Wednesday, November 30, 2005

 
RECOVERING

Well my big surgical procedure seems to have gone OK. Many thanks for the good wishes I have received from many readers. I felt like shit when I came out of the anaesthetic but after a few hours of post-operative testing they let me go home, whereupon I fell straight into bed and have just woken up after a few hours of sleep, feeling fairly normal. There was some morphine in the cocktail that the anaesthetist poured into me however so I am not sure if that has worn off yet or not.

I went into one of Brisbane's many private hospitals where my treatment was faultless: lots of competent and attentive staff. Maybe I should give the hospital a free plug: It was North West Private hospital, a for-profit hospital. My lady-friend Ann is a nurse and her her loving presence during my recovery period helped a lot too. The procedure was a dermatological one and I have frequent more minor dermatological procedures so I was on first-name terms with the surgeon. We even had a few laughs before proceedings began. I had had a couple of small excisions (SCCs) done by him just six days before and he in fact took out the sutures resulting from them while I was on the table -- as they were already well-healed. It is lucky I am a good healer.

For those who take an interest in such details, the hospital staff that I encountered were all white and all spoke perfect Australian English -- which helps a lot as I am a bit deaf these days. I don't think I should sit up for long at this stage so I don't think I will post to all my blogs straight off but I may get more up during the day. It is just after midnight here in Eastern Australia at the time I am writing. I do however have a few things ready to put up on Australian Politics and there are also a few excerpts from my recent readings below.

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ELSEWHERE

Aristotle vs multiculturalism: "Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit. A state is not the growth of a day. Hence the reception of strangers, in colonies either at time of their foundation or afterwards has generally produced revolution." (Aristotle THE POLITICS, book V)

Back to the animal rights folly : "Some ideas just keep being paraded about, yet there is so little merit to them that they should never see the light of day in intellectually respectable forums. It's as if we gave Nazis a place at the table when discussing how societies should be organized -- they are beyond the pale. Here, once again, I find a very famous person, indeed, a Nobel Laureate in literature, voicing sentiments that look very much like denying the difference between humans and other animals."

The honest truth about Honest Abe : "If you want to believe Lincoln's goal was to free the slaves -- fine. If you think he had to suspend habeas corpus, imprison rival politicians, and shut down dissenting papers because, for freedom to live, it had to be killed -- great. Think whatever you want to think. I honestly don't care. Six-hundred thousand lives were wasted in that war, but hell, they're dead now, so there's no use crying over spilled milk. All I'm saying is, in war, there are always two sides to the story. Always. Even in our current war. And if you don't teach both sides to school kids, they'll never be able to critically pick one. That kind of lopsided thinking gets us precisely nowhere in this world. It's a great way to trick kids into staying on your side of a conflict. But it's also a driving force behind most conflicts to begin with."

That most painstaking of Australian historians, Keith Windschuttle, has just written a brief history of Maoism in Australia in which he describes the powerful influence such complete nonsense had among Australian intellectuals. See here.

Amazing: France supported Britain in the Falklands war "Investigations in the 1990s revealed that France provided Britain with a large amount of technical assistance. The most valuable information was on the Exocet's homing radar. Officials of Aerospatiale, the manufacturer, denied having direct dealings with the British; but Aerospatiale was run by Jacques Mitterrand, the president's brother, a fact that may have facilitated a quiet arrangement. Sir John Nott, defence minister during the Falklands war, revealed in his memoirs that the French also supplied aircraft similar to those sold to Argentina for British pilots to practise against. "In so many ways," wrote Nott, a diehard Eurosceptic like Thatcher, "Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies." Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that the French president was "absolutely staunch" in his support. "I was to have many disputes with President Mitterrand in later years," she wrote. "But I never forgot the debt we owed him for his personal support throughout the Falklands crisis."

Mike Adams on Muslims and Marxists: "For those who have never considered the similarities between radical Muslims and radical Marxists, it is time to take heed. While the attacks of the former have been well-documented over the last few years, insufficient attention has been paid to the attacks of the latter. Our college campuses have become the last safe haven of Marxists, largely because its adherents have never had to survive in the real world, much less in a communist dictatorship. Indeed, there are more communists teaching in the State of North Carolina than there are in the former Soviet Union. Look carefully at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Few campuses have more avowed Marxists within the ranks of the faculty. And few schools have done more to present a kinder, gentler version of Islam - one that omits every reference to the killing of "infidels."... The proponents of Marxism are also the greatest supporters of those who kill our troops in Iraq. For the most part, academics are silent about the blood-letting that inevitably ensues once a nation is governed by radical Islam or by the principles of Marxism. And if anyone dares to state the obvious, the subsequent willingness to distort the "atrocities" of this nation knows no bounds."

Ireland beats the Scandinavians hands down: "In his research into the causes of growth differences between OECD economies the American economist James Gwartney showed that there was a direct correlation between economic growth and tax burden. The higher the level of taxation, the lower the growth rate. The explanation for this phenomenon is as logical as it is simple. The higher the tax level, the lower the incentive for people to make a productive contribution to society. The higher the fiscal burden, the more resources flow from the productive sector to the ever more inefficient government apparatus. Ireland has proved that a substantial lowering of the taxation level can become the motor for launching even the most slackish economy into full gear. A drastic reduction of the Irish tax rate, from 53% in 1986 to its current 35% , has led to a continuous boom of wealth creation at an average rate of 5.6% during the past two decades, while the number of jobs has grown by over 50%. In barely 18 years Ireland jumped from the 22nd to the 4th place in the OECD prosperity ranking. Ireland did not reduce its social welfare benefits. On the contrary. The unprecedented growth led to an increase of fiscal revenue and social expenditure."

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/30/2005 10:24:00 AM

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

 
POSSIBLE HIATUS

I go into hospital for a rather large surgical procedure today. It is however day surgery so I hope to be back home by the evening and blogging away as usual. If that proves too optimistic, however, this blog may not be updated for a day or so.

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PATRIOTISM AND NATIONALISM

I have never been able to explain to my own satisfaction why Leftists despise patriotism. And I think that the short answer is that they don't. I think it is only (or principally) a worm in the brain of the modern-day American Left. In America's "Progressive" era (late 19th and early 20th century) the Left were not only patriotic but outright nationalistic. The founder of America's "Progressive" party (Teddy Roosevelt) definitely put his trust in battleships and was instrumental in the invasions of first Cuba and then the Philippines. And the excuses mustered for both invasions were as threadbare as such excuses usually are. And under Woodrow Wilson (still a great hero to the Left for his sponsorship of the League of Nations) unpatriotic and antiwar utterances landed thousands of Americans in jail. A large slab of the modern American Left would now be in jail if Woodrow Wilson were still in charge.

Internationalism or Weltbuergertum (world-citizenship) as an ideal seems usually to be traced to Karl Marx and that aspect of Marx certainly inspires the small band of Trotskyists who still agitate away worldwide. Yet Marx's co-author, Friedrich Engels, was an unabashed and strident German nationalist. Go through the archives of my MarxWords blog if you doubt it. And Marx himself took sides in various wars of his day. So I think we must regard past Communist sponsorship of internationalism as no more than a ploy.

And the Left in countries outside the USA has generally been patriotic and continues to be so. No-one questions the patriotism of Australian Labor Party politicians, for instance, because there is no need to. They in general sincerely put Australia's interests first, according to their lights. American Democrat politicians, on the other hand, are super-sensitive to questioning of their patriotism because they know it to be well-founded and yet at the same time also know it to be electoral poison.

At this point I think I should digress a little to make a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. The concept of patriotism (love of one's country) is fairly unproblematic but nationalism is a much vaguer and more fluid concept. At its core, I think, is a claim of national superiority. But what follows from that varies. We can see nationalism in the form of invasion and domination of other countries (as in the "Progressive" assaults on Cuba and the Philippines) or we can see it in a non-aggressive form as in modern day France. The French continue to think that their national superiority is unquestionable and do their best to promote French Gloire, distinctiveness and independence but, after the tremendous loss of life that they endured under Napoleon, military adventurism has not been on their agenda to any significant extent at all.

I personally have no problem with either patriotism or non-aggressive nationalism. It is now a mainstream view among psychologists, despite their generally Leftist orientation, that patriotism is a normal and natural part of the human psyche and I myself have argued for that view at great length in the academic literature. Perhaps the most interesting finding that emanates from the psychological literature on the subject is that patriotism is in general totally unrelated to racial attitudes. It was for many years the dominant view among psychologists that patriotism and racial prejudice went together to form a syndrome of "ethnocentism" but careful research has repeatedly shown the two to be essentially unrelated. You can be proud of your country without at the same time looking down on particular racial or ethnic groups.

So why do modern-day American Leftists despise patriotism? I think it is clearly because they in fact despise America -- so anyone who loves America is anathema to them. And why do they despise America? Because they are haters. They hate and despise success and satisfaction in others. They disguise such motivations as a desire for "equality" but tearing down any contented society that exists is what gets their rocks off. And the USA has now become the world's most powerful, successful, important and generally pre-eminent society that there is. It is also a society that gives lots of ordinary people the experience of a full and contented life. And Leftists hate all that. They hate any pre-eminence but their own and they want to scratch the eyes out of all that contentment -- which they demonize as "complacency". So to Leftists worldwide, the USA is the epitome of all they hate and so it is on the USA that their hatred is focused -- whether they themselves are inhabitants of the USA or not.

In the "Progressive" era, of course, the world power was Britain and "British imperialism" was the great Leftist hate-object among the Left of that time, both in Britain and elsewhere.

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ELSEWHERE

The Leftist betrayers of America: "Clearly, little has changed among the American left since it ascended to prominence during the Vietnam era. Back then, brutality was not personified by the genocide of the Soviets, the Communist Khmer Rouge and their Killing Fields, nor the wanton slaughter of Vietnamese by the millions in the wake of the U.S. departure from that nation. Rather, it was singularly characterized by Lieutenant William Calley and the My Lai massacre. Now, to hear it from liberals, 9-11 was little more than a historical fluke to which the best response may well be indifference. Furthermore, the ensuing terror war has been a singular violation of human rights, defined not by the toppling of indescribable tyrants, but by a few terrorist inmates who were forced to play "dog pile" at the hands of some admittedly perverted U.S. prison guards.... During World War II, it was through the likes of "Tokyo Rose" that America's mortal enemies worked to undermine troop morale and destroy its will to continue the fight. But the mouthpieces of militant Islam need not engage in such efforts, since the American left has accepted the responsibility to wage this facet of the war on the home front."

The Leftist lack of principles goes a long way back. As a Communist of the 1930s relates: "I held onto the anti-Hitler sentiments that had led me to the Pioneers, and remained in touch with the neighborhood's chronic state of alarm over the fate of the Spanish Loyalists, the Czechs, the German Jews, and other targets of the Reich. But I was not prepared for the next lesson in the Left's politics of betrayal. It was taught by Vyacheslav Molotov as he announced, in the late summer of 1939, the USSR's nonaggression pact with Hitler's Germany. This was the agreement that set up the invasion and division of Poland, the fall of France, and the worst chapters of the Holocaust. All politics we are told are local, so what really shocked me was the zombie reaction of the neighborhood comrades and their Red Diaper kids to these tectonic changes. A few defected from the Communist Party, but most clung stubbornly to the new party line, no matter how violently it whiplashed them...... The inevitable Party line reversal came quickly: In June 1941, the Wehrmacht invaded Russia, and the Left once again, literally overnight, hated Fascism".

There is a good article here setting out the restaurant tipping habits of the "friends of the poor" on the political Left. No prizes for guessing how mean they are personally to people who really are poor. The usual Leftist hypocrisy and lack of any real principles. You would think that mega-rich John Kerry and John Edwards would be generous if only for the sake of their political image but even they make the cheapskate list.

I've got some crazy news heading up Australian Politics today.

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 11/29/2005 08:06:00 AM

Monday, November 28, 2005

 
SOCIALIST GERMANY: THE OLD IS NEW AGAIN

"A multimillion-dollar campaign to boost Germans' low self-confidence has backfired after it emerged that its slogan was coined by the Nazis. The $34 million "Du Bist Deutschland -- You Are Germany" -- campaign was devised to inspire Germans to stop moaning and do something good for their country. Beethoven, Einstein and the sports stars Franz Beckenbauer and Michael Schumacher have been cited in advertisements encouraging Germans to take more pride in their homeland.

But a historian from Ludwigshafen has provoked an uproar with his discovery that the same "Du Bist Deutschland" cry was used at Nazi rallies in the 1930s. Stefan Morz uncovered photographs of a 1935 Nazi convention in which soldiers display a banner reading, in Gothic script, "Denn Du Bist Deutschland (Because You Are Germany)." The slogan was topped with the head of Adolf Hitler. Leading Nazis such as Hermann Goring and Joseph Goebbels attended the event."

(Excerpt from here)

The Nazi connection is not as obscure as the article excerpted above pretends. One of Hitler's favourite slogans was: "Um uns ist Deutschland. In uns marschiert Deutschland. Und hinter uns kommt Deutschland!". Like much of Hitler's rhetoric it cannot be translated in a way that gives much idea of the impact of the original but it literally means: "Around us is Germany, In us Germany marches and behind us comes Germany". So the basic idea behind the modern slogan and Nazi thinking is pretty similar: Identifying the individual with the nation and making Germany a sort of mystical icon. All very Hegelian!

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ELSEWHERE

There is another article here on the stupidity of Abraham Foxman of the ADL. With him a a friend, Jews don't need enemies. The incredible Foxman thinks Christians are the main threat to Judaism. I guess I must have misheard the religion of Osama bin Laden. I linked to a similar demolition of the anachronistic Foxman on 20th.. It's time that the ADL sacked the non-foxy one. Having such a frantically Leftist fool representing them is no favour to Jews.

9/11 and the fraud that is Leftism: "Most remarkable is the initial and continuing indifference both to those who perished and to the country itself as it came under attack. On a political level, the Left could summon no indignation after assaults upon America's capital, defense headquarters, civil aviation, embassies, warships, and chief city, any one of which would be a classic and unambiguous casus belli, while in strange contrast it seemed to regard the mere presence of Americans in Saudi Arabia, the trade in oil, and the Arab world's exposure to American popular culture as unpardonable aggressions. Irrationality on a political level from these quarters has never been a shock. On a personal level, however, the predominant response of the intellectual Left was a mystery. It was as if the thousands of crushed and incinerated men, women, and children-those who threw themselves into a quarter-mile abyss rather than have the flesh seared off their bones as they stood in the wind at glassless walls, the small children who died in terror after watching hysterical fanatics slit the throats of screaming stewardesses, and so on, for there are almost three thousand stories-simply did not exist. How does one explain such an egregious absence of sympathy (much less assertions that "they" deserved it, or that it was a work of art) among endlessly self-proclaiming empathetics whose stock in trade is to milk compassion even from the Rock of Gibraltar?"

Wal-Mart critics reading from an old script: "The success of retail giant Wal-Mart has generated criticism of its business practices from across the political spectrum -- criticism that, according to a new study published today by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has been heard frequently before. Contemporary attacks on Wal-Mart are echoes of the same unjustified charges leveled at retail innovators for over a century. Because of Wal-Mart's uniquely successful history and influential place in the U.S. retail sector, the company has become the focus of many individuals' wider anxieties about shifting economic realities and the future of American prosperity."

That naughty advertising again: "Not content to save us from global warming, catastrophic cooling (said to result from global warming; don't ask), poisonous food, unsafe workplaces, dangerous water sports, and lawn darts, the federal regulatory apparatus in Washington now has a bright, shiny new cause: It wants to save us from product placement. When Peter Parker shot out his webbing and snagged that can of Dr. Pepper a few years ago in Spider-Man, it seems that impressionable movie audiences across the country suffered deleterious consequences -- perhaps in the form of forgetting how much they loved Mr. Pibb. Jonathan Adelstein, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, is particularly outraged at what he sees as product-placement manipulations by TV networks. Because "'he public needs to know when they're being advertised to,' Adelstein told The Wall Street Journal, he wants the FCC to investigate the practice and require a lengthy, large-font disclosure notice during every TV show with paid placements."

European doublethink about Muslims: "I would suggest that the Europeans are engaging in a more extreme version of what many liberals do vis a vis blacks in the U.S. In one part of their mind, liberals idealize blacks as the soulful oppressed victims about whom one must never think a judgmental thought, while, in the other part of their mind, they carefully organize their lives to have as little contact with blacks, certainly lower class blacks and angry activist blacks, as possible. In the same way, the Europeans with one part of their mind tell themselves that the Muslims are just marvelous, while with the other part of their mind they strictly avoid them. And somehow these two tendencies or thoughts never meet, so that the contradiction is never felt".

Incorrect book's 14th week on NYT best seller list: "No publicity in recent weeks. No reviews beyond three that appeared online when the book first came out. Yet my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) continues to attract interest. For the week of December 4, it checks in at #22 on the New York Times Bestseller List (paperback nonfiction). This is its fourteenth week on the list".

Jefferson vs multiculturalism? "Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here. If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements.."

Reliapundit has a review of the debate in France over how to respond to the Islamic and black riots there.

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/28/2005 06:23:00 PM

Sunday, November 27, 2005

 
A SMALL PERSONAL ANECDOTE

Social scientists and others rely (or should rely) on extensively sampled data to support generalizations that they make. Valid generalizations can hardly arise from anything but sampling of a wide range of relevant data. To generalize about a given population, you at least need to sample it in some way.

Nonetheless, statistical generalizations do NOT seem to be very persuasive to most people. Not unreasonably, people tend to be much more influenced by observations and events that they know personally or that people they know have told them about. So generalizations will not usually gain much traction without illustrative examples. Anecdotes are at least as persuasive as well-founded statistical generalizations.

So what I want to do below is give two small anecdotes from my life that do in my view illustrate at the personal level two generalizations that I believe are well supported by other historical and psychometric data: That many Muslim populations are emotionally immature and that the Chinese are innately a highly civilized people. There are exceptions to every rule of course but what I want to do is give examples that illustrate the rule.

I often eat out for breakfast. And in highly multicultural Australia the providers of breakfasts are ethnically highly varied. And the "ethnics" often do not understand English well. So getting a breakfast from them can sometimes have its communication difficulties. On one such occasion, I was having difficulty getting what I had ordered from a Muslim (Iranian, I think) business. After communication had repeately failed, I began to get a bit irate. When I did so, however, the Muslim owner got irate with me and accused me of insulting him. At that point I simply turned on my heel without another word and walked out -- and I never went there again. He went broke a few months later.

On a second more recent occasion, a similar situation transpired in a business run by a Chinese man. Did his "honour" get besmirched by my annoyance? Not a bit of it. He was apologetic and conciliatory. I did not walk out of HIS eatery. I enjoyed my breakfast when I eventually got it and I will eat there again. I shook his hand as I left by way of apology for my bad temper. And I am betting that he won't go broke. Give me the Chinese any day. I have known Chinese people since childhood and have had umpteen opportunities to observe their behaviour here in Australia -- and the example I have just given is absolutely typical of them in my experience: Truly smart, patient and civilized people.

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ELSEWHERE

Horrible story: "A Sydney doctor has been ordered to stand trial on charges of manslaughter and performing an illegal abortion, and faces up to 35 years' jail if convicted. Suman Sood has become the first NSW doctor since 1971 to be tried over an abortion. The prosecution alleges Sood, then owner of the Fairfield clinic Australian Women's Health, had failed to counsel a 20-year-old who wanted a late-term abortion. The woman had said Sood gave her some tablets and sent her home, where she gave birth on the toilet to a baby boy, who lived for four hours. Sood's lawyers had argued the young woman's evidence was unreliable because she could not remember all details of the consultation with Sood, in May 2002. However, the magistrate, Anthony Marsden, found yesterday that the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was a "straightforward and uncomplicated young woman" who showed no ill will or bias to the doctor and never denied she had wanted the abortion. After Sood was committed to stand trial yesterday, the Crown prosecutor, David Muddle, asked the court to order the 56-year-old Indian-born doctor to surrender her passport".

Globalization cuts taxes: "Only Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, but the rest of the world should pause for a moment and give thanks to tax competition. Thanks to globalization, it is increasingly easy for labor and capital to cross national borders in order to avoid punitive taxes. This process is forcing governments around the globe to lower tax rates and reform oppressive tax systems. In recent days, Spain's socialist government has announced a cut in its corporate tax rate, Ireland's government has announced that it intends to preserve its low 12.5 percent corporate tax, Colombia has announced that it will lower its corporate tax rate by more than 8 percentage points, and Russia has announced it will continue its tax-cutting crusade by reducing a number of levies - including a possible reduction of the corporate tax rate to 20 percent so that it is closer to the 13 percent flat tax that exists for individuals"

Privatization in Switzerland: "Swiss authorities announced overnight that they want to sell their majority stake in Swisscom, the country's largest telecommunications operator, as swiftly as possible. Switzerland's finance ministry and telecommunications department said in a joint statement that the aim was to give Swisscom more room for manoeuvre in the fast developing and competitive communications market. Swisscom, which was spun off from the former national postal and telecommunications monopoly PTT in 1998, is still 66 per cent state owned. The government believes this could "restrict Swisscom's strategic freedom of action," the statement said".

There is an article about socialist stupidity in Zanzibar here which is unremarkable except that it is a rare case of the L.A. Times pointing to a failure of socialism.

GM's woes are homeade, not imported: "If General Motors itself were one big car, its 'check engine' light would be flashing. The world's largest car maker announced this week that it plans to shed 30,000 workers by 2008 as its market share and stock price continue to slide against a backdrop of unsustainable labor costs. In the past 25 years, GM has seen its share of domestic automobile and light truck sales fall from half to a quarter. In the last quarter alone, it lost more than $1 billion and its corporate bonds were recently downgraded to junk status. The recent job cuts follow years of declining employment at the company. Like the mysterious dash-board signal, the reasons behind GM's woes are open for debate. The United Auto Workers union blames management for not developing and promoting more appealing cars. Management blames the relatively high cost of its union labor, including generous pension and health-care expenditures. And lurking in the background is that old bugaboo of allegedly unfair foreign competition."

Australian minimum wage earners not poor: "Workers on low incomes do not necessarily live in poverty, according to the findings of a national study that challenges the link between wages and prosperity. The study shows that a quarter of the workforce earning the minimum wage or less are not confined to the poorest households but are found in households all the way up the income scale. The 3.3 million workers earning close to or less than the minimum wage of $12.30 an hour or less include a disproportionate number of young people and women, many of whom live in well-off households which may include other wage earners. Less than a fifth of low-income earners are in the poorest 20 per cent of households where weekly income is $226 or less. The great majority of these households have nobody in the workforce and include retirees".

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 11/27/2005 07:07:00 PM

Saturday, November 26, 2005

 
EU SUGAR REFORM: GREAT NEWS FOR AUSTRALIA

And the ball is now firmly in America's court to do the same. Despite being the world's most efficient sugar producer, lots of Australian sugar mills have closed in recent years due to protectionism in their major markets

"Britain has brokered an agreement to reform the last remaining fully protected area of European agriculture, cutting sugar prices, phasing out quotas and bringing an end to sugar mountains. The first reforms since the postwar period to the EU's much criticised sugar regime will cut prices by 36 per cent, destroy 100,000 jobs in Europe, end sugar farming in countries such as Ireland and Greece, and lead to economic devastation for Europe's former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, which also benefited from the rigged market.... As well as European consumers and taxpayers, the reforms will also benefit efficient sugar producers such as Brazil, Thailand and Australia, who had taken successful legal action against Europe to force it to end its protectionism. It will also help some of the poorest African countries, who will get far better access to the EU market from 2009.

Under the reforms, prices will be cut by 36 per cent over the next four years, but the world's producers will not get free access until 2020. European sugar farmers and processors are being given billion euros (4.8 billion pounds) in compensation to help them to adjust to the new industries. Former colonies that lose out will be given 40 million euros next year.

Under the reforms, Ireland will be forced by quota cuts to shut down all its sugar beet production, while Italy will give up half its production quotas. Official estimates predict that European sugar production will drop by one quarter, and that 90,000 of Europe's 325,000 sugar workers will lose their jobs. With Europe's pampered and inefficient farmers largely unable to compete in the global market, the Commission predicts that all sugar exports from Europe will stop, and the EU will turn into a major sugar importer.....

The Common Agricultural Policy kept sugar prices in Europe at more than three times the world level. It led to huge sugar surpluses, which were dumped on the developing world, often undermining local farmers. However, sugar cane farmers in former European colonies, mainly in Africa, had preferential access to the European market, enabling them to sell at well above world rates...."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

What U.S. military men in Iraq have to put up with: "A small, but vocal group among us inhabiting most mainstream media newsrooms and occupying far too many elected positions in our government see our military's struggles not as a national sacrifice to stop an enemy driven to bring about our downfall, but rather as pawns on a global chessboard whose purpose is to show just how evil and corrupt our country is"

The terrorist-loving U.S. Presbyterians are at it again: "The Simon Wiesenthal Center has denounced renewed contact between the U.S. branch of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) and Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terror organization. According to the Middle East Research Institute, Lebanese media confirmed that a PCUSA delegation headed by Robert Morley, a retired professor from McCormick Theological Seminary and Father Nihad Tomeh, the Church's Mideast liaison met with Sheikh Nabil Qaouk, Hezbollah's commander in Southern Lebanon. The Church delegation reportedly wanted to learn more about Hezbollah's charitable works and its "concern" for people".

Well-deserved: "The number of households tuning in to the BBC's TV channels each week has fallen by half a million over the last year. Figures published yesterday showed the number of viewers watching the BBC for at least 15 minutes a week was down to 87.9 per cent for the year to date, compared with 89.9 per cent over the same period in 2004".

Good God! Scottish shipyard workers have stopped destroying their own jobs! "A government minister yesterday praised the Clydeside shipyard workers who have built the Royal Navy's latest warship. Lord Drayson, Minister for Defence procurement, was visiting the BAe Systems yards at Govan and Scotstoun. He watched the new Type 45 destroyer, HMS Daring, being readied for launch in February. "I have been impressed by the professionalism of both the experienced BAE Systems employees and the apprentices whom I have been fortunate enough to meet and talk to today and who are working side by side to help deliver this important programme""

Muslim riots in France stem from anger against the West: "This anger was directed, not against unemployment or exclusion from French society (inclusion in the latter is the last thing they want if it means being forced to adopt the decadent culture of the West) but against the very policies which provide them with equal opportunites and equal status in French society. The "youths" burned down schools and sports centres because they perceived these for what they are: attempts to lure them into the culture of Western liberal society. From this point of view all the policies promoting integration and participation, equality, education and employment, especially when they are shrouded in liberal, "tolerant" rhetoric, can only be interpreted as insults to their dignity".

There is an "apology" here that refers to the behaviour of some moronic Australian Muslims. They apparently thought that attacking news cameramen was a good way of showing that their relatives were not terrorists! Brief background on the behaviour referred to can be found here.

Never Yet Melted is a straight-shooting blog with some humorous comments on the riots in "Frankistan"

I have just posted here an email from an Australian of German origin about Germany's bleak leftist future.

Chris Brand has a new lot of postings up -- mainly focusing on France.

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

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 11/26/2005 05:59:00 PM

Friday, November 25, 2005

 
THANKSGIVING DAY

I supppose it is a bit dastardly of me to mark Thanksgiving Day in this way but I am going to remind my American readers that the devout Protestant Pilgrim Fathers who held the first Thanksgiving were also such devout communists that it took a couple of years of starvation before they gave communism up and rediscovered private property. One account of all that is here. Communism was a killer even in those days. So much for the idea that Christianity and conservatism are necessarily associated. I offer an historical look at the relationship between Christianity and politics here -- where I also look the authoritarian element in Christianity.

We have no Thanksgiving or other harvest festival in Australia but the original white Australians also had an ambiguous relationship to private property. Most of them were convicted thieves -- including two of my ancestors.

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ELSEWHERE

The secular Puritans of modern-day Massachusetts: "The Puritans of Massachusetts have been dead for 300 years, but their authoritarian ghosts haunt us to this day. Consider the plight of Whole Foods Market, an international chain of natural and organic food stores, which found itself accused of planning to engage in criminal activity in its 14 Massachusetts stores this week. What high crimes and misdemeanors was the upscale grocer plotting? It was going to open its doors for business on Thanksgiving. Shocking but true: It was going to sell fruit and vegetables and milk and desserts.... In short, Whole Foods was going to make its wares available to Massachusetts customers on Thanksgiving -- just as it does for customers in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and more than two dozen other states nationwide.... The attorney general of Massachusetts looked at it and saw a crime. In a stiff letter to Whole Foods last week, Attorney General Thomas Reilly noted that under Chapter 136 of the Massachusetts legal code, "the performance of work on legal holidays is prohibited, unless permitted by a statutory exemption." If Whole Foods opened its doors on Thanksgiving, the letter warned, it could face "criminal and equitable enforcement actions to enjoin violations of the Blue Laws." Ah, yes, the blue laws -- those rules and regulations imposed by New England's 17th-century Puritan theocrats to govern moral conduct and ensure proper observance of the Sabbath."

How unsurprising: Massachusetts in deal with Venezuela: "Thousands of low-income Massachusetts residents will receive discounted home heating oil this winter under an agreement signed Tuesday with Venezuela, whose government is a political adversary of the Bush administration. A subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company will supply oil at 40 percent below market prices. It will be distributed by two nonprofit organizations, Citizens Energy Corp. and the Mass Energy Consumer Alliance. The agreement gives President Hugo Chavez's government standing as a provider of heating assistance to poor U.S. residents at a time when U.S. oil companies have been reluctant to do so and Congress has failed to expand aid in response to rising oil prices. U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., met with Chavez in August and helped broker the deal. He said his constituents' needs for heating assistance trump any political points the Chavez administration can score".

Hillary hypocrisy: "Without question, Hillary Clinton is using every weapon of mass deception in her arsenal to attain the Presidency. With a solid lock on the liberal vote, Clinton is now pursuing moderate voters with breath-taking zeal. Senator Clinton has been remarkably successful at distancing herself from her husband's legacy of appeasing Osama bin Laden by casting herself as one of the few Democratic Party leaders who supports the liberation of Iraq. While she may be successful at fooling a pliable public, one of the major issues that will stand in her way is her unabashed support for abortion on demand".

Leftists indifferent to evils "If you want to understand the Left, most of what you need to know can be summarized thus: The Left hates inequality, not evil. As one raised as a New York Jew (who, moreover, attended an Ivy League university) and therefore liberal -- it took me a while to recognize this fatal moral characteristic of the Left. But the moment I realized it, it became immoral not to oppose leftist values.... Thus, when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," the liberal world condemned him. The Cold War, once regarded as an epochal battle between freedom and tyranny, came to be regarded by liberals as an amoral battle between "two superpowers." Likewise liberals almost universally mocked President George W. Bush when he labeled Saddam Hussein's Iraq, North Korea and Iran an "axis of evil." It takes a mind that either has little comprehension of evil or little desire to confront it to object to characterizing three of the worst regimes in modern history as "evil." How else can one explain the Left's enchantment with Fidel Castro, the totalitarian ruler of Cuba?"

California's not-so-bright future: "By 2020, California will be more crowded, its population older and its racial composition dominated by Latinos, according to a report released Tuesday. The changes will pose challenges to state lawmakers, who will have to grapple with the additional pressures on already-strained schools and health-care systems, according to the report by the California Budget Project. In just 15 years, one in seven Californians will be age 65 or older, the state will add 10 million residents, and Latinos will account for 43 percent of the population, with whites accounting for about 34 percent. The white and Latino populations are expected to become equal in 2010, when each is projected to account for 39 percent of the population, said Barbara Baran, associate director of the organization and the report's author. The report, "Planning for California's Future," examined Census data and figures from the California Department of Finance. While it doesn't offer recommendations, its intent is to warn lawmakers of the coming shifts".

Attitudes to Iraq: "The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively. Even more impressive than the Pew poll is the evidence of how our service members are voting with their feet. Although both the Army and the Marine Corps are having trouble attracting fresh recruits - no surprise, given the state of public opinion regarding Iraq - reenlistment rates continue to exceed expectations. Veterans are expressing their confidence in the war effort by signing up to continue fighting."

The weird one is antisemitic too: "The Anti-Defamation League has demanded an apology from Michael Jackson after a US TV network aired what was said to be a telephone answering machine message in which the pop star referred to Jews as "leeches". The message was supposedly recorded two years ago and has now surfaced in connection with a lawsuit against the pop star. "Michael Jackson has an anti-Semitic streak and hasn't learned from his past mistakes," Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman said in a statement. "It seems every time he has a problem in his life, he blames it on Jews." Jackson infuriated Jewish groups in 1995 when his song They Don't Care About Us included the lyrics "Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, kike me"."

Grandpa John is a good blog. How do I know? They quote this blog quite a lot! They also seem to agree with Dick McDonald about the low casualty rate in Iraq. They need a new template, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/25/2005 09:44:00 PM

Thursday, November 24, 2005

 
FOR THE LEFT, ABUSE TRUMPS LOGIC EVERY TIME

Excerpt from Daniel Pipes

My talks at university campuses sometimes occasion protests featuring Leftists and Islamists who call me names. A favorite of theirs is "racist." This year, for example, a "Stand up to Racism Rally" anticipated my talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I was accused of racism against Muslim immigrants at Dartmouth College, and pamphlets at the University of Toronto charged me with "anti-Muslim racism."

Anti-Muslim racism? That oxymoron puzzled me. Islam being a religion with followers of every race and pigmentation, where might race enter the picture? Dictionaries agree that racism concerns race, not religion...

Thus understood, the term racist cannot be ascribed to me, as I neither believe that race defines capabilities nor that certain races have greater capabilities than others. Also, my writings and talks never touch on issues of race.

Does that mean the word racist merely serves Leftists and Islamists as an all-purpose pejorative, a magical insult that discredits without regard to accuracy? No, the evolution of this word is more complex than that.... Note the evolution: As belief in racial differences and racial superiority wanes in polite society, some parties expand the meaning of racism to condemn political decisions such as worrying about too much immigration (even of poor whites), preferring one's own culture, fearing radical Islam, and implementing effective counterterrorist measures.

This attempt to delegitimize political differences must be rejected. Racism refers only to racial issues, not to views on immigration, culture, religion, ideology, law enforcement, or military strategy.

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ELSEWHERE

Corrupt Frog owns up: "One of France's most distinguished diplomats has confessed to an investigating judge that he accepted oil allocations from Saddam Hussein, it emerged yesterday. Jean-Bernard Merimee is thought to be the first senior figure to admit his role in the oil-for-food scandal, a United Nations humanitarian aid scheme hijacked by Saddam to buy influence. The Frenchman, who holds the title "ambassador for life", told authorities that he regretted taking payments amounting to $156,000 (then worth about 108,000 pounds) in 2002. The money was used to renovate a holiday home he owned in southern Morocco. At the time, Mr Merimee was a special adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general"

French ambassador says the Muslim rioters just want to be French! "Though the vast majority of the rioters were Muslims, Mr. Levitte believes the violence was not motivated by religion. "It was not about the role of Islam influence," said Mr. Levitte. "It has nothing to do with the clash of religions or civilizations or cultures. I think it's very important to understand that. You may say, but are you so sure? Yes, I am. Religion played no role at all during these two weeks." ... "These teenagers feel alienated and discriminated both socially and economically. They don't want to affirm any difference, but they want to be considered as 100 percent French," he noted. "They are not fighting to be recognized as a minority, either ethnic or religious, but on the contrary, they want to be accepted as full citizens of the French republic. They want to be part of the French dream." Mr. Levitte says the government plans to spend $42 billion to improve educational opportunities for immigrants and build new, more welcoming housing developments." (Hat tip to Reliapundit)

Bill Clinton says U.S. must stay in Iraq: Former President Clinton said yesterday that the United States should wait until after mid-December parliamentary elections in Iraq to decide whether to set a timetable for troop withdrawal. Clinton offered a lengthy assessment of the Iraq war as part of a wide-ranging talk at Westchester Community College for The President's Forum, a school fundraiser. It marked a rare local appearance by the former president, a Chappaqua resident. Clinton, a Democrat who left office at the start of 2001, said he had personally never seen any intelligence linking Iraq to al-Qaida, and "no one I knew believed that was the case." But that doesn't mean President Bush, a Republican, lied or deliberately misled the country about the reasons for going to war, Clinton said. Bush probably believed the information he was relying on was right, Clinton said".

NAACP chief makes switch to GOP: "For decades, Republicans have struggled to reach out to black Americans. But now in Orange County, the GOP has to reach no further than the NAACP. As of this week, Derrick Wallace, head of Orange County's NAACP, has switched parties -- to become a Republican. "I've thought about this for two years," Wallace said Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours after returning from the elections office. "This is not a decision I made yesterday." It is, however, a decision that rang out like a shot among political circles."

The phosphorous beatup: "The US defended the use of white phosphorus munitions against insurgents in Iraq last year but denied civilians were targeted. The toxic agent was used during what a U.S. Army journal called "shake and bake" missions against insurgents in the battle for Fallujah last year. "It's part of our conventional weapons inventory. We use it like we use any other conventional weapon," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. Whitman said he had no knowledge of any civilian victims of attacks with white phosphorus.... Reports that white phosphorous was used in Fallujah has thrust the US into a new controversy over Iraq war tactics. But another Defense Department spokesman highlighted that white phosphorous has been used by armies around the world for the past century. A yellowish substance with a pungent smell similar to garlic, white phosphorous erupts spontaneously into fire when exposed to oxygen, releasing a dense white smoke".

"Pacifist" novelist Kurt Vonnegut supports suicide bombers. He thinks "It must be an amazing high". He draws an analogy with Harry Truman and the bomb. Does he really think Truman bombed Hiroshima to make himself feel good? And that would be OK? Just another nutty Leftist with no idea of right and wrong.

A good spoof here that equates Kofi Annan with Nigerian spammers.

Strange Justice has a very troubling post about how U.S. soldiers are prosecuted for "offences" in Iraq.

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 11/24/2005 06:25:00 PM

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

 
EXTRAORDINARY ACADEMIC IGNORANCE ABOUT TWINS AND IQ

Below we see academic "experts arguing about something that they obviously know nothing about. The article is a discussion of the findings in "The cognitive cost of being a twin: evidence from comparisons within families in the Aberdeen children of the 1950s cohort study", by Georgina A Ronalds, Bianca L De Stavola and David A Leon, which appeared in the British Medical Journal of 18 November 2005:

"Twins may be livewires but they are certainly not bright sparks, according to new research showing that they have lower IQs than single children. The study has ignited debate, with some experts claiming the lower IQ is a result of the twins spending less time in the womb and having less room to grow while they are in there. But others have argued that what happens after birth is more important, with twins losing out because they do not have a parent's undivided attention.

"We know there are language problems with twins - it's very difficult for a parent to adequately develop the language skills of two children at the same time," said David Hay, professor of psychology at Curtin University in Perth, who challenged the assumptions of the British research team. Professor Hay said previous research had shown that if one twin died in early childhood, the IQ of the surviving twin reached normal levels, suggesting the post-natal environment - in particular, one-on-one contact with a parent - played a part.

The study, published yesterday, found a five-point average shortfall in IQ among twins compared to single children - and the difference remained apparent even after factors such as the mother's age, the child's sex and the number of older siblings were taken into account. When the twins in the study were aged seven, their average IQ was 5.3points behind the single children in the same family. By the age of nine, it was 6points behind. Girl twins tended to make up the IQ deficit by the age of about 13, which was not always they case with boys.

The researchers who wrote the paper, published online by the British Medical Journal, were sticking with their theory that the "likely explanation" was a shorter gestation. Lead author David Leon concluded that social and economic circumstances could not explain the IQ gap".

These guys must know twins only via columns of numbers about them. Anybody who has helped bring up twins -- as I have -- will know perfectly well what the problem is -- and it is "none of the above". What happens is that twins do not need others for social support as much as singletons do, so they develop language skills primarily to talk to one-another. But because of their similar age and situation, even dizygotic (fraternal) twins tend to understand one-another with a much reduced use of adult language. They to a degree develop a private and largely non-verbal language of their own. So they have much less incentive to develop adult language skills and are therefore slower to develop such skills. And language skills are a central part of IQ development.

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ELSEWHERE

I am pretty shaky, come to think of it! "People with high levels of education and demanding careers also have an increased risk of developing Parkinson�s disease, research has suggested. Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, have found that the chances of developing Parkinson�s rise with years of education, or intellectually challenging jobs. The highest risk was found in people who had studied for at least nine years. Miners, machine operators, metalworkers and farmers were less often affected. The study, published in Neurology, says that the findings do not mean that education or professional achievement cause the condition, but that people in these groups may lead lives that predispose them to the disease, or be more alert to its symptoms: doctors were the most likely to develop the disease".

Interesting point from a comment on Rishon-Rishon (also see here): How come the Left happily compare Bush to Hitler because of the invasion of Iraq, even though the guy Bush TOPPLED was a real dictator who did gas people, was a member of a national socialist party, AND had a moustache. Doesn't that make GWB more like FDR? There's no logic on the Left, though.

Muslims even intolerant of one-another: "France and other Western democracies offer Islam an opportunity that it has never enjoyed since the first Islamic civil war during Ali's Caliphate: the possibility for Muslims to develop their own approach to their faith and to practice it freely and in accordance with their deepest beliefs, without fear or hypocrisy. The West is the only place where all Muslim schools freely propagate their ideas and maintain their places of worships and seminaries without restriction. In Muslim-majority countries, the dominant school of Islam bans all other schools. Iran, for one, calls itself an Islamic Republic, but won't allow a single Sunni mosque to be built in Tehran, a city with at least 1.5 million Sunnis. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, sectarian feuds claim thousands of lives each year".

Islamofascism as a neurosis: "I came to the conclusion that we are facing a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization. Most neuroses have in common a dramatic event, generally linked to an unacceptable sexual behavior. In this case, we are talking of kids living all their lives in pure frustration, with no opportunity to experience sex, love, tenderness or even understanding from the opposite sex. The separation between men and women in Islam is absolute. So is contempt toward women, who are totally dominated by men. This leads to a situation of pure anxiety, in which normal behavior is not possible. It is no coincidence that suicide killers are mostly young men dominated subconsciously by an overwhelming libido that they not only cannot satisfy but are afraid of, as if it is the work of the devil. Since Islam describes heaven as a place where everything on earth will finally be allowed, and promises 72 virgins to those frustrated kids, killing others and killing themselves to reach this redemption becomes their only solution."

An early libertarian: "In 1851 Herbert Spencer published a treatise called Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified. Among other specifications, this work established and made clear the fundamental principle that society should be organized on the basis of voluntary cooperation, not on the basis of compulsory cooperation, or under the threat of it. In a word, it established the principle of individualism as against Statism -- against the principle underlying all the collectivist doctrines which are everywhere dominant at the present time. It contemplated the reduction of State power over the individual to an absolute minimum, and the raising of social power to its maximum; as against the principle of Statism, which contemplates the precise opposite."

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 11/23/2005 07:52:00 PM

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

 
ANOTHER AMUSING EMAIL FROM A LEFTIST

A Melanie Barrett (mbarrett@bayoucity.net) wrote to me as follows (I have not endeavoured to fix the grammar or spelling):

"we should adhere to the belief that if you do not make more than $100K a year or you are mentally deficient or physically ill, tough luck. Are you so vain as to not realize that there are many people that actually contribute to this world that do need some help? Your blog brings reason for euthenasia.

Actually every time I read some conservative blog, hear Limbaugh or one of those radio talking heads, I cringe to think that there is so much hate in this world".

I replied:

"You want to kill me ("euthanasia") and you say that I am the one full of hate? You are a psychiatric case -- the phenomenon is called "projection" -- seeing in others what is really in yourself. How sad that people like you have to live a life of such deranged suffering"

In a subsequent email she made this rather sad statement: "And for your information - life is suffering, for everyone..... ". She really is a mess -- like another Leftist emailer I commented on recently.

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

BIG ISSUES COMING UP FOR SCOTUS

No more striking down constitutions: "Let's drop the talking points about 'conservative,' 'constructionist' and 'originalist' nominees. Such language obscures what's going on. These nuances are a polite way of pretending that the mainstream in law and government interprets the Constitution differently than we do. No. They are oblivious to the actual content of the Constitution, or they are anti-constitutional. A polite term would be 'post-constitutional.' If Ginsburg, Souter, and friends have a 'theory' of constitutional interpretation, they're keeping it to themselves. When they shake the foundations of the earth from their bench it is neither theory, nor constitutional, nor interpretation. They are, wrote Jonah Goldberg after one heinous ruling, 'making it up as they go along.'"

Roe v. Wade was a legal absurdity: "What do Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe have in common with Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork? They all believe Roe v. Wade was a bad decision. Dershowitz and Tribe are not the only pro-choice legal scholars who denounce Roe as poor jurisprudence. John Hart Ely, another pro-choice legal scholar, wrote in 1973 in the Yale Law Journal that Roe was wrongly decided. Edward Lazarus, a dedicated pro-choicer and former clerk to Roe's author, says Roe was borderline 'indefensible.' Pro-choice Washington Post writer Benjamin Wittes calls Roe 'a lousy decision.' Slate columnist William Saletan--who left the Republican Party in 2004 because it was too pro-life--has written that Roe was a sloppy 'overreach.' Pro-choice Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls Roe 'a bad decision.'"

Privacy rights may be good but finding them in the constitution is absurd: "Nowhere does the Constitution guarantee the right to privacy. The word "privacy" isn't even mentioned in the text. But if all you had to go by was the obsessive interest in the subject whenever there is a Supreme Court vacancy, you might imagine that privacy is the very bedrock of American constitutional law. Few legal cows today are more sacred. A judicial nominee who referred dismissively to the "so-called right to privacy" or insisted that courts should not "discern such an abstraction in the Constitution [and] arbitrarily elevate it over other constitutional rights," would stand no chance of winning confirmation. That is why John Roberts, who wrote those words as a Reagan administration lawyer in 1981, smoothly disavowed them during his confirmation hearings in September. It is why Samuel Alito's nomination to the court was no sooner announced than his most important Senate ally -- Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter -- called a press conference to say that the nominee had assured him that "there is a right to privacy in the Constitution"

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ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald has had his calculator out: "If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops (majority of the time over 250,000) in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol"

The disgusting racist treatment of Michelle Malkin by Leftists: "The racist and sexist "yellow woman doing a white man's job" knock is a tiresome old attack from impotent liberals that I've tolerated a long time. It is pathetic that I have to sit here and tell you that my ideas, my politics, and my intellectual capital are mine and mine alone in response to cowardly attacks from misogynistic moonbats with Asian whore fixations. My IQ, free will, skin color, eye shape, productivity, sincerity, and integrity are routinely ridiculed or questioned because I happen to be a minority conservative woman. As a public figure, I am willing to take these insults, but I cannot tolerate the smearing of my loved ones. Because I have always been open and proud about his support for my career, my husband has taken endless, hate-filled abuse from my critics. His Jewish heritage, his decision to be a stay-at-home dad, and even his looks, are the subject of brutal mockery."

Sugar Daddies: "In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole. In that congeries of absurdities known as U.S. farm policy, sugar's sweet deal stands out as perhaps the most damaging and least defensible program. Now, more than ever, it needs to be scrapped."

Not a bad summary: "One way to describe libertarianism is that we believe in the separation of family and state as strongly as the American Civil Liberties Union believes in the separation of church and state. In contrast, both the Left and the Right view government as a substitute parent. As pointed out by George Lakoff in Moral Politics, the Left wants government to be a nurturant parent and the Right wants government to be a strict parent. Libertarianism does not want the government to act as a parent."

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

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/22/2005 04:50:00 PM

Monday, November 21, 2005

 
ONE THAT SLIPPED THROUGH THE NET

It is part of the conventional religion among psychologists to believe that conservatives are the ones who are "authoritarian". Joe Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers party just did not happen, you see. And like most Leftist beliefs, this one is impermeable to evidence. I have reported in the academic journals heaps of carefully conducted research showing the belief to be false but I was wasting my time of course. You can't argue with something that people need to believe.

Still, every now and again, a piece of research pops up which questions the orthodox faith and one such article is: "Is political conservatism synonymous with authoritarianism?", in The Journal of Social Psychology of Oct 2005, volume 145, issue 5, p571ff. by H. Michael Crowson, Stephen J. Thoma and Nita Hestevold. Their research is of course the usual rubbish that passes for science in psychology: No attempt at sampling, no awareness of what the questionnaires they use actually say, internally inconsistent indices treated as informative, negligible correlations reported as if they offered useful information etc. but it is still nice to see a challenge of sorts to the orthodoxy being put up. I would give a more detailed critique of what they did but I don't want to discourage them too much. They should probably read this and this and this, though.

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BLOG COMMENTS

I am well aware that having a Comments facility would enhance this blog. As in many other things, however, I try to steer a middle way with comments. I welcome comments via email and am generally pleased at the quality of the comments I get that way. But comments that can be read by all are a much more attractive facility, of course. The three group blogs to which I regularly contribute -- Majority Rights, Tongue-Tied and Western Heart all have a comments facility that is managed by the owners of the respective blogs so I don't have to spend time deleting all the rubbish that piles up in any comments facility from time to time. And I do cross-post a lot -- put the same post up on more than one blog. Western Heart specifically encourages cross-postings so I put up there every day what I personally consider to be the three most interesting of all the posts on my own blogs that day. So if any reader especially wants to make a public comment on some particular post of mine, there is around a 50/50 chance he will be able to find the post elsewhere and comment on it there.

Since rationality is the only thing I am unwaveringly committed to, however, I am open to change in what I do. So I have enabled comments on my new Australian Politics blog. If that works out well, I may add a comments facility on more of my blogs. I occasionally get up to a hundred or more comments to my postings on Majority Rights, however, and many of them do in my view require a response from me, so the workload of a comments facility here may well be more than I can comfortably offer.

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ELSEWHERE

Liberals lured by free lunch: "I first became aware of the law of gravity as a small child when I pedalled by tricycle off the porch and crashed into the yard. Gravity was of course operating all along, whether I was aware of it or not. Economics is a lot like that. Many people who are completely unaware of economics sometimes discover it the same way I discovered gravity, through some personal or national crash. Liberals especially tend to think up all sorts of good things we want -- a 'living wage,' 'affordable housing,' 'universal health care,' and an ever-expanding wish-list of things that everyone should receive as 'rights' -- with little or no awareness of the economic repercussions of turning that wish list into laws."

Do-it-yourself legislation: "The aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita have proved a massive breeding ground for what former OECD Chief Economist David Henderson has termed 'Do-it-Yourself Economics' (DIYE), which he defines as 'firmly held intuitive economic ideas and beliefs which owe little or nothing to textbooks, treatises or the evidence of economic history.' The DIYE phenomenon is not restricted to the general public. Henderson points out that DIYE ideas are 'sincerely held, and voiced with conviction, by political figures, top civil servants, CEOs, [labor unionists], well-known journalists and commentators, religious leaders, senior judges and eminent professors.' Sadly, these ideas might do real harm to the U.S. economy."

Move the media elite outside its bubble: "Former CBS-TV correspondent Bernard Goldberg rocked the journalism world in 2001 with his bestselling book 'Bias.' It was an indictment of what Goldberg believes to be an unintended but pervasive liberal prejudice in America's television and print newsrooms. Now, Mr. Goldberg is back with a more in-depth look at why this perceived bias exists. In his new book, 'Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite,' there is plenty of fresh red meat for those who believe that too many people in the media hold a baseline view of things that runs too far to the left. That point is well taken, but Goldberg presents a more significant one in 'Bias.' The author posits the existence of a 'bubble' inside which most established national media live and work. By looking through an elite pair of myopically focused glasses, these media movers deceive themselves that everything revolves around their own business and social circles in New York City and Washington, D.C."

Ilana Mercer on racism or realism? "I stated that Chinese and Jews have 1) overall endured far greater depredations in modern times than Muslims and African-Americans (notwithstanding category overlap). 2) Have coped with such contingencies admirably while Arabs and blacks . not so much. Is this not an observation of reality? Am I not stating an objective fact? So why is realism framed as racism? Dare discomfit people with unsettling facts, and they threaten to tarnish your reputation with damaging labels; tell the truth, and, it would seem, you risk your reputation. That pretty much sums the direction in which discourse has been steered."

The Guardian atypically features an excellent essay of some of the hairy issues involved in the intellectual property area without getting all soap boxy over pharmaceutical companies and the third world etc.

Wicked Thoughts has obviously had a VERY wicked thought about a certain German torchlit parade.

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/21/2005 06:46:00 PM

Sunday, November 20, 2005

 
LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE: THE NEW GESTAPO?

They are not quite the new Gestapo yet but they are a long way down the track. The immediate and savage execution of a Brazilian electrician just because he looked like a known terrorist and the lies the London police used in an attempt to exculpate themselves got worldwide publicity. That should have been a huge wake-up call for the British powers that be to bring their police back into civilization but the only difference now seems to be that they don't shoot you on mere suspicion. They can still be extraordinarily oppressive to innocent people if they are feeling a bit bored, however. Read this account of the ordeal that David Mery -- a totally innocent computer geek -- was put through just because he was wearing a backpack while quietly waiting for a London Underground train.

Like the Brazilian electrician incident, the Mery incident got heaps of publicity at the time it happened (in September) -- e.g. here -- but in spite of all the publicity. Mery still had to wait a long time and had huge difficulties getting all his possessions back from the police and heaps of data about him are still to this day held in police records. He was never charged with any offence in any court but he still effectively "has a record" that could seriously hamper him in the future. As Mery himself says:

"The Police eventually decided to take No Further Action (NFA): `a decision not to proceed with a prosecution'. In a democratic country such as the UK, one would be forgiven for naively thinking that this is the end of the matter. Under the current laws the Police are not only entitled to keep my fingerprints, palm prints and DNA samples, but apparently, according to my solicitor, they are also entitled to hold on to what they gathered during their investigation: notepads of the arresting officers, photographs, interviewing tapes and any other documents they collected and entered in the Police National Computer (PNC)....

Aren't the Police supposed to keep tabs only on convicted criminals and individuals under investigation? So even though the Police consider me innocent, otherwise they would have had a duty to prosecute me, there will remain some mention (what exactly?) in the PNC and, if they fully share their information with Europol and Interpol, in other Police databases around the world as well. Isn't a state that keeps files on innocent persons a police state? This gradual erosion of our fundamental liberties should be of concern to us all."

So how has a once highly-respected police-force degenerated so badly? After years of Leftist control, politically correct harassment and appointments of far-Leftists to leadership positions, the London police are now more a political police than a law enforcement body. Legal safeguards have been so eroded that they can now do almost anything they like without repercussions as long as their victims are white. The Left have destroyed the London police just as they destroy everything they get control over (education being another example of that).

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ELSEWHERE

A not very foxy Foxman: "Abraham Foxman has gone from nuisance to embarrassment to self-parody. The national leader of the Anti-Defamation League has declared war on conservative Christians. In doing so, he's not only attacking the best friends Israel and the Jewish people have, he's also repudiating Torah-based morality. At a New York meeting of the ADL's national leadership recently, Foxman experienced a near total meltdown. Groups like Focus on The Family and American Family Association are leading a full-scale assault on tolerance and diversity, Foxman foamed. As reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Foxman declared: "Today we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!""

Democrats Teach The World to Hate America: There is an old "joke" about a man who murders his parents and then pleads with the judge for leniency because he's an orphan. I think of this every time I hear a Democrat ask why the world so hates us. Could it be because, in places where people will never actually meet an American they can hear Bruce Springsteen, the Kerry flack, testifying over and over again that being "Born in the USA" is a horrible fate where people kick you when you're down and where you "end up like a dog that's been beat too much"? Could it be because, in places where the only Americans they'll ever see are in Hollywood movies made by leftists, the Democrat makes sure the villain is never an Islamic fascist terrorist and always an American, an American corporation or an American government agency? Could it be because when Michael Moore makes a movie that the Democrats know to be a lie-filled, hate-filled anti-American propaganda flick but those in other places might not, the Democratic Party leadership makes sure to smile for the cameras of al Jazeera and give the film a standing ovation and their endorsement of its message?

A good defence of Wal-Mart against the enviers: Just one excerpt: "Sam Walton's innovations created thousands of new jobs and allowed millions of Americans to save money. In earlier eras, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt were depicted as evil. But the condemnation rarely came from consumers. It was competing businessmen who complained. And newspapers lapped it up, calling them "robber barons." Vanderbilt got rich by making travel and shipping cheaper. Lots of people liked that. No one was forced to buy the oil on which Rockefeller got rich. He had to persuade people by offering it to them for less. He offered it so cheaply that poorer people, who used to go to bed when it got dark, could now afford fuel for their lanterns. These are "robber barons"? (Hat tip to Commonsense & Wonder)

"Faiths for Fairness is a project of the American Interfaith Institute, an organization with a long history of working to remove bigotry and hatred from the religions of Abraham. Most recently, we have been concerned by the decision of the Presbyterian Church USA to begin a divestment process of its multi- billion dollar portfolio from select companies that do business with Israel. Not only has this action threatened the bonds of friendship between Presbyterians and Jews, it is likely to have even greater consequences by giving encouragement to anarchist organizations"

The Fourth Rail is a very good blog if you want to know what is actually happening in Iraq: Detailed coverage of military movements etc.

Pleasing: My new Australian Politics blog got 300 hits in a recent 24 hour period. Pretty good for a brand-new blog. Some of that will be an initial surge of course so what the return visitor numbers will be like is anyone's guess. It is the only one of my blogs where I have a comments facility so anybody who has always wanted to comment at me now has their chance! I will delete any drongo comments, though. Australians will know what a drongo is.

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/20/2005 08:43:00 PM

Saturday, November 19, 2005

 
Brookes News Update

US economy, Ben Bernanke and recession: Ben Bernanke, the new Fed Chairman, could be seriously misinterpreting economic data. If so, the consequences could be very severe
Is the Australian economy sinking into recession?: Economic indicators are looking bad for the Australian economy. Profits are being slashed and productivity is dropping
Liberal Government's labour market reforms looking shabbier -- so who's to blame?: The Government does not seem to understand that some of its claims are bogus -- unless it believes labour markets were freer in the 1960s than they are today?
Jobs and income security: another union myth: It is impossible for unions to bring about a permanent increase in real wages for everyone. Only by raising the amount of capital invested per head of the population can this be achieved
Economic growth, exports and falling currencies: Would a depreciation of the dollar promote exports and stimulate growth?
Why payroll taxes are really income taxes: Payroll taxes are not similar to so-called consumption taxes: and they can be no more passed on in the form of higher prices than can taxes on profits. They are part of the gross wage

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ELSEWHERE

Further to my post yesterday about the poor reality-contact of the Left, I thought I might note how even when they do acknowledge reality, they are very selective about it. One of the more serious attempts from the Left to find parallels that would justify their constant "Bush=Hitler" mantra is by Thom Hartmann. As is usual with Leftist rhetoric, it's what Hartmann leaves out that is instructive, however. Just one example: GWB has been trying for years to get all US grade schools to use phonics in teaching kids how to read and write -- and still has not succeeded at it. So, at that rate, if he is a dictator he must be the most pissweak dictator of all time! And how long do you think Hitler allowed a press that was critical of him?

A detailed article here on how the NYT collaborates with antisemitism. Excerpt: "While the Times exerts its immense resources to protest what they see as ill-treatment of every minority group under the sun, it seems to have little will to use its prestige to help one of the smallest minorities, Jews. Why American Jews continue their allegiance to a paper that ignores them at best and maligns them at worst is unfathomable. However, maybe some Jews are beginning to wake up and smell the coffee when they unfold the paper in the morning. Readership and circulation figures are plunging in its home market, and it is no longer the most-read paper in New York City. As the internet continues its ascent to become the number one news source for Americans, the Times will now have to face stiff competition. The news will no longer be what they choose to print as the news, and they will face the toughest competition they have yet to face: the truth". (Hat tip to Commonsense & Wonder)

Apparently, the Muslim rioters (sorry: "youths") in France have burnt a lot of churches as well as cars. Astute Blogger comments: "That's one every other day over the last two weeks. Quite a clip. And during the same period, not a single mosque was torched by the rioters, (whose Muslim-ness has nothing to do with the riots - according to the MSM. And nothing about these targeted attacks against churches has appeared in the MSM, either)".

Why not fair-trade beer and cakes?: "I heard the story again just a few days ago. You know the basic plotline: Poor coffee growers in third world countries get paid $1 per bag of coffee, which Starbucks then turns around and sells for $10 a pound. The story always concludes with a discussion about the evil firms involved and how markets result in people at the top getting rich and people at the bottom getting ripped off. But, in the end, this story can only survive due to ignorance of how markets work.....A six-pack of beer, for example, uses perhaps 5-8 ounces of barley (i.e. a few cents worth), and may sell for $3 to $9. That beats Starbucks. Or take wedding cakes. While an inexpensive one might cost a few hundred dollars, you could easily pay thousands for a cake by a master chef whose wheat (flour) cost $10. If Starbucks is evil for the vast difference between what growers get paid and what Starbucks receives for its coffee, these other cases are worse. Difference between input price and output price doesn't inherently imply injustice, and the example of the cake case captures this best. The value doesn't come from the ingredients, but from the skill that went into the cake"

Welfare is the real opiate: "Marx called religion the opiate of the people, and as usual, got it wrong. It was Marx's contention that religion and religious inhibitions against violence kept the proletariat in a stupor that prevented them from overthrowing their capitalist masters. The analogy is false because religion has no addictive quality. Quite the opposite, people must struggle to maintain faith and adherence to God's law. Choosing between good and evil requires awareness, not a stupefied state. Socialism, whether you call it communism, liberalism or whatever, is the opiate dependent ideology.... American liberals haven't quite convinced the American public to abandon the capitalist system for rule by an oligarchy of socialist elites. To advance their cause, liberals employ opiates. The attack on capitalism using opiates to diminish free will and abandon moral responsibility is incessant and insidious.... The welfare state is an opiate. The recipients receive their fixes in exchange for political support. It may not be paradise, but it sure beats working, saving and having to struggle for a living, at least for those whose greatest aspiration is to not miss their favorite television talk-show host or win the lottery."

Bush as Truman: "Why President Bush waited so long to respond to the baseless "Bush lied" lie is a mystery. Perhaps he thought he had more to gain by remaining above the fray than by rolling up his sleeves and wading into it. Perhaps he imagined that because the slander was so brazen, -- so easily refuted, so self-evidently untrue -- it wouldn't deceive the majority of Americans who supported his re-election last year. As the president has finally started pointing out, after all, leading Democrats argued forcefully during the runup to the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein was a lethal menace who had to go. "The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as he is in power," Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said at the time. While Bush never described the danger from Iraqi WMDs as imminent, there were Democrats who did.... With public opinion of Bush's competence and honesty at record lows, it may be hard for many to imagine his ever being seen as anything but a failure. But in 1952, when Truman's approval rating was down to a miserable 22 percent, when he was so unpopular that he stood no chance of winning re-election, who would have guessed that millions of Americans 50 years later would look back on him with admiration as a man of character and a gutsy, plainspoken leader?"

According to my last look at Technorati my new "Australian Politics" blog already has 19 links, but as far as I can see only 2 of them are Australians. I have got a heap of Australian bloggers on my blogroll so a few people are being a bit slack.

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/19/2005 09:12:00 PM

Friday, November 18, 2005

 
DELUSIONS PLUS LIES: ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE STANDARD LEFTIST RECIPE

Below are just a few excerpts from a loony Left article that bears as little relationship to reality as possible. Reality just does not suit Leftists at all. That's why they so love censorship when they can get away with it. Note the way GWB is equated to the North Korean Communist dictator -- who is normally referred to as "The Dear Leader" in North Korean propaganda. And the poor sod writing the article seems to believe that the media are in bed with the Bush administration. Pinch Sulzberger and his "New York Times" staff would be amazed!

"Media giants have consistently concealed the Bush administration's attack on civil liberties, supported the expansion of executive power, and paved the way for global war.... Now, it is the media that crafts the storyline of American magnanimity while the US military carries out war crimes in Falluja and torture in Baghdad. It is the media that showers praise on the Dear Leader while thousands wallow in squalor in New Orleans or are bombed into submission in Tal Afar... It is fair to say that the media has assumed an adversarial role to the American people. It now functions exclusively as a weapon in the imperial arsenal...

The media refuses to provide news of the Iraq war and the devastation of Sunni heartland. Al Qaim, Husbaya, and Tel Afar have all been attacked with the same ferocity as Falluja; forcing the townspeople to flee and then destroying the water, electricity, sewage and other critical parts of the infrastructure. The Pentagon is now engaged in a scorched earth strategy knowing full well that its policy of killing journalists will keep the story from being reported."

One of my readers comments:

"I checked those "cities" and found that Al Qaim is a microscopic place on the Syrian border. Husbaya I could not identify anywhere (but there's certainly not anything sizeable in central Iraq of that name), and Tall Afar is a little place up in northern Kurdistan. Sorry but that looks like a serious conspiracy theory disproven by the facts (unless Microsoft had pre-fiddled my Encarta 2000 for this purpose)."

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ELSEWHERE

The truth doesn't suit apologists for Islamofascism either: Since the end of August, the Holy See has had a new apostolic nuncio for Kuwait, Bahrain, Yemen, and Qatar. The new nuncio in these Gulf states is archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, 71, a Maronite from Lebanon... But one passage from his first public interview has provoked surprise and disappointment in the Vatican... In it, he restated the Church's opposition to the war in Iraq, which "can only deepen the gulf between the parties and increase fanaticism." He didn't say a word about the present phase of democratization in that country. But he dedicated many words to analyzing Islamist terrorism and expressing appreciation for its motives. To a question about the link between religion and terrorism, El-Hachem replied: ... "This reminds me of the distressing incident at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when young Palestinians massacred Israeli athletes... At that time I was in the Vatican. It was a sunny Sunday and pope Paul VI appeared at his window and addressed the faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square in these words: `We too reprove and denounce the massacre in Munich, but we ask the following question: why have young Palestinians committed this act? We reply: because the Palestinian people (it was the first time anyone had spoken of the Palestinian `people') have been the victims of the most dangerous of injustices in the history of humanity, an innocent and peaceable people turned out of their land, who have lost their roots and identity amid the indifference of the entire world. What impelled these young men to commit this act was to attract the attention of the world to their cause.'... But if you re-read the words Paul VI really spoke at the Angelus and at the Wednesday general audience before that, where he also commented on the massacre in Munich, you will find nothing of what El-Hachem puts into his mouth.

PETA summarized: "Penn & Teller, in their own inimitable style, have dished the dirt on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in a short video. Nothing is off-limits: they joke about the unhealthy appearance of vegans (skeletal and pasty), and are astonished that PeTA kills dogs and cats (apparently they killed two thirds of the 2,100 dogs and cats they "rescued" in 2002, see also petakillsanimals). Not least, they expose one of PeTA's leaders as an insulin dependent diabetic who seeks to prevent others benefiting from future medical advances, by trying to abolish animal research. PeTA would outlaw fishing, circuses, dog shows, horse riding, zoos, pets and guide dogs for the blind: their goal is "total animal liberation" says Ingrid Newkirk, PeTA's leader."

The wisdom to know the difference: "If there's an iron law in the universe, it is that you can not get the changes you want through force. You may get some encouraging immediate results, but in the long run the reaction to the use of force will never satisfy you. Prohibition, after all, did cut alcohol consumption, but that doesn't mean it was a success. When you persuade, people will willingly change; when you use force, people will do as little as possible to avoid harsh treatment, and then direct their energies as far away from you as they can. Even when they comply with the new laws, people do not behave the way those who forced the change intended. The people find loopholes, or are driven to even worse behaviors then the ones that were banned. The Law of Unintended Consequences can also be called the Law of Forced Change. All life reacts badly to force, to threats, to fear."

History of tax revolts: "More than a quarter century ago, Californians rebelled against an overbearing political establishment. Property assessments were climbing, state expenditures were rising, the budget surplus was expanding, and government officials were lying. Voters responded by passing Proposition 13, triggering tax revolts nationwide. The movement has waxed and waned over the years, but the stories rarely cease to inspire. Popular resistance to higher taxes almost always reprises David versus Goliath. Such is the tale spun by Phil Valentine, a Tennessee talk-radio personality who helped stop the bipartisan drive for a state income tax. Tax Revolt offers a delightful read, detailing betrayal and deceit, insider maneuvers and public protests, and big-bucks lobbying and horn-honking rallies. Particularly satisfying is the end: the people win."

Progressives, eugenics and the minimum wage: "American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on "Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work" (PDF). Leonard makes the point that Progressive support for exclusionary labor legislation for women, including the minimum wage, was based among other things on ensuring "that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as 'mothers of the race'". Though most know that eugenics had some sort of open popularity prior to the Nazis giving it a bad name, few know how thoroughly it was supported by all the "best and brightest". Here's a partial list from Leonard's paper: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and economist Irving Fisher. Progressives, in part for eugenic reasons, wanted to make women and other groups unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage".

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 11/18/2005 07:21:00 PM

Thursday, November 17, 2005

 
MORAL VACUUM STARTS TO HURT

Excerpt from Dennis Prager

"Jordanians are shocked that Islamic terrorists would blow up families, including families celebrating a wedding. They are so shocked that for the first time in history, Muslims have taken to publicly demonstrating against Islamic terror. And why are they shocked? Because the terrorists blew up Jordanians. As long as Islamic terrorists blew up men, women and children who are Jewish, Christian, Hindu, American, Australian and black Sudanese, the Arab and larger Muslim worlds were not particularly disturbed. In fact, Palestinians, who comprise the majority of Jordan's population, celebrated when Jews were blown up at Passover seders and at weddings. And they took to the streets and cheered in the Palestinian fashion, handing out candy, when Americans were incinerated in office buildings.

For some reason, Palestinians, most other Arabs and many Muslims around the world thought that the credulity-straining evil of targeting the most innocent for death, paralysis, blindness and brain damage would be confined to non-Arabs and non-Muslims.... Now there is widespread condemnation of Zarqawi's terror in Jordan. There is even a fear that the name of Islam will suffer. Unfortunately, however, it is only because Zarqawi was foolish enough to massacre Jordanian civilians, and not confine his massacres to Iraqis and non-Arabs. What has aroused Arab voices against Zarqawi has nothing to do with the immorality of blowing up people celebrating at a wedding -- it has to do with the immorality of blowing up Muslims celebrating at a wedding.

Nevertheless, it is possible that a moral awakening of sorts may be taking place in parts of the Arab world. The London Telegraph reports that "Munder Moomeni, a 38-year-old former soldier who lives next to Zarqawi's house, 13 Ramzi Street, described his former neighbour as 'a bastard.' 'By killing Jordanians here in Jordan, civilian Jordanians going to a wedding, they did something that not even a Jew would do,' he said." That a neighbor and former supporter of Zarqawi publicly acknowledged that Jews would not engage in such terror may be a first step toward the moral awakening that the Arab world needs even more than oil revenues.

It may even come to realize the greatest truth regarding terror and evil: People who blow up Israeli weddings and cut Americans' throats are very bad people. And if you don't fight them, they will eventually blow you up, too."

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ELSEWHERE

There is a truly saddening report here of the sheer insensate hate that Leftists feel towards GWB and Israel. Just a couple of excerpts: "Craig J. Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan, asserted that the crimes committed by that country's rulers are "subsidized by the government of George W. Bush." Bush has done this, he said, for the benefit of Enron. The goal of Americans, he instructed the students, is to "get at the oil and gas so they can guzzle it." .... Yasser Arafat, he said, had been correct to reject the offer of Palestinian statehood made at Camp David in 2000 because it was "a pro-Zionist type of approach." It would have allowed the Jewish state to survive. He found that a distasteful prospect".

Sad that this bill was necessary: "Fears that overweight Americans will develop an appetite for litigation drove the House to pass a bill that would bar lawsuits by restaurant customers claiming burgers and French fries made them fat. "Trial lawyers have said they'd target restaurants the way they've targeted the tobacco industry," National Restaurant Assn. President Steven C. Anderson said".

Good Taiwan speech: "Taiwan has welcomed comments by US President George W. Bush praising the island's democracy and said it shares the same core values as its allies. "Democracy, freedom, and human rights have been the core values shared between Taiwan and its allies," the Presidential Office said in a statement.... The office said the remarks were especially significant since they were made in Kyodo, Japan, on the first stop of Bush's Asia visit. Mr Bush's unusually strong comments came during a tour in which he will visit Beijing for a brief summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao. "We encourage China to continue down the road of reform and openness because the freer China is at home, the greater the welcome it will receive abroad," Mr Bush said in what was billed as a keynote speech. "Modern Taiwan is free and democratic and prosperous. By embracing freedom at all levels, Taiwan has delivered prosperity to its people and created a free and democratic Chinese society.""

Some progress towards border control? "Concerned that the nation's borders are not properly protected against terrorists, illegal aliens and drug smugglers, a Senate committee warned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that if he fails to correct the situation promptly, they will. Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME], chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joe Lieberman [D-CT] want to know whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) should be merged to `enable them to operate more effectively.' In a report made public last week, the Homeland Security Department's Office of Inspector General recommended that the two agencies-with overlapping jurisdiction for border security and immigration enforcement-be merged, questioning whether they had the ability as separate organizations to carry out their homeland security missions. The report, requested by Collins and Lieberman, said a lack of effective coordination between the agencies had affected apprehension, detention and removal efforts."

The fallout from California's recent Special Election in which ballot initiatives for reforms of the inflexiblity of the state budget, compulsory union dues, and redistricting were all lost are now starting to emerge: Nissan Corporation is moving its headquarters out of California to Tennessee and A massive $50 billion bond is being contemplated by the Governor.

There is an article here that identifies the French welfare State as a key ingredient in causing the recent riots there.

Bill Cosby was right : Blacks do spend a lot more of their income on shoes!

I am having a lot of fun with my new Australian Politics blog. I have just put up what I think is a heap of interesting stuff there. The servers hosting the blog are sometimes a bit slow in responding so I have in my usual way done a mirror site for it that may be more convenient on occasions.

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

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

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

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

********************************
posted by JR 11/17/2005 07:29:00 PM

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

 
WAL-MART TAKES THE LEAD IN DEFENDING BUSINESS FROM LEGAL PARASITES

Give Wal-Mart Stores credit for one thing--the company certainly doesn't scare easily. The world's dominant retailer has been facing a tidal wave of negativity--from community activists trying to keep its stores out of their neighborhoods, to local governments mandating that Wal-Mart supply workers with health insurance, to opportunistic lawyers trying to strike it rich by bringing on endless lawsuits. Critics--many of whom are as financially motivated as Wal-Mart is--are accusing the company of everything from discriminating against women, to mistreating illegal aliens, to denying overtime pay. Thousands of customers who slip and fall in a store aisle are also trying to reach into the company's deep pockets....

Management experts say the company's strategy of confronting the charges head-on while not wavering from its low-price business model is the most effective formula over the long haul. "When you're just about the largest company in the world, it's tough to breathe without offending someone," said Kathryn Harrigan, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Indeed, suing Wal-Mart is now a cottage industry, with some 5,000 lawsuits filed against the company each year. After one of Wal-Mart's 1.2 million employees gets to work at 9 A.M., three lawsuits will be filed against the company by the time he or she takes a 10:30 A.M. coffee break. By lunchtime, the count is up to six. By the time the employee heads home at 5 P.M., no fewer than 17 people or groups have brought a complaint in court. The same pattern will repeat itself tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

The message is clear. To some, the American dream is no longer just about being successful, it's about not being too successful. Or it's about being successful enough for others to leech off of you.

The company is generally loath to settle all but the smallest suits, opting instead to take on plaintiffs' complaints while hammering home its message of "Everyday Low Prices" to the public. The more serious class-action complaints, each of which can potentially result in hundreds of millions of dollars in liability, are complaints the company has decided it won't take lying down.

Larry McQuillan, a director at the Pacific Resource Institute, a free-market think tank, said fighting the lawsuits makes the most long-term sense, based on building momentum for tort reform, and because winning some of these cases would deter more organizations from filing suits. The trial bar's strategy against corporate America up to now has been to file a suit, depress the stock price and bring the company to the table to get a settlement out of it, he said. "Wal-Mart has been a leader in not bowing to those pressures, unlike many companies that are afraid of bad publicity and want to settle," McQuillan said. "If you don't defend yourself early on, and be persistent, you will be steamrolled."

More here

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NEW OZ BLOG

I am a bit embarrassed to be reporting this but I have started yet another blog -- a blog devoted solely to Australian politics. There are of course already heaps of excellent Australian conservative blogs. You will find a list of just some of them towards the bottom of my blogroll. So the purpose of my new blog is very limited. I just want to put up there what in my view is the most interesting or striking bit of news or commentary to come out of Australia that I have encountered that day. Sometimes, I will also mention the item here on this blog -- if it seems likely to have international interest -- but on other occasions I will not.

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ELSEWHERE

Hot air from Chirac: "French President Jacques Chirac said today the riots that have rocked France revealed an identity crisis to which the country would respond with firmness and justice. "This is a crisis of meaning, a crisis of reference points, a crisis of identity," Mr Chirac said in a televised address to the nation. "We will respond with firmness and justice. "These events are the sign of a deep malaise. Some people started fires in their own neighbourhoods, burned the cars of their neighbours, their friends, attacked their schools and sports centres." .... "Children, teenagers need values, points of reference. Parental authority is key. Families must take their full responsibilities." "Those who refuse to do so should be punished, according to the law. Those who are facing serous difficulties should, on the other hand, be actively supported.""

Thomas Sowell explains how both high Muslim unemployment in France and high black unemployment in the USA are the result of do-gooder labor legislation: "Many people are blaming the riots in France on the high unemployment rate among young Muslim men living in the ghettoes around Paris and elsewhere. Some are blaming both the unemployment and the ghettoization on discrimination by the French. Plausible as these explanations may sound, they ignore economics, among other things. Let us go back a few generations in the United States. We need not speculate about racial discrimination because it was openly spelled out in laws in the Southern states, where most blacks lived, and was not unknown in the North. Yet in the late 1940s, the unemployment rate among young black men was not only far lower than it is today but was not very different from unemployment rates among young whites the same ages..."

Blogger Mary K. Ham on the transition from NASCAR reporter to political reporter: "Some folks ask me what the transition was like from NASCAR reporter to political reporter. It's easy. In one, you try to explain to your readers the significance of grown-ups getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to go around in circles indefinitely, always turning left. In the other, you get to interview racecar drivers."

A good summary here of the methods used by the media generally and public broadcasters in particular to inject covert Leftist bias into their coverage of events. I am pleased to note that Senator Santoro from my home State of Queensland is doing his best to expose the biases at Australia's major public broadcaster.

Dick McDonald has just given a good fisking to the latest moan from Jimmy Carter.

China Hand has just put up a couple of big new posts about life in China and the rocketing modernization now going on there. [NOTE: As people in China cannot access blogspot sites, I have put up mirror sites for "China Hand" here and here that should be accessible in China]

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.

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

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 11/16/2005 10:23:00 PM

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

 
MORE ON THE NON-EXISTENT "PRINCIPLES" OF THE LEFT

I mentioned last month the book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweizer but I think a few more details about what it says are in order:

"Staunch union supporter Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union. But the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop. The hypocrisy doesn't end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of Congress in recent election cycles. But the Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. But none of them are in a union, according to Schweizer, author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty" and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other periodicals. The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is - that's right, a non-union shop.

Ralph Nader is another liberal who claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights. But when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on the office door.

Self-described socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as "the most vile institution on the face of the earth" and lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich. But Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon over the last 40 years, and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.

Air America radio host Al Franken says conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action. But fewer than 1 percent of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-American.

Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters. But he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family's fortune from the IRS. One Kennedy family trust wasn't even set up in the U.S., but in Fiji. Another family member, environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr., has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources. But he receives an annual check from the family's large holdings in the oil industry.

Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessity of unions to protect a "living wage." But she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada, where she can pay less than American union wages.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have spoken in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill vetoed a bill seeking to end it. But the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die. Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, including having abortions without parental notification. But she barred 13-year-old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO.

Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates. But he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

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ELSEWHERE

Old news to psychometricians: "Smarter children may enjoy longer lives, the results of a new study suggest. The study, which followed elderly adults deemed gifted by childhood IQ tests, found that the higher their early IQs were, the longer they lived -- up to a point, at least. The survival advantage began to plateau after a childhood IQ of 163, an intelligence level few people reach. Dr. Laurie T. Martin and Laura D. Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health report these findings in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Though the reasons for the link between IQ and longevity are not clear, it does not appear to be merely a reflection of income and social position. As children, the participants were from affluent families and most were white. Yet childhood IQ was still a factor in their lifespan. Similarly, in an earlier study of Americans with more varied childhood IQs and family incomes, Martin found that IQ was related to health problems independently of socioeconomics. This, she told Reuters Health, suggests that IQ affects longevity among lower-income people as well. As research has already linked IQ to mortality, the current study, according to Martin, was in part an attempt to see how far the IQ-health advantage extends. The researchers expected there to be a cutoff at which a high IQ no longer brought any extra health benefits." [High IQ is just one aspect of general physical good function. The brain is just another part of the body]

Unca Dave is in good form. He has put up a detailed argument to justify his view that those who oppose the Iraq war are "treasonous vermin".

Our friends, the Saudis: "The government of Saudi Arabia is distributing books and pamphlets across the United States in an effort to recruit American Muslims to an international struggle against Christians and Jews, the director of a religious freedom organization told the Senate Judiciary Committee Nov. 8. In one instance, a booklet distributed by the Saudi Embassy in Washington offers instructions on how to "build a wall of resentment" between Muslims and infidels, said Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom. Among the book's directives: "Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel," Shea quoted during a committee hearing."

Wal-Mart helps the poor: "Wal-Mart, by revolutionizing bulk purchasing, logistics and inventory, and thereby enabling lower prices on a huge array of goods, which pushed everyone else to follow their lead, has probably done more to improve the standard of living for Americans over the last several decade than any other institution. That is to say, Wal-Mart has directly and indirectly contributed to an increase in real wages for almost all consumers. The media is almost totally blind to this fact."

Ted Baiamonte points out that the problems of France run a lot deeper than rioting Muslims.

Wow! Keith Burgess Jackson is now putting up post after carefully-reasoned post about the thuggish Brian Leiter. Neutralizing Leiter would certainly be a great service to American scholarship.

As readers will no doubt have observed, I am more inclined to put up pictures now that I am on cable. So I have recently added a few pictures to my internet biography as well.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/15/2005 07:20:00 PM

Monday, November 14, 2005

 
MYTHS ABOUT VIETNAM

Since I was in the Australian Army during the Vietnam war and volunteered for service in Vietnam, I take some interest in righting the misconceptions that prevail about that war. Just some excerpts below from a very wide-ranging article.

"Burkett looked into the apparently high suicide rate among Vietnam veterans and found it was not even remotely true. "Vietnam veterans have one of the lowest suicide rates in America. The two years after the war there was a slightly elevated rate that was only modestly higher then our peers who never went into the military. It fell off dramatically after that," he said.

Widespread Vietnam Veteran homelessness is another myth. "Back, around the late 70's Teddy Kennedy had a $10 million government grant to have a building in Boston for all the homeless Vietnam veterans. Several of guys gave testimonies about how they ended up on the street after Vietnam, but I got the military records of those individuals and virtually none of them were Vietnam veterans," he said. Burkett said other investigations have shown that very few "homeless veterans" were in the military.

Another myth he dispelled was the incarceration rate of Vietnam veterans. The prisons are not full of criminal veterans, Burkett said. "I went to the bureau of prisons and got the statistics, the demographics. At the time there were 1 million men in prison. 55% of those in prison are black, only 10.5% Vietnam Veterans are black. 80% of the incarcerated do not have a high school degree. As I mentioned 90% of Vietnam Veterans do have a high school degree. You can't get in the military with a felony conviction and 80% of the incarcerated have a felony conviction as a youth offender. About 75% came from broken homes, but about 80% of Vietnam Veterans came from a 2-parent home," he said.....

Burkett said drug rates were also low among Vietnam veterans, partly due to surprise inspections. "You could buy marijuana very easily; they literally sold it in bags on the street. But when you're living in a bay with 40 guys and you may be going into combat, I can guarantee if you're doing drugs-marijuana or otherwise-the 39 other guys are going to report it because they're not going into combat with some pot-head," he said....

Burkett said race was another politically incorrect myth he tackled. At the time of the Vietnam War, 13.5% of the draft pool was black yet only 12.5% among this group were drafted. Because of less access to medical care and lower educational rates, blacks failed the physical and aptitude exams at a higher rate than whites. "Nobody's ever telling the real story of the black man in Vietnam. They are always focusing on "The black man; the victim". They weren't victims; they were patriotic Americans. 75 percent of the blacks that served in Vietnam were volunteers-exactly the same rate as whites. Twenty won the Medal of Honor, 100 won the Distinguished Service Cross and dozens upon dozens won the airforce cross and the Navy Cross. "Nobody knows that about 300 went on to become admirals or generals in the armed services of America," he said.

Burkett also refuted the idea that it was only the poor or middle class who served and died in Vietnam. Contrary to an explosive story that said rich kids stayed home, Burkett said high per-capita income communities like Beverly Hills, and Grosse Pointe, Mich. actually had significantly higher casualty rates than the norm...."

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ELSEWHERE

Fun! Keith Burgess Jackson is still socking it to Brian Leiter with a new post titled "Leiter's Nietzschean Descent into Madness". Keith's consistent use of cool logic to pull apart what Leiter says seems to have got the abusive old blowhard a bit worried at least.

Riesman on Nazism: "My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.... When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei - in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party - Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism? Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed".

I thought I might make a brief mention of a book that has just recently come out in English called The Fabricated Luther. The book refutes the weird Leftist claim that Luther was responsible for the rise of Nazism! Since Hitler was a Catholic and had his main base of support in Germany's Catholic South, that always was a lulu but it is good to see the full story about Nazism and Lutheranism set out. The modern-day Left will blame Nazism on everything except what it should really be blamed on: Socialism.

End federal flood insurance: "Federal flood insurance transfers wealth from lower income earners to the more affluent, encourages people to build homes where they should not be built, and promotes disasters such as the one in New Orleans. Congress should not use our money in this way. One way to prevent future disasters such as New Orleans is to have fewer people living in flood plains. But federal policy takes the opposite approach - it pays people to live in flood prone areas through federally funded flood insurance. This has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to date, and the policy is made even worse by the fact that it transfers wealth from taxpayers who don't own property, to those who do. It is a form of welfare for the more affluent and politically powerful"

San Francisco irresponsibility: "Lost in the shuffle of post-election analysis this week was news that San Francisco voters approved a military recruiting ban on high school and college campuses.... In so doing, voters showed an astonishing disregard for the give and take of citizenship, and a deep disrespect for American military personnel. Such rash actions arise from a post-Vietnam anti-war activism that is no longer content with objecting to war on principled grounds, and is instead determined to eliminate the military all together. It is deliciously ironic then, that so many of these activists reside on the West Coast, a nice target for, and well within the range of, North Korean nuclear missiles. Who would the good people of San Francisco call upon for defense - the fire department? Or what happens when Islamic extremists take down the Golden Gate Bridge, who would hand down justice - the local library staff?"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/14/2005 07:17:00 PM

Sunday, November 13, 2005

 
A Manifesto of Lies

A small excerpt from an excellent expose by David Limbaugh

The following is a non-exhaustive sampling of certain important precepts one must believe, pretend to believe, or advocate in order to be in the Democratic leadership fraternity, that bizarre cadre of partisan creatures dedicated to destroying President Bush personally as an alternative to devising a coherent, politically viable policy agenda:

Nazi and Communist propagandists were on to something in teaching that if you repeat a lie -- even an outrageous one -- often enough people will begin to believe it.

This principle holds true even if you are guilty of precisely the same thing as those you accuse (talking up Saddam's WMDs) and your complicity is conclusively demonstrated on audiotape and videotape.

When your obvious duplicity in this affair is illuminated by reference to the uncontroverted fact that when you made similar claims about Saddam's WMDs you had access to the same intelligence as the administration, you simply say the president pressured the intelligence community to doctor the data.

When this specious assertion is contradicted by unequivocal findings of bipartisan investigative commissions, you simply demand, with righteous indignation, more investigations.

In the meantime, you also charge that President Bush cherry-picked certain intelligence and deliberately relied on other discredited intelligence in order to bolster his case for war against Iraq. And you do that knowing that it is you who are retrospectively cherry-picking the evidence and presenting it as irrefutable proof that Bush lied.

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ELSEWHERE

Lying about lies: Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed. What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact"

There is a rather amazing article here (hat tip to Infinitely Prolonged) about the large number of men who lie about being military veterans or lie about what they did whilst in the military -- John Kerry and Jimmy Massey being particularly obnoxious examples of the latter. I myself do on relevant occasions mention that I was a Sergeant in the Austalian Army during the Vietnam war but you will find a copy of my certificate of discharge included in my internet biography so anyone can check up on me any day. I have of course blotted out my signature from the online copy. If anyone thinks I am going to put my signature online they can think again.

The genetics of race mentioned in the NYT!: "In a finding that is likely to sharpen discussion about the merits of race-based medicine, an Icelandic company says it has detected a version of a gene that raises the risk of heart attack in African-Americans by more than 250 percent. The company, DeCode Genetics, first found the variant gene among Icelanders and then looked for it in three American populations, in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta. Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent. The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics".

No hope for Germany: "Germany's two major political parties on Friday sealed an agreement to govern the country together under Angela Merkel, who would become the country's first female chancellor. But after six weeks of grueling negotiations, which exposed fissures on both sides and necessitated deep compromises, the new government faced a murky future, shorn of the reformist zeal that many here believed is necessary to fix Germany's stagnant economy and stem its soaring unemployment.... Mrs. Merkel has had to set aside many of her proposals for overhauling Germany's economy, including a simpler tax regimen; reform of health care and pensions; and a more flexible labor market. The Social Democrats objected to Mrs. Merkel's proposals to curb unions and to make it easier to dismiss workers. Plans to restructure the medical and pension systems were also either watered down or deferred. And the Social Democrats succeeded in nudging up the tax rate for people with high salaries."

If you have not yet read or heard GWB's excellent Veteran's Day speech, it is here. There is too much good stuff in it to attempt an excerpt.

Les Bates on the basic idea of Leftism: "It is to replace the society of social and economic consent that we live in with the social and economic primacy of the parasites over the productive"

China Hand has just put up an interesting post on China's linguistic muddle. One excerpt: "Riding the No.78 bus through the outskirts of Suzhou this morning I saw a big red banner urging on all the importance of speaking in putonghua, the so-called "common language" of China... In English is it known as Mandarin - or the language of the court officials. But in Hong Kong when they speak of Chinese - they mean Cantonese. When they mean the Beijing dialect they say mandarin or putonghua... The Beijing dialect is the standard the model for putonghua although it is a very formal version of Beijing dialect which is just as unintelligible as any other dialect to a Mandarin-only speaker". [NOTE: As people in China cannot access blogspot sites, I have put up mirror sites for "China Hand" here and here that should be accessible in China]

Blog Herald says there are now over 100 million blogs. A bit hard to believe. If you want to back up your blog, these utilities might come in handy. I do daily manual backups myself. It only takes me a couple of minutes.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/13/2005 08:36:00 PM

Saturday, November 12, 2005

 
DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE GOP

Bidinotto has a point: One excerpt: "Not a damned thing distinguishes the Republicans from the Democrats anymore...not a damned thing. "No Child Left Behind" in essence, and unconstitutionally, federalized education. The GOP-engineered federal prescription drug subsidy program for seniors was another huge and costly step toward total socialized medicine. The Administration's response to recent natural disasters -- here and abroad -- establishes the premise of federalizing all local emergencies globally, and reducing the U.S. military into becoming the logistics wing of the International Red Cross".

The Anchoress has got pretty disillusioned with the GOP too: "If your plan was to make people so disgusted with your cowardice, your disorganization and your political tone-deafness that they either stop contributing to the RNC, or they decide to just sit out the next election (because what's the point), or they decide to vote out every stinking one of you in the next elections, because you freaking well deserve ouster for literally doing nothing constructive and squandering your majority.well.you have succeeded spectacularly! Beyond your wildest imaginings, I am sure. I can't think of a single reason to vote to re-elect a any one of you".

The Plantation Right: "I write editorials for a conservative editorial page. After my newspaper editorialized that U.S. House Republicans should replace Majority Leader Tom DeLay with someone more concerned with ideology than partisanship, we were deluged with letters from angry Republicans. Almost all of the letters made the same argument: No real conservative would oppose Tom DeLay because of all the good he has done the GOP. Of course, 'Republican' and 'conservative' are not synonyms. Until more conservatives make clear that they understand this distinction, they are in for continued abuse from the Republican leadership."

The House of Reps backdown over drilling for oil in less than 1% of Alaska really got to me but there is an informative comment here on just how it happened.

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Brookes News Update

Why Al Gore could have been America's last gasp? : In Al Gore we did not see the triumph of American liberalism but of nihilism springing from the corpse of liberalism
Are Liberal Party blue bloods sinking the Government's workplace reforms?: Looks like the Hugh Morgan, Michael Kroger and John Calvert-Jones' axis has contributed significantly to the Government's labour market reform stuff up. But what can one expect from the 'Blueblood Society'
Business Council of Australia's quack cure for recessions: The Business Council of Australia has demonstrated a shocking ignorance of economic history and the real nature of the so-called boom-bust cycle
Who hates America in the Arab and Muslim world, and why: Arab journalist tells all on Anti-Americanism and hate in the Arab world. This is something that most Western journalists would never dream of doing
Black group calls on Democrats to stop using racial slurs against black Republicans: Racist Democrats vilify black Republican candidate
Why government was never the source of money: According to a popular view, which originated from Plato and Aristotle, people accept money because of government decree. Not so
Hollywood can't even spell "Israel": Palestinians are perpetrating on their own people with a fervour that increases in savagery each day, because they can't get over the fence and kill Jews so easily
What should we expect from Bernanke now that he is the Fed's chairman?: Why Bernanke'a policy of stabilizing prices will generate a boom-bust situation

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ELSEWHERE

A mindless bigot speaks. Brian Leiter calls Texans mindless bigots because they prefer a traditional definition of marriage. But since he gives no reasoning for his assertion, who is the mindless bigot? Both Keith Burgess-Jackson and Right Reason have given the poisonous old bigot more attention than he deserves -- and I guess I am too.

Blunt talk from a senior Australian conservative: "Federal Treasurer Peter Costello has again urged Islamic extremists to leave Australia, saying there is no point in living in a country with a system of government they oppose. "There are some things Australia stands for, has always stood for, always will stand for, which will never change," he told A Current Affair. "We will never be an Islamic state. We will never observe Sharia law ... We will always be a democracy. "To people who say `well, we've come to this country and we would like to turn it into something it isn't, I say you must understand that will never occur". Mr Costello said rather than try to change Australia, they should leave it".

An interesting research finding: "This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that government plays an unambiguously positive role for individuals' quality of life, and public choice theory, that was developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement and regulation, thereby harming voters' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a leftwing median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but only in countries where the state sector is already small."

The authoritarian Left at work again: "Massachusetts politicians last week rose to new heights of holier-than-thou arrogance. House members on Thursday-just three days after the 80-page bill was introduced-voted overwhelmingly to tax businesses that do not provide health insurance for their employees, and to require all residents who can afford it to buy health insurance... No doubt, buying health insurance is a good idea. But so is buying a car with a five-star safety rating, brushing after meals and not running with scissors. And yet government lets people decide whether to do these things... If the state can order people to buy health insurance, then where does that authority stop? Why can't it order people to exercise a half-hour a day, quit smoking, and floss regularly?"

Various people have mentioned it but in case you have not seen it, the disastrous way French "unfair dismissal" laws have made Muslims almost unemployable in France is summarized here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/12/2005 09:56:00 PM

Friday, November 11, 2005

 
SORRY! JUST FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE:

I imagine that regular readers here have by now seen enough of 1930s Nazi propaganda to be thoroughly persuaded of how Leftist it was. But there is one last poster that I think really rams the point home so I reproduce it below. The picture below is in fact a blow-up of an election banner that appeared in a larger photo that I presented on 12th. October.



It reads: "Mit Adolf Hitler "Ja" fuer Gleichberechtigung und Frieden" -- which translates as "With Adolf Hitler "Yes" for equal rights and peace" -- the same old standby slogans that the Left trot out to this day, of course.

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ELSEWHERE

I do occasionally get derisive emails from unwary Leftists who don't expect the sort of effective response that they get from me. One of the most amusing such Leftists lately has been Steve Getto (gettos@fdn.uq.edu.au) -- apparently an academic or student from my Alma Mater (the University of Queensland) in my home town of Brisbane. He initially emailed me to express great scorn for my demonstration that Nazism was Leftist. I gave him more to think about than he expected, however, and he has been in continual backdown mode since. His most recent email to me was most amusing. He was trying to defuse the trenchant criticisms of the Left by George Orwell and this is what he wrote: "Oh hehe ... so does this mean you are sincerely interested in a fairer and more equitable society? Gimme a break. Orwell *was* deeply incensed at the behaviour of elements of the Left, yes. And some of your criticisms of socialists and socialism are valid. But Orwell never gave up on the idea of the basic principles of socialism. Some socialists have no right to quote Orwell, agreed. But right wing champions of capitalism like you have even less. How about replacing the Orwell references to a more suitable one like Andrew Bolt. Trying to glorify your crap with literary citations is absurd and offensive to people's intellect. Ugh. Intellectual fascism. Give me Nazism any day. At least they had the guts to admit they were scumbags. Yours to the strains of the Internationale (by way of waving a red rag to the bull)". [Talk about being condemned out of your own mouth! He denies that Nazism was Leftist and then, as a Leftist, expresses a liking for it! What a laugh.] Update: In a subsequent email Getto described himself as being of a "general revolutionary Marxist political persuasion". How unsurprising!

There is a good post here on how the moral degeneracy of the French (and the French Left in particular) has got them into their present pickle.

There is a huge debunking here of this attention-seeker: "For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq. In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians... Massey was discharged in December 2003, shortly after returning from Iraq due to depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome." The media of course lapped it all up without doing any checks on the truth of his stories at all

Socialist envy thriving in Britain: "Having a nice view or living next door to a golf course are going to cost householders more in council tax under Labour plans. Taxpayers are set to be charged hundreds of pounds extra a year if they are in a conservation area, next to an open space, have a swimming pool or tennis court or enjoy full or partial views of the sea, hills, mountains, lakes or rivers. Extra charges are also expected to be levied on homes with more bedrooms than average, conservatories, large patios or gardens, roof terraces or balconies. Homes in "gated communities" will also face higher bills. Official documents show that ministers are going to extraordinary lengths to build a detailed database of properties across England, with the intention of placing them in a higher council tax band.... A whole range of details - from "equestrian facilities" to patio size - will be tabulated. No fewer than 10 "value-significant codes" detail a range of possible views that a property can offer".

Socialist stupidity in Scotland: "Last month must have seen an especially potent full moon, because several Scottish economic bigwigs started behaving distinctly out of character. First, Sir John Ward, the chairman of Scottish Enterprise, declared that, according to his agency's own calculations, the post-devolution public sector now accounted for no less than 55 per cent of the Scottish economy. Ward was rightly scathing of this development. In booming Ireland, the figure is around 34 per cent. He went further and claimed that in certain areas of Scotland three-quarters of the local economy is dominated by public spending."

Anti-Americanism is now the Left's only real ideology: "After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the Left everywhere stopped offering options for governance or serious theories about development and equity and sought refuge in protest. The enemies of globalization explain their ideas by stoning McDonald's to smithereens. Anticapitalists hurl pies at the president of the International Monetary Fund. Anti-Americanism has turned into ideology. The communists have exchanged Das Kapital for T-shirts with the image of Che Guevara and choruses of brief (and badly rhymed) slogans. The Left today is nothing but circus and street violence. But that strategy, along with the corruption and follies of many governments, has burrowed deeply, especially in Latin America, where a growing number of citizens despise democracy as a method to organize coexistence and reject the market economy as a way to create and assign wealth".

Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort". Officer's Club thinks some of the pro-Jihadi American Left have gone so far as to be guilty of treason by that definition.

China Hand has a new post up about how personal helpfulness overcomes bureacracy in Chinese banking.

Ovi Magazine is out again with its usual broad coverage of interesting topics.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/11/2005 09:50:00 PM

Thursday, November 10, 2005

 
LA BELLE FRANCE

What is really happening in France: "It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularised welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The "youths" do not blame the French, they despise them. Most observers in the mainstream media (MSM) provide an occidentocentric analysis of the facts. They depict the "youths" as outsiders who want to be brought into Western society and have the same rights as the natives of Old Europe. The MSM believe that the "youths" are being treated unjustly because they are not a functioning part of Western society. They claim that, in spite of positive discrimination, subsidies, public services, schools, and all the provisions that have been made for immigrants over the years, access has been denied them. This is the marxist rhetoric of the West that has been predominant in the media and the chattering classes since the 1960s. But it does not fit the facts of the situation in Europe today... Those media that tell us that the rioting "youths" want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs..... the insurgents are viewing the politicians and the pundits with contempt and amusement. If there is "anger" of a kind, it is no more than infuriation at the, from their point of view, arrogant presumption of the French politicians that Muslims would even consider adopting, let alone abiding by rules that the French have set".

Eurabian fights: "The banlieues are not equivalent to American inner cities. This is not a replay of 'the fire next time.' The outcome will not be the kind of affirmative action that brought black stockbrokers to Wall Street and black actors to starring roles in TV commercials and sitcoms. What we are seeing is a jihad-style insurgency waged against a country that has fervently fostered the Eurabian fusion project."

Even the socialists are begining to stir: "Yesterday, Michel Pajon, the mayor of Noisy-le-Grand near Paris, asked for the French army to intervene and stop the violence which is taking over France. The mayor - a Socialist - went on French radio to say that what is happening in his country is absolutely appalling"

A different view: "Most commentators see the recent riots in Paris (and, it now seems, throughout much of the rest of the country) as evidence of France's failure to assimilate immigrants into the body politic. But perhaps it is just the opposite, that the riots, in fact, signify that these immigrants have assimilated French culture and politics. I don't mean to be flip, but to a great extent and perhaps more than any developed nation, the history of France has been written in the streets. My quick and dirty recall of French history suggests that many of its most pivotal moments (both good and bad) have resulted from popular uprising."

It had to happpen: Some people on Daily Kos are saying that GWB is to blame for the riots in France! (Hat Tip to Pubcrawler)

Maybe the French should ask their Swiss neighbours about how to run an immigration policy. You can read here how hard it is to become a Swiss. They actually require immigrants to INTEGRATE into Swiss society! Of course pro-immigration lobbyists will say Swiss style regulations will 'harm' the economy and undermine global integration, yet Swiss per capita income is greater than most of their West European neighbours and their unemployment rate is approximately half.

Stating the now obvious: "In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the US media became preoccupied with a key question: "Why do they hate us so much?" A fair-minded people, the Americans believed there must be a good, rational explanation why 19 educated, economically comfortable young men would ram planes into buildings, killing themselves along with thousands of innocents. Among the many reasons proffered, one that appeared frequently - and drew concern in Jerusalem - was that it was all due to US support for Israel. If the US would only toe a more pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian line, this argument ran, then the Arab and Muslim masses wouldn't hate it so. The events in Paris over the last 12 days have confirmed the vacuity of this argument. Since the mid-1960s, France has consistently been among the most pro-Arab countries in western Europe".

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ELSEWHERE

Looks like Californians have voted to keep their gerrymandered Democrat legislature. Not so surprising in kooky California, I suppose.

Another Leftist myth exploded: "Middle-class youths, not the poor, are providing the bulk of wartime recruits to the armed forces, according to a new study by a conservative think tank. The Heritage Foundation research paper found that a higher percentage of middle-class and upper-middle-class families have been providing enlistees for the war on Islamic militants since the September 11 attacks on the United States. Researchers matched the ZIP codes of recruits over the past five years with federal government estimates of household incomes in those neighborhoods. Contrary to complaints from some liberal lawmakers and pundits, the data show that the poor are not shouldering the bulk of the military's need for new soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines".

Louisiana cash goes to the dogs, cows and goats : "Louisiana will spend $45 million on sports and livestock facilities and other new projects in spite of a looming deficit, frustrating some officials who say the frivolity reinforces the state's history of political patronage. 'We're in Washington with our hands out asking for $2 billion plus, and rather than holding on to the money to see what the needs are, they're spending it on local projects financing goat shows and lawn-mower races,' says state Sen. Robert Barham, Oak Ridge Republican. Supporters of the $4 million Morehouse Parish Equine Center say it will give a much-needed boost to the economy. Jimmy Christmas, center chairman, says it will be used for horse, cow, dog, goat and art shows; rodeos; auctions; crawfish festivals; lawn-mower races; religious functions; an animal shelter; and a community center."

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

I have just put up here a detailed comment from a reader about how Australia's public broadcasters foster Islamic unrest.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/10/2005 08:04:00 PM

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

 
SPARE THE ROD AND SPOIL THE CHILD?

(I am sure many people reading this will think that I should be talking about the Paris situation at the moment rather than hardy perennial questions such as the one above but everybody else seems to be talking about Paris so maybe some readers need a break from that at the moment. If you want a really down-to-earth discussion of the present French situation, try Fred Reed. I have also just put up a predictably outspoken comment from Chris Brand about the French situation. And the role of France's rigid socialistic economic system in creating their present problems is touched on here. I wonder if the French realize how much they are being laughed at by the "cowboys" from the other side of the Atlantic at the moment?)

I did myself have a very permissive upbringing and, as a libertarian, I always supported my son in whatever he wanted to do. Though I would not of course have supported him if he had wished to do anything destructive. But Christians are often taught that a more directive style of parenting is appropriate. Barring children from watching TV or certain parts of TV is, for instance, common. My son was and is a "Simpsons" devotee so I was delighted for him to watch as much of all that political incorrectness as he wished.

Now I am not going to pontificate on exactly what is the right child-rearing style. The genetics research tells us that what we do makes very little difference anyway. What I DO want to do is to make it known to parents who favour a stricter approach that attacks on such approaches are very poorly founded. Leftists are of course great advocates of "there is no such thing as right and wrong" and Leftist psychologists have been claiming for decades that a permissive approach founded on such thinking is far and away better for your child's psychological health. Such claims are rubbish and I want to examine just one example of the "research" supporting such claims in order to show what a crock the whole research tradition concerned is. Below is the centrepiece of one such set of findings, from "Self-Reported Narcissism and Perceived Parental Permissiveness and Authoritarianism" by Ramsey, Watson, Biderman and Reeves and reported in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, Volume: 157. Issue: 2 of 1996. Page Numbers: 227ff.

"A negative relationship appeared between the OMNI and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale ( r = -.18, p <.001), and the OMNI correlated directly with the PAQ maternal measure of permissiveness ( r = .18, p < .001), with the PAQ paternal measure of permissiveness ( r = .11, p < .05), but not with the combined ( r = .04, p < .15) measure of permissiveness. All three authoritarianism scales were associated with greater tendencies toward narcissism: PAQ maternal authoritarianism ( r = .11, p < .05), PAQ paternal authoritarianism ( r = .14, p < .01), and the combined index ( r = .16, p < .01). No significant linkages appeared between the OMNI and any measure of authoritativeness ( r s = -.07 to .05, p s < .15). When the data for men and women were examined separately, no significant gender differences appeared in the OMNI correlations with self-esteem or with any parenting style. The coefficient alpha for the OMNI was .66"

So the study purports to show that "authoritarian" parents produce Narcissistic children -- which would indeed be a matter of concern if it were true. But the study is hilariously flawed. The data for it were obtained by handing out a bunch of questionnaires to 370 Introductory Psychology students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga! Their report of how their parents treated them is accepted unquestioningly and data derived from a non-sample of Chattanooga students is assumed to tell us something about humanity in general!

The great advantage of such "research" from the point of view of the psychologist is that students are pretty alert to what the psychologist expects and tend to give him the answers he hopes for. But on this occasion even that did not work out. Look at the correlations reported. They average around .15, which is effectively zero. The correlations are "significant" in a statistical sense but that is simply a reflection of the large sample size. Even if we take the correlations seriously, they are telling us that there is only around a 2% overlap between the upbringing and the personality variables -- which means that knowing about the upbringing of the child gives you virtually no power to predict how the child will turn out. What a lot of nonsense it all is! I will back Solomon (Proverbs 13:24; 29:15) as a better guide to child-rearing than that any day.

As a Parthian shot, it might also be noted the the measure of Narcissism (OMNI) used by the researchers showed very poor internal consistency (alpha of .66) and also showed virtually no correlation with another measure of what should have been largely the same concept -- the widely-used Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale. So whether their measure of Narcissism did in fact measure Narcissism seems dubious. Try not to laugh!

Update

A reader has emailed me to make the interesting point that narcissism is intrinsically anti-authoritarian -- so anti-authority attitudes of themselves could taken as an indicator of narcissism. The email: "A narcissist will ALWAYS consider any 'authority' figure to be an 'authoritarian'. Part of the definition of narcissism is responding to anyone expressing any 'outside' [of their views] opinions with rage (they see any other opinion as repressive). It makes them 'feel' to not be in control / important.... ie, the fact that they have this response defines them as narcissists..."

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ELSEWHERE

A nice bit of sarcasm: "If France has these kinds of systemic problems with its Muslim population, then it is time to partition France. It's time for an independent Muslim state to be created. After all, isn't that what France and other European nations have determined is the proper solution for Israel? These are not just riots. This is an intifada - just like the one begun in 2000 within and around Israel. France and other countries, including the United States, have demanded that Israel meet those attacks with land concessions to the rioters and suicide bombers. That is the only viable, long-term solution, they say. They claim this violence will never cease until those oppressed by Israel are granted an independent, autonomous state of their own. Why should the solution be any different in France? The global jihad has come home to Paris. Let's see if French officials impose upon their own population the same solution they demand upon the population of the Jewish state. After all, isn't the key to addressing the concerns of the jihadists to appease them?"

For once Wonkette says something that really is amusing: "It's day 12 of the French riots but I still haven't heard anyone say how it's Bush's fault yet. Is the Left so apathetic about France they cannot cite a simple connection to the White House? .."

The evidence keeps piling up: "Nature beats nurture in determining how successful a child will be at school and university. Inherited intelligence accounts for 75 per cent of educational attainment while home environment is responsible for the rest, according to a new study. The research, published in the Royal Economic Society's Economic Journal, contradicts claims that upper or middle-class parents "buy" their children's success. The study looked at more than 15,000 children, almost 600 of whom had been adopted." [See also here for a more extensive summary and here for the full original paper ]

Just note this typically Leftist but still astounding bit of arrogance from a man who very nearly became President of the United States: "Kerry concluded by giving the students a little lesson in politics. "All politics is a reaction to felt needs. You need to get people to feel the need. Our job is to make sure the right felt need is taken into consideration."" [So Leftists adjudicate on which are the "right" needs! Stalin lives!]

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/09/2005 06:58:00 PM

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

 
A VIEW FROM THE AUSTRALIAN LEFT

In my view, both the excerpt below from an article by a prominent Leftist Australian politician and the bipartisan legislation he is referring to show the Australian Left to be much more decent, realistic and responsible than American "liberals" will ever be -- sadly for the whole world

"We are seeing at the moment a strange state of affairs in Australian public life, in which the politicians and the people are in broad agreement both on the nature of the terrorist threat and on what ought to be done about it, while a large slice of the intellectual class is in furious disagreement. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, after Bali I and Bali II, after Madrid and London, most Australian politicians accept that the terrorist threat to Western society in general, and Australia specifically, is real and dangerous. That's why six Labor premiers [State governors] have worked co-operatively with a Liberal Party prime minister to come up with a balanced package of anti-terrorism legislation, one that will give our governments the necessary powers to protect Australia against terrorism, while preserving to the maximum extent the rights and freedoms that make Australia worth defending.

In working co-operatively to defeat terrorism, Australian politicians are doing what the Australian people want us to do. Every opinion poll shows that the Australian people expect us to do what is necessary, within the framework of our democratic system, to stop those who are planning to commit terrorist attacks as well as those who recruit, finance, organise or incite others to do so.

You would never know this from listening to some ABC [public broadcaster] commentary or reading some broadsheet commentators. In the world of Alan Ramsey and Phillip Adams and Michael Leunig, all the world's troubles an the fault of the Western democracies, or a witches' brew of Zionists and neo-conservatives; terrorism is a myth or a trick by George Bush and Tony Blair to divert our attention while they seize the world's oil. This strange disconnect between the people and the intellectual elite is dangerous and damaging.

My view is that Australia is at war - at war with a new form of totalitarian ideology as evil as the fascist and communist forms that the democracies fought during the 20th century. It is a not a war Australia sought, nor a war that we can escape by feeding others to the crocodiles in the hope that they will eat us last.... This week in Canberra, despite all the shouting, we saw a mature democracy at work. When the national interest is at stake, the parties work together to achieve an outcome that both protects Australia from terrorism and protects the safety of Australians".

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ELSEWHERE

The Iranian Mein Kampf: "Eighty years ago, Adolf Hitler published an autobiography-cum-manifesto. Its title translates as "My Struggle." In it, Hitler talked of his desire for revenge against France, the German nation's need to control more land, and the means by which his National Socialist Party could gain power. It also included, of course, a clear indication of his genocidal intentions against the Jews. Last week, Iran's president echoed those themes. He talked about his "struggle" - the word translate into both Arabic and Persian as "jihad" -- his desire for revenge against America and the West, the Islamic nation's need to control more land, and the means by which his Militant Islamist movement could gain global power. He also included his genocidal intention to wipe Israel "off the map." Of course, there are differences between Hitler in 1925 and Ahmadinejad in 2005. Perhaps the biggest is this: When Hitler made his threats he was an obscure politician whom hardly anyone took seriously. By contrast, Ahmadinejad is the president of a large and wealthy nation that operates terrorist organizations and is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. Had Hitler's threatening words inspired serious action then, millions of people - Jews, Gypsies, Czechoslovaks, Americans, British, Russians and others - would not have been slaughtered in the 20th Century."

A good post here about Leftist bias in the French media coverage of the Paris riots.

There is a good fisking by a blunt Dutchman here of the creepy way the American Leftist media are covering the Paris riots. Excerpt: "Somehow these revolting youngsters started to think that it was normal to want it all and to want it now without sweating for it. They drop out of school in masses but nevertheless demand the welfare state to fulfill their dreams, whatever they may be. They look down at going to work as baggage handlers or asparagus diggers, and they feel they have the right to do the same things and own the same things as the kids in the better neighborhoods - the state should give it them. They have a natural right, they apparently believe, not to be neglected, not to be overlooked, not to be abandoned, not to be counted out. They think it is the state's obligation to prevent them from being bored, from being poor and uneducated".

Mark Steyn on French folly: "Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February. Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.'' ''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois."

There is a rather witty commentary here on an utterly stupid anti-Israel book (The Question of Zion). Excerpt: "Rose claims that an important part of Zionism's psychopathology is its inability to criticize itself. And yet because she has little firsthand knowledge of the country, and even less of its language, she draws her critique from an impressive array of leftist Israeli critics, academics, peace activists, conscientious objectors, post-Zionists, and non-Zionists both past (Scholem, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon) and present (Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Uri Avnery, Amos Elon, David Grossman, Baruch Kimmerling), each of whom she quotes denouncing Zionism. She thereby implicitly--and, as it happens, accurately--gives the impression of an extremely lively tradition of Israeli self-criticism".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/08/2005 07:57:00 PM

Monday, November 07, 2005

 
MORE SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA FROM THE 1930s

Below is a picture of an original Nazi propaganda poster ("Flaggenspruch" or "flag motto") that was often publicly displayed during World War 2. An original copy is presently being advertised for sale on eBay. Its basic message is that help for the poor is not charity but something which the poor have a right to -- which is of course a common Leftist claim to this day.



The heading ("Opferwilligkeit") translates as: "Willingness for self-sacrifice" and the rest translates as: "Social works deserve no gratitude because they are not graciousness but the restoration of rights". The source of the quotation is blacked out in accordance with the rather ludicrous eBay rules but it is a quotation from Mein Kampf (around page 23 or 24 in most editions). I give the full context for the quote below (from the Manheim translation). I also give the full German original of the sentence from which the quote is taken as I think the Manheim translation is a bit clumsy. Hitler spoke a very colloquial "people's German" which it is very hard to translate so as to give exactly the same impact as the original.

"I do not know which is more terrible: inattention to social misery such as we see every day among the majority of those who have been favored by fortune or who have risen by their own efforts, or else the snobbish, or at times tactless and obtrusive, condescension of certain women of fashion in skirts or in trousers, who ' feel for the people.' In any event, these gentry sin far more than their minds, devoid of all instinct, are capable of realizing. Consequently, and much to their own amazement, the result of their social 'efforts' is always nil, frequently, in fact, an indignant rebuff, though this, of course, is passed off as a proof of the people's ingratitude.

Such minds are most reluctant to realize that social endeavor has nothing in common with this sort of thing; that above all it can raise no claim to gratitude, since its function is not to distribute favors but to restore rights. [In German: "Dass eine soziale Taetigkeit damit gar nichts zu tun hat, vor allem auf Dank ueberhaupt keinen Anspruch erheben darf, da sie ja nicht Gnaden verteilen, sondern Rechte herstellen soll, leuchtet einer solchen Art von Koepfen nur ungern ein"]."

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ELSEWHERE

I probably should make a brief comment on the latest furore about male/female differences in IQ. I have not read either the original Irwing & Lynn paper nor the attack on it by Blinkhorn but Blinkhorn seems mightily confused from what I see reported. He seems to think that the undoubted fact mentioned by Irwing & Lynn to the effect that there are far more very bright men than women means that women ON AVERAGE are less bright. That is nonsense. There are also lots more very dumb men than there are very dumb women so the male/female average is the same. For a fuller explanation, see my previous posts on the matter here and here

Conor Friedersdorf argues that France has failed to assimilate its Muslim immigrants because the French Welfare State gives them no incentive to assimilate.

Decent Italians: "Ten to 15 thousand epople took to the streets of Rome last night to demonstrate against Iran's open threat to exterminate Israel. While not a massive number, it is 10 to 15 thousand more people than have taken to the streets of Paris or London in the same cause."

A good comment here on the lies that Wal-Mart haters resort to. One excerpt: "In the closing minutes of the new documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," triumphant activists proudly point to vacant lots in their various communities. Their message: They were going to build a Wal-Mart here, but we stopped it. Vacant lots. What a victory. And what a perfect symbol of what's wrong not just with the anti-Wal-Mart ideologues, but the whole anti-development, anti-globalization, anti-everything left. "High Cost," which opens today in New York City and Los Angeles, is only a documentary in the most generous sense. It's more propaganda"

Banagor looks at the strange selectivity Leftists show in what causes they agitate for and conclodes that it is only really stupid people that they side with.

Global capitalism: Curing oppression and poverty: "Although leftist agitators continue to protest global capitalism, they overlook the key points in the debate. Capitalism has been instituted on three continents -- in western Europe, North America, and Asia. These nations -- England, France, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, and the others -- are among the world's wealthiest countries with per capita incomes in the range of at least $20,000-$30,000 annually. Additionally, even the prosperity of a so-called 'socialist' country like Sweden is based on significant elements of capitalism, including Volvo, Saab, and Ericsson, as well as countless private small shops."

The futility of non-stop relief: "No one can accept the idea of trying to fill a bottomless hole -- that people in these parts of the world will forever need to be taken care of, that they simply will never cope on their own. And this is quite rational -- if someone requires emergency support, to be helped back on his or her feet, after which a productive life will be resumed, helping makes sense. But if help simply goes to be consumed, after which more help is required, on and on and on, this is intolerable. At some point, no matter how much is given, it will reach an end and, once again, thousands will perish."

Ivar Berg long ago showed statistically that most education is pretty useless and not worth the money people spend on it. It looks like nothing has changed. This report ranks American States according to how well-educated their kids are -- with Vermont at the top and Arizona at the bottom. Yet, as Harry Hutton points out, Arizona is economically dynamic -- last year their economy grew by 7.1%, the second highest in the nation.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/07/2005 09:08:00 PM

Sunday, November 06, 2005

 
RACIAL PREFERENCE AS AN EXTENSION OF KIN PREFERENCE

French-Canadian psychologist J.P. Rushton has just put out a new paper elaborating on themes he has been discussing for some time. The Abstract of the paper is below:

"Genetic Similarity Theory extends Anthony D. Smith's theory of ethno-symbolism by anchoring ethnic nepotism in the evolutionary psychology of altruism. Altruism toward kin and similar others evolved in order to help replicate shared genes. Since ethnic groups are repositories of shared genes, xenophobia is the `dark side' of human altruism. A review of the literature demonstrates the pull of genetic similarity in dyads such as marriage partners and friendships, and even large groups, both national and international. The evidence that genes incline people to prefer others who are genetically similar to themselves comes from studies of social assortment, differential heritabilities, the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, blood tests, and family bereavements. DNA sequencing studies confirm some origin myths and disconfirm others; they also show that in comparison to the total genetic variance around the world, random co-ethnics are related to each other on the order of first cousins."

The paper will of course arouse great ire in any Leftist who reads it on the grounds that it treats preference for one's own race as natural. And yet precisely that conclusion is in fact old hat among psychologists. There was for a while a controversy about it but by 1986 we find in Roger Brown's popular social psychology textbook (titled simply Social Psychology) the conclusion that "ethnocentrism" and its associated phenomena are "universal ineradicable psychological processes". And given the usual Leftist inclinations of psychologists, the evidence had to be pretty overwhelming for that conclusion to be arrived at. So it is only the know-all Leftists who in fact know nothing who would jib at Rushton's basic point. Where Rushton's work is interesting therefore is not his discovery of the naturalness of race-preference but rather his explanation for it. He shows where it fits into theoretical biology as an aspect of both kin preference and altruism. Bringing several different phenomena together within a single theoretical framework is of course a great goal in any science so Rushton's conclusions are impressive if only for that reason. The entire paper is quite readable and I think anybody who looks at the variety of evedence Rushton masrshalls in support of his conclusions will find it hard to argue with them. See here (PDF) or here for the full paper.

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ELSEWHERE

Senate OKs benefit cuts : "A battle over deep cuts to popular federal programs like Medicaid and food stamps promises to intensify next week in the House despite relatively smooth sailing in the Senate. On Thursday, the Senate passed a measure calling for mild cuts in the health care programs for the elderly, poor and disabled, while leaving the food stamp program untouched. For now, the House bill generates $54 billion in savings, in part by imposing new fees on Medicaid patients, eliminating about 300,000 people from food stamp rolls and cutting enforcement funds against parents who duck child support.... The Senate bill, which passed 52-47, also would permit exploratory oil drilling in the Alaskan refuge, prompting five Republicans in the GOP-controlled chamber to vote against the bill."

Airports: A glimmer of sense: "The government plans to offer airline passengers nationwide the chance to avoid extra security checks by paying a fee and agreeing to a background check. Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley, who announced the plan to Congress on Thursday, said his agency also is studying other ways to reduce security delays. That includes possibly rescinding the post-Sept. 11 prohibition on passengers' carrying scissors and small knives onto planes. ... The program, tested at five airports for more than a year, would allow most people to avoid random pat-downs if they pay a fee, clear a voluntary background check and provide some form of biometric identification, such as a fingerprint. The program is intended to let frequent air passengers avoid delays and to free up security screeners to focus on other travelers."

Feisty oldster gets probation in airport case: "A woman has been sentenced to a year of probation for responding to an airport pat-down search by grabbing the screener's breasts and asking, "How would you like it if I did that to you?" Phyllis Dintenfass, 63, also was fined $2,000 Tuesday by a federal judge and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. The retired technical-college teacher was convicted in July of assault on a federal employee. Prosecutors said Dintenfass' hairpins and trouser button set off a metal detector in 2004 at the airport in Appleton. A screening supervisor with the Transportation Safety Administration then placed the backs of her hands under Dintenfass' breasts. Dintenfass became offended and grabbed the screener".

Australian Leftist government gets tough on welfare: "The State Government's increasingly hard line on social services has been extended to public housing and tenants will no longer be guaranteed a home for life. Those waiting to get public housing will face tougher asset tests as the Labor Government tries to cut waiting lists and tackle the state's escalating housing crisis. Only the most needy will have access to subsidised housing.... The changes reflect Labor's plans to give priority in public hospitals to the poorest patients and to force wealthy patients to contribute more. Premier Peter Beattie has signalled an end to free public hospitals, including possible co-payments and means tests.... Nearly 36,000 people are on the waiting list for public housing. More than 105,000 people already live in about 52,000 subsidised homes and pay as little as 25 per cent of the household's gross weekly income in rent.... Under the most controversial change, tenants will be reviewed every few years to ensure they are still eligible for housing. Those whose circumstances have improved will be given a year to find housing in the private sector... The number of people on public housing waiting lists has increased by 47 per cent in the past five years".

Hollywood shoots itself in the foot: "There�s no question Hollywood is reeling. Film attendance is down a wrenching 12 percent from last year, and a May USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that nearly half of American adults go to movies less often than they did in 2000. Some pundits have blamed the rising price of tickets, but in constant dollars a ticket costs less than it did 25 years ago. Others believe that it�s all those DVDs that people are buying�except that DVD sales are slumping, too. The most likely explanation is the left-wing politics. �You can date the recent box-office decline from the end of the summer last year, with the intensification of the presidential campaign,� notes conservative film critic and talk-radio host Michael Medved. �It wasn�t just Hollywood�s hostility toward President Bush; it was the naked, raw partisanship.�

American TV looks down on the worker: "Yet the economic explanation cannot fully account for the inordinate number of shows about doctors and lawyers. If the networks were seeking only to maximize their profits, they would air shows about corporate CEOs, business managers, and entrepreneurs. But they don't. Despite the best efforts of Virgin Music founder Richard Branson and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, only Donald Trump has succeeded with a show about the business class. Perhaps another explanation can fill in where economics fails: the cultural one. Screenwriters and producers come from the professional classes. So it makes sense that they would make shows about their own kind".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/06/2005 09:29:00 PM

Saturday, November 05, 2005

 
THE CAUSES AND CURES OF ISLAMOFASCISM

Francis Fukuyama has a fairly reasonable article on the Islamic problem in Europe which points to Islamic terrorism as being more the product of Western Leftism than of traditional Islam. No argument there. But his ideas for solving the problem would seem to be good only in theory. His main proposal is that Europe should somehow put into practice the American "melting-pot" idea (which America has now abandoned, anyway). One of my Dutch readers comments:

"Francis Fukuyama's recipe for warding off Islamofascism in Western Europe includes such bromides as "fashioning a national identity that will connect citizens of all religions and ethnicities in a common democratic culture, as the American creed has served to unite new immigrants to the United States."

Well, pish. This is what the Netherlands have done for centuries. They welcomed Jews from Spain and from Eastern Europe, they welcomed Pilgrims from England, Chinese and Moluccans from the East Indies - the list goes on. While expecting everyone to pull their weight in their adopted society, they granted every new group full civil rights. The Islamists of the 20th century got the same deal. The key difference - and this is true elsewhere in Western Europe - is not the lack of "a common democratic culture"; it is the modern welfare state. In Holland, second and third generation Islamic teenagers no longer need to look for work after they finish school. The government will pay them a stipend until they find work - if ever. Thanks to this official generosity the murderer of Theo van Gogh was able to spend his days in a radical Islamist hangout in Amsterdam, to become properly brainwashed for his dirty deed. No need to go out and find a job.

Every radical philosophy of the past - the French revolutionary creed, Communism, Fascism, and whatever the Baader-Meinhof gang believed - was hatched and nurtured not among the oppressed but among the privileged, the people with leisure. "Idleness," as Hippocrates noted, "and lack of occupation tend - nay are dragged - towards evil."

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ELSEWHERE

A good summary here of the big problems Western Europe is having with its Muslim population at the moment. Serves Europe right for invading Iraq and supporting Israel! Odd that there are no Muslim riots in the USA!

There is a good historical summary here showing that, despite all the media and Greenie hype, hurricane Katrina was far from being the worst U.S. hurricane in the last 100 years.

How these Leftist teachers hate little kids! "A Tulsa parent is outraged over how her child was disciplined at school for wearing a costume. Crystal Harris says her 5-year old son was forced to take off his costume, and go through the entire school day with only his underwear on. The incident happened Monday at Walt Disney Elementary. School officials acknowledge they have a policy that forbids costumes, and that's why the teacher did what she did. They say they've have apologized to the family. Harris says however the teacher should be disciplined for embarassing her son. Harris' son has not been back to school since the incident, and she says she's considering legal action". [How brave of them to traumatize a 5 year old boy! Their twisted ideologies are all that matters to Leftists, not people]

Crazy EU agricultural policies: "Prince Albert II of Monaco, whose fortune is estimated at _2 billion (�1.4 billion), received _287,308 in subsidies from the European Union Common Agricultural Policy last year. The Prince was given the grants for the 700 hectares (1,730 acres) of farmland he owns in northern France. He is among the 24 biggest recipients of CAP subsidies in France, according to a study by the World Economy Group. Another farmer, who has 1,733 hectares of rice fields, was paid _866,290, researchers found. "The bigger you are, the more you get," La Tribune, the French daily, stated. "Is it right that European subsidies should be used to fill the accounts of luxury car dealerships in cereal-growing regions?" French farmers received _9.39 billion in European subsidies last year - more than any other country. British farmers received _3.99 billion. Tony Blair has urged reform of Europe's agricultural policies but President Chirac is resisting him. The Queen received �545,897 in subsidies under the CAP last year and the Prince of Wales received �225,465."

Overspending causes and cure : "Perhaps no issue, outside of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, has angered conservatives more than the growth in federal spending during George W. Bush's presidency. Granted, Mr. Bush began his tenure by effectively slashing more than $1.4 trillion from the government's 10-year revenue projections through his tax cuts. Few of his critics see this as a spending cut, but if those tax cuts had not been passed, that money would have been spent, instead of remaining in the private sector where it fueled investment, job-creation and economic growth. That growth has paid off handsome dividends in the form of increased tax revenues that this year shrank the federal budget deficit by $100 billion. Still, there is no getting around the fact that spending has risen over the last five years, in many areas dramatically. But are the increases excessive or is there a reasonable justification for much of it?"

Bipartisan action on terrorism in Australia: "Police are expected to move within days against a group of terror suspects in Sydney and Melbourne after the Senate rushed through new anti-terror laws yesterday. A group of radical Muslim youths linked to controversial Melbourne cleric Nacer Benbrika fear they will be arrested under the emergency legislation, which received vice-regal assent from Governor-General Michael Jeffery in Sydney last night.... In a special sitting yesterday, the Senate approved government amendments to the criminal code designed to help police arrest people planning a terrorist attack. While Labor backed the changes, the party warned the Government that it expected results. It fears that the publicity of recent days may have prejudiced police operations.... The new law will allow people to be charged with terrorist offences even if they have not decided on a specific target for an attack.... Mr Howard said on Wednesday that he had received specific intelligence which "gives cause for serious concern about a potential terrorist threat".

Relentless negativity from the MSM: "What was the most important news out of Iraq last week? That depends on what you consider ''important." Do you see the war against radical Islam and Ba'athist fascism as the most urgent conflict of our time? Do you believe that replacing tyranny with democratic self-government is ultimately the only antidote to the poison that has made the Middle East so dangerous and violent? If so, you'll have no trouble identifying the most significant development in Iraq last week: the landslide victory of the new Iraqi Constitution. The announcement on Oct. 25 that the first genuinely democratic national charter in Arab history had been approved by 79 percent of Iraqis was a major piece of good news. It confirmed the courage of Iraq's people and their hunger for freedom and decent governance.... But that isn't how the mainstream media saw it. Consider The Washington Post. On the morning after the results of the Iraqi referendum were announced, the Post's front page was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, Lieutenant Colonel Leon James II, who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/05/2005 07:51:00 PM

Friday, November 04, 2005

 
SOME RECENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

Anti-Semitic poem wins British prize
Jews and the Jewish Birthrate
An Islamist threat like the Nazis
A History of Violence
Where are the good Jews today?
Israel can bank on Australia's support
Where cronies on the left can be found
Osama bin Laden: more media whore than guerrilla warrior
Egyptian Ambassador at Brandeis
Pretoria Calling
More Palestinians killed in internal strife this year
ABC board gets elusive powerbroker
Rulebook for reporting on Israel
War by prejudice from the BBC
Iraq's message to Mr Blair: we still need the troops...
An ABC investigation that could bite
Gaza Speech
When Young Jews Major in Anti-Semitism
The Mouse
Essay on Anti-Semitism
Seeking rationaliy is futile
BBC hangs on the balance

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ELSEWHERE

A liberal Bahraini journalist argues that hatred is a general phenomenon in the Arab and Muslim world: "...Hatred in the Arab and Muslim world is a general phenomenon that is not limited only to the Americans. It is possible that the Arabs and Muslims hate each other no less than they hate others... "In the 1990s, over 200,000 citizens were killed in Algeria - most of them by extremist Islamic groups. What was the response of most of the Arabs and Muslims? A mixture of amusement and of presenting justifications for the murderers and terrorists. During those years, the Taliban movement also abused Shi'ites, Azeris, Tajikis, and other minorities, and no one did anything [to stop it]. "In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, occupied it, and expelled its residents. What was the response of the Arabs and Muslims? Nothing. On the contrary: Most Arabs and Muslims supported Saddam... And in 1991, Saddam murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds, and most Arabs and Muslims did not condemn it."

Some things need to be "profiled": "Five Muslim football fans were detained and questioned during a game at Giants Stadium because they were congregating near an air duct on a night former President Bush was in the stadium, the FBI said Wednesday. Some of the Muslims said they did not know they were in a sensitive area, and they complained that they were subjected to racial profiling while they were praying"

Long live free Catalonia!: "Plans by Catalonia to achieve greater independence from Spain are set to test the authority of Spain's Socialist Prime Minister. The rich northeast region wants to be called a nation and have greater control over its own taxes, paying less towards poorer parts of Spain. But other regions have condemned the plan, calling on their people to boycott goods and services from Catalonia. The debate leaves Jos� Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister, with a dilemma: whether to honour his election pledges and grant key Catalan coalition partners autonomy from Madrid; or to heed calls from within his own party and try instead to stifle independence claims. Under a statute devised by Catalonia's regional politicians last month, the region would also have more control over police, the judiciary, the prison service, ports and airports. Catalonia would administer European Union funds and Madrid would have to ask permission if international issues affected the region".

Holy Ireland: "The crisis in the Irish Catholic Church over sex abuse deepened yesterday as another diocese revealed figures for the number of priests facing allegations. Fifteen priests have been accused of sex abuse over a fifty-year period in the largest Catholic diocese in Northern Ireland, according to figures released by the Diocese of Down and Connor. The figures come on top of the 21 priests identified in an Irish government report published three days ago on the Diocese of Ferns, Co Wicklow, and the 26 priests facing allegations in the Diocese of Derry. Yesterday the Irish Independent published the details of its own all-Ireland survey, finding that more than 241 priests have been accused of child sexual abuse in the past 40 years".

Big Muslim riots in Paris continuing. (Must be because of the French invasion of Iraq and its support for Israel): "Jacques Chirac called for calm today after six nights of rioting in the suburbs of Paris threatened to spread and ministers argued over the French government's response to the crisis. A total of 34 people were arrested last night after setting fire to 15 cars and clashing with riot police in the poor, crime-ridden suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois to the east of Paris. No one was injured. Police have fought with protesters every night since last Thursday, when two teenagers were electrocuted after running into an electricity sub-station in the mistaken belief that they were being chased by the police. More than 150 fires have been reported, and tensions were increased after police fired tear gas into a mosque".

Taxpayer revolt starts with state bill of rights: "A taxpayer revolt is sweeping the nation with a battle cry for a 'Taxpayers' Bill of Rights.' The latest count finds activists working with legislators in at least 22 states, from Georgia to Alaska, California to Vermont, to enact a Taxpayers' Bill of Rights (TABOR), a tax-and-expenditure limit on state government that requires voter approval of spending over certain reasonable benchmarks. Taxpayers are up in arms because politicians are wasting too much of their hard earned money, and they want it to stop. Taxpayers agree with Armey's Axiom: No one spends someone else's money as wisely as he spends his own."

An amusing story here about the sheer awfulness of the French bureaucracy. After reading it, I don't think that I should ever complain about Australia's bureaucracy again.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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

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

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

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posted by JR 11/04/2005 08:27:00 PM

Thursday, November 03, 2005

 
AUSTRALIA'S ECONOMIC PROWESS

Which country will have no government debt within a year, contributed the most to help those in need after the tsunami, and was described by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as a "model for other countries", America or Australia? You've guessed it. Australia. For so long simply seen as an adventure playground for gap year students or a breeding ground for sportsmen, Australia has now graduated into the world of big players....

The Australian economy is now in the 15th year of the longest economic expansion in 50 years - perhaps, according to John Howard, the Prime Minister, "the longest since the gold rushes of the 19th century". Today this continent, much of it desert, ranks 53rd in terms of world population, but is the world's 13th largest economy; eighth in the world in income per head from 18th two decades ago.

John Howard (and to be fair, in some areas such as currency deregulation, his predecessor Bob Hawke) practised what he preached: the foundation of a nation's success is economic growth, and that growth is rooted in economic stability, free trade and rewarding hard work and investment. Out went tariff protection. It was no use hiding under the duvet, hoping that the growling Asian tigers on our doorstep would disappear. "Bring 'em on," became the Australian warcry. Down came the national debt and borrowing. Australia's net debt position has fallen from 20 per cent of GDP to 1.3 per cent. And within a year, Australia will have no net government debt at all. Read that again: no debt. Down from $96 billion to zero in a decade....

The burden on the private sector fell, helping it to create more jobs - more than 1.5 million new jobs since 1996 alone. Not bad for a country of just 20 million people. Today, unemployment is at a 30-year low - and inflation is under lock and key despite high oil prices.

Much more here

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

What should we expect from Bernanke now that he is the Fed's chairman? : Why Bernanke's policy of stabilizing prices will generate a boom-bust situation
Liberal Party stuffs up its workplace reform arguments against the unions: Why has the Liberal Government failed to persuade the electorate that reform is good? Because disdainful arrogant economic illiterates have been in charge. This article lays out the case for reform by demolishing the unions' argument
How capital gains taxes retard economic growth: Shows how capital gains taxes damage economic growth by sapping investment and punishing success
The Great Depression and the paradox of thrift - another Keynesian fallacy: It is nonsense to claim that the Great Depression was caused by excess savings. The evidence flatly contradicts this view
Scooter Libby v Fitzblooey: a 'crime' against the process: Is it now normal practice for prosecuting attorneys to allege a crime and then set traps to elicit falsehoods upon which they can then indict a target without having to prove a crime was committed?
Iranians boycott regime's anti-Jewish rally: The Iranian regime's vicious anti-Jewish rally was ignored by the vast majority of Iranians
Mugabe unleashes his fanatical thugs against the poor: Mugabe has unleashed his infamous 5th Brigade on the poor. Having learnt well from their North Korean mentors the 5th Brigade murdered, tortured, and raped about 20,000 Zimbabweans in the early '80s

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ELSEWHERE

Theodore Dalrymple notes that suicide bombers and other Islamic terrorists are often fairly Westernized. He says that Leftist victim-talk makes them resentful of their failures in our society and Islam gives them an outlet for their anger. But this is definitely a "read the whole thing" article.

A good article here shows that the whole of Islam is complicit in Islamic terrorism. Excerpt: "So, here we are: part of the Muslim community is in the thrall of a totalitarian ideology which turns young Muslims into human bombs. Photos of Muslim and non Muslim civilian body parts flying in the middle of markets, mosques, discos and hotels have become routine. Beheadings of Christian and Jewish men and women are no longer surprising. And what do the ever-silent and passive-defensive Muslim countries, Organization of Islamic Conference and the Arab League vociferously condemn? They are condemning the publication of cartoons featuring Muhammad in a Danish paper. The absurdity of this action is only matched by its hypocrisy."

An amusing explanation here of how GWB's proposed tax changes would screw the "Blue-staters" who have made themselves his political enemies.

There is what is alleged to be a speech here by a Chinese general that speaks of attacking the United States. Is it just the fantasies of an old man or totally phony? I don't know but maybe we should try to find out. There are a lot of comments here that throw doubt on the story. The "learning from the Nazis" part of the speech does not sound to me like anything any Chinese Communist would say.

A good summary from Dennis Prager: "Judeo-Christian America -- American exceptionalism America -- loves John Bolton, has contempt for the United Nations, mistrusts the World Court, regards Amnesty International as another morally confused leftist organization, thinks little of the world's media and academic elites, and regards "world opinion" as morally confused and left-wing media manipulated. On the other side are those, like the ACLU, who regard even the smallest cross on any county or city seal as a religious threat to the secular republic, who think it America's fault that this country is not highly regarded in public opinion polls from Canada to Germany to South Korea, who passionately opposed John Bolton becoming ambassador to the U.N. because he is highly critical of that institution, and who believe that other nations' laws should be cited in U.S. Supreme Court decisions".

Carnival of the Vanities is up right on schedule this week with lots of goodies to read.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/03/2005 06:43:00 PM

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

 
RECENT ABORTION RESEARCH

Dear me! There is a lot of nonsense reported in abortion research. As far as I am concerned, abortion is an ethical issue and I have made my view of it clear elsewhere but various medical claims seem to get tangled up in it too. One claim is that women who have abortions are subsequently more depressed, which makes some intuitive sense and appears to be borne out by research. A recent piece of research has challenged that, however, and the BBC gives a reasonable summary of the controversy for the general reader. The abstract of the actual research report concerned is here and you can link from there to the full research report. I confess to not having read the article in full but it seems a rather silly article to me. They report that higher income women are more likely to abort and that such women are typically less depressed -- which rings true. But they apparently fail to control for that in assessing the effects of abortion. They really needed to compare women of SIMILAR income background (or control for income background statistically) in order to assess the effects of abortion. So I don't think we can conclude anything from their study at all.

And there is another study here which reports that women who have had abortions are more likely to become child abusers when they do eventually have children. The inference is that it is the abortion that makes the women more abusive. But isn't it the more obvious conclusion that women who are callous enough to have an abortion in the first place are also the types who would abuse children anyhow? Not all women who have abortions are callous but I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that there are a lot more callous women among them than in the general population.

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THE IRISH FLOODS OF THE YEAR 2000

You can read a little about the floods here and the predictable Greenie comment is here but I think the picture below tells you most of all.



With an enormous effort at self-restraint, I will refrain from making any comparisons.

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ELSEWHERE

Australia's major public broadcaster, the ABC, is getting very grand -- with the pride that come before a fall, I fancy. The Managing Director of the ABC has just failed to turn up for a Senate scrutiny of ABC operations -- sending an underling instead.

Targeted terrorist assassinations would spare innocent lives : "When Pat Robertson, the televangelist who once ran for president, suggested that the U.S. consider assassinating Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, he was roundly denounced by voices left and right. Robertson is, of course, known for saying impolitic things. But, based on the breaking news that Chavez is seeking nuclear technology, perhaps Robertson's assessment of the Venezuelan situation was more farsighted than impolitic. The Washington Times recently reported that Chavez is on the offensive, making 'overtures to various countries' including Iran 'about obtaining nuclear technology.' Even more troubling than rumors of the Venezuelan government discussing the obtainment of nuclear technology is Chavez's recent fraternization with Iran's ruling bad boy, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which has brought increased pugnacious policy choices in the southern hemisphere."

American and European car-makers both trailing on quality "Toyota, along with its Lexus division, makes more than half of the sedans and small cars that earned our highest Reliability Rating. All the others that earned this Rating were also Japanese, including the Honda Accord and previous-generation Civic; the 2006 Infiniti M35/M45; and nonturbo models of the Subaru Impreza. Most of the worst sedans in our rankings came from Europe, including several expensive luxury models such as the Audi A8, BMW 7 Series, Jaguar S-Type, and the Mercedes-Benz E- and S-Class. The rest of the bottom-rated small cars and sedans were from domestic manufacturers and included the Chevrolet Cobalt, the V8-powered Chrysler 300C, and the Lincoln LS".

Methodists rediscover the Bible: "In a denomination divided over the role of homosexuals in its ranks, a United Methodist Church court Monday defrocked a lesbian minister and reinstated a pastor suspended for denying church membership to a gay man. The nine-member Judicial Council, the denomination's highest court, released its decisions after hearings last week at Houston's First United Methodist Church Westchase campus. The council ruled that the Rev. Irene "Beth" Stroud of Pennsylvania had violated church law that prohibits "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" in the clergy. It also reinstated the Rev. Edward H. Johnson, pastor of South Hill United Methodist Church in Virginia, who had been suspended by his bishop after refusing to add a gay man to the church membership roster."

Reliapundit has a summary of the Muslim riots in Paris -- riots the French rather deserve, in my view. More background on the subject here

Brits still ruling some waves: "Royal Navy snipers shot out the engines of a speedboat carrying �200 million worth of cocaine during a drugs bust in the Caribbean, it was disclosed last night. The operation to intercept and arrest the drug trafficking gang was led by the Type 22 frigate Cumberland and a Lynx helicopter from her support vessel, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship Wave Knight. They intercepted the speedboat as it raced across the ocean 100 miles off Nicaragua. The four-strong gang tried to outrun the helicopter but they were forced to surrender after specialist snipers in the Lynx fired bullets to disable the speedboat's engines. A team from Cumberland boarded the speedboat, arrested the crew and seized two tons of cocaine with a street value of �200 million.

I have just put up here a big new lot of postings by Chris Brand on recent events to do with race, IQ etc.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/02/2005 08:42:00 PM

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

 
SUITCASE NUKES

One of my nuclear physicist readers has emailed me to offer the following technical correction to the "Suitcase nukes" story in the WSJ's Opinion Journal that I referred to below:

You are correct to note that the suitcase nukes story is bunk and that real suitcase nukes have an extremely limited shelf life - but the Opinion Journal article on why it is bunk gets the physics all wrong. A suitcase nuke has to make use of a small quantity of plutonium with isotopics that are referred to as "super-grade" well above the normal weapons grade level (super grade is around 97% Pu-239 as opposed to 93% Pu-239 for normal weapons grade) - the Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. The Opinion Journal's explanation of why the suitcase nukes have a limited shelf-life is simply ludicrous.

The real reason is that the nukes themselves operate at extremely fine tolerances and their yield is incredibly dependent upon the absolute perfection of their internal geometries. As the higher isotopes of the Pu decay (most importantly Pu-241 going to Am-241) the heat output of the Pu part of the core changes drastically and the geometry changes slightly - this makes the weapn prone to two problems that are referred to as spalling and jetting. As the weapon itself operates right on the limit of having too little material to give an actual nuclear explosion, any material lost to spalling or jetting will prevent the weapon from going off at all. The steps necessary to remake the suitcase weapon to get back its old yield are at least as complex as building it in the first place.

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ARE RELIGIOUS PEOPLE BIGOTS?

The above question is one that has often been asked and the answer has been found to depend on how you define "religious". But generally, psychological research -- such as mine -- has found no association between orthodox Christian beliefs and racial prejudice. That does not suit the religion-hating Leftists at all, however -- as "racist" is one of their handiest terms of abuse. So we find an attempt (under the heading "Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice") by the ludicrous "Bob" Altemeyer to salvage something nasty from the situation.

Altemeyer relies in his research very heavily on a scale (set of statements) of his own devising called the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. As the very name of it implies, it contains a "mixed bag" of statements. Many are worded in a very aggressive and punitive ("authoritarian") way but there are also in the scale statements such as: "National anthems, flags and glorification of one's country should all be de-emphasized to promote the brotherhood of all men" (from p. 305 of Altemeyer's 1981 book). Now how many conservatives would agree with that statement? Very few, I suspect. So agreeing with the aggressive and hostile statements of the RWA scale can get you a high score on it but just rejecting characteristically Leftist statements can also get you a high score on it. So whether any given correlation with the scale arises from its conservative character or its authoritarian character is simply unknowable.

So Altemeyer's failure to recognize that simply being conservative could lead you to get elevated scores on his RWA scale leads him to lots of apparently profound conclusions that are in fact much more parsimoniously (simply) interpreted. For instance, he concludes: "people raised in no religion are apt to be the least authoritarian [conservative] respondents". But all that that finding really tells us is that modern-day North American Christians tend to be conservative. Big news! In a similar vein he supports his assertion that high scorers on his RWA scale [conservatives] are characterized by "deplorable behavior" by showing that they were more supportive of Republican President Richard Nixon and were more opposed to Communists and more dubious about homosexuality. Again: Big news

Anyway, Altemeyer's whole approach is so silly and naive that it does not deserve a full critique so I will simply move on to a few remarks on what he says about religion. His first interesting statement is this one: "For example, in a study of 533 University of Manitoba students tested in the fall of 1987 by Altemeyer, the RWA Scale correlated .48 with a measure of acceptance of Christian beliefs, the Christian Orthodoxy (CO) Scale ( Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982). It also correlated .41 with a measure of prejudice against most of the minorities mentioned a few paragraphs ago. But CO scores correlated precisely .00 with prejudice". In other words, Altemeyer found what I found 15 year before him (not that he mentions my work) -- that orthodox Christian beliefs have ZERO correlation with racial prejudice.

That pesky finding did not defeat him, though. He went back to the drawing board and came up with his own measure of religious belief -- a "Religious Fundamentalism" (RF) scale, which was essentially a set of statements that were very dogmatic about the truth of religion. And he went on to show (Phew!) that that scale DID show a small (.30) correlation with racial prejudice. But here's the kicker: Altemeyer's scale of religious belief deliberately EXCLUDED all specifically Christian statements of belief! Even an atheist with a passionate belief in flying saucers could get a high score on it! There is a later study here which also used Altemeyer's scales and that study confirms that high scorers on Altemeyer's RF scale (but not Christians) tended to be simple-minded. So once again poor old Alty tried to fudge his data and failed. All he has really shown is that racial prejudice (but not Christianity) tends to be simple-minded.

It may finally be worth noting that my earlier study used a measure of religious dogmatism too (which I called the "religiocentrism" scale) but my scale was specifically Christian in content. And guess what? It too showed NO correlation with ethnic prejudice. So it was only by taking the Christianity out of religion that nutty old Altemeyer could show that religious people were bigots. What a laugh! Only too typical of Leftist psychology, however.

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ELSEWHERE

Steve "Finefrock" and his friends have been having fun promenading among the Lefties of Santa Monica wearing pro-Arnie t-shirts. You can guess how much intelligent discussion that elicited from the Lefties! Maybe someone should however tell Steve that "boot" in German is "Der Stiefel", not "Das Boot". But his proximity to Hollywood probably means that he was just joking about a famous submarine movie.

PETA kills animals wholesale: "Hypocrisy is the mother of all credibility problems, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has it in spades. While loudly complaining about the "unethical" treatment of animals by restaurant owners, grocers, farmers, scientists, anglers, and countless other Americans, the group has its own dirty little secret. From July 1998 through the end of 2004, PETA killed over 12,400 dogs, cats, and other "companion animals" -- at its Norfolk, Virginia headquarters. That's more than five defenseless animals every day. Not counting the dogs and cats PETA spayed and neutered, the group put to death over 85 percent of the animals it took in during 2003 alone. And its angel-of-death pattern shows no sign of changing.... PETA raked in nearly $29 million last year in income, much of it raised from pet owners who think their donations actually help animals. Instead, the group spends huge sums on programs equating people who eat chicken with Nazis, scaring young children away from drinking milk, recruiting children into the radical animal-rights lifestyle, and intimidating businessmen"

The lies of Edgar Snow: "The new biography Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday shows that every major claim made by Snow was false. Rather than opposing the Japanese invasion, Mao had welcomed it. He hoped the Japanese would engage and destroy his rival, Chiang Kai-shek, and would also draw Soviet troops into China. Mao avoided armed conflict not only with the Japanese but also with the Nationalists. Rather than being a champion of independence for his country, Mao since the 1920s had been an agent of the Soviet Union, taking its arms and money, doing its bidding, and accepting its control of the Chinese Communist Party. He knew his only hope of gaining power in China was with Soviet support, a belief ultimately confirmed in his takeover of the country in 1949. Mao was no agrarian reformer. He redistributed no land and liberated no peasants. His initial "red base" at Ruijin in Jiangxi province, southern China, had been achieved not by a revolutionary uprising of the masses but through military conquest by the Red Army, armed and funded by Moscow. His rule was identical to that of an occupying army, surviving by plundering the local population and killing anyone who resisted".

A pretty reassuring article here explaining why "suitcase" nuclear weapons are a myth.

I have just put up here a review of recent research on the genetics of IQ, civilization and race by Chris Brand.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 11/01/2005 07:37:00 PM