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30 November, 2004

SOME ECONOMIC ISSUES

Massachusetts: State eyes tougher welfare rules: "About 10,000 additional Massachusetts welfare recipients, including many people with disabilities, would have to work, and thousands who already have jobs would have to labor for longer hours under new rules recommended yesterday by a special state panel. The proposed changes, which would have to be implemented by October of next year to put Massachusetts in compliance with federal welfare rules, would force as many as 5,600 disabled people to meet work requirements and compel some recipients to work for as many as 34 hours a week, up from the current maximum of 30 hours. Overall, the recommendations would increase the number of Massachusetts welfare recipients who have to work from roughly 12,700 to about 22,000. A total of 49,000 families are currently on the state's welfare rolls."

Why Personal Retirement Accounts? "There is little risk in personal retirement accounts. A recent study done by the CATO Institute has shown that there has been no 20 year period where that has been a loss in the market. In fact, the 3.36% rate of return on investments in the period between 1929-1948 is still much greater than the rate of return retirees receive currently on Social Security. And with future retirees facing a negative rate of return, the current Social Security system is much riskier than market investments. Besides, money will not simply disappear from the Social Security Trust Fund during the transition to private accounts."

Globalization takes off: "We're in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history. Last week, the World Bank released a report showing that global growth "accelerated sharply" this year to a rate of about 4 percent. Best of all, the poorer nations are leading the way. Some rich countries, like the U.S. and Japan, are doing well, but the developing world is leading this economic surge. Developing countries are seeing their economies expand by 6.1 percent this year - an unprecedented rate - and, even if you take China, India and Russia out of the equation, developing world growth is still around 5 percent... This is having a wonderful effect on world poverty, because when regions grow, that growth is shared up and down the income ladder. In its report, the World Bank notes that economic growth is producing a "spectacular" decline in poverty in East and South Asia..... What explains all this good news? The short answer is this thing we call globalization. Over the past decades, many nations have undertaken structural reforms to lower trade barriers, shore up property rights and free economic activity. International trade is surging.

Really free enterprise: "Slugging is a term used to describe a unique form of commuting found in the Washington, DC area sometimes referred to as "Instant Carpooling" or "Casual Carpooling". It's unique because people commuting into the city stop to pickup other passengers even though they are total strangers! However, slugging is a very organized system with its own set of rules, proper etiquette, and specific pickup and drop-off locations. It has thousands of vehicles at its disposal, moves thousands of commuters daily, and the best part, it's FREE! Not only is it free, but it gets people to and from work faster than the typical bus, metro, or train. I think you'll find that it is the most efficient, cost-effective form of commuting in the nation"

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Why Bush is misrepresented as a religious fanatic: "Fleischer says that the critics "believe their policies are so correct that no reasonable person could see things differently - unless people like President Bush are blinded by an extreme faith that prevents them from seeing the facts." To him, this is the same narrow-mindedness that critics claim to find in conservative Christians".

Britain to deny young women private sector jobs (As has already happened in Sweden): "Mothers will win the right to a year's paid leave after having a baby as part of a massive overhaul of childcare" [What employer in his right mind would hire a young woman under those circumstances?].

Amusing: The one thing that Leftists will normally allow as genetically-inherited is homosexuality. Yet it is also one characteristic for which the evidence of genetic inheritance is quite equivocal. On my reading of the matter, homosexuality can be caused by several things -- one of which could be in utero damage. Ruling out environmental causes (which Leftists do) is certainly sheer dogmatism.

Primitive party animals: "Since the 1976 presidential election, the Democrats have not received more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Most organisms, except for very primitive ones, usually modify their behavior after repeated failure in order to survive. Much has been written about why the Democrats continue to fail in the polls. But as an economist, I have been particularly struck by how they have failed to learn sound economics, despite all the empirical economic and political evidence of what works and what doesn't. Let's start with taxes. There is overwhelming evidence our present maximum tax rates on both labor and capital are so high they reduce economic growth, job creation and the general level of wellbeing for Americans. Despite this, Democrat candidates from Walter Mondale to John Kerry keep proposing higher marginal tax rates on labor and capital. ... Higher tax rates are not only an economic loser but are also a political loser."

Is it the government's business if you lose money gambling? "As legalized gambling spreads across the states, a branch of the federal government that deals with drug and alcohol addicts is studying ways to help compulsive gamers -- and looking to Louisiana, especially, for inspiration....Louisiana Association on Compulsive Gambling Executive Director Reece Middleton, who took part in a meeting this summer with representatives from other state programs, says the federal government may be close to taking action. "You've got a proliferation of legalized gambling across the country, and you've got an increase, I believe, of people getting in trouble," he said. "I just think it's gotten to the point where all of a sudden it's real hard for the federal government to ignore the question anymore." .... "It's absolutely urgent that a national initiative for gambling treatment be forthcoming, and that it be forthcoming from a federal government," Middleton said".

Nazis were normal Leftists -- not insane: "Now the book the Florida State University professor fine-tuned - "The Nuremberg Interviews" - is being heralded for giving the world new insights into the chilling thoughts of Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of more than 6 million Jews during World War II.... "There is this kind of inner logic behind the outer madness," Gellately said of the book's 33 interviews. "That's the horror of the thing." That's because, Gellately said, for the most part, these Nazi rulers were as normal as next-door neighbors. "I think we all have an idea about what makes the Nazis tick. Some of us think they were demonic or crazy ... Really, two people in the book are like that, but they are not the interesting ones," Gellately said. "Most of the other ones are like you and me. They are well-educated, rational, sensible." They pour out their thoughts to Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, who kept detailed notes of his interviews with the war criminals and witnesses awaiting trial in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946..... "They had a sense of duty, perverted, but they were rational, kind of cold, calculating killers," he said, "not this emotional, go-out-and-shoot-their-friend-in-the-woods kind of thing. You can't prove these were guys that actually hated the Jews or actually ever hit anyone".

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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29 November, 2004

LEFTISTS: PRO-DARWIN OR ANTI-DARWIN?

Whichever suits at the time, of course

The recent success of Christians in getting school textbooks to point out that evolution is merely a scientific theory -- not something totally grounded in replicable fact -- has enraged Leftists no end. As far as I can gather, the tiny success that has provoked all the rage is an arrangement whereby some school textbooks in Georgia have not been changed but have just had a sticker inserted in them pointing out the status of the evolution theory. So now there is a very popular site on the web from which Leftists can download "alternative" stickers designed to ridicule the Christian ones. So in the question of how mankind got here in the first place, Leftists are proud "Darwinists" and ridicule anyone who questions evolutionary explanations.

You know what's coming next, don't you? That good old Leftist inconsistency and opportunism. Leftists are fervent ANTI-Darwinists when it comes to explanations of human nature. People (such as sociobiologists) who use concepts of evolutionary biology to explain how mankind is innately tribal, territorial, aggressive, selfish etc. are treated as anathema by Leftists. The most prominent of the sociobiologists is of course Harvard Prof. E.O. Wilson. In good Harvard style he is actually quite Left-leaning and very much a "Greenie" so he seems to have earned some personal forgiveness from the Left in recent years. As he himself summarizes: "My writings on sociobiology in the '70s had the implication that ordinary instinctive human behavior does indeed have a biological basis, which in turn originated through a long period by natural selection. At that time, the academic left included many social scientists who based their social programs and reasoning on the assumption that humans are a blank slate, so I was a prime target of the left. And now, promoting conservation as strongly as I do, I'm sometimes a target of the right".

I could go on to give umpteen quotes showing what a core assertion the blank slate status of human nature is for Leftists and how genetics and biological thinking upset that claim at every turn but I think my readers will already have seen plenty of that. Wilson himself gives a pretty good history of the Leftist attacks on his work. Apparently, to Leftists, evolution affected every organ of the human body except the brain! Pathetic.

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A libertarian message to the defeated Left "When you seek to gain by the use of force, don't be shocked when others turn it around on you. When you look to government and seek the enforcement of your preferences on others, you invite others to respond forcefully in return. When you urge government to implement your "programs", you're granting the use of force against those who don't agree with you. That attitude is now coming back to haunt you.... You self-righteously demanded that your social programs be implemented through government, by force, funded by money stolen from all of us, whether we agreed with those programs of not. In so doing, you granted to government the power, and the ever-increasing funding, to do with us what it would. Now you are faced with the disgusting spectacle of seeing that power turned back against you because your "opponents" may now be in control. You sought to exercise forceful "mob rule" when you were in the majority, but now a different mob is in charge. You eagerly pushed power into the hands of government, blanking out the truth that you were effectively pushing all of us into forceful bondage. By believing that force is moral if the cause is good, you've laid the basis for the use of force for causes that others believe are good. Just as you forced others to support what you thought was good, they will now force you to support what they think is good."

Those racist conservatives again: "The idea that racial civil rights programs were the sole province of liberal Democrats is an urban legend promoted by Democrats to keep African - Americans voting for them. A cursory examination of history will reveal that civil rights legislation was implemented, proposed and/or endorsed by Republicans. It was during the Eisenhower presidency that the 1957 Civil Rights Act was passed. Eisenhower's Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, crafted the legislation in March 1956. Brownell wanted a new division within the federal Justice Department to monitor civil rights abuses. It was because of Brownell that the Kennedy administration was able to intervene on behalf of civil rights activists. Ironically, some Democrats criticized Eisenhower for pandering to the black vote. It was Eisenhower who desegregated public facilities in DC during his first term -Truman did not do it. It was Eisenhower who enforced school the Supreme Court school desegregation order in 1957. Fifty years earlier it was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who invited the African-American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House. Contrast this to the Democrat segregationist President Woodrow Wilson. Republican Senator Jacob Javitz once proposed an amendment to a mental health bill (S.1576) to deny funds to states with segregated mental health facilities. The Democrats denied the amendment. It was Richard Nixon who implemented affirmative action".

Tibor Machan: "Whenever I speak up for liberty, there's bound to be someone who accuses me of favoring the individual as against the community, favoring rights as against responsibility and obligations. But it isn't so at all. Champions of individual liberty often believe even more firmly than critics in doing the right thing, including acting generously, compassionately, and helpfully -- in the spirit of community. What they insist on, however, is that all such responsibilities and obligations be carried out from personal conviction, not from fear of going to jail or being fined."

Judicial arrogance in Australia too: Australia's High Court is the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS). It is however much less prone than SCOTUS to making the law up as it goes along. It does however have some Left-leaning Justices, most particularly the openly homosexual Michael Kirby. Kirby is legally qualified but began his rise to prominence via the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, a pseudo-court set up to mediate union disputes. He has recently spoken with rather surprising frankness of a need for the High Court to become a sort of political opposition to Australia's now well-entrenched conservative government. An article here sums up pretty well my own response to such outrageous presumption.

Good to hear that President Bush is listening to Sharansky: "Sharansky's ideas are clear: no concessions, funds or legitimacy for the Palestinians unless they adopt democracy, but a modern-day Marshall Plan for the Palestinians if they embrace democratic ways. The same hard line that worked for Ronald Reagan against the Soviet Union, Sharansky argues in his book, would work for Israel against the Palestinians." I couldn't agree more.

Andrew Sullivan, in his usual supercilious way, has voiced his support for the brainless Leftist "Buy nothing" day. Pejman puts him right, however -- pointing out that the only people likely to be hurt by such tactics are the poor, particularly people in poor countries who make so many of the things that we buy.

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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28 November, 2004

HITLER'S SOCIALIST PREDECESSORS IN AMERICA USED PUBLIC SCHOOLS

No one can measure the monstrous impact of government schools imposing racism and teaching racism as official policy for so long. Government school racism did much more damage than private enterprise could ever have afforded to do.....An eye-popping historic photo of a segregated class chanting the pledge of allegiance is here..... When government began socializing schools in the late 1800's, it expanded government-mandated racism.

The pledge of allegiance was written in 1892 by a bigot who was a self-proclaimed National Socialist. [Again see here].

Francis Bellamy and his cousin and cohort, the author Edward Bellamy, wanted government to take over all schools as a socialist monopoly, end all of the better alternatives, and use government schools to produce an "industrial army" (a Bellamy term) explicitly modeled upon the military in order to nationalize the economy and create a society of totalitarian socialism as described in the book "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy. It explains the modern Military-Socialist complex. The Bellamy boys actively promoted what they called "military socialism." Part of the plan was the pledge.

The Bellamys and the pledge influenced the hate-spewing paramilitary societies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (62 million dead), the People's Republic of China (35 million dead), and the horrid National Socialist German Workers' Party (21 million dead). (Death tolls from Professor R. J. Rummel's book "Death by Government" which is also available).

Most so-called conservatives are ignorant of the pledge's deplorable past, and to the extent they do know, they cover it up. Republican socialists have been duped into robotically chanting the pledge and there are probably socialists in-the-know who laugh silently at the spectacles.

The government forced children to attend segregated schools where they recited the Pledge using it's original straight-arm salute. The practice began three decades before it was adopted by the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and the government school racism continued through WWII and beyond, and the government schools still exist to this day.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

I have recently written two new articles. I submitted both to Tech Central Station but they were too controversial for TCS, I am afraid. One is on called "Understanding Women" (see here or here) and the other is "Down with Education" (see here or here). If anybody wants to recommend them for publication to someone else, please do so. They are pretty heretical.

"Crooked Timber" is run by a group of Leftist bloggers who fancy themselves as intellectuals. At least one of their members, however, is very shaky on basic philosophical terms. He cannot decide on whether he is discussing "ab hominem" arguments or "ad hominem" arguments. It's not a typo. D and b are not close together on the keyboard. He just doesn't know his Latin. For his information, "ad hominem" means "to the man" while "ab hominem" means "from the man". The latter makes no sense in the given context, however.

Promethean Antagonist proudly informs me that he is a "Red-stater" but he is still a classical music fiend, as I am. He wonders whether the dreadful garbage that constitutes most classical music of the last century or so is the product of the rise of Leftism over that time. I certainly see a destructive attitude behind most of the "music" concerned and destruction is what the Left is all about too. Many of their policies (e.g. punitively high taxes) make sense only if you assume that their chief priority is to impoverish the rich rather than enrich the poor. And innovation at all costs (even if it the results are unpleasant) is another theme common to both the music and the politics.

Reliapundit is trying to analyse why the Left have always accepted a lot of Christian references from other Presidents but go ballistic over GWB's Christianity. He thinks that Islamic fundamentalism terrifies them so they take it out (with typical Leftist logic) on Christian fundamentalists. I myself think that the Left tolerated Christianity in the past because they thought it was in decline. But now that it seems to be gaining influence they are terrified that it may be their own Leftist religion that is going down the plughole! They are fighting like cornered rats. What fun!

Amusing: "Spiked" notes that the "tolerant", multi-culti, postmodernist moral relativists of the left have been hoist on their own petard by the creationists. If all points of view are equally valid, why not creationism? Why not indeed. So apparently creationism is already making something of a comeback in the schools.

The famous "gay-hate" murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming that filled Leftists everywhere with such delicious indignation looks like it was not an anti-homosexual crime at all. It was a drug crime and Shepard was picked up only because he looked like he had money. It was still of course a shocking crime but "homophobia" had little or nothing to do with it.

Frank Devine sets out well the strategic reasons why the USA is in Iraq. Having an American Army slap bang in the middle of the Islamic world does tend to make Islamic governments a lot more cautious. David Horowitz spells out the reasons even more.

Interesting thought: "The conservative insight has always been that the destruction of pain is impossible and an attempt to do so will destroy us. The liberal dogma that culminated in this election is that pain is the fundamental human injustice that must be destroyed. America does not believe this false maxim of the left".

I enjoyed Jonathan Chait's acerbic comments on whom the Democrats should nominate as their Presidential candidate for 2008. Excerpt: "Probably the only worse option than Dean or Clinton, short of nominating Paris Hilton, would be to renominate John Kerry, who, reports have suggested, inexplicably harbors ambitions of running again in 2008. In a previous column I compared Kerry's contribution to his own campaign to an anchor's contribution to a boat race. In retrospect, I seem to have given him far too much credit."

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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27 November, 2004

SOME FUN WITH A LEFTIST NINNY

I am indebted to the mini-Chomsky himself, the great Brian Leiter, for a recommendation of a long article by Orcinus about the probability of America "going Fascist". Seeing Hitler was a socialist and Mussolini was a Marxist, you might think Orcinus is worried about arrogant trends in the Democratic party but, no, it is the GOP that he thinks is likely to "go Fascist". The Leftist origins of Fascism don't get a mention, in fact, so one knows immediately that the article will be low on scholarship. And its chief scholarly source for the nature of Fascism is in fact R.O. Paxton, the "historian" (much lauded in the N.Y. Times, of course) who said Hitler was an "antisocialist" -- when the very name of Hitler's political party was (translated) "The National Socialist German Worker's Party"! I think I have already at this early stage said enough about the article concerned to dismiss it for the claptrap it is but I cannot resist having a bit more fun with it.

The body of the article is in fact made up of what is actually a rather good proof of the idiocy of its conclusions. Orcinus quotes a long line of sources from the 1930s which offer all sorts of evidence for the claim that America was on the brink of going Fascist then. But it didn't happen! America did get the Mussolini-admiring FDR but thanks to the U.S. constitution and the U.S. Congress there were lots of limits placed on what he was allowed to do. So if America did not go Fascist during the Fascist era despite the many pressures towards it that Orcinus ably documents, how likely is it likely to go Fascist now, when Fascism is thoroughly discredited? The question answers itself, I think.

But let's have a look at a bit more weirdness. Take this Orwellian statement: "This tendency has finally metastacized into a genuinely dangerous situation, one in which the GOP has become host to a Stalinist movement that exhibits so many of the traits of fascism that the resemblance is now unmistakable." Quite aside from the fact that this great intellectual cannot even spell "metastasized", he is asking us to believe that the people who opposed Communism for decades and finally destroyed it utterly are themselves communists! I guess it's not impossible but seeing that the GOP and their Christian allies have always advocated the exact opposite of communism, the writer is clearly in cloud-cuckoo land. If you can say that free-enterprise=Stalinism, you might as well say black=white. I guess that a Leftist "postmodernist" would have no problem in doing exactly that, however.

More fun: Orcinus also looks for the day when "the attack style of politics -- in which the smearing an opponent substitutes for the lack of any substance or accomplishment -- has been relegated to the ashheap of history". Well. He got his wish. I think John Kerry has now been so relegated. Whoops! In true Leftist "projective" style, Orcinus was actually referring to the GOP rather than John Kerry, it seems!

Orcinus also deplores the way that "families, longtime friends, and communities are being torn apart by the divisive politics of resentment and accusation". He must be talking about all those guys documented at length on Leftists as Elitists! You could not conceivably get more resentment and accusation than is documented there.

Orcinus is a real humanitarian by Leftist standards, however. He ends up conceding: "Conservative-movement adherents are still human beings, and seeing them in terms of participating in a kind of fascism should not render them into mere discardable objects". He must have written that for the benefit of those of his colleagues who still admire Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

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Wicked Thoughts has just put an atom bomb under another one of Brian Leiter's arguments. The only possible way Leiter will be able to cope with it will be by ignoring it.

SUVs: "Motorists who buy big four-wheel-drives to be safer on the roads could be doing the wrong thing, according to the latest crash research. A study of more than one million crashes involving vehicles manufactured between 1982 and 2000 has revealed higher injury rates for people in four-wheel-drives. The worst performer was the Toyota Landcruiser"

An interesting editorial in "The Australian" suggesting that the leadership in the three Anglosphere countries of the USA, the UK and Australia are all preaching a future-oriented message of hope rather than delving back into the animosities of the past.

A good commentary here on the absurd "unfair dismissal" laws introduced by Australia's last Leftist government and defended fiercely by them ever since. Now that Australian conservatives have control of our Senate, the laws concerned should soon be repealed.

More evidence that the Australian Labor Party is much further to the Right than the U.S. Democrats. A recent declaration by a Labor party spokesman: "Labor's future economic policies will be tailored to enrich the affluent as much as the poor"

Surprising realism from San Francisco: "A Latino attorney general? A black woman as secretary of state? Who would have imagined it 50 years ago--or even, more recently, say, during the Clinton administration? Give President Bush credit for breaking barriers that his Democratic predecessor never got around to. Just don't tell that to white liberals thrilled with the idea of minorities doing well--as long as liberals can claim credit. If they can't, or if the minorities happen to be conservative, things can get messy. The American people are about to get a sense of just how messy, now that Bush has nominated Alberto Gonzales to head the Justice Department and Condoleezza Rice to run the State Department".

There is an article here which disputes the claim that prohibiting abortion leads to large numbers of deaths at the hands of "back-yard" abortionists.

The Leftist nonsense about "curing" criminals fails again: "Nonviolent drug offenders diverted to rehabilitation programs under Proposition 36 had higher rates of rearrest than those who remained in the criminal-justice system, a UCLA study released today says. Researchers found that offenders who enrolled in treatment programs created by the 2000 ballot measure were 48 percent more likely to be arrested for a drug offense within a year than those who entered treatment through drug courts or as a term of their probation".

Chris Brand has been having a good chortle over derogatory comments about British education made by Prince Charles. I have transferred Chris's post on the subject here.

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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26 November, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

US economy: storm clouds ahead What needs to be understood is that the so-called business cycle is a monetary phenomenon that presidents can do nothing about until the economics profession comes to understand that fact
Professor John Quiggin gets it wrong on taxes and jobs The idea that any government cure unemployment by simply putting people on the public payroll should be too absurd to consider
Arafat: A Guerrilla and Statesman? I Want To Gag! Arafat, the godfather of modern terrorism, was barely cold and yet world dignitaries and the media rushed to offer their condolences
The Clinton Legacy: the 2004 Presidential Election Did Americans need a kinder gentler President Bush,to lead our country in the war against terrorism? No. Only Kerry, the Democrats, and the terrorists thought we did

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Interesting that there now seem to be several scientists who are contending (as I immediately did) that the "hobbit" bones discovered recently in Indonesia are not of a new species at all but are rather the bones of a race of homo sapiens. See here and here. The initial claims that the bones were of a new species focused on what were claimed to be different facial features but anyone who has seen the pictures of Truganini, the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine, will see very similar features to that of the "hobbit" -- though Truganini did have a much higher forehead -- higher even than most modern-day Westerners. More recent claims, however, focus on the proportionately longer arms of the "hobbit", identifying that as a crucial difference from modern man. As I myself and various of my relatives have unusually long arms, however, I think this is clutching at straws too. I think there can be little doubt that all the characteristics of the "hobbit" can be found in modern man too. Even the very short stature is not all that unusual. I was at a Vietnamese restaurant recently when a Vietnamese family who were also dining there got up and left. I noted that the elderly matriarch of the clan cannot have been much above 4' tall. And Vietnam is quite close geographically to Indonesia. But a country that is even closer to Indonesia is Australia and there are still pygmies in Australia too. See here and here for my previous posts on that matter.

Those pesky genes again: "Genetic factors influence female infidelity and the number of sexual partners women have, British scientists said on Wednesday. They studied the responses of 1,600 pairs of identical and non-identical twins in a confidential survey to look at the impact of genes on behavior. "We found that around 40 percent of the influence on the number of sexual partners and infidelity were due to genetic factors," Professor Tim Spector, director of the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas' Hospital in London, told a news conference".

What happens when the law is an ass: "A mob angry about recent child abductions cornered plainclothes federal agents taking photos of students at a school and burned the officers alive, mistaking the agents for kidnappers in the latest example of vigilante justice in a country beset by high crime."

The Clinton library: "Maybe I haven't visited enough presidential libraries. And, yes, I do know they all inevitably have something worshipful about them; it's in their nature. But I can't recall anything - anything! - so blatantly partisan, so full of just plain bullfeathers, so completely . . . Orwellian in its approach to the truth as one display at the newly opened Clinton Library here in Little Rock...."

A message to Europe about American values: "If these beliefs seem strange to you, they shouldn't. For these are precisely the beliefs that powered Western Europe - you -- from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, on to the Enlightenment, and forward into the modern world. They are the beliefs that made Europe itself the glory of Western civilization and - not coincidentally - ignited the greatest outpouring of art, literature, music and scientific discovery the world has ever known including Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Issac Newton and Descartes. It is your abandonment of these beliefs that has created the gap between Europe and the United States. You have ceased to be a Judeo-Christian culture, and have become instead a secular culture. And a secular culture quickly goes from being "un-religious" to anti-religious. Indeed, your hostility to the basic concepts of Judaism and Christianity has literally been written into your new European Union constitution, despite the Pope's heroic efforts to the contrary.

Tim Worstall is having a good laugh over the fact that the most successful program yet for dealing with sexual offenders was devised and carried out by a Christian group. One in the eye for the know-all "professionals" who are always talking about curing criminals rather than punishing them but who have yet to find a way of doing so.

Leftist amorality: "Those who cannot stand President Bush don't realize that any philosophy or political vision that lacks the idea of good and evil will not fly with most Americans. Liberals excuse most evil with stories about bad luck, disease and other impersonal forces that make people do bad things. Good deeds, in turn, come about through good luck. There are a few matters about which even liberals moralize - sexism, racism or economic inequality. But assault, battery, robbery, burglary, theft, laziness, recklessness and the like, these are due to sad circumstances. That's why they believe the poor are all deserving, because they deny that poverty is ever the result of irresponsibility. The basic thesis behind the modern liberal mentality is the denial of free will.... Unless they toss their derisive attitude toward the rest of us who think it is perfectly sensible to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, the sophisticated ones will be seen for what they are: People essentially lacking a serious understanding of our distinctive human nature."

Why liberals can't compete in the values arena: "Liberals and traditionalists are talking about entirely different things when they address values. Like Big Brother in George Orwell's chilling novel 1984, liberals employ a NewSpeak lexicon in which the word values is unrelated to its historical meaning. Two things explain this gulf. First, liberalism is the American sect of the international religion of socialism. Second, socialism is a secular and materialistic religion. When liberals speak of values they are talking about material goods and services, which are presumed to flow exclusively from collectivized government. Those values fall under the heading of so-called social justice, or redistribution of income and property as equally as possible."

Who's afraid of inequality? "Because inequality springs from diversity, individuality, talent and creativity, it should be celebrated and the institutions that allow it protected. History and theory show that the use of naked government aggression is not a moral or efficacious way of dealing with poverty. Rather, the market economy, the best system for poverty alleviation, is to be strengthened and supported through property rights and the rule of law."

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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25 November, 2004

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

To all my American readers. And for those blessed with the faith may it be a holy day too.

Australia is nearly a whole time zone ahead of the USA so you might well be reading this before your Thursday. Thanksgiving Day is of course a specifically American holiday. Australia does not celebrate it nor do we have anything similar. Athough we have many holidays, our only feast day is Christmas day. I have put up here some reasons why conservatives in particular have reason to be thankful today. And for the lesson that Thanksgiving itself has to conservatives, see here. But let me finish with some wonderful words from the great inspirer:

"While never willing to bow to a tyrant, our forefathers were always willing to get to their knees before God. When catastrophe threatened, they turned to God for deliverance. When the harvest was bountiful, the first thought, was thanksgiving to God. Prayer is today as powerful a force in our nation as it has ever been. We as a nation should never forget this source of strength. ... Through the storms of Revolution, Civil War, and the great World Wars, as well as during times of disillusionment and disarray, the nation has turned to God in prayer for deliverance. We thank Him for answering our call, for, surely, He has. As a nation, we have been richly blessed with His love and generosity." --Ronald Reagan

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ELSEWHERE

GWB's firmness pays off: "France told an international conference on Iraq Tuesday it was time to put aside differences over the U.S.-led invasion and help the country put an end to violence".

NewMark's Door has a useful roundup of the various ways in which the Berkeley claims of voter fraud in Florida have been demolished.

Sad news: The geneticists are avoiding research that might produce a cure for Alzheimers disease because the incidence of Alzheimers correlates with both race and IQ. So finding the genetic details behind Alzheimers might also lead to finding the genetic basis for high IQ and race -- and that would be political dynamite. It would cause the Left to go into paroxysms of denial, with the scientists concerned being immediately labelled as "Nazis" etc. So once again the Left are the chief enemies of human welfare.

Amazing! Rupert Murdoch writing an editorial in the WSJ! As if his own media outlets are not enough! But the WSJ is frantically pro-immigration and so is Rupert so it is not so surprising after all.

Krauthammer is being a bit simplistic in saying that GWB can do what he likes in his second term because he has no heir waiting in 2008. He does. His brother Jeb. Jeb has said that he is not interested but that is probably just an opening gambit. And with his Hispanic connections Jeb would hoover up the big Hispanic vote: Plenty to put him in the White House. Only Arnie would have greater public appeal and getting the constitutional barrier cleared for him before 2008 is a big ask.

The United Church of Christ, a "peace with justice" church (translation: "appeasement and socialism" church) is trying its hardest to get time for Iran to develop nuclear weapons! There is a copy of an email from them here which says that "possession of a nuclear weapon is the best deterrent to a pre-emptive strike by the United States". Americans are greatly endangered by such America-haters of the Left.

U.S. Presbyterians admire Hezbollah but don't like to admit it: "Two officials of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have left their jobs one month after taking part in a meeting with Hezbollah, a Lebanese group listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. In an announcement yesterday, the Louisville-based denomination gave no reason for the departures of Kathy Lueckert and Peter Sulyok, nor did it say whether they had resigned or been fired.... John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, announced their departures "with sadness" in a memo to staff. He declined to comment further.... What generated particular controversy were the comments of one member of the committee who made the trip, Ronald Stone, a retired professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In a news report widely broadcast on Arab television, Stone told Hezbollah leaders that "according to my recent experience, relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders."" [The church was obviously not outraged enough to sack the antisemites].

Sowell: "At least as far back as the 1930s, the intelligentsia and others have warned against military spending as setting off an "arms race" in which each side escalates its military buildup in response to the other, making the whole thing an expensive exercise in futility. The same notion was repeated throughout the long years of the Cold War. Today's version is that, no matter how many Middle East terrorists we kill, new ones will take their place and we will have nothing to show for all our efforts and sacrifices. People who talk this way are completely undaunted by the fact that Ronald Reagan proved them wrong during the Cold War."

Senate: It's time to "go nuclear" : "With Democrats not flinching, it's time for the Republican leadership to exercise the mandate on judges handed to them by the American people. In other words, it's time to 'go nuclear.' The so-called Nuclear Option is nothing more than a correction of the current interpretation of Senate rules to reflect the unconstitutionality of filibustering judicial nominations. It would rely on a ruling from the Chair -- most likely Vice President Dick Cheney -- that would declare such a filibuster unconstitutional. The majority would then uphold that ruling by simple majority vote."

There are reports that Europeans are boycotting American products as a result of the recent U.S. election. David's Medienkritik has some sarcastic comments.

Keith Burgess-Jackson has a great attack on the racist, sexist and homophoblic bigotry of the Left.

Fabian's Hammer has changed his focus a bit recently. Instead of concentrating just on China, he is now focusing on Maoists worldwide. There are still an amazing number of such dismal critters around, unfortunately.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots of interesting links

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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24 November, 2004

LAKOFF AGAIN

A message has come down from an ivory tower in the People's Republic of Berkeley in the form of an article in The Nation by linguistics professor George Lakoff. He is trying to do what he calls "framing" -- what others might call "agenda-setting". He has seized on the survey results that show moral values to have been important to some people who voted for GWB in the last election. He wants to convince Democrats to campaign on moral values too -- but different moral values. He wants Democrats to proclaim that their moral values are better and truer and more American than those silly conservative moral values.

Nice try, George! But it won't wash. Why? Because one of the most consistently proclaimed assertions of Leftist intellectuals like George is that there is no such thing as right and wrong and that all values are arbitrary. So who is going to believe that all these preachers of moral relativism have suddenly become committed to high moral values? George is trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Sudden conversion to morality will be seen for the hypocrisy that it is.

And I have to laugh at George's first sentence: "We are the 55 million progressives who came together in this election, voted for Kerry and rejected the Bush agenda". Is that a Royal "we" George? The presumption of a Berkeley professor pretending to speak for 55 million diverse Americans is hilarious -- and his claim that the 55 million were all progressives certainly strains beyond breaking point the meaning of that much-abused word. The vast majority of the Kerry voters were minorities who think the Dems will give them more handouts. And a lot of those minorities have very punitive views on many things -- such as wanting homosexuals to be castrated. Is that "progressive"? If you say so, George.

In reality, of course, the only thing the Left of politics believe in is power -- as I pointed out yesterday. They may claim to have such values as "tolerance" but as Christ said: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:20) and never has there been such an outpouring of intolerance and hate-speech from the Left as what we have seen recently. As this Australian writer says: "It's amazing the amount of vitriol that has been launched by people who paint themselves as "tolerant liberals" against evangelical Christians in recent months. There are pages of this stuff in the Sydney Morning Herald's "Webdiary". In almost all cases these critics have not spent two minutes actually investigating what Family First Party or evangelical Christians actually support. Is this not the very definition of ignorant prejudice?" And we all know how much "tolerance" Christians and conservatives get on American university campuses. Read here if you don't.

Dennis Prager is also good on the divergence between normal American values and what the Left do and advocate. One excerpt: "To most Americans, Michael Moore is a Marxist who has utter contempt for most of his fellow Americans, who goes abroad and tells huge audiences how stupid and venal his country is, and in his dishonest propaganda film, portrays the American military as callous buffoons. Yet, this radical was given the most honored seat at the Democratic Party convention in Boston, next to former President Jimmy Carter. To most Americans, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are race-baiting demagogues. Yet they are heroes to the Democratic Party. Most Americans do not see their country as the bigoted and racist nation regularly depicted by both black and white Democratic leaders. To most Americans, a man who wears women's clothing to work is a pathetic person in need of psychotherapy. To the Democratic Party, he is a man whose cross-dressing is merely another expression of multiculturalism. The California legislature, controlled by Democrats, passed a law prohibiting employers from firing a man who shows up to work wearing women's clothing."

I have more on Lakoff 's Mommy/Daddy theory of values here. (Hint: In Lakoff's predictable Leftist world, Daddies are hopeless unless they become like Mommies. Maybe Lakoff's father used to beat the tar out of young George and every Daddy in the world now gets the blame. Given Lakoff's talent for overgeneralization, I would not be at all surprised).

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ELSEWHERE

There is another article here (and a previous one here) which portrays GWB as very much his own man who bows to nobody in the pursuit of his agenda: Not all a puppet of the "neocons" or anybody else. The Left portray GWB as a puppet of Karl Rove or the neocons because they cannot admit how smart and capable he is beneath his relaxed Texan manner. And some conservatives portray him as a puppet because they don't want to face the fact that their guy is more realistic than they are about such things as immigration, Iraq and how to use government. Both groups are kidding themselves and would do a lot better to face reality instead of indulging in puerile conspiracy theories.

A blog I particularly enjoy is Blithering Bunny. He has up at the moment some quite amazing stuff about the EU. It is hard to decide which is more corrupt: The EU or the UN. The EU certainly shows that the great European tradition of authoritarian government (e.g. Bismarck, Hitler, the Tsars and various Kaisers both Austrian and Prussian, Lenin, Stalin, Napoleon, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Papadopoulos, Horthy etc etc) is still alive and well. And why am I not surprised to read this: "Jose Manuel Durrao Barroso, New president of the European Commission, former Prime Minister of Portugal: As a young man, he was an activist in the extreme left-wing Maoist Party"? And they have the cheek to criticise the great Republic, the USA!

The Iraq insurgents are undoubtedly organized but by whom? "There is a growing conviction among some foreign observers and American intelligence experts - though apparently not yet in the Pentagon - that what is happening now in Iraq is not just the reaction to the American occupation by a small group of "dead-enders" (as suggested by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) or a spontaneous insurgency. Indeed, these observers believe that the suicide bombers, the roadside bombs and the attacks on Iraqi police and other so-called "collaborators" in Mosul and the Sunni towns in the Tigris valley are part of an organized guerrilla war... The events of the past few weeks do seem to point to a well-organized and -planned campaign against the coalition forces. As soon as American troops smash resistance in one place, such as Fallujah, it pops up elsewhere. Hundreds of well-armed and organized insurgents attacked the key city of Mosul earlier this month and took nine police stations; the stations have been recaptured, but the attacks caused mass desertions among the police force".

"With the absentee votes in California and Washington finally counted, it appears that overall turnout was up 12 percent. John Kerry's popular vote was also 12 percent above Al Gore's. But the popular vote for Bush was up a stunning 20 percent. Before the election, some liberal commentators were claiming that Bush would win no votes he hadn't won in 2000. Not quite: He won 10 million more".

Wayne Lusvardi has an article up which asks: Did we have to destroy Falluja to save it?

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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23 November, 2004

LEFTISTS DROP THE MASK

I must say that I have been totally surprised at the way the American Left has dropped the mask in the post-election period. These great advocates of equality and mockers of IQ are suddenly breaking out all over to proclaim that they are elitists and saying how much more intelligent they are than anyone else; these great defenders of the common man have suddenly started to abuse in the vilest terms all the common men who voted for George Bush; these pretenders to such high principles as "tolerance" and "compassion" have suddenly started admitting that only power matters to them; and these great opponents of racism are abusing America's most prominent black woman using the vilest racial slurs and images (e.g. here). All the things that I have long said about the Left are suddenly being confirmed by Leftists themselves.

Tyrrell proclaimed in the 80s that the American Left was undergoing a "crackup". I think it is clear now that the crackup is complete. If the Democrat party is ever to win national elections again it will have to do what the Australian Labor party did years ago -- firmly distance itself from such loonies and become little more than an alternative conservative party. Now that they have given up pretending to be what they are not, real Leftists have put themselves outside mainstream politics.

There are some good posts showing the utter lack of any consistent principle in Leftist arguments here and here and here.

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ELSEWHERE

There is is an apparently popular homosexual/Left-oriented blog called "Americablog". It is one of the most misnamed blogs there is. Here is a sample of its "wisdom": "It's high time we started fighting back against the far-right and their religious coup against our democracy. And I think the way to do it is to give them what they want, and watch the American people freak out. First off: 1. A constitutional amendment banning divorce; 2. A federal law making adultery a felony; 3. A federal law making blow jobs (i.e., sodomy) a felony, even for married couples in the privacy of their own homes. We can then move on from there later. I'm quite serious. The next time the fundies want an amendment "protecting" marriage, we ought to give it to them". The author is obviously totally absent from the real world and its politics -- whether in America or anywhere else. Good to see, though. The more such voices are heard on the Left, the less likely the Left are ever to win anything. The blurb about the author of the blog says: "John Aravosis is a Washington DC-based writer and political consultant, specializing in using the Internet for political advocacy". May he get lots of Democrat customers! He doesn't even seem to know the difference between blow-jobs and sodomy! The world of the Left sure is a weird place.

Well, I was wrong about how the Democrats would explain their defeat in the Presidential election. As soon as I knew the result, I predicted that the Dems would blame their defeat on Osama bin Laden's threatening last-minute videotape. In actual fact, most of the Dems seem to have blamed their defeat on stupid evangelical Christians or on "rigged" voting machines (despite all the evidence that "it aint so"). It seems, however, that I was spot-on as far as John Kerry himself was concerned. He thinks his defeat was all Osama's doing. So my prophetic powers aren't so bad after all. In science, of course, the ability to generate accurate predictions is the ultimate test of a theory. Incidentally, it still cracks me up that in his videotape, bin Laden relied so heavily on the claims of Michael Moore. Even when he is trying to attack it, he still depends on the products of American culture!

What are Democrats about? "Once more, the theme of themelessness. Cover the Democrats for any length of time and you become expert in campaigns that don't seem to be about anything. They have policies; Democrats are good at policies. But all too often the campaigns lack a message -- a sense of what the candidate's about and what he aims to do. Democrats don't have a monopoly on such campaigns; if anyone can remember the theme of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential bid, he's probably got it mixed up with some other campaign. But John Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis ... never really delivered a compelling message to American voters. And there were times during each of their presidential campaigns when the candidates knew it, when they sensed they weren't connecting, brought in new advisers and asked what it was they stood for."

I should stop looking at Daypop.com. It leads me to so much amusing Leftist tripe that I hardly know where to begin in commenting on it. Anyway, a big deal in Democrat circles at the moment seems to be the idea of "Re-Branding" the Democrat party. As usual, they are relying on slogans rather than policy. But some of their slogans are shots in the foot. How about this one: "National security first. Presidential yachts later, Much later". I think most people would expect that to be a GOP slogan, given the Democrat wobbling on Iraq and John Kerry's expensive toys. And how about this: "Our Congressional leadership isn't under any sort of criminal investgation. That would just be bad form" I would be most surprised if that did not remind people of Bill Clinton's impeachment or Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. And how about: "Our God gets along fine with your God, or Allah or Buddha or... whatever". To equate the Christian God with Allah in a heavily Christian country is REALLY going to win the Dems a lot of votes, isn't it? And how about the sheer cheek of this: "We won World War II". Can you imagine how many World War II veterans and their families would be antagonized by that slogan? It was the blood of Allied servicemen that won World War II, not the fatcats of the Democratic party. And so on .... These galoots plainly have not got a blind clue about what they are doing.

Matthias Doepfner, Chief Executive of German publisher Axel Springer AG, has written a blistering attack in the daily Welt against the cowardice of Europe in the face of the Islamic threat: "Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work for us. ... In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner instead of defending liberal society’s values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China. ... For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy — because everything is at stake. ... While the alleged capitalistic robber barons in American know their priorities, we timidly defend our social welfare systems. ... These days, Europe reminds me of an elderly aunt who hides her last pieces of jewelry with shaking hands when she notices a robber has broken into a neighbor’s house. Europe, thy name is cowardice."

Old news now but good news: "The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state's hate-crimes law yesterday, saying the measure is too broadly worded. It was the first application of the 2000 law, which called for up to five extra years in prison for crimes in which the victim is chosen because of 'bias or prejudice.' Forty-eight states have hate-crimes laws, but Georgia's was the only one that did not specify which groups qualified for protection." For more on hate and hate-crimes see here.

I have just tried Google's new academic search tool: Google Scholar. It's got a long way to go. Using the search term "Ray, J.J.", it picked up only 38 out of my nearly 300 scholarly publications and failed to direct the reader to any of the copies of them that are online! Standard Google will get you to copies of all of them!

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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22 November 2004

POPULATION DENSITY

My post yesterday about the correlation between high population density and Democrat voting elicited a bit of correspondence so I thought I should say more about it. The famous case of Kitty Genovese being stabbed to death while lots of her fellow New Yorkers looked on without raising a finger was of course mentioned. NYC people are of course famous for not wanting to get involved but they do have good reason for that. Crime there was at one stage so bad that getting involved would have guaranteed a short life. And the law there penalizes getting involved too. I understand that to this day you can be sued if you intervene to help someone and the outcome is not universally satisfactory. So crazy Leftist law is at least one reason for the NYC situation. If gun ownership had not been so controlled in NYC, for instance, Kitty Genovese's assailant could well have got his head blown off before he killed her. And NYC has such a lot of crazy Leftist law (including rent control!) because of its huge Jewish population, who to this day are still overwhelmingly lockstep Democrat voters. So NYC pathologies are a good example of some of the ills that Leftism leads to but there could be causes of the Leftism other than high population density. And it should be noted that the Netherlands have long had high population densities combined with a low crime rate -- though that has changed with the recent Muslim influx there.

On the other hand, psychologists have done a lot of work on the effects of crowding -- including some famous white-rat studies. And such studies have of course shown a great upsurge in pathlogical behaviour (including sexual deviance!) as a result of crowding. So while NYC is no proof of anything by itself, it must be admitted that NYC people and overcrowded white rats do have some things in common!

On the third hand, it could be argued that a largely parasitical underclass living on welfare and crime thrives only in big cities and "get out the vote" drives do end up with a lot of them voting Democrat. So it could be purely the tendency of big cities to attract an underclass that gives the Democrats an edge there.

On the fourth hand, the normal human tendency towards division of labour is at its peak in big cities. In NYC, people even delegate to others the walking of their dogs! So if delegation is such a habit in the big cities, it must seem fairly natural to delegate your caring and compassion too. And that is what Leftism offers. Leftism is caring shoved off onto others.

So in the end I do think that a crowded urban environment makes you less caring about those around you (and hence makes you more Leftist) but I don't think that that is the whole of the story. I think there are other causes of that big-city Leftism too. And it must finally be noted that what one person sees as overcrowding, many others (Japanese?) may not -- though there is surely not a total disconnect between objective circumstances and what is perceived.

Reliapundit has more on the subject.

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ELSEWHERE

Ratzinger is right: "A leading contender to become the next Pope has launched a fierce attack on the forces of secularism, arguing that they were fostering intolerance in Europe and forcing Christianity underground. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 77, one of the Vatican's most powerful figures, said that liberal consensus had now evolved into a "worrying and aggressive" ideology. As a result, "Catholic and Christian religion" had been pushed out of the public debate and was being "driven into the margins". Coming shortly after European Parliament MPs refused to approve the Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione as European justice commissioner because of his strong Catholic views on gays and women, his statements might be seen by some as something of a manifesto.... Describing the development of a "secular ideological aggression" across the continent as "cause for concern", the cardinal said: "In Sweden, a Protestant minister who preached about homosexuality on the basis of an excerpt from the scriptures was put in jail for a month. "Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality, which opens up space for freedom for all. It is beginning to change into an ideology which, through politics, is being imposed."

Antisemitic Norway: "Norway managed to forbid Jews from marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a step the French haven't yet taken. The local TV2 News reported that no Norwegian Jews participated in Oslo's commemoration of Kristallnacht."TV2 also reported that the authorities, saying they didn't want trouble, forbade any Jewish symbols, including Stars of David and Israeli flags," according to Israel's Arutz-7 radio station. "On the TV2 evening news, a group of Jews and their friends who wanted to take part in the commemoration were shown being firmly told by a policeman to 'please leave the area,'" according to a dispatch from an American journalist living in Norway, Bruce Bawer, on AndrewSullivan.com. "This in a city where Muslim demonstrations take place on a regular basis, and include signs and banners bearing hateful, barbaric slogans.""

When an England football team that included some blacks played in Spain recently, some Spanish fans chanted racist epithets at the England team. See here for the righteous wrath over it. One of my readers however doubts that the motivation was really racist. He writes: "First of all it was really useful that it happened right next to the commentators microphones. Next, these "racists" seemed to only target one black player and not all the black players. Odd behaviour for diehard racists".

Jim Bennett's book about the Anglosphere is out at long last. See here. We might think that the co-operation between the USA, the UK and Australia is just a matter of "blood is thicker than water" but Bennnett shows it is much more than that. There is also a related site here.

One in the eye for those who say GWB is a puppet of the neocons: "Because Ignatieff originally supported the invasion of Iraq, there are people who think he's become some sort of apologist for the administration. Not so. Ignatieff is no fan of the president or, for that matter, the entire Bush clan, whom he refers to as "the Corleones of American politics." It is simply that "it never pays, never, to underestimate this president, intellectually or politically," he says. "He is not the cipher of Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice. He is the boss. There is absolutely no question about it. Sorry." [Ignatieff is a Harvard history professor]

Lileks is good on the Leftist hatred of the Boy Scouts: "Move over, OBL - our new national threat comes from the BSA. They're a strange, religiously oriented group that's stated purposes ought to make your blood run as cold as chilled mercury. We've had remarkable success in recent years keeping them from undermining American power, thanks to the U.S. military. But now it's official, and what was once a shadowy war is out in the open. The Pentagon has informed all bases not to sponsor the Boy Scouts of America.... Boy Scouts haven't been suing anyone for the right to hold compulsory God and country rallies in schools across the land. The American Civil Liberties Union is forcing the issue. The people barging into the courts are the ones obsessed that Boy Scouts might be using public school rooms after hours to learn knot tying"

There is a particularly amateurish version of Carnival of the Vanities up at the moment -- overdue as well.

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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21 November 2004

SOME BAD NEWS FOR DO-GOODERS

Hunger campaigners help warlords: "When Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine was transmitted on BBC News on 23 October 1984, the idea immediately took hold that this was a natural disaster - `a biblical famine', in Buerk's words - which would be alleviated by massive food aid. There was a severe drought in the region, but the creation of famine was a military tactic of the Dergue government of Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu. For journalists like Buerk and activists like Geldof, the wars in Ethiopia were an inconvenience which were complicating relief efforts. Yet the wars were the principal cause of the tragedy... As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984-85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies.... Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory. One point is certain: the war which we helped fuel continued for another six years, claiming many thousands more lives.

Post-colonial Africa: "Today there is no public security. Slavery is found once more in Sudan, and sinister forms of domestic enslavement that involve the trafficking of children exist elsewhere too. Fiscal management is a farce- and Nigerian misappropriation of public funds is a farce played on a global stage. Transport is haphazard and unreliable. Education and public health struggle on in deplorable conditions. And nothing can be done without lies and bribes and payoffs at every step and every social and political level, all public revenues tending to leak away into private hands. Corruption is universal, malignant, and destructive"

Most poor people in our society would not be made better off by more money -- which is why lottery millionaires constantly end up broke.

How do you waste half a billion dollars worth of poverty-alleviation funds? Easy! You give it to a city government to spend. Excerpt: "City Hall squandered much of the half-billion dollars in federal aid it received over the past 30 years to revitalize its downtown and neighborhoods and to recharge its ailing economy, a Buffalo News investigation has found. Buffalo gets more federal community development block grant aid per resident than all but one city in the country because of its pervasive poverty. But three decades and $556 million later, there is scant evidence of the federal government's largess".

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ELSEWHERE

Patrick Cox has a fascinating article in TCS showing that the vote for John Kerry was highly correlated with population density. The "Red" states do of course have generally lower population densities. He also quotes research showing that people in more crowded environments (like NYC) are less kind, caring and responsible towards one-another. He resists drawing the obvious conclusion so let me spell it out: Crowding makes you less "caring" and less caring people voted for Kerry. Why? Dead simple: Leftists are people who want government to do the caring rather than do it themselves. So of course city-dwellers voted for someone who promised more government welfare. It lets them personally off the hook. All the Leftist talk of "caring" is camouflage. They are really people who DON'T care. One look at how they behave when they get unrestricted power (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) tells you that. And they have lately become very vocal about their detestation of ordinary people. See Leftists as Elitists for many examples of that.

Wow! The Australian Left is learning even if the U.S.Left is not: "Mark Latham has dumped key Labor policies and embraced small business, the self-employed and the "upwardly mobile" as he attempts to reinvent the Labor Party and bolster his leadership.... Jettisoning the ALP's traditional preference for public-sector delivery of social services, Mr Latham embraced upward mobility in the workforce and promised the party would be driven by pragmatism, not ideology. In a key shift to its approach to the workplace, Mr Latham said Labor had to realise that workers were no longer just people on a job site that could be unionised. Instead he called on the party to make a philosophical shift to embrace "the upwardly mobile".... "The new middle-class is here to stay with its army of contractors, consultants, franchisees and entrepreneurs," Mr Latham told the Fabian Society in a speech in Melbourne.... Among the election commitments ditched yesterday were key pledges to provide free hospital care for over-75s, an $8-a-week tax cut for people earning under $52,000, and its $800million compensation and protection blueprint for Tasmania's old-growth forests.... Labor's policy soul-searching came as influential ALP figures called for the party to move back to the centre to embrace ordinary Australians. Australian Workers Union national secretary Bill Shorten warned the federal ALP would be consigned to more election defeats unless it widened its appeal beyond the nation's left-wing intelligentsia".

I thought that having values was "intolerant": "European interior ministers have signalled a tougher line on immigration by agreeing to bring in new requirements to ensure immigrants integrate into their new society. At a ministerial meeting in Brussels, all 25 European countries agreed to make newcomers learn the local language and what they described as "European values"."

The huge FDA bureaucracy failed to protect people so this galoot wants more of the same: "At least five medications now sold to consumers pose such risks that their sale should be limited or stopped, said a government drug reviewer who raised safety questions earlier about the arthritis drug Vioxx. In testimony yesterday before the Senate Finance Committee, Food and Drug Administration Reviewer David Graham cited Meridia, Crestor, Accutane, Bextra and Serevent. The nation is "virtually defenseless" against a repeat of the Vioxx debacle, he said." [Dismantling the failed bureaucracy concerned would make more sense]

LOL. The poor petals!: "Canadian censors are likely to approve Fox News Channel for airing on digital television starting next year, reports Toronto's Globe and Mail. The far-left newspaper describes Fox as "the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right."

Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknoll organization has done another dissection of Leftism that is worth reading.

Right Dominion has some derisive remarks about the new Bill Clinton library and its contents.

A note from a reader about my second post yesterday: "Congratulations....a milestone indeed and best wishes on his university studies. Our 5th grade son [my new step-son] goes to a Catholic School and we couldn't be more pleased....especially since it's about 1/3rd the cost of his old "elite" Episcopal school. We like the religious instruction, albeit Catholic instead of our Presbyterian/Methodist bent and the firm but fair discipline and even Jack likes wearing a uniform. And no surprise the parents are involved in everything. I went to 'hotdog' day at lunch and almost every kid had a parent or grandparent there."

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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20 November, 2004

BERKELEY SOCIOLOGISTS DREAM ABOUT VOTER FRAUD IN FLORIDA

The "voter fraud" explanation that many Leftists give in explanation for their loss of the recent U.S. Presidential election has already been pretty thoroughly debunked but Leftists are still not giving up on it. Given their own efforts to rig the vote by enrolling dead people etc., one can understand their conviction that there was foul play. It's another example of their chronic "projection" (seeing their own faults in others). And I am sure that one place where the fraud explanation is almost universally treated as gospel would be the People's Republic of Berkeley. So it is no surprise that a group of Berkeley sociologists have done a statistical analysis (PDF) which they believe offers proof that voting-machine fraud took place in the Florida voting.

The method they adopted is amusing, however. I myself taught sociological statistics at a major Australian university for many years so maybe I can explain simply what they did. They took a large number of things that normally predict the vote and combined them to produce an estimate of what the vote SHOULD have been. They then show that this estimate of the Republican vote was lower than the official Republican vote in precincts where voting machines were used. They then conclude that the official figures were "rigged" because they diverged from the theoretical figures.

To show how ridiculous this procedure is we only have to ask why the USA had an election at all if the result was predictable with such certainty? Surely it would have been easier to leave the whole business of electing the President to the sociologists and their computer models! The plain fact, however, is that there are many things -- most of them not easily meaasurable -- that could have influenced the vote but which were not included in our sociologists' model. And even the data that were used are subject to error.

What one of the omitted factors could have been is suggested by econometrician Newmark's Door. He points out that there is a large Jewish population in the "suspect" counties and that Jews who quietly switched to Bush because of his support for Israel and his strong opposition to Islamic terrorism could account for at least part of the "wrong" voting. And it may be noted that the percentage of Jewish voting for Bush is one of those variables that could be particularly hard to estimate. Given the strong historic tradition of Democrat voting in the Jewish community, Jews who did switch to Bush might not be keen to go public about it.

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A MILESTONE

I went to my son's graduation from High School yesterday. He has already been accepted for admission to Queensland's most prestigious university and I will be paying his fees so the occasion was just a formality. But the school is a Catholic one so I was pleased to hear a great deal of mention of Christian themes and Christian values. It was not at all politically correct! I am very pleased that I was in a position to give my son a private education where he would get good exposure to the sort of influences that have made our culture great. A sign of the quality of the school is that about half the teachers are male. Male teachers are of course rare so can pick and choose where they want to teach. And my son's school is obviously seen as a desirable environment. There certainly seem to be minimal discipline problems and there is a high level of civility generally. It is however a very multi-ethnic school so my son was one of the few blond heads in the crowd. His best friend is Chinese. My son is much more of a Mathematics whizz than I am, however, so the Math Dept. at the University of Queensland gave him a small scholarship to entice him to study there. Scholarships of any kind are rare in Australian universities.

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ELSEWHERE

There has now been quite a bit of commentary (e.g. here) saying that "Red" states get more back from Uncle Sam than they put in by way of taxes -- with "Blue" states being the losers. One part of the reason for that is that the top 50% of U.S. income earners pay 96% of all the income tax. But living by the sea (preferably with a water view) has always been a very desirable luxury item. So most rich people (and hence most taxpayers) will be found in the "Blue" coastal states (or Great Lakes states) where that luxury is available. A second major reason for the difference, however, is that the U.S. government spends up hugely on agricultural subsidies -- and the big farms tend to be inland in the "Red" states. The irony in that, however, that it is only free-traders who oppose such subsidies and free-traders are mainly to be found in the GOP. The Democrats tend to be protectionists. With all his complaints about "outsourcing" of jobs, John Kerry was certainly a protectionist. So, in a sense, the Democrats have themselves to blame for their disproportionate tax burden. If they had put their weight behind the free-traders, it might have been possible to at least reduce America's economically indefensible farm subsidies. But they did not. So the "Blue" subsidy to the "Red" states is in fact a deliberate "Blue" policy! You've gotta laugh!

The Berlin wall fell only 15 years ago: "Reagan's experience in winning the Cold War provides a model of strength and offers hope. In 1980, no one expected to see the Berlin Wall come down that decade. By bringing the same tenacity to the War on Terror, America may be able to defy expectations again by creating a stable democracy in Iraq that acts a beacon of hope for the Middle East"

United Nations pervasively corrupt: "With estimates soaring of graft and fraud under the United Nations Oil for Food program in Iraq, we are hearing a lot about the need to "get to the bottom" of this scandal, the biggest ever to hit the U.N. To get to that bottom will need a much harder look at the top--where Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself resides. That violates all sorts of taboos. But so, one might suppose, does a United Nations that allowed Saddam Hussein to embezzle at least $21.3 billion in oil money during 12 years, with the great bulk of that sum--a staggering $17.3 billion--pilfered between 1997-2003, on Mr. Annan's watch."

Reliapundit thinks the USA should threaten to withdraw from the UN if they don't start co-operating with investigations into Saddam's oil-for-food scam.

Philosopher Will Wilkinson has gritted his teeth and tried to makes some sense out of the latest evidence-free claims of black Leftist Cornell West -- a book with the remarkably unoriginal title: Democracy Matters. One excerpt: "The tu quoque is cheap. But it's hard to resist the thought that West's animosity toward the market is projection of his own ideologically fundamentalist impulses. It is perhaps fitting that West, a man who says he is committed to the truth of teachings of Jesus Christ because his sanity depends on it, should level the charge that advocates of the free-market are animated by blind faith. We see in others our weaknesses enlarged. But faith in markets in not West's complaint so much as is the reluctance of Americans to adopt his faith in socialist democracy (which we could only love, if we were exposed to it)".

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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19 November, 2004

THAT CONSERVATIVE "RACISM" AGAIN

"President Bush and diversity: Against expectation, and without divisive debates over affirmative action and quotas, he has built an extraordinary record of minority appointments to his inner circle. He did it by sneaking them in the front door while everybody was watching. Condoleezza Rice's nomination yesterday to be secretary of state is the latest and most dramatic example. That she would be the first black woman to hold the post - and that she would succeed Colin Powell, the first black man - is a groundbreaking moment in American racial history. Our original sinners would be shocked. But we're not, and that, too, takes the breath away. America clearly is ready for a black official to be our representative to the world. And both Powell and Rice are so obviously qualified that it's as though race is not a factor for or against them....

Limousine-liberal Democrats and their media poodles, many of whom send their children to near-segregated private schools, have basically ignored the racial triumphs Powell and Rice embody. Just as they have barely noted that Rod Paige, the departing secretary of education, is the first black to hold that job. Or that Ann Veneman, the departing secretary of agriculture, is the first woman to hold that job. Or that Alberto Gonzales, if confirmed, will be the first Hispanic attorney general. Or that Bush has an Arab-American and two Asian-Americans in his cabinet. Had a Democratic President made those appointments, the celebratory coverage would invoke Harry Truman's integrating the armed forces or Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's battle for civil rights. Talk about your double standards.

No matter. Bush isn't looking for applause. And my guess is that his trailblazing days are not finished. Given William Rehnquist's failing health, Bush likely will get to nominate an associate justice and a chief justice of the Supreme Court. There has been talk that Clarence Thomas might get the top job. I don't see it. A more likely scenario is that whoever Bush adds to the panel, he would elevate Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice. She is the one true swing vote on the court and thus the perfect leader to guide its deliberations and jawbone for consensus. Did I mention she would be the first woman to hold the job?"

More here.

And British conservatives have twice chosen a Jew to lead them: Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century and Michael Howard in the 21st century

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ELSEWHERE

Great news! Republican Dino Rossi won the governorship of Washington State by 261 votes over Democrat Christine Degregorie after 2 weeks of counting. Bush was defeated in this state but Rossi won in a state that is one of the most irreligious in the U.S.

Jeff Jacoby has a good tribute to John Ashcroft and a reply to the hysterical Leftist slurs about him.

"Reed Irvine, the indefatigable founder of Accuracy in Media and one of the very first people to question the received wisdom of the news media, passed away last night. He was 82. As a media critic, Reed Irvine was a trailblazer. While much of America was still blinded to the still fairly new notion that journalists could rise above their human nature and deliver the news without even a scintilla of bias, Irvine knew better".

From "The Australian": "With our US and Thai trade deals effectively overcoming their final hurdles, yesterday was a red-letter day for Australian trade. It was also a big day in sustaining the prosperity that two decades of economic reform have already brought us.... This is good news for our exporters, which means good news for employment, growth and living standards overall. But the other side of the coin, an increased range of cheaper imports, is just as important. Reduced protection on imports means local producers become smarter, more innovative and more efficient - just as we have seen with the local car industry, which rather than taking its begging-bowl to Canberra each year is now taking its products into niche export markets in Asia and the US. Cheaper shirts for our backs and refrigerators for our kitchens leave us with more money for the big things - our homes, our health, our kids' education. As former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating pointed out last week, the anti-trade Left has yet to demonstrate how forcing people to pay more for the necessities of life contributes to a fairer society".

News from another planet: "Berkeley tolerates its homeless people, and takes good care of their stuff when they abandon it in shopping carts. Not only does the city pack carts and other belongings into a huge container in case folks want it back -- it also deep-freezes them for as long as 90 days."

This must be a classic case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason: Brazil's Leftist President Lula is decriminalizing drugs. Why? It looks like it is in part a payoff to the drug barons that backed Lula financially during his rise to power.

Very encouraging: According to Pew Research, 41% of voters said that they used the web to obtain campaign news with 21 percent saying that they used the internet as a primary news source. And 40% said that media coverage of George Bush's campaign was unfair.

Tyrrell: "At the heart of the liberal crack-up, which I first diagnosed in 1984, is the impulse to politicize everything from food to sex to happenstance -- and to moralize. The liberal of the liberal crack-up is a free-floating moralizer. Such liberals are also dramatists of the most adolescent variety. No human experience is beyond their melodrama. There is no misfortune that they will not exploit for votes. Their politics is built on a world of extremes. The conservatism of President George W. Bush, a conservatism that has been governing America for most of the past 24 years, remains to these liberals shocking, dangerous or "extremist," as they say. The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable. Thus in the last election, the perfectly sensible and tolerant solution for stable homosexual couples' legal difficulties, namely, civil unions, was not sufficient"

Dodging Federal speech restrictions: "The FCC has no jurisdiction over radio broadcasts that come from satellites in the sky. Regulators can scare executives worried about their million-dollar bonuses and small station managers struggling to get by. But satellite radio takes programming decisions out of the hands of individual stations with their individual prejudices."

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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18 November, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

A journalist libels President Bush over Iraq War Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald, aka the Saddam Times, is an excellent example of the left's pathological hatred of President Bush
China's insane one-child policy is crumbling What is not generally recognised is that China's fertility rate was already falling before the one-child policy was implemented. So why the policy?
Why must Israel negotiate with the Palestinians while Beijing refuses to negotiated with the Tibetans? The idea of Palestinian people was born in the mid of 1960s, after Arab states realized that it was impossible to destroy Israel using military force
Lefty journalist thinks President Bush more evil than terrorists According to the leftwing Matt Price of The Australian, President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair and Howard are more evil than Saddam, bin Laden and Zarqawi
Journalist uses Democratic Party Judge to slime President Bush The Bush-bashing Phillip Coorey of the Herald and Weekly Times couldn't wait to hammer out the story of how a judge challenged Bush on military tribunals
What a Difference a Day Makes in the life of Arafat and President Bush I will never forget the creepy feeling Arafat gave me standing only a couple of feet away from him. Truly, it felt like I was in the presence of Satan

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Well, I am still capable of being surprised. Top Left-of centre blog Daily Kos (400,000 hits per day) denies it is a liberal blog: "But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory. And since we haven't gotten any of that from the current crew, we're one more thing: a reform blog. The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It's one between establishment and anti-establishment factions. And as I've said a million times, the status quo is untenable. But it has nothing to do with ideology". I have always said that Leftists are interested in power only and that any beliefs or principles that they espouse are just whatever sounds good at the time but I really did not expect to see it so openly admitted in such a major Leftist source. But then I also did not expect that so many passionate advocates of equality would suddenly declare themselves as elitists, either. I have always argued that what the Left say only makes sense psychologically rather than philosphically but even my cynicism seems to have been inadequate for the reality. The Kos author is however showing a typical psychopathic trait: Making amazingly damaging admissions about himself without the slightest awareness of how damaging such admissions are.

But this Leftist pundit recognizes what the Democrats are too: "We must stop the Democrats from being a party that simply wants to win elections and back into a party that actually stands for something important, something more than "not the other guy"."

Wicked Thoughts has just done another attack on the illogicality of Law professor Brian Leiter and his claim that America is becoming a "theocracy".

Australians abroad: "A former State Department official is known to refer jocularly to the power wielded around the world by the "axis of ocker". By that, she means the Australian diaspora - the large community of Australians who live offshore on a permanent or long-term basis.... Given our small population, the rollcall of Australians in top international positions is impressive. They head up businesses such as McDonald's and British Airways; they edit leading international newspapers; they run international organisations and cultural institutions and teach at the world's best universities. Together with other expatriates, they constitute our worldwide web of ideas and influence".

The official seal of Los Angeles county features a large pagan goddess and a tiny Chriistian cross. Leftists want to remove the cross. Dennis Prager comments: "I fear intolerance. And the move to expunge the singular Christian contribution to an American county and city is intolerant to the point of bigotry. No religious Christians, despite their deep opposition to paganism, ever objected to the pagan goddess that is many times larger than the cross. I have found over and over that most Christians who preach faith are more tolerant than most leftists who preach tolerance."

Are CBS learning? "CBS News fired the producer responsible for interrupting the last five minutes of a hit crime drama with a special report on the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat". Maybe not. They also said that they should have been MORE critical of the Bush administration prior to the election. I wonder how? Weren't barefaced lies enough?

Selective support for choice: "The bulk of liberals are an inconsistent lot. Take, for example, their support of the pro-choice position in the abortion controversy. These same people are almost uniformly hostile to choice in many other areas of life -- just ask them if they support choice in whether one may develop one's own property as one likes, or whether one has the authority to decide on what to spend one's own money (instead of having it taxed away by government).The fact is that this very tiny sphere of authority is all these folks tend to wish to keep out of government's reach."

Dummies not so dumb: "As the furor over the election dies down, with more unseemly whining from sore losers and some unseemly gloating from sore winners, certain stereotypes of Bush voters continue to have a lot of currency among disgruntled liberals. One of them is that Bush supporters, and conservatives in general, are dumb, ignorant and out of touch with reality. This notion has been bandied about with quite a bit of smugness. Some on the left have humbly taken to calling themselves 'the reality-based community.' .... David Bernstein, a libertarian who was highly critical of both candidates in the past election, points out on the Volokh Conspiracy blog that in other surveys, Republicans have on average scored higher than Democrats on knowledge of political issues than Democrats -- though voters across the board tend to be woefully ill-informed."

Liberals in the UK: "What all liberals have in common is a touching certainty that they are right. Liberalism is a missionary faith, and proselytising zeal is not normally conducive to sceptical inquiry. Whatever the core values of liberalism, they can surely conflict with one another - and with other goods such as social cohesion. Yet it rarely occurs to liberals to ask themselves whether their values - however vaguely or inconsistently defined - are viable in the long term."

Blair smarter than his party: In a paroxysm of their traditional class envy, the British Labour Party has again legislated to ban all foxhunting -- against the wishes of their Prime Minister. It remains to be seen whether Blair will ever take the legislation to the Queen for her signature, though.

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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17 November, 2004

A GREAT LETTER FROM A CENTRIST TO THE LEFT

Just a few excerpts from Dean's World

"A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today. We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves--not because we "embraced the establishment," but because we were questioning the establishment. You may laugh, but a whole lot of what's "questioning the establishment" to you seems like the establishment itself to a hell of a lot of people like me. Culturally, at least.

You also, in your missive, speak of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11." I hope you're aware that that movie uses all the same propaganda techniques as used by the great Fascist and Stalinist film producers such as Goebbels and Eisenstein. Indeed, I must tell you that after I finally watched that film, my hands were literally shaking. Not because of my great love and devotion to Bush (which I'm sure the left-wing stereotypers would love to believe) but because I had not seen such concentrated hatred and dishonest propaganda put to film in my lifetime. By comparison, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" seemed tame.....

I've experienced firsthand just how hateful, intolerant, and irrational you guys can be when someone dares to question your beliefs. You guys often come off exactly like the theocratic mullahs and the lock-step fascists you claim to hate (but which you, oddly enough, don't seem willing to use American power to try to overthrow)......

We saw a good, decent, moderate man in Bush who decided to take a big gamble and do the right thing for both America and Iraq and finally, finally, finally bring down the monster Saddam. Which would have been done a long damned time ago if we'd had any decency as a country. You don't agree. Fine. You don't have to. But don't think that acting like an asshole about it gets you my vote. You guys may have whipped a bunch of dumbass kids into a rage by feeding them Michael Moore style hate-propaganda, but you equally pissed off a bunch of other folks in the process who showed up to vote just to spite you guys for being such mean-spirited, reactionary, paint-by-numbers, bigoted, closed-minded jerks.

I don't know. Maybe you guys on the left need the stereotyping and the rage in order to motivate people to the polls. But from where folks like me stand, it's your ideas that need to be questioned, and it's you guys who have been on the wrong side of human rights and progress these last couple of years. It's you guys who are the reactionaries.

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ELSEWHERE

The poor old Guardian! They are trying to cope with the IQ issue and the "dumbness" of the "red" states but they just don't get it. They quote the well-known table of the average IQs of American States and then admit it is discredited. To soften that blow, however, they also say: "Educational statistics also seem to support the (attractive to people like us) smart/dumb divide between the parties. The District of Columbia, which the census records as having the nation's highest population of college graduates (42%), turned in the nation's lowest number of votes for President Bush (9%)." So was it because of all the graduates that DC gave such an amazingly skewed result? Not at all. It is because Washington is one of the world's biggest black cities and we all know how most blacks vote. And we know how many (or few) blacks have degrees too. But perhaps the Guardian doesn't. And a willingness to regurgitate Leftist propaganda is as big an influence as intelligence over who gets one of the many trashy American college degrees.

James Glassman has a splendid piece of sarcasm about how to make the Democrats a winner at the next election.

Anti-religious bigotry: "Liberals scoff, but the balm that comes with being part of a religious community -- the Bible study, youth groups, choirs and, yes, the moral absolutes that often accompany such communion -is real and comforting, unlike the promise of complicated and expensive government programs.... The liberal hostility to funding faith-based social programs- which are provided mostly by poor black and Latino congregations who need the financial help - is a witlessly secularist reaction against some of the most successful antipoverty efforts in the U.S."

Blair did his best: "Jacques Chirac dealt a blow to Tony Blair's attempt to heal the wounds between the US and Europe last night by saying that the Prime Minister had won nothing for supporting the war against Iraq. As Mr Blair used a keynote speech to present Britain as a "bridge across the Atlantic", President Chirac doubted whether anyone could play the "honest broker". Speaking before he visits London on Thursday, he said that it was not in the nature of this Administration to return favours."

Jim Lindgren has a comprehensive debunking of all the "voter fraud" myths of the 2004 election.

Reasonable: "Though the economy was sluggish in Bush's first three years in office, it has been quite strong in 2004, with solid growth and low inflation. Using those data, Yale economist Ray Fair expected Bush to garner 56 percent of the presidential vote. But in fact, he gained only 51.5 percent. Why did Bush do so poorly despite the resurgent economy? What happened to those 5 million missing Bush votes? We must conclude that Iraq is the reason for Bush's subpar performance."

Affirmative action hurts blacks. Conservatives have said it for years but now a Left-leaning law professor has produced research confirming it. You can read the man himself on the Volokh blog. He found that AA actually reduces the number of successful black lawyers.

Leftist judge defies the law: "John Morganelli, District Attorney for Northampton County, PA, probably had no idea what he was in for last week when his office appeared before Judge Leonard Zito for the conviction and sentencing of 27 individuals accused of using false and stolen social security numbers. Morganelli's investigators had worked for months to prosecute the group, 14 of which had not simply used false social security numbers, but had stolen and used the social security numbers of law-abiding people. But although every one of the defendants pleaded guilty, Judge Zito refused to impose any period of incarceration, nor did he fine the defendants. Zito based his decision on the fact that the defendants were all illegal aliens, remarking that they should never have been arrested in the first place because the men committed the crimes 'strictly for the purpose of working.'"

Harvard researcher surprises Leftists only: "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin,"

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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16 November, 2004

NOTE: Hotmail has been playing up a bit on me lately. They seem to be under attack from someone. I got nearly 1000 big spam emails yesterday. So if you have emailed me and I seem to not have got your email, it might be a good idea to resend


"DUMB" CONSERVATIVES AND INCONSISTENT LEFTISTS

As an amusing post about John Kerry on Majority Rights reminds me, Leftists are hugely inconsistent in their attitude to intelligence. Just mention the word "IQ" and they will immediately say that there is really no such thing and all men are equal anyhow. And any attempt to measure differences in intelligence (which is what IQ is) is Fascist, racist and all the usual Leftist terms of abuse. Yet here they all are in the post-election period saying that they are heaps more intelligent than conservatives and that their superiority in that regard is enormously important! If I could be bothered, I would be going around all the comments boxes on Leftist blogs and accusing the blog authors of Fascism and racism every time they say how superior they are and how dumb conservatives are. And how they can proudly admit to being elitists (for some examples see Leftists as Elitists) while at the same time believing in equality really quite escapes me. At any event, below are a few more comments on the current Leftist claims:

"A. Barton Hinkle": "Us here in Bush Country sorry. We sorry for being so dumb, voting for dumb President Bush. We know we not so smart. But ain't nothing we can do about it. We try hard. Honest injun! Stay up on current events. Watch Fox News and "Entertainment Tonite." Read Weekly World News - and not just stuff about Bat-Boy, neither. But we no match for likes of you in brains department. Heck, we barely just learn to walk upright. Grandparents' knuckles still all red and swole up.... It true, as recent poll show, that perty near seven out of 10 Bush fans think U.S. have "clear evidence" Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. We admit we fooled on that score. Vice President always hint at connection. Him probably thinking of grand jury indictment sought by Clinton U.S. attorney Mary Jo White back in 1998. Indictment said - we quoting here - "[A]l-Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." Guess she not so smart either." (Via Keith Burgess-Jackson)

Mark Steyn: "How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was..... If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA." Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton"

Steyn again: "In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't"

Keith Burgess-Jackson: "In my discipline, philosophy, there are as many theists as there are atheists. The ratio of atheists to theists may be higher among philosophers than among people generally, but if the hypothesis of stupidity is correct, shouldn't the ratio be extraordinarily high in a field such as philosophy, which attracts people of such impressive intelligence? Shouldn't it be extremely unusual to find a theist in a philosophy department? I can assure you that it's not. Many of the best philosophers in the world today are theists: William P. Alston, Peter van Inwagen, Marilyn McCord Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Philip L. Quinn, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne. See here. They work not just in philosophy of religion but in epistemology and metaphysics. They are as hard-headed, rigorous, and intellectually demanding as anyone, anywhere, in any field. Liberals are going to have to face the fact that religious belief is independent of intelligence. It is a function of other things, such as upbringing"

A message to the Left from a truthful bear: "George Bush is President, and he is going to keep being President for another four years. That's not going to change. So telling us how much he sucks is irrelevant. Telling us how stupid the portion of America which voted for him is: also irrelevant. Discussing secession and to hell with those red states: well that's just plain stupid, forget about irrelevant. What is relevant are answers. Solutions, not a list of problems. Declaring that Iraq is a mess is easy, and worthless. Telling us what we should do to fix it is harder, but far more worthwhile. Don't like the operation in Falluja? Fine: how else would you stop the terrorists? Think we should involve allies more in Iraq? Great. How?

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ELSEWHERE

Does the blogosphere have a memory? Not much of a one, I would guess. In mid-December of 2002 a big blog topic was the defamation case brought by Australian Jewish businessman Joe Gutnick against Dow-Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and various other papers. My main contribution to the debate is here. The fuss arose because Dow Jones published most gross accusations against Mr Gutnick and then absolutely refused to retract them. Mr Gutnick was advised that he would have little redress under American law because American law takes little heed of the truth of such accusations. He therefore sued before the High Court of Australia. Dow Jones cried foul because they did not like being sued under law that required them to be truthful. The outcome of the case has recently been announced: After 4 years and 27 court appearances, Mr Gutnick finally got his public apology and retraction from Dow Jones plus $180,000 in damages and $400,000 in costs. Common decency and a respect for truth would have saved Dow Jones a lot of money. I hope that they learn from it and am pleased that Australian law administered the lesson.

The Dutch pratfall: "The recent assassination of Dutch author and moviemaker, Theo van Gough, by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam should come as no surprise to those familiar with the condition of multiculturalism in Holland. Earlier this year, the Dutch government became the first Western state to admit that the multicultural experiment, the biggest socialist fraud ever to be foisted on countries since the Soviet one, is a colossal failure. This admission came in the form of an all-party parliamentary report that basically concluded, among other things, that Muslim immigrants, who make up almost one million of Holland’s 16 million inhabitants, are refusing to integrate.... Ironically, it is the emphasis Dutch governments have placed on multiculturalism that has helped lead to its inevitable downfall. The report states that, in planning their ‘perfect’ society, the biggest mistake the lib-left multiculturalists made was to have immigrant children educated in their own languages, which has resulted in an ethnic separatism in society. This voluntary apartheid from the mainstream has reached the point where it is dangerous for white Europeans to venture into some immigrant neighborhoods where they are regarded as either “an enemy or victim.” The growth of this parallel world has also corresponded with a growth in discomfort among the native Dutch toward the newcomers and a loss of a feeling of security, which is largely due to the new immigrants’ propensity for crime, violence and overrepresentation in the criminal system. The report concludes that the ethnic ghettos must be broken up and the immigrants made to become Dutch if the country is not to come apart. But it is probably already too late for that.... And what is the response of the oh-so-clever Dutch leftists to the multicultural mess they have created? Like after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, they have been either silent or offered only more of the same." More background on the Dutch situation here.

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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15 November, 2004

ON NOT QUITE GETTING IT RIGHT:

I can't help myself: I have got to have a laugh at the follies of the Leftists instead of just letting them dig themselves into a hole. Take this article from beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. The author looks at the map of "blue" counties and draws the correct conclusion that the Kerry vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. But that's the last thing he gets right. He immediately jumps to the laughable conclusion that everyone in the big cities is like him and it is people like him who won the cities for Kerry. It is the old Leftist trick of claiming to speak for far more people than they actually do. They once used to claim to speak for "the worker", but they never did, of course. In this case the cities were won for Kerry not because of the Leftists there but because that is where minorities concentrate. It is minorities that are characteristic of the big cities, not bourgeois whites. Bourgeois whites are scattered everywhere these days. Material comfort and options in life are available to almost any American anywhere who is prepared to work hard in fact.

And the fact that minorities and Leftist whites vote for the same candidate does NOT mean that the two groups share the same values. The minority vote is a "bought" vote -- bought with the promise of welfare dollars. On social values such as attitude to homosexuals etc, the two groups have long been known to be poles apart. In a public-opinion-polling sense, then, "city values" would be just about the opposite of what our author claims. To put it vividly, you would almost certainly get a bigger vote in favour of castrating homosexuals in the big cities than you would get anywhere else. So our poor old Leftist would actually find more solace among the kindly souls of middle America than among a true random sample of his acclaimed big city Americans. His Leftist cities exist only in his imagination.

And another amusing point he makes is that the "raving neo-Christian idiots" of Wyoming got roughly twice as much per head spent on them by the Federal government as the good citizens of Washington State did. And he calls the Wyoming people idiots? They sound like the winners to me! What a fool the guy is.

And there is an article by Malanga which nicely detonates yet another common Democrat fallacy -- that the GOP support for basic cultural values has distracted the workers from economic realities. The underlying Leftist claim is that the economy is in a mess and poor people are going backwards and the Democrats would fix all that! If that were true it would indeed be foolish for working people to be seduced away from voting Democrat by issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage. The inspiration for the claim is Thomas Franks' recent book What's the Matter With Kansas? and the book claims that Kansas is an example of such folly. As usual with Leftist claims, however, this one is fact-free too. Kansas is in fact doing particularly well economically so sticking with conservatives who have helped bring that about is entirely logical and in the best interests of all Kansans.

But let Leftists believe all these silly explanations for their failure. Let them waste their energy fighting imaginary enemies! They will never cure their sickness if they keep misdiagnosing its cause.

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Another laugh: The frantically Leftist Maureen Dowd of the NYT is now defending a senior Republican Senator to whom GWB gave his personal support in the recent campaign! Nobody is saying so but I presume that the price of that support was a promise from Senator Specter not to actually vote against any of the administration's judicial nominees.

An excellent defence of conservative policies from Australia's last Labor Party Prime Minister: "In a fiery defence of Labor's opening up of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr Keating crowed that ordinary Australians now had cheaper cars, higher wages, near-full employment, and easy access to home loans and the stock market. "When the government I led abandoned general centralised wage fixing ... productivity went off," Mr Keating said. "Productivity went to 3 per cent through the 90s, the highest rate of any of the OECD countries." The result was a 20 per cent increase in incomes, or "the highest growth in real incomes in any decade of the 20th century", Mr Keating said. "You can't believe that we still have critics for this policy," he said.... Mr Keating scorned critics who have cast Labor of the 1980s and 1990s as "not really Labor governments" or "Labor fakers of some kind who passed the parcel on government and the markets". "You can buy a reasonable quality small car for under $15,000 today," he said. "(Before tariff reduction) that would have been nearer to $30,000." Materialism was under attack for hollowing out social values, however Mr Keating said: "One has to ask, will people have better values and be better put together if their car costs twice as much? "Is that extra call on their disposable income going to produce some astringent moral effect on them?""

Leftists still celebrate the Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925 in which fundamentalist Christians fought a rearguard action against the teaching of the theory of evolution in the schools. Evolution was considered a "progressive" or Leftist cause at the time and -- predictably -- had the overwhelming support of the press. It is interesting therefore that Jim Lindgren has recently put up some excerpts from the school textbook that the Christians were attacking and which the "progressives" were defending. The excerpts make a case for eugenics that could have come straight from Hitler himself. So it seems that those silly old Christians were not so silly after all and that the Leftists and the media were, as usual, on the side of depriving people of their liberties in the name of whatever theory might happen to be fashionable at the time.

Islamic primitivism: "Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased. .Textbooks in Muslim countries speak of the victories of Muslim fighters from an earlier era. Orators still call for latter-day mujahedeen to rise and regain Islam's lost glory. More streets in the Arab world are named after Muslim generals than men of learning. Even civilian dictators in the Muslim world like being photographed in military uniforms, Saddam Hussein being a case in point. While the Muslim world's obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to "restore" Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply".

Abortion worse than the KKK: "In America today, almost as many African-American children are aborted than are born. A black baby is now more than three times as likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby. Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. Planned Parenthood operates the nation's largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions."

There is a good Rothbard article here summarizing three major Papal encyclicals. It shows that the Popes have advocated economic authoritarianism to go with their religious authoritarianism and that they have been no friends of the free market. My reading of a more recent encyclical led me to similar conclusions.

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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14 November, 2004

SSSHH! DON'T TELL THE LEFT THIS:

I find it difficult to restrain my amusement at the way the American Left is at present relentlessly shooting itself in the foot. Their bile and hate has so overcome them that they are saying almost insane things about their election defeat. They seem to be almost uniform in blaming evangelical Christians for their defeat and the abuse they are pouring out at those much-abused people is quite amazing. "Dumb" and "stupid" are just the mildest of the adjective hurled out. "Jihadists", "Theocrats", "American Taliban" are some of the more imaginative descriptions.

Great! Is all I can say. Hurling gross insults at people whose votes you need if you are to win next time is so stupid that it almost confirms the Left as children of Satan. Does the Left really think that Christians will not notice what the Left thinks of them? I think the Left are at the moment doing far more to send the Christian vote to the GOP than George Bush could ever do in his wildest dreams.

And that is the big laugh! A lot of the Christian vote is still up for grabs. The swing to Bush actually had nothing to do with the Christian vote. If any particular demographic is to be blamed for Bush's victory it is actually Catholics and women. The Left are abusing an entirely innocent party!

But I will say no more on the matter. Let us all keep an amused silence about the matter from now on. To check up on what I have just said, however, you could (for instance) read the following:

"The Economist": "Look at the figures: the moralists' share of the electorate was only 22%, just two points more than the share of those who cited the economy, and three points more than those who nominated terrorism as the top priority. A few points difference (and the exit polls are, after all, not entirely reliable) and everyone would have been saying the election was about jobs or Iraq. Moreover, that 22% share is much lower than it was in the two previous presidential elections, in 2000 and 1996. Then, 35% and 40%, respectively, put moral or ethical issues top, and a further 14% and 9% put abortion first, an option that was not given in 2004. Thus, in those two elections, about half the electorate said they voted on moral matters; this time, only a fifth did".

Mick Hume: "Bring on the most influential myths of the post-election debate so far: that the Republicans won by scaring stupid redneck voters, and by mobilising a powerful block of Christian fundamentalists to vote for their conservative moral values on abortion and gay marriage. It is not hard to see why this should be an attractive explanation/excuse for the Democrats and their supporters on the international left. After all, how can they be blamed for losing to Bush, if the voters are just too ignorant or too bigoted to appreciate their sophisticated arguments? This sort of contemptuous attitude towards the electorate reveals rather more about the left than it does about American voters. Apart from anything else, it is a bit rich to blame Bush for emotive scaremongering when the Kerry campaign was just as guilty... But, as Guardian/Observer columnist David Aaronovitch points out, on closer inspection the 'populist uprising' of Christian conservatives turns out 'to be more or less a mirage, a self-inflicted liberal nightmare':

Krauthammer: "Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck. In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils." Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest?"

Jill Stewart: "But as national Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin noted, President Bush increased his support among occasional churchgoers more than among regular churchgoers. That speaks to support untethered from intense religiosity..... In California, he notes, Bush improved with swing voters: white Democratic men, Republican working women, Latinos with children. Nationwide, women split between Bush and Kerry. Just four years ago, Al Gore won an 11- point female advantage, thanks to a 20-year trend in which women went Democratic. The vanishing gender gap and other trends cannot be blamed on Kerry's failure to pray".

And I love this comment:

"It is not true that the Democrats didn't show sympathy toward fundamentalists during the campaign. They did -- just to the wrong ones. Islamic fundamentalists received a great deal of understanding and tolerance from the Democrats. John Kerry made a point of showing sensitivity to the Islamic community and for it earned numerous endorsements from Muslim Imams. Perhaps herein lies a new strategy for the Democrats: What if they treated Christians as respectfully as they treated Yasser Arafat? What if they extended to Christianity the tolerant understanding they extend to Islam? Maybe from time to time the Democrats could refer to Christianity as a religion of peace. One would think a party that can canonize a de facto terrorist and jihadist like Arafat could tolerate a Southern preacher or two. Jerry Falwell has never blown up an airplane like Arafat, but Democrats wouldn't be caught dead in his company".

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ELSEWHERE

Wicked Thoughts has just put up a sweeping demolition of the thoughts of Brian Leiter, the influential far-Left law professor and blogger.

European economic growth only 11% of U.S. growth: "Figures for the third quarter have punctured French delusions of growth altogether. The French economy crawled along at an annual pace of just 0.4% between July and September.... As for Germany, its economy grew by just 0.4% last quarter, at an annualised rate". [For comparison, the most recent GDP growth-rate figure for the USA was 3.7%]

Happiness: "A new survey of national wellbeing has found the people happiest about their lives are those earning more than $150,000 a year. Those least happy earn less than $15,000 a year". [See also my post of Sept. 14th]

Arlene Peck is a bit disturbed at the conciliatory attitude towards the Palestinians coming from the post-election White House.

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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13 November, 2004

THE SEMI-SOVIET EU

Peter Hitchens "The E.U. is a top-down creation, an elitist idea with its roots in the branch of European social democracy whose features were internationalism, a loathing of the nation-state, a belief in the benevolent intervention of the state in almost all areas of life, and a belief that capitalism untamed was necessarily evil. Remember that many of the founders of the Soviet Union were well-intentioned and didn't mean to end up where they did.... I'm not saying it's like Stalin and the gulag, but I think the end result could well be quite like Brezhnev, and what some Russians still refer to as the golden time. There was plenty of vodka, plenty of sausage, national pride, but from the point of view of someone who wanted a free society, it was disastrous. The Brezhnev regime, though it wasn't Stalinist, was very nasty to those who persisted in dissenting. The European Union hasn't a gulag, but it also doesn't have habeas corpus, it doesn't have jury trial, or due process as it is understood in the U.S. and the U.K. It has no concept of opposition"

Seceding from the EU: "All of the various secession proposals fail to consider the possibility that no permission should be needed to drop out of the EU. Yet that is the question that needs to be asked first. Should some nation be forced to continue its membership in the EU if it cannot persuade some supermajority of member nations to let it go? Forcing an unwilling nation to remain part of a political association that it does not want goes against all theories of fairness, not to mention human rights. Permission to leave should not be required. Any nation that wants to leave should be able to leave without asking permission of other member nations.... One also needs to consider that failure to allow a group of dissatisfied citizens to leave a political union that they did not want led to the completely unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. So bloodshed can happen when people cannot peacefully exit from a political association that they feel no longer represents them".

More on secession here.

But even the French are getting disillusioned: "Like Britain, France will be holding a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. A bout of stress over both this plebiscite and the separate prospect of Turkey joining the EU has now so diminished French aspirations for Europe that the old passion looks altogether spent. Enter Blair. For a root cause of Gallic anguish is Britain. While Blair will have his own tough struggle to win a UK referendum, what haunts France on both the constitution and Turkey is that Britain has apparently prevailed in making the EU an ever-expanding zone of liberal mercantilism that obstructs political union. An initial heart tremor was diagnosable in early autumn, when Laurent Fabius, a Socialist Party heavyweight and former prime minister, astonished France by bidding that the opposition left vote No to the EU constitution in the referendum next year.... The chief argument Fabius advances for rejecting the EU constitution is that it institutionalises Blair's liberal, free-market economic programme, in disregard of social welfare and jobs lost to cheaper, low-wage neighbours. The French now talk of the "English Europe" with the same disdain as Michael Howard's Conservatives talk of "Brussels". Fabius baldly asserts: "The British concept has won." And he does not see why it should be allowed to stand".

Europe from an American viewpoint: "Roughly speaking, I think Americans see the world in this way. A crazy European ideology, Fascism, tried to replace democracy with dictatorship, and ended in concentration camps and a pagan Europe aflame. Meanwhile, another wild ideology, Communism, proposed a Mickey Mouse vision of economics and, except for a powerful military, kept the many nations forced into the Soviet Union at the level of a fourth-world economy, until the whole project collapsed. Americans find it hard to understand what Europeans find plausible in socialist economics. Americans have experienced the great advantages of owning their own property, building their own businesses, inventing and discovering new goods and services. Enterprise is the second secret to American life -- enterprise springing from creative economic imagination and personal initiative".

And Germany's media are DELIGHTED with Bin Laden as he appears on the recently-released videotape: "Osama bin Laden presents himself as less warlike. ...Bin Laden's latest message gives the impression that the bearded man with the soft voice is looking for a new image, away from the jihad rhetoric to a more factual political message ... Not much is left of his usual flaming Islamist rhetoric. The usual tones of "battle against the infidels" are missing this time. Instead he speaks of the ambitions of the "Islamic nation" for "freedom" and "security" and disproves President Bush with political arguments... Instead of martial armed polemics, Bin Laden uses irony to attest to the failures of George W. Bush. ..." (Via Davids Medienkritik)

Robert Kagan: "Europeans do not fear that the US will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the US and, by extension, the direction of world affairs. If the US is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington's behaviour. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the US invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because US willingness to go to war without the UN Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe's approval -- challenged Europe's world view and its ability to exercise even a modicum of influence in the new unipolar system".

And the German left-wing media report glowingly on the "America says sorry" site set up by a few disgruntled Kerry voters.

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ELSEWHERE

The main reason some conservatives do read the sneering Yglesias is that he does sometimes make sense -- as here -- where he advises Senate Democrats to go easy on the obstructionism. He does not know the difference between "horde" and "hoard", though. Is he dyslexic or just a hopeless speller?

Transatlantic Intelligencer has a most comprehensive demolition of the utterly stupid Democrat claim that America's actions in Iraq are responsible for European anti-Americanism. You would have to be brain-dead not to know that anti-Americanism was rife in Europe long before 9/11/2001 but Democrats still lie in their teeth about it. The blog author uses hard words like "otiose" and "metonym" (I would have said "superfluous" and "substitute-word") but he makes up for that with heaps of documentation.

An amusing suggestion from a reader that alludes to the likelihood of Arafat having died of AIDS: "I could never understand Hollywood's, the Leftist (progressive) Church's and the Catholic Church's seeming love affair with the PLO and Yasser Arafat. I have to wonder: Is there some sort of an underground gay Mafia connection here?"

Australia's Cardinal Pell says that Islamic fundamentalism is to some extent a reaction against the values-free amorality promoted by the Western Left. (For a pic of the good Cardinal, see here or here).

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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12 November, 2004

EUROPEAN ANTI-AMERICANISM

"Bush was loathed by the British and European Left-liberals before he had done anything in office. He was detested purely and simply for what he was - a point to which I shall return. But the idea that the most recent wave of rabid anti-Americanism stems from mistakes in Iraq is simply absurd. Anyone whose historical memory goes back more than 10 minutes should recall the extraordinary effusion of hatred that spewed from sections of the opinion-forming class as a consequence of America being attacked.

Like most expatriate Americans living in Britain, it was a phenomenon I am unlikely ever to forget. The response to the deaths of 3,000 civilians, by comment writers in the Left-wing newspapers and the producers of "flagship" BBC current affairs programmes, was to orchestrate abuse of the bereaved country....

So, no - George W Bush is not hated here and in Europe because he removed a genocidal tyrant in Iraq and failed to anticipate the chaos that followed.

He is hated because he is the embodiment of everything that the United States is, and Europe is not: not just enormously powerful, militarily and economically, but brashly confident and fervently patriotic. Where Europe is steeped in historical guilt and self-loathing - so immersed in its own unforgivable past that it is trying to fashion a constitution that actually prohibits national pride - America is profoundly proud of the success of its own miraculous achievement.

What it has succeeded in doing is cracking the great dilemma of modern history: how can disparate and ethnically diverse people live together?....

The answer lies not in the post-religious, anti-clerical mania of the European Union which has just rejected a commissioner for espousing mainstream Catholic principles, but in that patriotism so despised by European elites. It is the unifying force of national self-belief with all those ridiculed school rituals - pledging allegiance to the flag, reciting the preamble to the Constitution - that makes America whole and at one with itself. Bush is the personification of that unashamed America and that is why Europe cannot bear the sight of him".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Master-butcher Arafart is dead. How sad. I was hoping he would live long enough for an Israeli missile to get him. For a summary of the repulsive one's contribution to humanity, see here. And Jeff Jacoby's comment: "Yasser Arafat died at the age of 75, lying in bed and surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves. In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg...."

Good news for Australia's conservative government: "The official unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest levels since monthly records began ..... The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 5.3 per cent in October from 5.5 per cent the previous month.... Releasing the data on Thursday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said the 5.3 per cent jobless rate was the lowest since it began monthly records in February 1978".

Some very biting comments about Americans who despise America and choose to live in Europe instead here. Excerpt: "There are those Americans, or should I say Americans-in-passport-only, who well deserve the title of expatriate. They are predominantly affluent and alienated leftists and they tend to be "writers," i.e., they don't actually write, they in fact have never actually written a sentence, but they nurse their hatred of America during leisurely hours in cafes and kid themselves into thinking that they are writers and patriots. You see them all the time in almost every European city. Mostly male, mostly middle-aged, sitting in cafes, writers all but seldom putting pen to paper. They wear sunglasses, smoke Gitanes and fantasize about under-aged schoolgirls in the delusion that they are experiencing the "authentic" Europe. They know little of the local patois, but fancy themselves fluent".

An interesting argument here to the effect that the Falluja operation is a "Roach Motel" strategy -- first getting the terrorists to "check in" and then killing them off.

Hitchens on the way Leftists hate Christians but praise Islam: "George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he -- and the U.S. armed forces -- have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary -- that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

I have just put up here an article by a British journalist with a few good bits in it that I like: "Contemporary Republicans are not conservatives. On the contrary, theirs is a revolutionary movement aimed at overthrowing much of the post-World War II order at home and abroad." and "After a glorious period of catch-up with US incomes per head, the EU has experienced a marked relative decline since 1990. Behind this lies a worrying deterioration in both absolute and relative productivity performance; and the proportion of people of working age actually at work is only 64 per cent in the EU of 15 members, against 71 per cent in the US, with particularly poor performance in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy and Spain." [He is right about Europe but is still confused by the old Leftist lie that conservatives oppose all change. It is only foolish or Leftist change that conservatives oppose. They would like LOTS of things changed about the world as it is today.].

Michelle Malkin has up a very clear picture of how "compassionate" Democrats are. The "Red States" are the big charitable donors.

There is an amusing post-election picture of Dan Rather here

Dick McDonald has an excellent gloat about the election result from a retired U.S. Navy Admiral.

I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists the claims by Ted Rall to the effect that Democrat voters really are superior -- followed by a demolition of the arguments he presents.

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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.

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



11 November, 2004

BACK TO THE ELECTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Both Henneberger and Gould have recent articles out which portray how frantic and extreme Democrat supporters now are in their hatred of Bush and of conservatives generally. Such fury is not the reaction of people who are quitely confident in the truth of their own beliefs. It is the derangement of people who know that they are wrong and who are steadily having their props kicked out from under them. How otherwise to explain the fact that such great preachers of "tolerance" cannot abide over half of their fellow citizens?

I guessed wrongly. It is the voting machines that Leftists are blaming for their defeat: "A large number of states already have electronic voting machines in place. A large number of those do not produce paper ballots at all. Since many pundits have already raised hell about the highly politically partisan Republican ownership and control of these high-tech companies, I won't rehash that here. If you haven't heard about it, you've been living on another planet. If you didn't hear yesterday that many of these machines already contained thousands of votes before Tuesday's polling places opened their doors, you've been relying on mainstream media for your news." [Odd that the machines worked fine when Clinton won! -- though I must say that the American voting system as a whole is a shambles. In Australia, all voters need proper identification to register and all votes are on paper. Leftist outrage might help to get a stupid system reformed].

No tolerance in SF: "The summer of love has given way to the autumn of fear in San Francisco, a liberal stronghold where residents bitterly disappointed by the Bush victory are in no mood to reach out and mend divisions..... Some are canceling plans to travel to neighboring "red states," where Bush drew most of his support. They are asking serious questions about the future of American democracy. And the usual post-election bravado about moving out of the country when a favored candidate loses is sounding different this year. It sounds a lot more serious..... Peace and tolerance have long been the words to live by in San Francisco, known for its large gay community, broad ethnic mix and frequent anti-war protests. But days after the election, many residents said they ... did not know how they could tolerate the Bush administration, or Americans who voted to re-elect him. "I have family in Idaho, but I told my wife we're not going to visit them now. It's all Republicans there," said Ron Schmidt, a public relations executive. "We have family in Indiana and I don't want to go there either.""

LOL: "The Bush political team intuitively understood the tone of the U.S. voters much better than the media did. To be honest, I still don't quite understand how certified media junkies like me could have been so wrong. I read the New York Times and the New Yorker religiously. I watch CNN and the networks' evening news programs as well as the gabfests on Sunday mornings, too. Go figure". [Wotta dummy! He probably believes in global warming too.]

Single women: "This year, the Bush and Kerry campaigns joined the media and various women's groups throughout this election to chase a hot new voter, the unmarried woman. Dubbed the "Sex and the City" vote... this elusive group of 22 million women was expected to turn the election in John Kerry's favor. But in the end it was George W. Bush who successfully wooed the single female voter. Bush increased his share of the unmarried women's vote by twenty percent over the 2000 election, more than increases in votes cast by unmarried men, married women or married men.... Today's unmarried woman is independent and mindful of the way in which political and economic issues affect her on a personal level. She wonders whether her investments and retirement accounts are safe from broad fluctuations in stock prices. She follows interest rates and real estate trends... A large part of her pay is taken each payday by government in the form of income and social security taxes to fund programs from which she receives few direct benefits.... Perhaps the Kerry campaign failed to convince unmarried women that the Bush administration has mishandled the economy".

Rare sense from Seattle: "It was Bush's progressive agenda that kept him in office.... The left's conservative policies of get-along diplomacy with dictators and theocracies have been rejected in favor of more progressive and proactive strategies of freedom and pluralism..... Bush's victory was due to the fact that nationally the majority of voters was tired of the status quo, tired of the knee-jerk conservatism of the left and wanted a progressive administration. Kerry wanted to take us back to the ideas, policies and attitudes that prevailed before the 9/11 attack.... The majority of Americans wanted a candidate and an administration with new ideas and a plan, and the Democrats offered an administration that was anti-everything.... . The left has shown itself conservative and reactionary on the domestic front as well, resisting in political lock step such progressive ideas as the testing, standards and performance required by the No Child Left Behind Act, against any reasonable limitations on abortion, against any and all aspects of "ownership society" such as partial privatization of social security or health care savings accounts..."

A good gal: "She'd already signed the precinct register when an election worker said her Bush-Cheney T-shirt amounted to illegal electioneering. So Debbie Dupeire pulled it off. Dupeire, who voted in a sports bra, exercise pants and flip-flops, said she was afraid she would lose her chance to vote if she left to turn her shirt inside-out.

There is a good article here on how adversely midweek voting affects American productivity. But I guess that the Australian system of voting on Saturday would be too big a change to ask for.

There is an excellent article on the electoral college system here. One excerpt: "It is precisely because of the Electoral College that the recounting of votes focused on one state instead of many. If the popular vote decided the winner, we would still be bogged down in questionable recounts in dozens, if not hundreds, of counties across the country. The potential for mistakes and abuse would have been enormously compounded, and the cloud over the eventual winner would have been all the more dark and ominous".

A good post on Chicago Boyz: "The core strength of "liberal" America resides in the descendants of Yankee puritans, a memetic "Greater New England" that sprang from the Yankee diaspora which settled the Northern tier of the country. These folks have been living uneasily with their fellow Americans for over 350 years. They have been trying to reform the rest of us for our own good the whole time: Revolution, abolition, prohibition, civil rights, environmentalism..." [He is right. The slightest knowledge of history will tell you that the Pilgrim Fathers were bungling communists. Their Blue State descendants are just a toned-down version of that]

Rush Limbaugh has some good commentary on the latest Leftist response to their election loss. They think the "Blue States" should secede and join up with Canada. They also claim that the "Red states" are parasitical on the "Blue States" anyhow. Rush gives some reasons why "it aint so".

Chicago Boyz also mentions the current Leftist talk about the Blue States seceding but, despite the obvious precedent of the civil war, seems to take it seriously. He somehow misses the way Anglosphere countries normally deal with territorial differences: States' rights. If Jeb Bush can be persuaded to stand in 2008, the Republicans will have America wrapped up until 2016 so a Leftist push to devolve power away from the Feds to the States should result from that -- which would be highly amusing considering past Leftist love of centralized power and hostility to States' rights.

"Republicans have bigger yards." --Tom Firey, explaining all that red space on the electoral map....

Favourite bumper-sticker: "First I voted for John Kerry and then I voted against him".

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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.

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



10 November, 2004

I think I will put election commentary on hold for today:


SOME POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Many conservatives have noticed by now that "projection" is very common on the Left: Leftists commonly accuse conservatives of what are in fact their own faults. This is particularly true of psychological diagnoses, as I have shown elsewhere at some length (e.g. here and here). Perhaps the most constant accusation of that kind is that conservatives are stupid -- where the only published survey on the question that I know of shows the opposite -- that it is in fact LEFTIST attitudes that go with lower average IQ.

Projection is classified in clinical psychology as a "defence mechanism" -- basically something used to prop up weak (and often inflated) egos. But it is in fact only a subset of a more general defence-mechanism: Denial. Denial of your own weak points can be accomplished by projection or in other ways. One of the other ways is familiar to all: Deception (often accompanied by self-deception), or claiming that you have virtues, assets or abilities that you do not have. A rather striking example of this is a claim that seems to have become common among Leftists only recently: The claim that they are "reality-based". That they are "realists" is of course a claim that conservatives have always made and Leftists were for rather a long time fairly happy not to deny that but to counter-claim that they were "idealists". But that strategy seems to have fallen out of favour lately. Why? At one level it is presumably an attack on Christians -- representing a claim that Christians are not realists (though one might ask how come Christians control two branches of the U.S. government in that case) but at the psychological level it simply creates a symmetry with projection: If you claim that your enemies have what are in fact your bad points it makes sense to go the whole hog and claim that what are really your enemy's good points are in fact your good points. One example of this self-identification is well-known Leftist blogger Matthew Yglesias -- who subheads his blog: "Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community". In his most recent post as of this writing, however (post of 9th) he twice uses "right" when he means "write" -- suggesting that his grip on reality is in fact pretty shaky. He is at least dyslexic.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

President's Bush's victory is a win for common decency The true divide in America is not between those who vote Republican and those who vote Democrat. It is between those Americans who love their country and those who disdain it
China's feelings about the Bush victory Beijing believes that the more informed the American public becomes the more it will shift toward the Republicans
Bin Laden tape proof that President Bush is winning The Bin Laden tape was an admission that President Bush had beaten him
The American economy: recessions and tealeaves The fallacious belief that layoffs could be avoided by maintaining wage earners' purchasing power was responsible for deepening and prolonging the Great Depression
A George Soros myth lives on The myth that George Soros broke the Pound has been solidly entrenched. But that's just what it is - a myth

Details here

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

ELSEWHERE

I suppose everyone is laughing about this: "France rolled out overwhelming military force Sunday to put down an explosion of anti-French violence in its former West African colony, deploying troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs that hunted house-to-house for foreigners. In the second of two stunning days that stood to alter French-Ivory Coast relations -- and perhaps Ivory Coast itself -- French forces seized strategic control of the largest city, commandeering airports and posting gunboats under bridges in the commercial capital, Abidjan."

Great English election result! The English just want to be English: "John Prestcott's cherished dream of English devolution was shattered last night when voters overwhelmingly rejected an elected assembly for the North East. The Deputy Prime Minister, was shocked and humiliated when voters threw out his proposals for a directly elected regional assembly in yesterday's referendum by 78 per cent, with only 22 per cent in favour... Despite a huge push by the Labour Party over the last 48 hours to get out their vote, the higher turn out in the end favoured the "no" camp, which was backed by the Tories and UKIP.... The Government is now expected to tear up its twelve-year-old plan to create eight or nine regional assemblies in England to mirror devolution in Scotland and Wales.

More evidence here to suggest that Arafart is dying of AIDS.

Leftists routinely claim that the American economy "traps" many people in poverty. This article shows that few Americans are in fact stuck permanently in poverty and that those who are can scarcely blame others for it.

There is a good post here saying what I have always said about Michael Moore -- that he is simply a clever and well-paid entertainer of the Left. Perhaps because of that, Moore is careful to avoid outright lies -- relying instead on distortions and innuendo. As this post shows, however, official Democrat election propaganda was not so squeamish.

But Moore is a Johnny-come-lately in the Leftist-entertainment business. Noam Chomsky has had the same shtick for years -- with similar lucrative results. There is a good summary of how reality-defying Chomsky is here -- which also notes how useful Chomsky is to the incessant Leftist need to appear "different".

On 3rd., I commented here about the 100,000 post-invasion civilian deaths in Iraq that Leftists are at present claiming. Wayne Lusvardi has put together some additional commentary on the claim here.

I have a good crop of posts up on GREENIE WATCH today

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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.

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



9 November, 2004

BACK TO ELECTION 2004: MY COMMENTS

My first comment is on this plaint from a Left activist: "Contrary to my predictions, we had had a relatively fair election and the American people (or something over half of them) had democratically voted for an extremist Christian regime... In the other America, we believe that killing all those Iraqis (not to mention Afghanis and, indirectly, Palestinians) is not only wrong but also terribly hazardous to our own security.... More important, though, we had better take a good hard look at what is happening in the Christian extremist America, dissect it and try to understand it from the inside out."

She could start by listening to what GWB was saying instead of inventing a non-existent bogeyman. Read what GWB actually said about abortion in the Presidential debates and tell me he is a Christian extremist. He's more a libertarian on the issue, in fact. But she's an illiterate anyway: The people of Afghanistan are Afghans. The Afghani is their currency.

My second point is that to regain Federal electability, the Democrats are going to have to do what the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party have already done -- marginalize the far-Left. The Dems know that of course or Kerry would not have presented himself as a GWB clone on practially all policies in the last election. But a last-minute conversion like that is just not convincing. There has to be real change, not cosmetic change. The British Labour party, for instance, was once the anti-nuclear and unilateral disarmament party. Now its leader is America's chief ally in the Iraq war. Quite a change! Just as is already the case in Britain and Australia, America's party of the Left needs to become just an alternative conservative party.

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BACK TO ELECTION 2004: OTHER COMMENTS

"Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him--one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results. But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched the "old media" --the New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC, and NBC--beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak".

Rove speaks: "Kerry's decision to vote for the $87 billion in funding for troops and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then deciding in October 2003 to vote against it, was a bonanza for the president's campaign, "the gift that kept on giving," Rove said. Bush's campaign featured the videotape in thousands of commercials around the country to paint Kerry as a flip-flopper. Rove played down the importance to the campaign of "moral values," which exit polls last Tuesday unexpectedly identified as a major consideration of many voters, especially those who voted for Bush. Rove said 34 percent of the voters were motivated by issues surrounding Iraq and the war on terror, compared with 30 percent motivated by moral values. "What essentially happened in this election was that people became concerned about three issues: first the war, then the economy, jobs and taxes and then moral values. And then everything else dropped off of the plate," he said... On one sideline row during the campaign, Rove said the president's tailor was devastated about a controversy over a box-shaped bulge in Bush's back that television cameras captured during the first debate. The mysterious bulge spawned speculation that Bush aides were feeding the president advice secretly through a radio receiver tucked under his suit jacket. "Nothing was under his jacket," Rove said".

A timely warning: "Democrats did well in the AAA league of politics, the state legislatures. Republicans have to pay attention not only to where they are gaining votes, but also to the states and demographic groups where they are losing them. Last week, more than 80% of the roughly 7,300 partisan legislative seats in the country were up for grabs, as elections for state legislators took place in 44 states. Before the election, Republicans had a narrow 60-seat aggregate nationwide lead in seats, the smallest any party had held since statistics have been recorded. Now the margin is even smaller, but this time Democrats are on top".

How the Catholic vote turned out in 2004: "Mr. Bush carried Ohio Catholics by 10 percentage points - 55 percent to 45 percent - over Sen. John Kerry.... Nationwide, the Catholic vote swung eight points from 2000, when 50 percent backed Al Gore to 47 percent for Mr. Bush. This year, it was 52 percent for the president and 47 percent for Mr. Kerry, a Catholic. "The change in the Catholic vote was crucial to the margin of victory," Mr. Cuccinelli said. .. Mr. Bush obliquely referred to the role Catholics and Protestant evangelicals played in his victory when he noted at a press conference yesterday that, "I am glad people of faith voted in this election." "

Overseas Leftists outraged too: "The re-election of President Bush dominated British newspapers Thursday, and many cast impartiality aside in reporting the result. 'How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?' the liberal Daily Mirror asked in a Page One headline. Inside, several pages of coverage were headed 'U.S. election disaster.' The Independent bore the front-page headline 'Four more years' on a black page with grim pictures including a hooded Iraqi prisoner and an orange-clad detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The left-leaning Guardian led its features section with a black page bearing the tiny words, 'Oh, God.' ... Across Europe, many newspapers expressed dismay at the prospect of another term for Bush... 'Oops -- they did it again,' Germany's left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper said in a front-page English headline. The cover of the Swiss newsmagazine Facts called Bush's re-election 'Europe's Nightmare.'

The investor vote: "The largest demographic shift in this country over the past 25 years is not the number of Americans whose parents speak Spanish. It is the number of Americans who own stocks directly. In 1978 only 17 percent of American adults owned stocks. Today, more than 60 percent of adults and 70 percent of those who voted in 2002 own stock. The "investor voter" has already changed politics in the past 4 years.... Low stock market values make investors demand solutions from politicians that will increases their wealth. Kerry has chosen sides. In the 1995 debate on capital-gains tax cuts he said, "This week defines the difference between them and us." It's not so wise to define 70 percent of voters as "them." It shows your political age."

Heartening Massachusetts win: "In an unprecedented landslide, approximately 85% voted for joint physical custody of children on Fathers & Families' non-binding ballot question. The lopsided margin of victory was greater than that of any elected official in Massachusetts, including John Kerry, Barney Frank, or Jim McGovern..." The wording: "Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation requiring that in all separation and divorce proceedings involving minor children, the court shall uphold the fundamental rights of both parents to the shared physical and legal custody of their children"

There is a rather remarkable map here which shows that the Democrat vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. By and large it was of course a "bought" vote: The vote of minorities bought with welfare dollars.

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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.

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



8 November, 2004

Just for a change, I am going to do all-Australian posts today -- but if you need some post-election commentary to keep you going, there is an excellent post here. I understand that the author has already got hate-mail about it!


ANTISEMITISM IN THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY

Just a few excerpts from an article by Barry Cohen, a former ALP Federal parliamentarian

I have often been asked if my being Jewish was ever an issue during my 20 years in Federal Parliament. Not to the best of my knowledge. I cannot recall a single anti-Semitic remark from either side of the House. That did not mean that everyone agreed with my views on Israel. Nor did I expect them to. However, while my views remain the same, the Labor Party's these days are very different....

But gradually, Labor's Left and more extremist elements, such as the Greens and Democrats, became increasingly shrill in their denunciation of Israel.... That trend has infected the ALP. The handful of pro-Palestinian supporters has grown steadily as the party has become dominated by the education mafia; former public servants and party union apparatchiks....

I'm sick of the calumny heaped on Israel - most of which is a pack of lies... I don't want even-handedness when it ought to be obvious to all but the blind that there is no moral equivalence between a country that seeks to defend its citizens from thousands of terrorist attacks, and the terrorists themselves. I want to hear Labor MPs stand up and be counted. I want to see an end to well-known Labor identities marching behind banners equating Israel with Nazism...

Silence on these issues isn't good enough for me. If people want to criticise Israel, fine - plenty of Israelis do. But let it be reasoned criticism, and if they want even-handedness let them also berate the Arab world for its denial of basic human rights for any of its citizens. Let's hear the Labor feminists take the Arab nations to task for their abominable treatment of women. Let's hear those Labor supporters, who are so loud in their denunciation of homophobia, demand an end to the barbaric treatment of gays. Let's also hear civil rights activists bemoan the lack of basic freedoms available to most of the 300 million Arabs in the 22 Arab countries...

Before the Iraq war one of the most senior NSW right-wing MPs told me: "I understand and support Israel's position, but in my group, I'm the only one." Soon after I told a Labor legend: "Anti-Semitism is now rampant in the Labor Party." I expected a vigorous denial. His response confirmed my worst fear: "I know," he said. For better or worse my character and life were shaped by the anti-Semitism I experienced as a boy and a young man. I was proud to belong to a party that fought all forms of prejudice. Not any longer.

There is a collection of comments on Barry Cohen's article here. Note the claim to virtue from dopey Leftist spokeswoman Plibersek: "In addition, I am proud of my statements criticising the Taliban for its treatment of women in Afghanistan and the mullahs for their repression of democracy in Iran. I do not believe these criticisms make me anti-Arab". Since neither Afghans nor Iranians are Arabs, she was on safe ground there! (Comments via Fabian's Hammer).

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ELSEWHERE

Australian politics have always seemed more class-oriented than American politics. Australia lacks the race factor and has never had any equivalent to the old conservative Southern Democrats. An article I have just put online is therefore interesting. It shows that by the 1970s even Australia had lost almost all the class polarization in its political system. Working class people by then were just as likely to vote conservative as Leftist. Cultural factors were already more important. In both America and Australia, of course, the process of change has since then progressed even further -- with the major Leftist parties reversing themselves completely -- now being parties of the social and economic elite rather than of the worker.

I said it first!: "A leading Indonesian scientist challenged the widely publicised theory that fossilised bones found on the eastern island of Flores were from a previously unknown species of human. Professor Teuku Jacob, chief palaeontologist from the state Gajah Mada University, will carry out tests to prove the fossils are from a sub-species of homo sapiens -- "an ordinary human being, just like us"... "It is not a new species. It is a sub-species of homo sapiens classified under the Austrolomelanesid race. If it's not a new species, why should it be given a new name?" the professor said." As soon as I saw the initial reports on this, I said that these Indonesian pygmies were probably relatives of the Northern Australian pygmies. See here and here for my relevant posts on the matter.

Welfare reform needed: "Of the 14 million Australians of working age, an amazing 14 per cent depend on welfare. Back in 1969 the figure was only 3 per cent. This affects the economy because these people are not contributing - they're taking money from those in paid employment. A majority of those on welfare are on disability or sole parent support pensions. To put it bluntly, many of them shouldn't be. Let's start with disability support. The numbers have more than tripled since 1980 - to 670,000 - and now account for a whopping $7.6 billion per year. Of course, many of these people are genuinely disabled and deserve our support. But many aren't - unless the level of disability has skyrocketed since 1980, and there is no medical evidence to suggest this is the case. What has happened is that it's been made much easier to get the pension. The two biggest categories are depression and bad backs, which are notoriously difficult to prove, or disprove.... The last Labor government began this increase around 1991, shunting people from unemployment benefits to the pension to make the unemployment figures look better.... This is not just about the economy. Working-age people on welfare for no good reason are more likely to be depressed. Their sense of self-worth is low. Their children, compared with children from working families, are far more likely to become homeless, to break the law, and to end up on welfare.

Australian book publishing is failing our society badly by publishing far too narrow and turgidly repetitive a range of viewpoints, especially on politics and foreign policy.... How can it be that here we already have a welter of biographies of Mark Latham, who has yet to achieve ministerial office of any kind but only one, highly unsatisfactory, biography of John Howard, soon to become Australia's second longest serving prime minister? In Australia almost every book dealing with foreign policy, especially Iraq, begins with the premise that Howard is bad, Bush is worse, the war on terror is a con, the war in Iraq was based on a lie, Australia's closeness to Bush hurts us in Asia, and so on. There is a reasonable amount of disagreement within those positions, but nothing to challenge the consensus... By accepting the absurd premise that there is something inherently evil about the Australian Government, publishers seem to drop all editorial standards. Any rhetorical and emotional excess is justified. There is no need to marshal facts for an argument. If there is any research in most of these books, it consists of assembling newspaper clippings to illustrate the predetermined thesis.... it's just a virulent and deeply unintelligent stream of abuse aimed at anyone on the conservative side of politics in the US or Australia. You have to conclude that Australian publishers have no standards of honesty, factual accuracy or elementary decency, that they will publish absolutely anything, no matter how bad, if the author is well known and is attacking conservatives.

There is a new Australian blog here written by Father Peter Wales, an Anglo-Catholic. I have corresponded with Peter for a while off and on and, unlike most of the Anglican clergy, I judge him to be a true man of God. His post here, however fills me with rage at American judges.

I rarely put up pictures or graphics of any kind but I have just put up here or here) a picture of a man in a great hat!

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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7 November, 2004

Apologies for continuing to focus on the election but I think this was the election that will ensure that the Anglosphere wins the world war it is presently engaged in so I think that is kind-of important


THE "HICK CHRISTIANS" MYTH

I touched on this yesterday but I hope to sink it altogether today. For a start, I do NOT intend to dignify with any counter-argument the sickening denigrations of American Christians that have been spewing from Leftists in recent days -- describing these good people as "hicks", "ignorant", "jihadists" etc. I think the reality is too plain to need any defence from me. And how the sad souls of the Left think such language will help them win the Christian votes that they will need if ever they are to win power again entirely escapes me. So why should I do anything to stop American Leftists from destroying their own future? They are, in fact, an excellent example of the self-destructive nature of hate. How much better off Christians are with the wisdom of Matthew chapter 5 to guide them. I am an atheist and it still inspires me! Leftists claim to be idealists but they don't know what idealism is until they have read those words.

As I pointed out yesterday, the vote for GWB was a clear vote for solid conservatism so it is of great interest to see which demographic groups swung in that direction. I noted yesterday that Hispanics were one such group but have a look through the statistics listed here and you will see that the swings were just about the opposite of what the haters on the Left claim. The swing to Bush actually occurred in almost ALL large demographic groups, including Africans, Hispanics, Jews, Catholics and women -- with a notable EXCEPTION being Protestant Christians! (Down from 63% in 2000 to 59% in 2004). Polysigh has arrived at similar conclusions.

And so has David Brooks: "Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them. In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top. This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.... The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums."

And the Leftists call conservatives stupid! If conservatives are stupid, Leftists are fact-free! Not that that's any news.

Leftists have of course tried to console themselves in various other ways for their loss but one of the most amusing such efforts is the frequent claim that Bush's margin over Kerry was small (What's 3 million people to a Leftist? A mere bagatelle. It's the THEORY that matters, stupid!) and that America is still therefore roughly 50/50 divided between Left and Right. The Leftist talent for self-deception is legendary but that one takes the cake. It overlooks their candidate's ENTIRE campaign! Kerry presented himself as being simply a more skillful version of Bush. His proclaimed policies were virtually the same as Bush's. Only his history -- e.g. his Senate voting record -- identified him as the far-Leftist he is. So lots of people would have bought that bill of goods and voted for Kerry simply as an alternative conservative candidate. Lots of Kerry votes were therefore "stolen" conservative votes -- won by deception! The real Leftist candidate was "screamer" Dean and the Dems didn't dare run HIM against Bush. If they had run Dean, they would have seen that the Left/Right divide among Americans was MUCH more extreme than 50/50!

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OTHER COMMENTS ON THE ELECTION

The media lost: "Sen. John Kerry has gotten the white-glove treatment from the press, garnering more praise from journalists than any other presidential candidate in the last quarter-century, according to a new analysis of almost 500 news stories released today by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "It's not just that John Kerry has gotten better press than President Bush before this election, he's gotten better press than anyone else since 1980. That's significant," said Bob Lichter, director of the D.C.-based nonpartisan research group. "Kerry also got better press than anyone else in the days before the primaries as well," Mr. Lichter added. In October alone, Mr. Kerry had a "record-breaking 77 percent positive press evaluations," compared with 34 percent positive for Mr. Bush... But Mr. Bush didn't get the absolute worst press on record. With only 9 percent positive stories in 1984, President Reagan got the most negative treatment by news outlets on record, the study says."

The elitism never stops: "When President Bush's poll numbers surged in April after a press conference where his performance was derided by the press and the chattering classes, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry was baffled ... He said with a sigh to one top staffer, 'I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot.'"

Even the Leftist Nation says it: "The Democratic elite are out of touch, as Republicans claim. They have lost reliable connections to ordinary people, including some long loyal constituencies".

Jeff Jacoby: "Hatred lost. For four years, Americans watched and listened as President Bush was demonized with a savagery unprecedented in modern American politics. For four years, they saw him likened to Hitler and Goebbels, heard his supporters called brownshirts and racists, his administration dubbed "the 43rd Reich." For four years they took it all in: "Bush" spelled with a swastika instead of an 's', the depictions of the president as a drooling moron or a homicidal liar, the poisonous insults aimed at anyone who might consider voting for him. And then on Tuesday they turned out to vote, and handed the haters a crushing repudiation."

Anti-illegal immigration win: "Arizonans have voted heavily for the ballot initiative that aims to stop illegal aliens from receiving involuntary taxpayer subsidies, voting in elections etc. Proposition 200's grassroots triumph in the teeth of the united opposition of the entire political establishment and its media mouthpieces is, as with California's similar Proposition 187 ten years ago, a further illustration of the extraordinary power of the immigration issue."

Democrats up against it: "Of all the hard facts Democrats have to consider today, the mass mobilization of evangelical Christians must certainly be the most painful. It's easy enough for the party to produce GOP-clone positions on issues ranging from Iraq to education to "saving" Social Security. But the Democrats will never be able to turn out the anti-gay marriage vote (even as they lack the conviction to field a strong pro-gay marriage candidate). It's getting harder to see just what the Democrats can turn out. The party remains in thrall to unattractive special interests that don't matter anymore: unions, teachers, trial lawyers, and so on"

The Guardian loses: "Thank you, Lady Antonia Fraser! In 2000, Clark County, Ohio went to Al Gore. This time round, after the local citizenry were targeted by the Guardian to be the beneficiaries of Lady Antonia's voting advice, and John le Carr‚'s and Richard Dawkins's and many others, Clark County went to ...George W. Bush!"

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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6 November, 2004

MY ELECTION REFLECTIONS

The heavy-duty pontificating about what the election result means is already well underway so let me try to spoil the party by pointing out the obvious: In 2000 GWB tried to learn from Clinton's apparently very successful centrist policies and campaigned as a "compassionate conservative". He lost the popular vote by half a million but thanks to the small-state bias of the electoral college he still got the job. In 2004, by contrast, he campaigned on security and morality -- classic conservative causes. And what a difference it made! He won the popular vote by over 3 million. So can anybody doubt that in voting for Bush it was good solid conservatism that was being chosen and that the Anglosphere is basically conservative? It was the conservative element in Clinton's appeal that turned the tide for him; it is the conservative element in Tony Blair's appeal that will continue to win the day for him and it was certainly thoroughly conservative policies that recently won the day for John Howard in Australia.

The case of Australia is particularly useful in seeing how it all works. For over a decade the Australian Labor Party followed policies (privatization, tariff reduction etc.) that were in many ways more conservative than the policies of our nominal conservatives. And that got the Labor party a long term as the government of Australia. Eventually, however, John Howard came along with even more conservative policies and tossed Labor out. And he has recently won his fourth election in a row. Howard was never successful enough to gain control of the Senate, however -- until the last election. In the last election the Labor party took a lurch to the Left (more socialized medicine, attacking private schools, bringing home the troops etc) and got the lowest share of the vote for over 70 years. So now Australian conservatives DO control our Senate.

So what it all shows is that Leftist parties in the Anglosphere can only succeed at elections by being an alternative conservative party. Which is also why John Kerry pretended to be a gun-lover and a Christian -- when he clearly knew nothing about either.

The predominant Leftist "explanation" for the defeat of Kerry seems to be that it can only have been a big turnout by those dreadful religious "hicks" that did it -- virtually claiming that there is no such thing as an intelligent Christian and quite ignoring the fact that the born-again Christian in the White House has an MBA from Harvard. Let me note again that the Australian comparison is instructive. In the recent Australian elections, the conservatives did at least as well as George Bush -- even grabbing complete control of our Senate for the first time. But very few Australians are religious so there is no Left/Right religious polarization in Australia to explain all the new conservative voters. All the outspoken church leaders in Australia were in fact AGAINST John Howard, as far as I can recollect (Who noticed?). But if the major conservative parties were not particularly representative of Christians, there WAS another party that DID represent Christians -- the Family First party. And it got only 2% of the vote! So with such a tiny Christian vote, Australia should, on Leftist reasoning, have elected a bunch of near-Communists. In fact, of course, Australia is in many ways more conservative than the USA -- with BOTH major political parties (Left and Right) completely ruling out any form of homosexual marriage long before the election (as just one instance of that). So you DON'T need a big "homophobic" and "fundamentalist" turnout to get a big conservative win in Australia and it would be pretty surprising if the American result could realistically be explained that way -- given the great similarities between the two countries on everything but religion. The big swing to GWB seems to have been among the Hispanics, in fact. See below.

But let the American Left continue with their febrile Christian-bashing. It will only entrench them as losers -- and Christians have had 20 centuries of experience in putting up with ignorant abuse.

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MORE ELECTION REFLECTIONS

My vote for the most amusing post-election comment so far -- from the NYT, of course: "Caving in to depression and a sense of helplessness should not be an option when the country is speeding toward an abyss" (Thanks to Dick McDonald for the link)

There is another amusing NYT article by Garry Wills that is apparently very popular in Leftist circles. Wills claims that America is as intolerant, oppressive and irrational as the Muslim countries. Anybody who is so far out of touch with reality as that would have to be an American college professor. If he told such falsehoods about his own society in a real Islamic country he would be dead. As it is, I am sure he was handsomely paid for his delusions.

The Times of London shows a lot better perspective than the rubbish the NYT prints: "It is absurd to believe that Bush's re-election represents the triumph of a Christian fundamentalism... The world did not end on Tuesday. A great darkness did not descend across civilisation. America is not about to embark on a biblically-mandated jihad against the enemies of evangelical Christianity around the world. American soldiers will not be enforcing Washington's imperium on your towns and villages any time soon".

Hispanics: "The biggest reason for Bush's victory was that he finally cracked the Democratic stranglehold on the Hispanic vote. While Gore won 65 percent of the Latino community, holding Bush to a mere 35 percent, Kerry only carried the Hispanic vote by 55-45, paving the way for the Bush victory. Since Hispanics cast 12 percent of the vote in 2004, their ten point movement to the GOP gave the president an additional 1.2 percent of the national vote. Take a similar amount away from Kerry and the Latinos gave Bush a 2.4 percent edge in the general election balloting".

"Healing? "After conceding the election to President Bush, John Kerry encouraged the American people to "begin the healing" and said it was time for us to come together and unite. It is not that easy, Johnny Boy. Who are we suppose to unite with? The people who vandalized Republican headquarters around the nation? Those who sprayed bullets through GOP offices, hurled rocks and cinder blocks through windows, sprayed racist and anti-Bush graffiti on walls outside and broke laptops and other equipment inside? Or just unite with those large groups of unkempt hippies who attempted to overtake Republican headquarters around the nation? What about the people who vandalized and egged cars that had Republican bumper stickers on them, or those who slashed the tires of dozens of GOP Campaign vehicles election morning? Is this what we are suppose to unite with?"

Lots of people liked the county map of the election results. It shows that even within States, it is mostly the big city areas that voted for Kerry. The map is reproduced here together with some comments. Michelle Malkin has the map up too.

Hee hee!: "European leaders struggled to prevent tensions over Iraq and transatlantic relations flaring out of control last night as President Bush's election victory dominated an EU summit. While Tony Blair accused Europe of being in denial about America, President Chirac of France withdrew from a lunch with Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi leader, who accused France of being a "spectator" refusing to get involved in his country's reconstruction. President Bush's re-election has upset his critics in Europe, particularly in France, which had led the anti-war effort. Yesterday French politicians insisted that Mr Bush's re-election showed the need to turn the EU into a superpower to counteract the US."

The big "October Surprise" that the Left intended for the election was the story about the lost Iraqi explosives. The L.A. Times says that the "explosives" removed from Al QaQaa in Iraq "are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon". A professor of chemistry, however, says that the chemicals concerned were not explosives at all. See here for details. Though why the Left ever thought a possible army stuff-up was the fault of GWB has always escaped me. Do they think he is there in Iraq every day supervising every single platoon of soldiers?

The election has put my Leftists as Elitists site into high gear. I have recently put up some more great quotes there.

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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5 November, 2004

THE WRAP-UP

Just imagine how Michael Moore and George Soros are feeling now. Justice has been done.

We do live in a better world now. The Islamicists are pipsqueaks compared to the menace that was once posed by the old Soviet Union. And just look at this news item now: "Russian President Vladimir Putin led world leaders' tributes to George W. Bush's victory in the U.S. presidential race, saying it meant Americans had not allowed themselves to be cowed by terrorists. "If Bush wins... I can only feel joy that the American people did not allow itself to be intimidated, and made the most sensible decision," Putin said at a Kremlin news conference". I have always had great respect for the long-suffering people of Russia and it is a joy to see that the artificial antagonism between them and the people of the Anglosphere has now ended. It is a considerable irony that the two biggest Slavic countries -- Russia and Poland -- now seem to have greater affection for America than Western Europe does. Note the disgusting comment by the Swedish Prime Minister in the same news item.

There is a lot of talk in the media about a "divided" America. See for example this rubbishy article. But Polipundit notes what will be obvious to everyone but the media: "I don't think it's an "bitterly divided country" when: 1. The Republican president just won over 50 percent for the first time in 16 years. He won more raw votes than anyone ever has, including Reagan. 2. The GOP has 55 senators. 3. The GOP has over 230 House members. 4. There are at least 28 Republican governors, including those of the 4 largest states. 5. The majority of state legislators and legislatures are Republican. 6. The GOP has just performed miracles, like ousting a Senate caucus leader for the first time since 1952, and getting a Republican senator elected from Louisiana for the first time ever".

And as Neumayr says: "What does all this talk of division really add up to? Aren't reporters really just saying that they feel divided from the country they cover? If the country is as divided as they eagerly assert, why don't the Democrats control half the branches of government? Why did they lose, not gain, votes in Florida? Why did Bush improve on his popular vote numbers so significantly? The country-is-divided chatter is not a journalistic report, but a wish -- the media's attempt to create the appearance of division so as to create division which might obstruct the progress of conservatism in the country."

But there is nonetheless still a very clear geographical division, as this map shows. The people who think they are superior and the big-city welfare clients whose votes were bought got together to vote for Kerry.

I think John Kerry's concession was one of the few good things he has ever done. He certainly showed more class than his odious litigation-loving vice-presidential sidekick who seemed determined to spin the matter out forever. And he put himself well above Gore too. Note this comment on conceding defeat: "They say Nixon had no class, but in 1960 he put the good of the country ahead of his own ambition and conceded a very close and controversial election to John Kennedy. A shift of a few thousand votes in Illinois and Texas would have given Nixon the presidency. In both places voter fraud was legendary and always on the Democratic side. Until the day he died, Nixon believed he had won in 1960. It seems to be one of the few things he really believed sincerely. Nobody will ever know whether he was right. The election was too close to call and in Chicago they knew how to steal elections too well to be caught. It is not so much that we are in new territory with elections, but we have become much more litigious. Al Gore should have given up after the first recount for the sake of the country. Despite myths that have been repeated endlessly, he had no reason to believe in widespread Republican fraud. Democrats ran all the disputed counties and the infamous butterfly ballot was designed by a Democrat. Any fraud is much more likely to have benefited them".

A good summary of election night here. Excerpt: "In a graphic demonstration of how strong the Republicans' lock has become on the South, only one generation ago the preserve of the Democrat Party, even John Edwards, Mr Kerry's running-mate, saw his own state of North Carolina vote for Mr Bush by 56 per cent to 43, the same margin of victory for Mr Bush four years ago. Mr Edwards's own senate seat, which he vacated to focus on his initial bid for the Democrat presidential nomination last year, went Republican by nearly 200,000 votes. Democrats lost all five of the Southern senate seats they were defending"

Some Democrat "clients" reject them: "But before the entire Bush constituency is dismissed as merely a collection of religious fanatics, armed to the teeth and living in the hills, it should be remembered that the army of secular Americans is about the same size as those for whom cultural conservatism is the essence of their politics.... The crucial additional building blocks in the Bush coalition were drawn from beyond the stereotype of the Republican electorate. Mr Bush performed notably better among three categories of Americans on Tuesday than he had done four years earlier. These were women, the elderly and Hispanic citizens. The Hispanic electorate has been wooed by the White House for the whole of Mr Bush's tenure. He reaped a substantial reward for his efforts, not least in Florida. The Democratic Party, once the ultimate "rainbow coalition", has thus lost its hold on female electors and its dominance over a rapidly expanding ethic minority".

Hey! How come he's not a "neocon"?: "Mr Rove can claim more credit for Mr Bush's re-election triumph than anyone other than the President. The strategist who masterminded Mr Bush's three previous elections, two for the Texas governorship, was always going to emerge from this presidential election as either an electoral genius or a snake oil salesman. The strategy and tactics were his alone. He shaped the battleground and crafted the message. He recruited and marshalled the troops and issued their orders. And he got it all just about right". [He doesn't sound like a Jewish intellectual recently converted from Trotskyism to me! He has no university degree, has been a Republican since age 9 and isn't Jewish. But silly me! If he has big influence he MUST be a neocon!]

Promethean Antagonist is from "flyover country" and comments: "A pompous weasel who collaborated with communists and established a record of having done absolutely nothing for the last 30 years, was defeated by the voters of "flyover country" -- those dreaded commoners who don't know names like, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida have rejected George McGovern Jr. The Left and the international spoiled brat brigade will wring their hands in horror..... The greatest irony of Bush's win is that he may not have won if the phony renegades of Leftist elitism hadn't screeched their nonsense for over a year now. To folks like Michael Moore, Moveon.org, Steve Earl, Bruce Springsteen et al. (the list is really long), ya blew it! and you have only yourselves to blame."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again and this week's host voted for Bush so pay him a visit!

I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists some amusing excerpts from elitist reactions to Bush's victory.

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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4 November, 2004

HOORAY!

The people of the United States have chosen a humble, sincere and moderate man to be their President again. Great to see both a solid red heartland and Bush ahead by a few million in the popular vote as well! My favourite media comment of the night? When the map was already very red, Dan Rather said: "Nobody is saying that Bush is not going to win this". How grudging can you get? The best comment from my readers so far? "The only shocking thing is that 48% of Americans could bring themselves to vote for that freak of nature, the gigolo"

And Daschle was defeated too. What a great bonus!

There were a lot of conservative bloggers and pundits who abandoned President Bush in the last six months or so. I wonder how all the anti-Bushies (Left and Right) feel now? I think the Leftists in particular should be conceding that GWB was right. In their amoral perspective, right and wrong is DEFINED in terms of power. The backpedalling among anti-Bush conservatives should be amusing too. And it's particularly nice for it to be clear that GWB owes his victory to the people, who voted for him despite huge opposition from the pundits and would-be manipulators in the media who think that they know it all. Reality has overcome theory, spin and lies.

And what about all those loonies who have been saying that GWB's policies are all the work of the "neocons"? I wonder if it might now occur to them that GWB did what he did because it was the right thing to do? Over half the American voting population seems to think he did. But I guess the people are just "rabble" to conspiracy theorists -- "manipulated" by those devilishly cunning Jewish neocons. It was exactly such paranoid thinking that started Hitler off. Read Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf if you doubt it. But I have commented at some length on the neocon myth previously.

Let me predict the predominant Leftist spin on this election result. It will be that: "Osama bin Laden won it for Bush". There is of course a glimmer of truth in that. GWB kept saying that Osama and his minions were a threat while the idiotic John Kerry kept denying it (insofar as anybody could work out what Kerry was saying). And then Osama popped up on TV saying: "I am a threat". That it was actually Kerry's denial of the obvious that made Osama's statement noteworthy will not be mentioned. The crazies will even say that Bush was "in cahoots" with bin Laden -- and bin Laden is really a Jew, of course.

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ELSEWHERE

Good news from the Australian elections too: The Christian party has finally squeaked into our Senate, squeezing out the Greenies. "The fledgling Family First Party today made political history by winning a Senate seat. Steve Fielding was announced the winner of the final Victorian Senate place by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) about 12.15pm (AEDT) today. He emerged victorious after the distribution of final preferences by the AEC, more than three weeks after the October 9 poll. Mr Fielding, a manager with a superannuation fund, is the first person to be elected to federal parliament from the Christian-aligned Family First, which contested its first federal poll this year.... Flanked by his wife Susan and three children immediately after hearing the result, Mr Fielding declared it a historic victory. "This is an historic occasion in Australian political history with Family First being elected to the federal parliament in the Senate."

Historian Paul Johnson is good on the lessons from Iraq. One excerpt: "We have been reminded that France is not to be trusted at any time, on any issue. The British have learned this over 1,000 years of acrimonious history, but it still comes as a shock to see how badly the French can behave, with their unique mixture of shortsighted selfishness, long-term irresponsibility, impudent humbug and sheer malice. Americans are still finding out--the hard way--that loyalty, gratitude, comradeship and respect for treaty obligations are qualities never exhibited by French governments. All they recognize are interests, real or imaginary. French support always has to be bought. What the Americans and British now have to decide is whether formal alliances that include France as a major partner are worth anything at all, or if they are an actual encumbrance in times of danger".

Dennis Prager has some short sharp answers to a bit of superficial Leftist cleverness called: "Things You Have to Believe to Vote Republican Today." Three excerpts: "No Christian I have ever talked to ever said that either Jesus or they hate homosexuals. Only demagogues confuse opposition to same-sex marriage with hatred of homosexuals" and "Few big businesses have the best interests of the public at heart. No conservative has ever argued otherwise. But liberals believe that big government and big unions do" and "it is entirely dishonorable to charge President Bush with lying about WMDs in Iraq. Everyone, including Democrats and the intelligence services of Russia, Britain and France, believed Saddam Hussein had them. It is the great lie of our time that President Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq. To act upon the knowledge one has at the time is not a lie. It is the behavior of a responsible leader."

Myths about the Crusades : "The Crusaders were not unprovoked aggressors, greedy marauders or medieval colonialists, as portrayed in some history books. In fact, Thomas Madden, chair of St. Louis University's history department and author of "A Concise History of the Crusades," contests that the Crusaders were a defensive force that did not profit from their ventures by earthly riches or land.... From the time of Mohammed, Muslims had sought to conquer the Christian world. They did a pretty good job of it, too. After a few centuries of steady conquests, Muslim armies had taken all of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor and most of Spain. In other words, by the end of the 11th century the forces of Islam had captured two-thirds of the Christian world. Palestine, the home of Jesus Christ; Egypt, the birthplace of Christian monasticism; Asia Minor, where St. Paul planted the seeds of the first Christian communities -- these were not the periphery of Christianity but its very core. And the Muslim empires were not finished yet. They continued to press westward toward Constantinople, ultimately passing it and entering Europe itself. As far as unprovoked aggression goes, it was all on the Muslim side. At some point what was left of the Christian world would have to defend itself or simply succumb to Islamic conquest".

Inborn differences. How awful! "Healthy infants older than three months who cry incessantly for no apparent reason may be at risk for lower IQ and behavior problems in their childhood years, new study findings suggest.... This prolonged crying after the colic stage was associated with poorer results on tests that measured cognitive development both in infancy and at 5 years old, Rao and his colleagues report in Archives of Disease in Childhood. At 6 months of age, for example, infants with prolonged crying scored nearly five points lower on an intelligence test than those in the comparison group, who did not show any signs of colic at any age, and lower than those whose colic did not persist beyond three months. At 5 years old, the prolonged criers had lower performance and verbal IQ scores than the comparison group, and also performed worse on tests measuring eye-hand coordination, the report indicates. These children were also more likely to be hyperactive and to have discipline problems than their peers".

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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3 November, 2004

WHY NOVEMBER 2ND?

In Australia, we vote on Saturdays because most people have at least Saturday afternoon off work -- and that means that voting doesn't clash with normal routine. So why do Americans mess up their work routine to vote on a Tuesday? One of my readers researched it for me and advises as follows:

"The Tuesday after the first Monday in November was initially established by federal law in 1845 for the appointment of presidential electors in every fourth year. In 1875, lawmakers established this day for electing representatives in every even numbered year. In 1914, it also became the day for electing U.S. senators.

Why early November? For much of U.S. history, America was a predominantly agrarian society. Lawmakers therefore took into account that November was perhaps the most convenient month for farmers and rural workers to be able to travel to the polls. The fall harvest was over, (spring was planting time and summer was taken up with working the fields and tending the crops) but in the majority of the nation the weather was still mild enough to permit travel over unimproved roads.

Why Tuesday? Since most residents of rural America had to travel a significant distance to the county seat in order to vote, Monday was not considered reasonable since many people would need to begin travel on Sunday. This would, of course, have conflicted with church services and Sunday worship.

Why the first Tuesday after the first Monday? Lawmakers wanted to prevent election day from falling on the first of November for two reasons. First, November 1st is All Saints Day, a Holy Day of Obligation for Roman Catholics. Second, most merchants were in the habit of doing their books from the preceding month on the 1st. Apparently, Congress was worried that the economic success or failure of the previous month might prove an undue influence on the vote!"

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ELSEWHERE

Much has been made of an article in The Lancet (summary reproduced here) which estimates that there have been more than 100,000 deaths in Iraq that were due to the invasion. Various conservative writers have criticized the study and various Leftists (e.g. here) have replied. Nobody, however, seems to have commented on the fact that the findings were a product of cluster sampling. The major fault I see with the study is that estimating low-incidence phenomena via cluster samples is inherently dodgy. I have had many findings derived from cluster samples reported in the academic journals so I know a little bit about it. You just have to get one or two clusters being a-typical (either by chance or intentionally) to arrive at totally distorted results. Basing such an important conclusion on a sample-size of only 33 is really quite ludicrous. I have used as few as 10 clusters in some of my surveys but I was concerned only to find whether some effect existed at all. I was not trying to estimate it precisely. All that aside, however, who doubts that wars kill people? And who doubts that the deaths in a war have to be offset against the deaths that might otherwise have occured if the war were not fought? If you believe that such offsetting should not be done, you would also have to say that Britain should have said "We surrender" to Hitler.

Gay Patriot has up a picture of a good doggy comment on the election.

Jobs: "Our unemployment rate, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put at 5.4 percent in September, is one of the lowest in the world and in our history. France's unemployment rate is 9.4 percent, Germany's 9.9 percent and Italy's 8.6 percent. Our Canadian neighbor's is 6.6 percent. The only reason for today's hysteria over jobs is because it is an election year, and one of the ways politicians gain power is to create fear among the electorate. The next time you hear a politician whining about our "awful" job climate, ask him which European country we should look to for guidance in job creation. The fact of business is that our country is the world's leader not only in job creation but in terms of where the world wants to invest its money.

Nazism lives: "As hard as they may try, some Muslim leaders in Western countries are unable to camouflage their hatred for Israel, even in public. Like an underground geyser, these feelings of animosity toward the Jewish state eventually burst their bonds and gush to the surface -- from behind the fa‡ade of tolerance and respectability these sham representatives know they have to adopt in order to operate in our societies. The most recent outburst of anti-Israeli enmity from a "respected" Muslim leader occurred only last week when Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, one of the largest and most influential Muslim groups in Canada, stunned television viewers with outrageous comments that supported murdering Israelis. Revealing his true colors toward the Jewish state, Elmrasy said, on The Michael Coren Show, that all adult Israelis of military age, including women, are legitimate targets for suicide bombers, since they are eligible for military service".

A Leftist's view of why he is in politics: "Although politics does not necessarily provide excitement or power, it does provide a ready-made identity, one where your sense of who you are is sharply defined against "the other". For anyone with an underdeveloped sense of self-esteem, this is a lifeline, providing a short cut to coherence and purpose. In the midst of all its supposed drama, politics provides a certainty that is enormously comforting".

Muslims a problem in China too: "Violent clashes between members of the Muslim Hui ethnic group and the majority Han group left nearly 150 people dead and forced authorities to declare martial law in a section of Henan Province in central China, journalists and witnesses in the region said today. The fighting flared late last week and continued into the weekend after a Hui taxi driver fatally struck a 6-year-old Han girl, prompting recriminations between different ethnic groups in neighboring villages, these people said. One person who was briefed on the incident by the police said that 148 people had been killed, including 18 police officers sent to quell the violence.

Conservative humorist Imre Saluszinski turns out to be an admirer of Bob Dylan. Not as strange as you think when you realize that Bob Dylan always rejected the Leftist embrace of him and was in fact in his heyday an admirer of none other than the very conservative Republican, Barry Goldwater!

Kevin MacDonald argues that members of America's majority culture should be just as keen to promote their rights and identity as members of minority groups are.

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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2 November, 2004

LEFTIST DOUBLE STANDARDS AGAIN

Email from a reader

Here's another example-- as if you needed more-- about the ego-predominant locus of moral control among the left. Basically it is a parallel between Kerry's "outsourcing" comment about Tora Bora and abortion.

As you stated, if Kerry considers a third party as an "ally"-- collaborating, networking, dialoguing, "caring and sharing", etc.-- then the process is lionized and embraced. If he wishes to denigrate the contribution of a third-party ally, it's "outsourcing" and "the coalition of the coerced and the bribed." Never mind that the assistance from either type of ally may be identical.

With abortion the issue it is very similar. If a pregnant woman WANTS her baby, it's all about maternity leave, women-as-special, give me my paid time off (better to be for a year, as in Sweden), driving a minivan with "Baby on Board" sign in the window, play dates, preschool, and "my Devon is the most important little person in the world", etc. Let's do it all For the CHILDREN.

If this is an "undesired" pregnancy, it's just a "blob of tissue", "obligate parasite", "reproductive right" (for women only, of course), zero-population-growth, save-the-planet decision "between a woman and her doctor and her God". Never mind that these two "definitions" pertain to the same baby.

I believe the Left's incessant "For the Children" meme represents not only hiding behind the child-proxy to disguise their selfish policies, but also a reaction-formation against their desire to sacrifice a child for their own "lifestyle" AND a projection of their own childish self-absorbed desire to be protected from life's exigencies.

The Left lacks any core principle-- as you have maintained consistently-- other than solipsism. "It's all about MEMEMEMEMEMEME, and my definition of reality trumps yours. Only an idiot can believe differently from me." -- And if I change my mind tomorrow, only a rigid, inflexible idiot fails to understand my nuanced approach to life.

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ELSEWHERE

Democrats -- the "fat-cat" party: "Democrats: the party of the little guy. Republicans: the party of the wealthy. Those images of America's two major political wings have been frozen for generations.... No more. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys"--ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans--began moving into the Republican column. And big chunks of America's rich elite--financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software millionaires, entertainers--drifted into the Democratic Party.... It is "becoming harder by the day to take the Democrats seriously as the party of the common man," writes columnist Daniel Henninger. "The party's primary sources of support have become trial lawyers and Wall Street financiers. It is becoming a party run by a new class of elites who make fast money--$25 million for 30 days work on a movie, millions (even billions) winning lawsuits against doctors...millions to do arithmetic for a business merger."... Federal Election Commission data show that many of the very wealthiest political players are now in the Democratic column.... And the money on the Kerry side has come much more from rich individuals, while Bush has relied on flocks of small donors. So which is the party of the people now?"

Australia's big Muslim neighbour: "Newly-elected Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said he would consider becoming a globe-trotting advocate for moderate Islam, promoting peace in hotspots such as the Middle East. Yudhoyono said he wanted Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, to be a model for moderate Islamic democracy".

Australians and Americans know how to work: "Australia is a land of workaholics, ranking with the US and rivalling the Japanese as the world's hardest workers.... the International Labour Organisation says one in five employees in Australia, New Zealand and the US works at least 50 hours a week. Australian employees work twice as hard as Europeans, with just a 10th of European workers putting in such long working hours. Only in Japan, where 28.1 per cent of employees work 49 hours or more a week and New Zealand 21.3 per cent, do people work longer."

There is now an academic journal of Ayn Rand studies

Anti-Protester thinks Leftists work harder for their cause and are better organized. Seeing that power is their sole aim in life, that figures.

Do you fancy 'a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power'? It's Mao's little red book, of course. Fabian's Hammer notes the still great reverence in the West for history's greatest mass-murderer.

Michael Darby is online again with some notes about the dishonest character of John Kerry and some history showing that Clinton too believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

AstuteBlogger notes: "The Left trots out ACTORS to be their leading lights; Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Garofolo, Danny Glover, Jessica Lange, etc., etc., etc. and so on. WEIRD, AIN'T IT!? The Left criticizes real, experienced political leaders (Reagan had been a politician for decades before becoming president, and the Governor of California; Bush had defeated sitting governor Ann Richardson to become a two-term Republican Governor of Texas) - who lead boldly and who courageously confront and defeat tyranny, and the Left derides them for being mere "ACTORS.""

I have just put online an interesting article on the psychology of Jihad (Also here).

I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists some derogatory comments by Tom Wolfe about the Leftist elite of New York City.

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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1 November, 2004

ENCORE MONSIEUR KOHN KERRY

John Kerry sometimes quotes the scripture: "Faith without works is dead" (James 2:17). This post points out that by that criterion Kerry's own faith is very hollow indeed.

Jeff Jacoby on Kerry's flip-flops: "Bush, unlike Kerry, has the courage of his convictions. He can take a strong stand and not run away from it when the political winds shift. On the big issues, the crucial issues, he is a decisive man who means what he says -- and who isn't afraid to say it even when his listeners disagree. For a nation going to the polls in wartime, no issue matters more than character. Kerry has much to recommend him, and Bush's flaws are many. But Bush has the character and backbone of a leader. And Kerry doesn't."

Daniel Pipes: "It has not been fully appreciated that, when it comes to the Middle East, Bush has systematically responded to the region's problems by dispatching decades' worth of accepted practices and replacing them with stunningly different approaches. In contrast, John Kerry unimaginatively holds to failed policies of the past.... It is easy to overlook Bush's radicalism in the Middle East, for in spirit he is a conservative, someone inclined to preserve what is best of the past. A conservative, however, understands that to protect what he cherishes at times requires creative activism and tactical agility."

Bigots for Kerry: "If George Bush had chosen the racist David Duke as a running mate, I'd have voted against him, almost without regard to any other issue. Instead, John Kerry chose the xenophobe John Edwards as a running mate. I will therefore vote against John Kerry. Duke thinks it's imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it's imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There's not a dime's worth of moral difference there. While Duke would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of skin color, Edwards would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of birthplace. Either way, bigotry is bigotry, and appeals to base instincts should always be repudiated."

Bush did not lie: "President Bush couldn't possibly have lied about WMD unless he miraculously knew something that neither the CIA nor all the other world's intelligence agencies knew: that Saddam didn't have WMD. Now how could he have known that? Did he hire his own private investigators to dispatch some Farsi-speaking, cowboy hat-wearing paragon of erudition to comb its entire landmass to confirm there were no WMD? Frankly, it is nothing short of amazing that Democrats are still peddling this canard about Bush lying about Iraqi WMD. But they are. In the meantime we see that they really don't care about presidential lying about war, because it is they and John Kerry who are lying about it."

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ELSEWHERE

Democrat hatred: "Shelby Pope is a 60-year-old small- business woman from Pasadena who, until recently, had never been in a fight. Then a Democrat spit on her. "It was horrifying,' said Pope, who puts out Bush/Cheney literature on her table at a Los Angeles flea market at Fairfax and Melrose avenues.... Pope has volunteered for Republican campaigns since the Eisenhower era, and says this year the political climate is "the worst I've ever seen.' ... "These people are calling Bush 'Hitler,' ' said Frank Napolitano, a Republican precinct campaigner from Altadena. "I didn't call Clinton 'Hitler.'' Napolitano has had several Bush/Cheney signs stolen from his front yard. He then put up a sign saying, "Please don't steal my signs.' It was stolen, too..... The experience has pushed him toward harsher language. "The Democrats are Nazis,' he said. "They don't believe in freedom of speech. They're Nazis. They're intellectual morons.'" I have put another example of an attack on a Republicans up on EDUCATION WATCH.

And Mike Tremoglie has more examples of Democrat attacks on democracy. One excerpt: "On October 19, 2004 a movie theater in Jenkintown Pennsylvania, a suburban borough just north of Philadelphia with a population of about 4500, was scheduled to show the documentary Stolen Honor. This movie features the testimony of Vietnam POW's and it is extremely critical of John Kerry. However, after receiving threats of " civil disobedience" (i.e. destruction of property and who knows what to people), the owner of the theater canceled the showing. Because of Stalinist intimidation, nearly 400 people were denied the opportunity to see a movie simply because it was critical of a presidential candidate. Jenkintown was more like Tienamen Square than Independence Mall. According to Gil Spencer, a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, a suburban Philadelphia paper, "Thuggish pro-Kerry "protesters" showed up at the urging of the Kerry campaign. Police had to be called to the scene to keep order."

Voting fraud: "The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said it would wait until after the presidential election to investigate Republican charges that nearly 1000 convicted felons had illegally requested absentee ballots or already voted early. The state Republican Party said it had combed a list of suspected felons and found 925, mostly Democrats, who had not had their voting rights restored, but had requested ballots or voted early." There is another article here on the third-world shambles that is the American voting system. Australia's system is not perfect but it is miles more secures than America's.

Arafat: "Speaking of media bias, here's a question you won't hear in our big papers or on network TV: Does Yasser Arafat have AIDS? We know he has a blood disease that is depressing his immune system. We know that he has suddenly dropped considerable weight - possibly as much as 1/3 of all his body weight. We know that he is suffering intermittent mental dysfunction. What does this sound like?" Senior Nazis were homosexual too, of course.

Fruitcake Walter Cronkite believes Karl Rove is behind the recent bin Laden tape

Hilarious: "A Vatican-approved sex guide is encouraging churchgoers to make love more often to offset "impotence and frigidity" and address papal concerns over declining birth rates among Italian Roman Catholics. The book, "It's A Sin Not To Do It", written by two theologians, promises the reader answers to "everything you wanted to know about sex but the Church [almost] never dared to tell you". In their attempt to galvanise the faithful, Roberto Beretta and Elisabetta Broli, who write regularly for the Italian Bishops' magazine Avvenire, have written one of the raciest works ever to deal with the church and sex."

Uncivil Rights has some good posts up about the unending Democrat talent for inconsistency and self-contradiction.

Wayne Lusvardi has just done a post on the place of paranoia in Leftist politics.

I have just put up on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS an article from a major Leftist publication that is absolutely dripping with thinly disguised contempt for ordinary people and their entertainments.

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

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

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

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

Comments? Email me or here. 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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