.51 ($455.56). Google's 7.1 percent drop didn't come out of the blue. The stock is down 23.7 percent since January 11, when it hit its lifetime high of $US475.11 ($639.50)."

I guess the media will try to ignore this but a manifesto against Islamofascism has just been signed by some notable campaigners -- Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bernard-Henri Levy etc. Excerpt: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats...."

Leftists blame the victim: "There's a certain consistent pattern regarding the worldwide Left's assessment of culpability for Muslim terror. It is the fault of the murdered.... For a decade or more, it has been a given on the Left that Israel is to blame for terror committed against Israelis by Palestinian Muslims (Palestinian Christians don't engage in suicide terror). What else are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they had Apache helicopters, the argument goes, they would use them. But they don't, so they use the poor man's nuclear weapon -- suicide terror. The same argument is given to explain 9-11. Three thousand innocent Americans were incinerated by Islamic terrorists because America has been meddling in the Middle East so long. This was bound to happen. And, anyway, don't we support Israel? And when Muslim terrorists blew up Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others, the Left in Spain and elsewhere blamed Spanish foreign policy. After all, the Spanish government had sent troops into Iraq. When largely Muslim rioters burned and looted for a month in France, who was blamed? France, of course -- France doesn't know how to assimilate immigrants... During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, black mobs murdered innocent Korean shopkeepers and burned sections of the city. The liberal response in America was virtually universal: We must understand the anger of these people..."

Abortions getting easier: "Women who are less than nine weeks pregnant can safely have medical abortions at home, according to the head of a government-backed pilot project. Abortion services for the 20,000 women who seek a chemically induced abortion every year could be transformed should the Department of Health's official evaluation of the pilot confirm initial findings. But it is also likely to provoke controversy from anti-abortion campaigners who will claim that home abortions would make the procedure easier and therefore lead to more women having terminations. Shirley Butler, the project manager of one pilot which has tested the abortions with 172 women patients since 2004, told the Guardian: "We haven't had any significant problems apart from one woman who had a slightly heavy bleed. In my opinion medical abortions outside of acute hospitals seem to be safe.""

Why foreign aid to Africa does not work: "Economic development in Africa will depend -- as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world -- on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders. Development everywhere is homegrown. As G-8 ministers and rock stars fussed about a few billion dollars here or there for African governments, the citizens of India and China (where foreign aid is a microscopic share of income) were busy increasing their own incomes by $715 billion in 2005."

Leftist scam in Britain: "A 2 million pound bid for funds made to Walsall Council has been turned down as officials have never heard of the organisation and were staggered that its plea was for nearly twice as much cash as 53 others put together. The Anti Abuse Of Minorities group request was to help fund investigations into racial abuse and institutionalised racism. The application was nearly twice as much as the total 1.2 million pounds requested by 53 other groups across the borough. Councillor Zahid Ali, communities and partnership cabinet membership, said he had never heard of the group, which cannot be found on the internet. The application was one of the least researched he had ever seen he added. "It was the first time I had heard of them. We just don't know much about them. It was their first application and many of the forms were incomplete. There was no way we could give this kind of money." Efforts to contact AAOM were unsuccessful."

Tim Blair has an interesting look back in time to when British cartoons about the Nazis were causing official palpitations similar to what we now see in response to the Mohammed cartoons.

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

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

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

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

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

****************************
posted by JR 3/02/2006 05:47:00 PM

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

 
SIKHISM

I have always liked the Sikhs. Sikhs were one of the many groups in the very multi-ethnic area where I grew up. I remember in my early teens how a tall dignified brown man in a blue turban gave me a tract about Guru Nanak (founder of Sikhism). The name of the publisher of the tract so amused me that I remember it to this day, nearly 50 years later: The Gurpurb publishing company.

Although Sikhs are sometimes mistaken for Muslims because they wear turbans, Sikhism in fact started out as an Indian alternative to Islam and Sikhs fought the Muslims almost from the inception of Sikhism. There is a good interview here with a British Sikh leader who calls on Britain to stand firm against Islamic pressure.

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ELSEWHERE

Arrogant EU elitists: "The French President, Jacques Chirac, will urge European leaders to set the doomed European Union constitution aside and consider radical projects that can be pushed through under existing treaties. A list of more than a dozen such projects has been drawn up already, some at the heart of the EU constitutional treaty frozen since France and Holland rejected it in referendums last year, and from which Mr Chirac will choose a few to present at summits in March and June. Ideas salvaged from the constitution include the creation of an elected EU president, replacing the present system of a six-month rotating presidency. The French list includes asking the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, to take on the effective role of EU foreign minister. Paris also said it would be possible to use existing treaties to form an EU diplomatic service. New EU embassies would replace overseas delegation offices now operated by the European Commission.... A French official called for European Union lessons for secondary school pupils in all 25 member states, based on a standardised teaching model covering EU values and history."

Addiction Gene: "Genetics researchers have confirmed that people with a different form of a certain gene are more susceptible to drug and alcohol addiction. They hope the finding will help predict who might get hooked and what treatments will help those who do. Researchers led by Wolfgang Sadee, a scientist at the Ohio State University, have figured out how differences in one gene can make the brain more sensitive to alcohol, narcotics, or nicotine. The gene Sadee's team looked at has long been known to code for a kind of brain protein called an opioid receptor, which acts like a switch, turning on pleasure and blocking pain when triggered by certain addictive drugs."

Mexico still stupidly socialist: "The future for foreign manufacturing (maquiladoras) in Mexico is bleak. Tijuana, home to one half of the nation's foreign owned plants, has enjoyed zero unemployment for the last five years. That trend has reversed. This month 17 Japanese manufacturers in TJ announced they are moving their operations to Asia. There is now growing unemployment in every sector of Tijuana's economy. Vicente Fox deserves much of the responsibility for making Mexico less investor friendly by not advancing two of his campaign pledges: To overhaul a socialistic and antiquated set of labor laws and reducing bureaucratic red tape. His policies, in fact, have created more red tape and increased the costs of doing business in this country."

Venezuela: Another destructive revolution: "Seven years after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez first took office, an event commemorated earlier this month, Juan Francisco Rivas is still waiting for the 'revolution.' His 24-square-meter makeshift house, currently inhabited by nine people, sits at a 45-degree angle atop one of the city's worst hillside slums, Petare. His roof is a single metal sheet. There is no hot water. Mr. Rivas voted for Mr. Chavez in 1998 but today, while showing his often-flooded living room, says, 'Look at this place and tell me honestly that Chavez is for the poor.' During the 1990s, Rivas worked as a carpenter and even had social security. Today he is grateful to get three days of work per week, all in the underground economy."

Stateless in Somalia, and loving it : "Somalia is in the news again. Rival gangs are shooting each other, and why? The reason is always the same: the prospect that the weak-to-invisible transitional government in Mogadishu will become a real government with actual power. The media invariably describe this prospect as a 'hope.' But it's a strange hope that is accompanied by violence and dread throughout the country. Somalia has done very well for itself in the 15 years since its government was eliminated. The future of peace and prosperity there depends in part on keeping one from forming."

Wanted: Secretary General: "This week, The New York Times finally caught onto a story that U.N. experts and others in the press have been focused on for months -- the world body's upcoming selection of its next Secretary General. The current Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was first elected in 1996, and according to U.N. tradition may only serve two terms. It doesn't help, of course, that on his watch corruption, nepotism and incompetence have become the organization's defining traits. So what happens now?"

80,000+ now on "no-fly" lists: "The latest figures that I have seen are that at least 80,000 Americans are now on FBI and Homeland Security's red-flagged 'no fly' lists with another 325,000 on yellow-flagged 'watch lists' (the latter being subject to body and luggage searches). Hundreds more names are added every week. The criteria for being put in these lists is secret, and there is no official procedure for getting off a list. Government propaganda for these lists implies that only 'known terrorists' and terror 'suspects' are on the lists, but the reality is far different."

FDR believed in Stalin: "The great irony, unacknowledged by Russian historians even today, is that had it not been for the hundreds of thousands of Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the Red Army would never have reached Berlin before the Americans. Roosevelt refused to attach strings to aid. Nor, more surprisingly, did he intervene or protest when it was discovered that the Soviet Military Mission in the US was spying shamelessly and flying quantities of stolen documents from the Manhattan Project out of the country". More on Roosevelt and Stalin here.

Rand Simberg has a good fisking of a particularly nutty bit of Leftist kookery.

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

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

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

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posted by JR 3/01/2006 02:41:00 PM