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30 April, 2005

"BLACK CULTURE" REVISITED

On Wednesday I posted a brief critique of Thomas Sowell's theory about black culture being responsible for black under-achievement. Yesterday I put up two further comments on the subject by Steve Sailer and Star Parker. A reader has however reminded me of what is probably the most important factor:

"Sailer's comment that today's behavior is "an African thing" is just as much of a "stretch" as Sowell's saying it was a "Redneck thing". Neither has had serious influence for over 200 years. Blacks were long past the "Redneck thing" and the "African Thing" at the time our "welfare state" began. Their behavior is an "American thing", brought on by welfare state".

In fact, that comment reminded me of an earlier post harking back to something that most Americans have probably now forgotten: That characteristic black behaviour in America was up until around 50 years ago roughly the opposite of what it is now. See here. So where was the "African" and "cracker" culture then? Did it have opposite results then to what it has now? My correspondent is clearly right: Objective circumstances (to use a Marxist term!) matter most and current self-destructive African behaviour is not the result of ANY long-standing culture but rather the result of the perverse incentives that American Leftists have created with indiscriminate welfare policies, affirmative action, anti-American education, racial quotas on policing and the promotion of a "victim" mentality among minorities generally. And I think it is clear that even the influence of genetics pales into insignificance compared with the effect of the positive and negative incentive systems that society sets up for people.

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MORE FUN WITH THE ANGRY LEFT:

I noted yesterday on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS how Liberal Avenger has put up another of his fact-free streams of abuse -- this time in response to a critical article by Debbie Schlussel about Marla Ruzicka, the Leftist "martyr" recently killed by the Islamic nutjobs in Iraq. The avenging one has also added a link to the bottom of his post recommending an article by Raimondo which he recommends as a good "fisking" of the Schlussel article. Here are some choice comments from early on in the Raimondo article:

"Yeah, Debbie, Marla was a real blonde – unlike your haggish self. And she was young – again, unlike yourself, in spite of the few pounds of makeup you slosh on your tired old forty-if-you're-a-day face. But recognizing the roots (if you'll pardon the expression) of Schlussel's schadenfreude would require a "reality check" on Debbie Dye-job's part, which is not about to happen. Apart from outright envy, however, what exactly is Schlussel's beef?".

With irrelevant ad hominem garbage like that masquerading as an argument I certainly felt no need to read any further at that point. Coming from someone as messed-up as Raimondo, however, the hate-speech did not at all surprise me.

I have not myself taken any interest in the life and times of Ms Ruzicka but from the extensive and detailed information provided by Debbie Schlussel, I suspect that, far from being a martyr, she was just another self-promoting bigmouth hiding behind a front of "compassion" in the usual Leftist way. There is a picture of her on Raimondo's site which could almost have been designed to portray a self-promoting bigmouth.

Update

The Avenger wrote to me in response to the above and asked how I could condemn what he and Raimondo said when I also came to derogatory conclusions about Ruzicka and Raimondo -- which is a fair question. I replied: "I have no difficulties at all with derisive judgments about people. I make them about Leftists all the time. It is abuse AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR facts and argument that leaves me cold -- and which I deride. In the case of both Raimondo and Ruzicka, I linked to fact-filled articles to give the sources of information on which I based my conclusions".

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Unbelievable self-deception and reality-denial. Just listen to what Elizabeth Edwards, wife of the recent Democrat vice-Presidential nominee, has to say about free speech and compare it with the constant attacks on anything conservative that occur almost daily on Left-dominated American university and college campuses: "Democrats are simply good and decent people. And good and decent people want everyone to do well -- those who agree with them and those who do not. We fight for the right of voices with which we disagree to speak out, for the right of people to say things we don't believe to be true, even for the right to be malicious and mean-spirited." Just look at today's post on EDUCATION WATCH for starters.

Dennis Prager has compiled a list of "liberal" opinions of the sort that commonly appear in America's mainstream newspapers and suggests that few Americans would agree with most of them. They are pretty absurd when spelt out and I think he is right that they are very much minority views. I wouldn't mind designing a survey to test out properly how popular they really are if anybody living in the USA feels like helping me with that. I live just a bit too far away to do it all myself. People willing to go doorknocking or able to pay others to do so would be what I would need.

Canadian ignoramuses: The CBC has recently broadcast a programme comparing neo-conservative philosopher Leo Strauss with the Islamic fundamentalist Sayyid Qutb -- a very stretched comparison indeed. They could make a much better case for saying that Islam and Judaism have a lot in common but that would have no propaganda value, of course.

Islamic "scholar" convicted of urging holy war on US: "An Islamic scholar who prosecutors said enjoyed 'rock star' status among a group of young Muslim men in Virginia was convicted Tuesday of exhorting his followers in the days after Sept. 11 to join the Taliban and fight U.S. troops. The convictions against Ali al-Timimi, 41, carry a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison without parole. But the judge left open the possibility that she will toss out some of the counts. The jury reached its verdict after seven days of deliberations and convicted al-Timimi of all 10 counts."

Leftist antisemitism in Britain: "Although egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and internationalist principles are common to all variants of socialist doctrine, these have not immunised the Left from antisemitism.... The shift from the politics of class to the politics of identity has meant that the Left's main imperative has been to express solidarity and seek out alliances with those groups opposed to the dominance of the United States. In this worldview, America is regarded as the main foe. Any concerns about the political ideas and affiliations of such groups have been subordinated to the larger goal of anti-Americanism. A wide range of organisations have, therefore, been branded as worthy of support, from Latin American populists like the Frente Sandinista (FSLN) in Nicaragua to Arab nationalists, of both conservative and radical hues, in Syria, Iraq, Libya and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). In recent years, this comradeship has been extended by large sections of the Left to the Islamist movements and their followers in Europe. As the old Arab proverb would have it, 'My Enemy's Enemy is My Friend.' The contemporary alliance between the western Left and nationalist and religious radicals in the Middle East is of special concern here. Arab and Muslim radicals have always denied that Israel, uniquely among the states in the international system, has the right to exist. That position is shared by a large proportion of western Leftists."

Jonah Goldberg takes a good swipe at the "Iraq as Vietnam" kneejerk that is so common on the Left.

There is a very pointed article here by a professor of criminology showing the extensive similarities between Leftists and juvenile delinquents.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS we see that Engels advocated war between Germany and France.

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

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

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

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

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

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29 April, 2005

ANTISEMITIC BRITISH LEFTISTS

In the universities, of course

Below is a letter sent on Thursday to Sally Hunt, the secretary general of the AUT, the UK teachers' union, by Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi, The Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford University (emanuele.ottolenghi@sant.ox.ac.uk):

"Regarding the AUT recent decision to boycott Haifa University and Bar Ilan University in Israel, I am shocked to learn that, in addition to a call for boycott, the AUT is ready to offer a waiver to scholars on condition that they publicly state their willingness to conform to the political orthodoxy espoused by the academics who sponsored your motion.

Oaths of political loyalty do not belong to academia. They belong to illiberal minds and repressive regimes.

Based on this, the AUT's definition of academic freedom is the freedom to agree with its views only.

Given the circumstances, I wish to express in no uncertain terms my unconditional and undivided solidarity with both universities and their faculties. I know many people, both at Haifa University and at Bar Ilan University, of different political persuasion and from different walks of life. The diversity of those faculties reflects the authentic spirit of academia. The AUT invitation to boycott them betrays that spirit because it advocates a uniformity of views, under pain of boycott.

In solidarity with my colleagues and as a symbolic gesture to defend the spirit of a free academia, I wish to be added to the boycott blacklist. Please include me. I hope that other colleagues of all political persuasions will join me."

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

US economy, deficits, taxes and Democrats: The truth about Clinton's tax hike, interest rates and deficits
The anti-Catholic Professor Quiggin gets blasted for sliming Pope Benedict XVI: Leftwing Professor John Quiggin, who called Pope Benedict XVI an "arsehole", is taken to task for his anti-Catholicism. We can be sure of one thing when it comes to Quiggin - he'll never call the sadistic Castro an "arsehole"
"Bay of Pigs, 40 years After" conference, Fidel Castro and the lying media : Forty years after the Bay of Pigs mainstream journalists are still shamelessly lying for the murderous Fidel Castro
Social security: Dreaming the impossible dream: Is Tom Friedman so selfish that he wants to retain 30 cents out of every dollar at the expense of the "world peace" Republicans are working for?
US economy, tax cuts and Paul Krugman's Keynesian ideology: That Krugman is unable to comprehend the consequences if his own economic nostrums doesn't say much for his critical faculties, though he is never short of criticism when it comes to Republicans

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Steve Sailer too has some skeptical comments about Sowell's view that black culture is "redneck": "Yet, when we talk of "redneck culture" today, such as country music and Nashville, we are largely talking of Scotch-Irish culture. And the Scotch-Irish generally stayed away from the blacks. They went to the Appalachian and Ozark highlands where disease was less of a problem for Europeans than in the lowland South. Moreover, the Scotch-Irish disliked having to compete with slave labor and tobacco and cotton slave plantations were uneconomical in the highlands. Today, the state with the least educated whites is the prototypical hillbilly state of West Virginia, which had so few slaveowners that it seceded from Virginia and joined the Union during the Civil War. Other Scotch-Irish redneck states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have limited black populations, too..... Of course, the least-discussed cultural influence on African-Americans is also the most obvious: Africa.... Perhaps the biggest social problem of African-Americans, as reflected in the very high illegitimacy rate, is that the culture they brought with them from Africa is one of low paternal investment. America's dominant culture had largely succeeded in inculcating monogamy and bring-home-the-bacon norms in blacks by about 1960, when it suddenly lost its self-confidence and began funding, via AFDC, the traditional African tendency toward mothers supporting their children without much support from their fathers....."

Star Parker on black disadvantage: "The National Urban League recently released its "State of Black America" report for 2005.... Few will be surprised to learn that blacks earn less, own less, are unemployed more, live shorter lives, attend worse schools and are more likely to be convicted of a crime and be sent to prison. How, according to the League, should blacks handle this deficit in equality they continue to experience? .... The report lists 10 "prescriptions" for change. Eight of them are government programs. Of the other two, one suggests blacks should tithe and volunteer more, and the other admonishes blacks to "focus on savings, investing and estate planning." .... There is barely a hint in the League report that black problems might have anything to do with things other than politics. Here are some gaps between white and black America that the study does not see relevant to report: 48 percent of black families vs. 82 percent of white families are headed by married couples; 43 percent of black families vs. 13 percent of white families are headed by a woman with no spouse; Black women are three times more likely than white women to have an abortion; 70 percent of black babies vs. 23 percent of white babies are born to unwed mothers; Whereas blacks represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 50 percent of new AIDS cases. The gaps that the National Urban League reports are gaps in symptoms and results. These gaps show the causes"

Sowell on judges: "The future of the legal and political system of this country may be on the line when two judicial nominees that the Democrats refused to let the Senate vote on in the last Congress are being again submitted for a vote.... This is not about two people being nominated to be federal judges. It is about the whole role of judges in a self-governing republic. The voters' votes mean less and less as time goes by, when judges take more and more decisions out of the hands of elected officials and substitute their own policy preferences, all under the guise of "interpreting" laws. Judges who decide cases on the basis of the plain meaning of the words in the laws -- like Justices Brown and Owen -- may be what most of the public want but such judges are anathema to liberals. The courts are the last hope for enacting the liberal agenda because liberals cannot get enough votes to control Congress or most state legislatures. Unelected judges can cut the voters out of the loop and decree liberal dogma as the law of the land.... An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the law. Nor is the rule of judges the same as the rule of law. Too often it is the rule of lawlessness from the bench."

The furious cries of the American Left about perfectly legal and routine conservative appointments to the Supreme Court ring very hollow when one rembembers that the great hero of the American Left -- FDR -- tried to do far worse: "FDR's revolutionary New Deal plan encountered two big problems: The Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court. When cases challenging the NIRA and the AAA reached the Supreme Court, it held both laws in violation of the Constitution. During Roosevelt's first term, the Court ruled that other parts of his radical economic scheme were unconstitutional as well. Elected by a landslide in 1936, Roosevelt did not intend to let those "nine old men" on the Supreme Court interfere with his transformation of American life.... he came up with a shortcut plan designed to circumvent the constitutional-amendment process and the Supreme Court decisions against his New Deal.... FDR's plan requested Congress to permit the president to appoint an additional Supreme Court justice for every justice over 70 years of age, thereby expanding the size of the Court. By enabling him to appoint new justices who were committed to his economic philosophy, Roosevelt figured that the newly aligned Court would start voting in his favor. Despite his enormous popularity, the American people, to their everlasting credit, rose up in arms against Roosevelt's "court-packing scheme" and, as a result, the Congress failed to enact it. Americans didn't like their president tampering with their constitutional order."

And as Reliapundit says: "Powerline has done a great job of exposing a major MSM flip-flop about the utility/advisability of the FILIBUSTER. Viking pundit adds a link to another NYT whopper. And Powerline gets a Senator. Michelle Malkin has a list of other folks who conveniently change their values when it suits their narrow partisan aims. Bottom-line: Filibusters are NOT protected by - or even mentioned in the Constitution, and they were once scorned by the Left. The Left cannot get away with lying about this."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual big range of select reading.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS we see that Engels welcomed world war.

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

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

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

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

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

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28 April, 2005

RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE REVIEWED IN A MAINSTREAM PSYCHOLOGY JOURNAL

Academic news report below from Chris Brand:

"Licensed scholarly warfare broke out in the APA journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law (vi 05), (full articles here) over whether psychological race differences (especially in intelligence) are substantially heritable. Race realists Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton and Linda Gottfredson fought their corner excellently, conveniently reviewing the literature (cf. the Cambridge debate (i 97) and adding some useful points (e.g. that skin lightness is linked to IQ among South Africa's Blacks - which it is not among America's Blacks, where lighter skins often came about from historical Black female matings with White farmhands during the days of slavery). The hereditarians were opposed by such as Robert Sternberg (sometimes said by me to believe in 666 types of intelligence - Behav.Res.&Therapy, 1992) and Richard E. Nisbett (reviewed by me in Heredity, 2003) who claimed among other things medium-term boosts on non-IQ tests from Headstart-type programmes involving 8 hours intervention daily! Overall, the race realists had a coherent message with copious evidence and the environmentalists had the scraps - they remained respectively the `stompers' and `stompees' as amusingly caricatured by Professor Earl `Buzz' Hunt (Brand, Person.&Indiv.Diffs, 1999). Occidental Quarterly reckoned the 60-page Rushton & Jensen article might prove as much of a landmark as Jensen's classic 1969 Harvard Educational Review article, `How much can we boost IQ and educational attainment.' The race-realist argument was summarized in News-Medical Net, 26 iv."

The articles Chris summarizes above are not notable for being published in an academic journal. Almost all of the research in this field has been first published in academic journals. It is however of some note to find such articles in a journal of the American Psychological Association. The APA is distinctly Left-leaning and their journals are the most prestigious and authoritative ones ones in psychology. Logical Meme has a bit more on the Rushton & Jensen paper. He also has a short roundup of the medical research that has found race differences.

There is another academic report here (PDF) of similar interest. One of the authors in this case is a Nobel prizewinner! Working from a very comprehensive body of data, the authors found that average racial differences in adult income are almost entirely predictable from childhood differences in IQ. They also found that, from early childhood on, black males have other disadvantages (less self-control, less tendency to plan ahead etc) and that those differences also influence income in later life. The third finding is that although blacks and Hispanics share similar environmental disadvantages in childhood, Hispanics tend to rise above that whereas blacks do not -- showing again that the source of black disadvantage is not environmental. There are fuller discussions of the report concerned here and here

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There is a short comment here on "Downfall", the recent German film about Hitler, that is more realistic than most and which rightly points to the way the German people followed Hitler as the thing in most need of explanation. The writer, like most modern writers about Nazism, seems to see the whole thing as a great mystery. Yet if you read Mein Kampf, it is not the slightest mystery at all. Mein Kampf is essentially a love-song to the German people. Hitler was the ultimate practitioner of that great Leftist deception -- the claim that he "cared" for his people. And his nationalism -- his propaganda about how great Germans were -- powerfully reinforced that. So Germans followed Hitler because they loved him and because they thought he was right. And they loved him because they thought he loved them. It could hardly be simpler but nobody dares mention love in conjunction with Nazism, of course, so everybody pretends that there is some great mystery about it all. See here for more details.

USA Today publishes an attack on Democrat filibustering: "While minority rights are a significant Senate tradition, the Constitution itself, through the "advice and consent" clause, clearly mandates confirmation of judges by simple majority once every voice has been heard. The filibuster is not enshrined among the Constitution's system of checks and balances. Judicial filibusters of majority-supported nominees have never been part of the Senate's tradition. In the past two decades, even with the stakes at their highest, Democrats did not filibuster Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas. Yet in the 108th Congress, Democrats filibustered 10 of 34 appellate court nominees."

Crazy rules finally defied "A federal air marshal sued Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other officials to block government rules that prevent him from speaking out about possible security lapses. The federal complaint, filed Thursday in Riverside by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, claims the rules infringe on Frank Terreri's free speech rights. Terreri, 38, wants to blow the whistle on policies he believes threaten aviation security, lawyers said. Among his concerns are visible flight check-in procedures and a formal dress code that could compromise marshals' undercover status, and news stories approved by federal administrators about training and tactics..... The discipline came after strong criticism about agency policies by the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, whose air marshal unit is headed by Terreri. The organization, whose members include about 1,400 marshals, has called for the resignation of air marshal service director Thomas Quinn."

Libertarians, Leftists and paleocons are all fond of asserting that the 9/11 events were caused by American "interventionism" abroad. Clifford May has an astringent comment on that: "That's an astonishing conclusion. The atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian. How, before 9/11, did Washington intervene in Egypt's affairs -- except to give Egypt billions of dollars, re-supply its military, and turn a blind eye to President Hosni Mubarak's repression of dissidents? Atta followed orders from Osama bin Laden, a Saudi. For more than fifty years, American "interventionism" in Saudi Arabia consisted of paying the kingdom astronomical sums in oil revenue, granting Saudis unprecedented privileges (for example, empowering Wahhabis to vet Muslim chaplains for our military and our prisons) and, in 1990, sending American soldiers, at the request of the Saudis, to protect them from being invaded by Saddam Hussein. Or maybe Buchanan was thinking about our intervention in Somalia - the only goal of which was to feed starving people. Or our intervention in Afghanistan to support guerrillas fighting the Soviet invader. We also intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo - to save Muslims from further devastation at the hands of their Christian neighbors".

Dutch to put mutts in iron containers: "Government and opposition MPs are teaming up in a joint plan to house anti-social tenants in special iron huts to reduce city disputes and prevent people from being forced onto the street. The plan from the Christian Democrat CDA, Liberal VVD and opposition Labour PvdA is focused at troublesome tenants who have long been a nuisance factor. Instead of being evicted, they will be given a 'last chance residence', newspaper 'De Telegraaf' reported on Monday. Christian Democrat MP Mirjam Sterk wants to prevent tenants who disturb their neighbourhood ending up on the street.... The party will submit a legislative proposal to Parliament allowing the relocation of anti-social neighbours to container homes in a specifically designated and remote area of a city. It is considered likely the extra strong homes will be specially built -- probably out of metal or shipping containers -- to withstand vandalism".

There is a good article here about "Joh", a great Queensland conservative.

Jennifer Marohasy has a very good demolition of Leftist Australian blogger John Quiggin. I have had words with Quiggin myself in the past. See here and here

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx saw Germany's future wars as race-based. Funny that Hitler had the same idea!

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

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

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

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

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

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27 April, 2005

SOUTHERN CULTURE AND BLACK UNDER-ACHIEVEMENT

The person whose writings I quote most often on this blog is Thomas Sowell. I think he is spot-on most of the time. His theory of black under-achievement is however one with which I must respectfully disagree. He says that blacks do poorly because they have absorbed "cracker" culture and that holds them back. Why? Because "cracker" culture is bombastic and anti-intellectual. His thesis would seem to require that White Southerners in general do as poorly as black Southerners on IQ tests and other achievement criteria but he offers no evidence for that dubious proposition. There are certainly SOME poor whites who do as poorly as blacks on educational and other criteria but that proves nothing. It is averages across whole groups that we have to look at if we are to explain group phenomena. See also here.

There are other reasons why Sowell's thesis does not stand up. An obvious one is that, as Sowell himself notes, "cracker" culture originates from the rural parts of British Isles, particularly from the Scotch-Irish population (see here and here). But who were the Scotch-Irish? They were Scots (mostly farmers) who had moved to Northern Ireland under the encouragement of Protestant English rulers. They were given Irish land by the English because of English dislike for native Irish rebelliousness. And their descendants still form a majority in Northern Ireland to this day. But, like all the Irish, many of them became dissatisfied with life in Ireland and moved to the United States, where they mostly ended up in the rural South, where their rural skills could be gainfully employed. So they were a Scottish people of a particularly enterprising sort -- they had first emigrated to Ireland and then again to America. And they took their fundamentalist Protestant religion with them.

But what is the one thing that we know about Scottish culture? What is the legendary preoccupation of the Scots (aside from whisky)? It is of course education. Scots are an education-worshipping people. So the idea that ANY Scottish culture features a dislike of learning and education is absurd. If "crackers" are intellectually backward, it is not because of any anti-intellectual cultural inheritance. Yet it does seem to be true that the intellectual achievements of American "crackers" have always been low. So how come? Easy. It is simply the rural effect. One of the most reliable generalizations in IQ research is that rural residents test out much dumber that their urban counterparts. Perhaps the most striking example of that is the fact that Afrikaners (white South Africans of mainly Dutch ancestry) score poorly on IQ tests. Yet their parent population in the Netherlands performs perfectly creditably. Lynn & Vanhanen have many of the figures on IQ averages worldwide, subsequently much extended in their book.

So how come? How come rural dwellers score poorly on IQ? Do Afrikaners and "crackers" score poorly because they are immigrants? Are they the dregs and rejects of their parent populations? If anything we would expect the reverse. People who have enough vision to look beyond their accustomed local horizons and set off across the seas in search of personal betterment ought surely to be a bit brighter than the norm. So emigration should surely select for slightly HIGHER IQ, not lower IQ. An interesting case in point is Australia. Up until quite recently, the Australian population has always been almost entirely comprised of people whose ancestry is in Europe or the British Isles. Almost all Australians are the descendants of immigrants, including some who came out as convicts and many who came from very poor parts of Europe, such as Ireland, Scotland, Greece and Southern Italy. The Irish component is particularly large. So what is the average Australian IQ? It has always been virtually identical to the average British or white American IQ. So it would seem in the Australian case that there has been a balance achieved between an immigrant effect leading to a slightly higher IQ and an adverse effect on IQ due to many immigrants coming from unpromising original backgrounds. In fact, it is mainly from regional areas of the British Isles that the Australian population originates so Australia might be held to constitute one big "cracker" culture. There is certainly a strong and unashamed celebration of working-class culture and origins among many Australians. Yet the evidence is clear that Australians have no need to view themselves as inferior to anybody -- and they don't.

So if it is not an immigrant effect we see holding rural populations back, why are rural populations generally a bit backward intellectually? It is presumably because of another well-known influence on IQ. IQ is only about two thirds genetic. And a major non-genetic influence is stimulation. A highly stimulating environment in early childhood leads to higher adult IQ. And, delightful though the country can be, it is just not as stimulating as the bustle of the big city. So after one or two generations growing up in the big city, people who were once mainly rural (as in the case of American blacks) should have lost the rural handicap. Yet there is no sign of the black IQ average converging on the white norm in any area where both racial groups can be found. Even where black and white parents are of similar social background, their children tend to diverge markedly in the usual direction -- as Ogbu found.

Similarly, we would expect that Southern whites who move to the North or to large Southern cities should rapidly lose any disadvantage associated with coming from a rural culture and background -- and I don't think I have to point to the many successful white Southerners in America today to show that that does happen. Similarly prominent blacks are however very few and, as Sowell points out, most of them are recent immigrants to America rather than being the descendants of slaves. So while a TEMPORARY disadvantage associated with rural origins is perfectly reasonable, to say that a lasting disadvantage accrues from that source is very tendentious.

This whole topic is a very big one with a huge history of disputation behind it so I make no claim to have covered it fully in this brief post -- and I have not even covered all of Sowell's points fully -- but I think I have outlined some reasons why "cracker" culture is a weak reed to lean on in explaining the vast black/white gap in intellectual achievement. For more background, readers might find this article interesting.

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Harvard grows up: "In a showdown of the sexes on Friday, Johnstone Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker and Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Spelke debated whether innate differences lead to the underrepresentation of tenured women in math and the sciences. In front of a packed Science Center B crowd, they analyzed the data behind University President Lawrence H. Summers' controversial January comments on women in science. Pinker, whom Summers recruited to Harvard last year, cited evidence arguing that male superiority in skills like mental object rotation and problem solving provides a biological basis for the argument that men are more talented at math and science. Spelke countered, acknowledging the existence of differences between men and women, but arguing that the reason "women are as scarce as hen's teeth" in academia is due to discrimination".

I have just transferred Chris Brand's latest thoughts to here He has some interesting data about males and females being psychologically different right from birth.

MJ paranoia at work?: "The pro-marijuana lobby and much of the media have been silent about the fact that the killer student in Red Lake, Minnesota, Jeff Weise, was a pothead, and that scientific studies link marijuana to mental illness"

Marathon Pundit has a petition that you can sign in support of Prof. Klocek, who dared to speak the truth about Islam at De Paul university.

I have just added an update to my post of a few days ago about Thomas Friedman, Matt Taibbi and Leftist rage.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx thought that the French deserved a thrashing from the Germans. And again, of course, Hitler carried it out.

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

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

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

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

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

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26 April, 2005

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

I am doing a shorter form of my "roundup" today:

On Dissecting Leftism I explain why the Left of yesteryear seem so much more rightist than they do today.

On Political Correctness Watch I note that human protandry -- where girls spontaneously turn into boys at puberty -- is a comprehensive disproof of the feminist claim that sex-roles are "socially constructed"

On Education Watch I note a report showing that seating students in rows works best for learning

On Socialized Medicine I report the "Dr Death" horror in an Australian public hospital

On Leftists as Elitists I note a union organizer who deplores the haughtiness of the modern Left

On MarxWords I note that Engels equated "niggers" with animals

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SOME EXCELLENT CONSERVATIVE THOUGHTS FROM THE POPE

As a libertarian and an atheist, there is much that I disagree with in the Pope's teachings but I like the thoughts excerpted below:

"The state is not the whole of human existence and does not embrace the whole of human hope. Men and women and their hopes extend beyond the thing that is the state and beyond the sphere of political activity. This does not only apply to a state that is Babylon but to any and every state. The state is not the totality: that takes the load off the politician's shoulders and at the same time opens up for him or her the path of rational politics. The Roman state was false and anti-Christian precisely because it wanted to be the totality of human capacity. In that way it claimed what it could not achieve; and in that way it distorted and diminished men and women. Through the totalitarian lie it became demonic and tyrannical. Getting rid of the totality of the state has demythologized the state and thereby liberated men and women as well as politicians and politics.

But when Christian faith, faith in man's greater hope, decays and falls away, then the myth of the divine state rises up once again.... The mythical hope of a do-it-yourself paradise can only drive people into fear from which there is no escape; fear of the collapse of their promises and of the greater void lurks behind it; fear of their own power and its cruelty. So the first service that Christian faith performs for politics is that it liberates men and women from the irrationality of the political myths that are the real threat of our time.

It is of course always difficult to adopt the sober approach that does what is possible and does not cry enthusiastically after the impossible; the voice of reason is not as loud as the cry of unreason. The cry for the large-scale has the whiff of morality; in contrast limiting oneself to what is possible seems to be renouncing the passion of morality and adopting the pragmatism of the faint-hearted. But in truth political morality consists precisely of resisting the seductive temptation of the big words by which humanity and its opportunities are gambled away. It is not the adventurous moralism that wants itself to do God's work that is moral, but the honesty that accepts the standards of man and in them does the work of man. It is not refusal to compromise but compromise that in political things is the true morality".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Domestic terrorism is overwhelmingly Leftist: "Immediately after Timothy McVeigh was arrested for blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on a beautiful April morning 10 years ago, the media were atwitter with the talk of "right-wing militias" and the threat they posed to the republic. McVeigh, unapologetic, defiant, and awash in hatred for the government, was presented as the poster boy of the government-hating, gun-loving, right-wing nuts. And we were told ad nauseam that McVeigh was the product of conservative talk radio and irresponsible Republican politicians who talked about revolution. It was all the fault of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. (Rarely mentioned was the real motivator of McVeigh's actions: Janet Reno's attack on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. But I digress.)... In the decade since the Oklahoma City bombing, the media have remained interested in the right-wing crazies, but have almost entirely ignored the left-wing ones -- those committing most of the terrorist acts inside the United States. Left-wing terrorist groups have been responsible for almost all of the recent domestic terrorism. The National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism maintains a terrorism database. According to its files, as the Baltimore Sun reported on Sunday, fully 22 of the 25 terrorist attacks inside the United States since 2003 are believed to have been the work of environmental extremists. This is not a recent development. Left-wing terrorists have always been the major terrorist threat in the United States"

Mississippi throws down the gauntlet: "A new Mississippi law allows displays of the Ten Commandments, "In God We Trust" and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in public buildings. Governor Haley Barbour, who already has a Ten Commandments display in his Capitol office, signed the bill without a public ceremony. The Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union is awaiting a U-S Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property before deciding whether to challenge the state law. In 2001, Mississippi passed a law that required "In God We Trust" to be posted in every public classroom, cafeteria and gym. Last fall, Mississippi approved a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage".

The usual bad consequences of government regulation: "A new European Union regulation is forcing airlines to pay passengers if a flight is delayed. Just delayed. Not as a matter of agreement between customer and vendor but as a matter of law. A single flight delay can now cost an airline hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, delays usually have causes, including safety-related causes. So this regulation punishes airlines for safeguarding passengers. You can predict what the consequences will be. Recently a British Airways plane was in the news after its pilot decided to fly across the Atlantic with a busted engine. Otherwise the airline would have had to pay over the $280,000 to compensate the passengers."

What "liberals" want in the constitution: "The left makes no secret of its intentions where the Constitution is concerned. It wants to change it, in ways that have nothing to do with what the document actually says. It wants the Constitution to enshrine its own policy preferences--thus freeing it from the tiresome necessity of winning elections. And how will the Constitution be changed? Through a constitutional convention, or a vote of two-thirds of the state legislatures? Of course not. The whole problem, from the liberal perspective, is that they can't get democratically elected bodies to enact their agenda. As one of the Yale conference participants said: "We don't have much choice other than to believe deeply in the courts--where else do we turn?" The new, improved Constitution will come about through judicial re-interpretation."

Leftist backpedalling: "American idealism, backed with force and conviction - not soft power, multilateralism, Europeans, or the U.N. - ended the rule of the Taliban, and of Saddam Hussein. The often-lonely vision of George W. Bush ushered in elected governments in their places, and inspired the disenfranchised elsewhere to begin agitating for change. Those in Lebanon know that it was an American president, not Kofi Annan or Gerhard Schroeder, who both shares their aspirations and is willing to stand up to their oppressors. Among the critics of the first George W. Bush administration - and especially among the architects of the feeble U.S. response to terrorism in the 1990s - the present reality must be either denied or spun. The former is impossible when Arab radicals themselves credit Bush with being a catalyst for reform. That leaves the latter alternative of spin as the only recourse: Bush erred by going alone and is now changing to our point of view and thus basking in the world's appreciation."

PETA loses: "A leading animal-rights group has lost its court fight to pull the California milk industry's popular "Happy Cows" television spots over accusations of false advertising. The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to review an appeal brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which sued to stop the national advertising campaign featuring the talking, laid-back cows and their tag line, "Great Cheese Comes From Happy Cows. Happy Cows Come From California." ..... The "Happy Cows" ads, part of a five-year-old, $33 million campaign, became a huge hit in California and helped push the state's cheese industry to first in the nation, said Nancy Fletcher, spokeswoman for the California Milk Advisory Board. "This appears to be another loss for PETA in their campaign against the California milk industry," Ms. Fletcher said. "The highest priority of our dairy farmers is the health and comfort of their cows. They take great pride in how well they treat their cows."

Drunkablog (who seems to blog from Denver) thinks that Australian bloggers do a particularly good job. I completely agree!

Melbourne blogger Matter of Opinion has quite a bit up about Anzac day.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS a war against Russia is said to be good for Germany. I always wondered where Hitler got that idea!

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

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

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

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

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

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25 April, 2005

ANZAC DAY

Today is Anzac Day in Australia -- our only genuine national day -- when we remember with both great sadness and gratefulness all those legions of young Australians who have died in our many wars to keep ourselves and others free.


TWO UPDATES

I have reproduced here one account of the central ceremony of Anzac day -- the Dawn service. It conveys something of the emotional power of the occasion, under even adverse circumstances.

I have put up on my RECIPE BLOG a recipe for Anzac cookies.

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THE LEFT: YESTERDAY AND TODAY

It is now a very common cry among older American "liberals" to say that the Democratic party has moved away from them (e.g. here). The Democrats of today are (rightly) seen as very different from the Democrats of (say) the Truman or JFK eras. By the same token, to younger American "liberals" Truman and JFK seem hopelessly reactionary and conservative. If they had been anyone other than Democrat notables they would be branded as "Fascists". The great similarities between the foreign policies of Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, JFK and GWB can usually be greeted by contemporary Democrats only with averted eyes.

Fortunately for the peace of mind of the Left, they usually know practically no history. If they were capable of going back further they would find that the problem in fact gets worse the further back you go. In the era before World War II, "progressives" were very fascist indeed. The two great heroes of the prewar American Left that contemporary Leftists still know something about are FDR and Woodrow Wilson. FDR did his best to socialize the entire American economy as part of his "New Deal" and Woody is regarded as the father of the League of Nations, predecessor of the United Nations. Yet FDR was an admirer of Mussolini, whom he referred to as "that admirable Italian gentleman" and Woody was a good ol' Southern boy who promptly cut back on the rights of blacks as soon as he became President and wrote at length about the distinctive qualities of Aryans (Yes: Aryans, the same guys Hitler idealized). I have documented all that (and more) here (or here).

And when you go right back to the writings of Marx and Engels themselves you find in them virulent antisemitism, Germans viewed as a superior race, contempt for "niggers", belief in eugenics, support for black slavery, support for British rule over India, belief in war as a purifying force and just about everything else that the modern-day Left regards as anathema. Again I document that at great length elsewhere

So how come? Why has the Left done such a huge about-face over time and why were the Leftists of yesteryear so "Fascist"? It couldn't be simpler. It is just another case of the general rule that Leftists really believe in nothing at all. They only believe in themselves and in their entitlement to power. So they just use whatever thinking is popular at the time and stretch it to absurd lengths in order to make themselves seem holier than the next guy. The racial and eugenic theories that Marx, Engels, Hitler and the prewar American Left believed in were accepted throughout society as wise and insightful right up to World War II so Leftists were their most energetic and extreme advocates. As soon as Hitler's deeds discredited such theories, however, the Left reversed gears immediately, easily and without a qualm.

As a noted historian of the British Conservative Party points out, however, conservatives by contrast are by temperament compromisers and pragmatists, people who are cautious and distrustful of grand theories in general -- so they have always seen small (but only small) amounts of truth in most theories. Most of the world's common beliefs and intellectual fashions of the last several centuries have had some reality behind them and conservatives have always been able -- and continue to be able -- to see and acknowledge those bits of reality -- without at the same time being so incautious as to think that reality can be reduced to a few simple formulas or rules.

As they have always done, for instance, conservatives do think that race exists and that some differences between races are real and important (such as the black crime-rate) but they have never drawn from that the sweeping inferences that Leftists such as Marx, Engels and Hitler did -- that there are superior races which have a right to kick out or exterminate inferior races. Even at the height of the British Empire in the 19th century, when conservatives were as racist as they have ever been, far from trying to exterminate or kick out Jews the British Conservative Party actually made a flamboyant Jew (Disraeli) their Prime Minister! A more extreme contrast with the gas ovens could hardly be imagined! Conservatives have always been able to recognize the reality of race without at the same time wanting to persecute other races. Murders of millions by Stalin and tens of thousands by Castro are still to this day greeted with indulgence by the Left of American politics whereas in the "racist" days of the old British Empire the killing of a couple of score of Indians at Amritsar by a British General (Dyer) led to a huge outcry in Britain that eventually saw the General cashiered for his pains.

So that in the end is how the Left get away with blaming the political Right for the deeds of Hitler. What Hitler preached was in his day mainstream Leftism and almost everything he said could also be found in the writings of Marx & Engels but Leftists today have done such an about-face that what Hitler preached is now not readily recognizable as Leftism. And since some of the things that Hitler advocated to an extreme -- such as national independence and patriotism -- are part (but only a part) of normal human motives, conservatives continue to see some virtue in them and are not reluctant to say so. So the claim that Hitler was a Rightist is an easy accusation to get away with. Conservatives still recognize the small elements of truth that Hitler took to outrageous extremes, while Leftists deny all reality that does not suit their propaganda needs of the moment. That conservatives have never extended any of their ideas to support deliberate mass murder -- as Leftists have done on many occasions from Lenin on -- is conveniently overlooked.

An obvious comment on the above that Leftists might want to make is that if modern Leftism is so different from pre-war Leftism, then pre-war Leftists such as Hitler cannot really have been Leftists. But most of what Hitler spouted was straight from Marx & Engels (see here) so if Hitler was not a Leftist then neither were Marx & Engels -- and if Marx & Engels were not Leftists, then who would be? This still of course leaves untouched the common modern claim that "liberals" are not Leftists. But since both Communists and "liberals" have the same avowed goal -- government-enforced equality -- that is a very hollow claim indeed. At the height of the Cold War, it was common for American "liberals" to defend Communists as being just "liberals in a hurry". I agree with that. And I particularly agree with its logical corollary: That "liberals" are just slowed-down Communists.

(A short version of this post appeared on Blogger News yesterday)

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ELSEWHERE

No doubt there will be huge Leftist demonstrations about this: "Iran's Revolutionary Guards executed a number of teenage demonstrators in the streets of Ahwaz, southern Iran, according to eye-witnesses. Residents reported that Revolutionary Guards arrested demonstrators in the city streets and gunned them down to terrorise the local people and end a weeklong anti-government uprising that has spread throughout the oil-rich Khuzestan Province. Helicopters were also seen opening fire on demonstrators. A 5-year-old boy was killed when he was run over by a Revolutionary Guards' armoured personnel carrier, eye-witnesses said".

The making of a Pope: "For all Pope Benedict XVI's decades as a Vatican insider, it may have been the crucible of a university town swept by student radicalism in the late 1960's that definitively shaped the man who now leads the Roman Catholic Church. During his Bavarian childhood under the Nazis, Joseph Ratzinger became convinced that the moral authority based in Catholic teachings was the sole reliable bulwark against human barbarism, according to friends, associates, and his biographer, John L. Allen Jr. But while his deep reading and thinking in theology, philosophy, and history were fundamental to development as a theologian, it was the protests of student radicals at Tuebingen University - in which he saw an echo of the Nazi totalitarianism he loathed - that seem to have pushed him definitively toward deep conservatism and insistence on unquestioned obedience to the authority of Rome."

On both the Left and Right of politics there are extremes that regard almost the whole world as being against them. But while there are still plenty of moderate conservatives who are tolerant enough to embrace a centrist like George Bush as one of their own, almost none of the Leftists who are prominent in politics these days could be described as moderate. To them George Bush is the Devil incarnate no matter how moderate and compromising his positions on most matters are. So when you get to the MOST extreme Leftists you really are in a never-never land. Jeffrey Blankfort, for instance regards even Noam Chomsky as a dangerous centrist and a friend of Israel, of all things. Read him yourself if you don't believe me. Batty old Noam's occasional concessions to reality are held mightily against him.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS Marx supports the general view of his day that war is a purifying force.

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

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

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

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

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

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24 April, 2005

MORE MEDICAL NOTES

At last! "Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the cot deaths expert who gave evidence at a string of criminal cases which resulted in mothers being jailed, faces charges of serious professional misconduct. The paediatrician was a key witness in the cases of women wrongly accused of killing their children including Sally Clark. He will appear before the General Medical Council (GMC) in June accused of serious professional misconduct. Prof Meadow gave evidence in the trials of Trupti Patel, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony as well as Mrs Clark. All denied murdering their children and were eventually vindicated."

African AIDS isn't spread by vaginal sex either: "Ninety-nine percent of AIDS and HIV cases in Africa come from sexual transmission, virtually all heterosexual. So says the World Health Organization, with other agencies toeing the line. Massive condom airdrops accompanied by a persuasive propaganda campaign would practically make the epidemic vanish overnight. Or would it? A determined renegade group of three scientists has fought for years - with little success - to get out the message that no more than a third of HIV transmission in Africa is from sexual intercourse and most of that is anal. By ignoring the real vectors, they say, we're sacrificing literally millions of people.... The chief reason it's so hard to spread HIV vaginally is that, as biopsies of vaginal and cervical tissue show, the virus is unable to penetrate or infect healthy vaginal or cervical tissue. Various sexually transmitted diseases facilitate vaginal HIV infection, but even those appear to increase the risk only slightly..... "

Circumcision and African AIDS: "At the heart of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, there is a deadly mystery that has puzzled scientists for years. There are groups of people who are four times less likely to get HIV than other people, sometimes living just yards away, across a single valley - people with apparently similar behaviour and lifestyle. Scientists realised that if they could understand why these people are so much less vulnerable to the HIV virus, it might lead to an answer that could save millions of lives. And after 15 years of detective work it turns out there may be a remarkably simple answer: the high risk areas for HIV coincide with tribes who are uncircumcised. In Africa, it seems a man is much more likely to get HIV if he is uncircumcised".

Male homosexuals have partly female brains: "Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women - using landmarks to find their way around - a new study suggests. But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances.... "Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic," explains Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, UK. "It's not simply that lesbians have men's brains and gay men have women's brains." The stereotype that women are relatively poor map readers is borne out by a reasonable bulk of scientific literature, notes Rahman. "Men, particularly, excel at spatial navigation." The new study might help researchers understand how cognitive differences and sexual orientation develop in the womb, he says."

Richard Irving reports in The Times on plans by Epitan to market the drug Melanotan to supply a sun-tan without the need for harmful exposure to bright sunlight, or recourse to tanning salons whose regular use may carry risks. It works by encouraging the body to produce Melanin in its brown-black form which helps block out the sun’s harmful effects: "The drug will initially be available in injection form at a cost of about 105 pounds. The jab takes about a week to work and lasts for between 60 to 90 days". It sounds like a way to acquire the good-looking tan, but without the health risks. Ah, but there's more: "Originally developed by scientists from the University of Arizona, Melanotan could have two other potentially lucrative uses. The first is that in sufficient quantities it appears to suppress the appetite; the second is that it appears to ease erectile dysfunction". The major problem with what appears to be a significant advancement in lifestyle choices is that it all seems too good to be true! (Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog)

There is a pretty worrying article from a few years back here which strongly suggests that somebody does not want antidotes or vaccines against biological weapons developed. The fact that we have heard no more of the matter since suggests that it is only the fear of Mecca being nuked that protects the USA at the moment.

I put up a report on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH yesterday that should be central to any discussion of feminism -- if facts were relevant to feminism, that is.

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ELSEWHERE

Dubious survey finds discrimination: "Despite metro Boston's increasing diversity, 80 percent of African-Americans and roughly half of Hispanics polled recently said that racial discrimination remains a somewhat serious or very serious problem that can cost jobs or promotions and make others feel unwelcome at sporting events and shopping centers. More than half of African-Americans and almost four of 10 Latinos said they face day-to-day discrimination at least a few times a month -- for instance, by being treated with less respect, offered worse service or called names." [But they didn't ask how many whites felt discriminated against for various reasons -- such as being fat, female or old. And given Affirmative Action, maybe whites felt MORE discriminated against overall]

There must never be another Waco: "The events at Waco have contributed to the disdain of federal abuse of power like nothing since the Boston Massacre back in 1770. (By comparison, the British killed 5 Americans in that assault.) ... Evidence was conveniently lost. Videotapes of the events revealed duplicity, arrogance, and blood-lust on behalf of the federal agencies involved. At the end of the hearings, the questions remained unanswered, and no one within the government was held accountable. Those Davidians who survived the raid were tried for murder. A jury found them innocent, but no charges were ever brought against any federal agents. Whatever one thinks of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, they had committed no capital crimes. Neither could the charges of child abuse, illegal weapons, or illegal drug activity (charges that were used by the feds to justify their ghastly attack) be substantiated."

Lying British Labour party: "The Government is misleading the public on the true level of crime in Britain by instructing police forces not to record many offences, while simultaneously logging crimes in which nobody is convicted or even taken to court as "detected". This week the Government will release its latest quarterly figures for recorded crime in England and Wales, the last such release before the general election. But regardless of whether they show an overall fall or rise, they will give a highly distorted picture".

Oil-for-food investigators resign: "Two senior investigators with the committee probing corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program have resigned in protest, saying they believe a report that cleared Kofi Annan of meddling in the $64 billion operation was too soft on the secretary-general, a panel member confirmed Wednesday. The investigators felt the Independent Inquiry Committee, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, played down findings critical of Annan when it released an interim report in late March related to his son, said Mark Pieth, one of three leaders of the committee."

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS Engels makes clear how extremely derogatory is his view of "niggers"

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

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

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

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

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

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23 April, 2005

IN MEMORIAM: Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen (1911 - 2005)

I think all my Australian readers will know who "Joh" was but I would be surprised if any of my American readers do. Joh was for nearly 20 years Premier of my home State of Queensland. An Australian Premier is much more powerful than an American State Governor because he controls both the legislature and the administration. Australia seems to get on perfectly well without the American docrine of the separation of powers and, in a famous remark, Joh once revealed that he did not even know what the separation of powers referred to.

Joh led the National Party -- of which I was a member -- and was pro-business to a fault. As a result, Queensland saw an unprecedented rise in prosperity under his rule. During his time in office, Brisbane (the Queensland State capital) seemed to make the national news as often as Canberra (the national capital) because of Joh's total disregard for all Leftist pieties. In 1974, he gained a remarkable 59% of the popular vote. He was a great Queenslander and I miss him.

There are obits of him here and here. I have a previous comment on him here

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THE LEFTIST RELIANCE ON ABUSE

It's horribly fascinating to see the way the Left in our society rely on torrents of abuse as a substitute for rational argument. Take this excerpt from a Leftist review of Thomas Friedman's latest book (Friedman is a conservative-leaning New York Times columnist):

"Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses. On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country".

That passage is virtually information-free. There may be facts behind it but the passage itself tells us nothing factual. It is mere abuse. And the review goes on like that at great length. There is the occasional fact mentioned but never any attempt at a balanced evaluation of the fact concerned. I have myself been the object of similar rage-filled tirades from Leftist bloggers recently. There may be shreds of rational argument somewhere among the rage but "shreds" is the word. One hardly needs do more than spell out the argument in order to expose its absurdity -- as David Boxenhorn has shown. But if I were a Leftist, I guess I would have to write in a similar irrational way. When the facts are so much against you, what is left but rage? But reading these diatribes of rage and hate does certainly explain the horrors that happen when Leftists gain unrestricted power (i.e. in Communist regimes).

And note this fact-free rant about Christian conservatives:

"They are the Theocrats, the Christian Taliban right here in America, and they are deadly dangerous both to this nation and the world entire. These people do not in any way represent mainstream Christianity, yet sadly they are redefining the meaning of that faith across the board. They would annihilate all that America has stood for these last two hundred years to 'save' the nation, literally as far as they are concerned, and right now, they believe they have the power to get everything they want."

And this comment from Powerline also shows how the Left rejoice in hate rather than in reason:

"How Sick Can the Left Get? I don't know, but we haven't hit bottom yet. A reader called me to point out this sickening display on Cafe Press. American political history is often not pretty. But I don't think we have ever experienced anything remotely approaching the current descent of liberals into hate. Not only hate, but weird hate. And it will continue until voters definitively reject the Democratic Party. Another reader points out this one. There is no depth to which the American left will not sink."

What I have noted above is of course far from entirely new. Around 100 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was a "Progressive", but a decent one. Some of his wise words: "It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of sentimental attachment to the rights of man .... The good citizen must be a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the world at large".

(A short version of this post appeared on Blogger News yesterday)

UPDATE

I have come across some amusing confirmation of my observations about the Leftist diatribe against Friedman above: I am not a regular reader of the NYT -- to put it mildly. It is The Times of London that I read regularly. And I am certainly not a regular reader of Thomas Friedman. Links that I put up here to NYT articles are ones suggested to me by my readers. So when I read the diatribe against Friedman by Taibbi there was so much rage and abuse in it that the only information I could glean from it was that Friedman probably uses metaphors badly, that Friedman sometimes espouses conservative causes and that Taibbi has at least some Leftist views. All the rest seemed mere abuse with no real information content at all. And the immoderateness of what Taibbi said made even his few points of information about Friedman suspect -- which is why I described Friedman as conservative-LEANING rather than conservative. So the essence of what I pointed to in the Taibbi article was its devotion to abuse rather than rational argument. I note however that two conservative bloggers (Taranto and Powerline) have praised the Taibbi article. And from reading Powerline in particular I now understood what was worthy of derision in Friedman -- that his use of metaphors is indeed often bad and that he is a shallow thinker generally. Because Powerline and Taranto knew Friedman's writings, they needed no information about him from Taibbi. They simply approved of Taibbi being derogatory about him. So my point about the article by Taibbi being just a rage outburst with only marginal information content stands well confirmed.

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ELSEWHERE

Do-gooders can't face facts: "The World Social Forum (WSF) meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil, last January brought together nearly 130,000 people to hear more than 350 policy proposals about subjects as diverse as hunger, weapons proliferation, child abuse, and "globalization" in the developing world. Yet although the meetings' attendees fancied themselves as cutting-edge humanitarians fighting the good fight against poverty and injustice, their proposals have little chance of improving the everyday lives of the poor and disenfranchised because the WSF participants failed to challenge the root causes of underdevelopment and social marginalization... Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for example, said nothing about the government restrictions and political cronyism that hamper local entrepreneurs.... we could say that those who participated in the latest World Social Forum represent countries underdeveloped by their own hand, because they used all the tools of the State available to them to hinder and prevent the indispensable process of capital accumulation and wealth creation."

Politics causes unemployment : "Whenever government forcibly raises employment costs it causes marginal labor, that is, labor that barely covers its costs, to become submarginal. It does not matter whether government orders wage rates to rise or benefits to be improved, the workday to be shortened, overtime pay to be raised, funds to be set aside for sickness and old age, or any other benefit to be granted. A small boost renders few workers submarginal, a large boost affects many. In matters of employment they now are 'unproductive' and cannot be used economically."

More people haters: "Last week the world celebrated an historic medical research milestone, the 50th anniversary of the polio vaccine. But Hollywood glitterati — including Alec Baldwin, Noah Wyle and Emmylou Harris — dishonored that life-saving moment by celebrating another milestone — the 20th birthday of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). This is an organization which opposes the very research that made the polio breakthrough possible. In 1949, Science magazine explained to readers that animals (including mice, oxen and rhesus monkeys) were needed in every phase of polio research.... Animal research has led to vaccines for rabies, smallpox, rubella, measles and anthrax. Insulin diabetics owe their quality of life to animal models — which also brought us heart bypasses, organ transplants and the minimally invasive surgical techniques we now take for granted. Throw it all out, says the Physicians Committee.... If this anti-science position sounds familiar, it should. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) — those protest-happy lunatics who believe your life is worth no more than that of a cow or a chicken — have a sympathetic take on nearly every message PCRM promotes"

Pejman has some good shots at the latest subterfuge of the Leftist authoritarians who want to make our decisions for us. They call it "libertarian paternalism" but that's just typical Leftist verbal magic. There's nothing libertarian about it. Their claim is that too much choice is bad for you. Even if that were so, too much government would certainly be even worse for you.

Good news: The serial litigator who tried to set up the Wendy's restaurants with a story about a severed finger found in a bowl of chili has now been arrested.

The Amtrak disaster summarized: "Amtrak, the nation's troubled passenger railroad, might as well have been in a train wreck..... Supporters of Amtrak insist that cutting its federal lifeline would kill passenger train travel. To the contrary. Three decades of crisis, including this month's Acela fiasco, demonstrate that a new approach is needed."

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows Engels mocking "niggers".

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

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

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

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

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

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22 April, 2005

SOME MEDICAL NOTES

Was the first mad cow French? (A triumph for all those EU health regulations?) "The brain of a French woman who died in 1971 shows evidence consistent with human mad cow disease, United Press International has learned, a finding that if confirmed would indicate the deadly disease began infecting people more than 20 years earlier than previously thought. A former National Institutes of Health scientist said he tested the woman's brain in 2000 and it showed a pattern that looked like variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- a fatal, brain-wasting illness humans can contract from eating beef products infected with the pathogen that causes mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE. VCJD was unheard of in 1971. The first recognized case was detected in the United Kingdom in 1995, so if the French woman did indeed suffer from vCJD, the case would shift the origins of the disease back more than two decades and possibly to a different country.... The pattern on the test "was more like BSE than CJD," Johnson said, noting he never saw a pattern like that in the hundreds of other brains from CJD patients he had tested.... A recent report published in the journal Veterinary Research estimated that from 1980 to 2000 more than 300,000 cattle were infected with BSE in France, yet went undetected."

Medical effects of "non-existent" race: "At least 29 medications have varying effects in different racial or ethnic populations, says biologist David B. Goldstein of the University College London. In the November 2004 Nature Genetics, he and his colleague Sarah K. Tate gave a detailed account of these treatments, which range from antipsychotics to cancer-chemotherapy drugs..... Genetic traits do appear to underlie some differences in disease susceptibility and response to therapies. For example, researchers have noted for years that because of differences in enzyme activity, people of Asian descent metabolize cholesterol-lowering statin drugs more slowly than other people do. As a result, some studies suggest, Asians are more susceptible to side effects at a given dose of statins. FDA recently advised physicians not to administer the highest allowed dose of one such drug, rosuvastatin (Crestor), to people of Asian ancestry."

Marvellous news: "The invisible "chain of transmission" of rubella virus has been broken in the United States. With it disappears a disease that a little more than a generation ago struck fear in the heart of every pregnant woman. Fewer than 10 people a year in this country now contract the infection known popularly as German measles. Since 2002, all cases have been traceable to foreigners who carried the virus in from abroad".

Arnold Kling has a properly cautious look at the reasons why Americans spend much more on health care than Europeans do. The one really well-substantiated difference seems to be that Americans on average get much more health care than Europeans do. Spending months and years on waiting lists -- which is normal in socialized medicine systems -- is certainly a good way of cutting down on the total amount of care that people get. People can (and do) die while waiting for an appointment. For examples, see SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

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ELSEWHERE

Non-existent French ethics: "During a state visit to China, French Premier Raffarin threw support behind a law allowing China to attack Taiwan and continued to push for a lift of the EU arms embargo".

Pirate Ballerina is a clearing-house of information about the apparently unsackable academic liar Ward Churchill. And Drunkablog has more information about Pirate Ballerina.

Blithering Bunny has just put up a big post defending supply-side economics against attacks from a Leftist economic illiterate. No defence of tax cuts will ever convince Leftists, though.

The new Pope: "In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century," historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots "if it truly wants to survive.""

A Jewish answer to slurs against the Pope: "Ratzinger's membership in the Hitler Youth was not voluntary but compulsory; also admitted are the facts that the cardinal -- only a teenager during the period in question -- was the son of an anti-Nazi policeman, that he was given a dispensation from Hitler Youth activities because of his religious studies, and that he deserted the German army. ... As prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger played an instrumental role in the Vatican's revolutionary reconciliation with the Jews under John Paul II. He personally prepared Memory and Reconciliation, the 2000 document outlining the church's historical 'errors' in its treatment of Jews. And as president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Ratzinger oversaw the preparation of The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, a milestone theological explanation for the Jews' rejection of Jesus. If that's theological anti-Semitism, then we should only be so lucky to 'suffer' more of the same"

I have put up a note on my SCRIPTURE BLOG about the scriptural basis for the Papacy.

Bankruptcy bill now law: "George Bush on Wednesday signed the biggest rewrite of US bankruptcy law in a quarter of a century, making it harder for debt-ridden Americans to wipe out their obligations. "Bankruptcy should always be a last resort in our legal system," Bush said. "If someone does not pay his or her debts the rest of society ends up paying them." Many debtors will have to work out repayment plans instead of having their obligations erased in bankruptcy court under the law, which will go into effect in six months".

Bankruptcy abuse: "The key fact in the U.S. debate is that bankruptcy filings have been doubling every decade for nearly three decades. The abundant supply of credit is not matched by an abundance of personal responsibility in current bankruptcy law. Do the critics really believe Congress should do nothing and let the problem continue to fester? .... Critics would have you believe that the bankruptcy legislation will curtail risk-taking, but make no mistake: runaway bankruptcies are not a sign of healthy entrepreneurship. As Richard Posner points out on the Becker-Posner blog, the bill's most important likely effect is "to reduce interest rates." The hurdle to obtain capital and start a business will therefore be easier, meaning more new companies, and more job creation, not less. There were nearly 1.6 million consumer bankruptcies in the U.S. in 2004. Yet in 1980, there were only 300,000 bankruptcies. You don't have to be a bankruptcy expert to recognize that trend reveals a problem. The stunning fact is that there are more bankruptcies per capita today than there were during the Great Depression."

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx supported black slavery in America.

I am following a particularly nasty public medicine disgrace on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE at the moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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21 April, 2005

AN AGGRESSIVE PEACENIK

I get a fair bit of email from Leftists, most of it purely abusive. The writers obviously cannot think that abuse will persuade me of anything so I take such emails as showing that the writers have such a strong hatred in them that it just has to be expressed. Many Leftist bloggers are no different. Ever since I pointed out some slippery standards in his writing, Mr Hatespeech (a.k.a. "antiwar" blogger Liberal Avenger) has frothed rage at me on a couple of occasions. I replied to his latest outburst of hatepeech two days ago and in the course of my reply mentioned his real name -- Brian MacKenzie. Yesterday I got an email from him that read: "Thanks for posting my name, shitbag. I thought you'd enjoy this". Since I found his name via a quick net search that anyone could have done, I see that email as yet another outburst of irrational rage. The site he referred me to is written by a Leftist friend of his who spouts a great torrent of unsubstantiated and hate-filled Leftist assertions but it also includes reference to a "friend" identified only as "B" who is said to own 40 handguns. The post also goes on to say:

"The one thing I think many a liberal is wrong on is reflexively renouncing violence in all cases. Violence is a very, very bad thing. We don't like violence. Boo violence. But you know when people say that violence is no way to solve problems? Bullshit: It's often a great way to solve problems. Yes, some people can be talked to, and are responsive to reason. Violence should not be a first recourse, but that doesn't change the fact that some people really need to be beaten to death with a length of closet pole. Obviously I'm being facetious: You'd only use a length of closet pole if you had nothing else handy."

That I was referred to that particular site is rather Delphic but perhaps I am meant to infer that "B" stands for "Brian" (MacKenzie) and that I am in danger of the violence that the author of the site threatens. The more contact one has with such people the easier it is to recognize how close to the surface of allegedly "compassionate" and "antiwar" Leftism is the sort of real hatred and violence that was exhibited by such monsters as Stalin and Pol Pot. That they have such conflicting motivations shows how messed-up their heads are, though.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Che Guevara at the Oscars: Che Guevara, the toast of the Oscars, was a cowardly sadistic thug who murdered children. But as far as Hollywood leftwing dipsticks like Robert Redford are concerned, his murderous heart was in the right place
Unions, unemployment and minimum wage rates: The unions and their media allies' defence of minimum wage rates neatly illustrate their intellectual bankruptcy
Social security and the New York Times dishonest propaganda: How the New York Times deliberately misleads its readers over social security reform
US economy: the Great Depression and interest rates: Economics is a subject plagued with fallacies, ill-informed commentary and historical myths, especially concerning the Great Depression
Why oil price hikes cannot cause inflation: It is a tragedy that so many of our economic and financial commentators are so ignorant of economic history as well as Austrian developments in monetary and capital theory

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ELSEWHERE

Peacenik logic doesn't work: "The grad student shot in a home-invasion horror on the Upper West Side is a peace activist who hails from a small Pennsylvania town and moved to the Big Apple only last year, friends said yesterday. Keith Whitmoyer, a 24-year-old philosophy student at the New School, is battling lung and stomach wounds in St. Luke's Hospital after Sunday's vicious attack. He was shot in front of his terrified fianc,e after a thug followed her into their building on West 108th Street and pushed his way into the apartment, demanding cash. After robbing the pair, the burglar appeared to linger, prompting Whitmoyer to ask, "Are you going to shoot me now?" The thug then pumped three bullets into him".

Leftist hypocrisy about the Darfur genocide: "Remember how exercised everyone around the world was about crimes committed at Abu Ghraib? Infinitely worse deeds are being done in Darfur daily. Where's the outrage? The street rallies that might spur Western governments into action? Aside from a handful of journalists and human rights activists, the only Westerners who've shown sustained interest in Sudan are evangelical Christians, who've been exercised primarily about the fate of their coreligionists in the south. The silence of the "antiwar" masses speaks volumes about their priorities"

Odd that! Private screeners outdo public ones: "A congressional investigation found airport screeners employed by private companies do a better job detecting dangerous objects than government screeners, according to a House member who has seen the classified report. The Government Accountability Office found statistically significant evidence that passenger screeners, who work at five airports under a pilot program, perform better than their federal counterparts at some 450 airports, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. and chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, said on Tuesday."

Tennessee: Senate panel endorses fetal personhood law: "The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved legislation to expand the definition of a person to include an unborn baby. Tennessee would join 18 other states including Kentucky and Virginia that currently protect unborn children, bill sponsor Sen. Doug Jackson (D-Dickson) said. 'These are unborn children at any stage of gestation,' Jackson said. 'The bill will extend protection if a wrongdoer commits an assault against a mother who is carrying an unborn child that results in the loss of the life of that fetus.' ... Sen. Steve Cohen (D-Memphis) cast the only 'no' vote, expressing concern that someone could be charged with murder at the night of conception. 'I mean the sperm and the egg have just met,' Cohen said. ... A fetus would have to be able to survive outside of the mother's womb before a perpetrator who killed the mother could face charges for double murder."

Waco: Remembering 4/19: "The Israeli government took sixteen years to track down Adolph Eichman at the little house in Buenos Aires where he had retired from a long and productive career of burning, gassing and machine-gunning Jews. How long will it take us to put U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno behind bars where she belongs? Six years after the literal holocaust at Waco, Reno remains at large. When Hezbollah or Hammas claim responsibility for an act of terrorism, our officials piously vow to track them down and exact retribution, whatever the cost. When one of those same officials claims responsibility for the fiery deaths of 80 people, including twice as many children as Dylan Harris and Eric Klebold murdered at Columbine High School, she goes on to become the longest-serving Attorney General in the history of our nation."

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Engels approved of antisemitism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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20 April, 2005

BEST WISHES TO POPE BENEDICT XVI

His views are well-known and he will be a great defender of his church against the white-anting from within that is its major threat. His early election is a tribute to the already great authority he held within the church. From a news report:

A delirious crowd of around 100,000 cheered and waved wildly as Ratzinger, the 265th pontiff in the Church's 2000-year history, smiled and acknowledged the applause from the curtain-draped balcony of Saint Peter's basilica. His first words were met by a huge ovation. "Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II the cardinals have elected me a simple and humble labourer in the vineyard of the Lord," he said, paying tribute to his immediate predecessor. The announcement that the 115 cardinals sequestered inside the Sistine had chosen a new pontiff on only the second day of their conclave came when white smoke billowed out of a chimney atop the Vatican.... The election by a two-thirds majority came in a fourth round of voting that had begun when the 115 cardinals sequestered themselves into the chapel for their conclave. The Pope now has the onerous burden of guiding the Church into a new era fraught with moral dilemmas and dissension over a host of issues ranging from emptying pews to contraception and celibacy. A close confidant of John Paul II, he shared his conservative views.

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ELSEWHERE

Immigrants and the pledge: "A child of two immigrants is leading a charge in the General Assembly to require our children in state schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The bill is currently in a Senate committee, but lawmakers from both sides of the isle [aisle?] showed their support for the legislation at a press conference Thursday. They are 31 words of loyalty and devotion to one's country and God. They have sparked controversy and debate when used in the classroom, but the Pledge of Allegiance could soon be required in a North Carolina public school near you. "This is something in the will of God, I think this is something that really has to be done." Apex sophomore, Julian Quesada is on a mission, pushing lawmakers to pass legislation that would require students to recite the pledge. "I think it will instill in their minds a sense of national self preservation which I think might be lacking in this country as a whole in the youth of America." Quesada has no shortage of patriotism. He is a first generation American taught to honor his country from his Costa Rican father and Argentinean mother, Adriana Quesada. "We've always instilled in him, both our boys, you don't take things for granted. This is a privilege to live here.""

Whoopee! Caltech student sentenced to more than 8 years for SUV arson: A graduate student was sentenced Monday to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution for firebombing scores of sport utility vehicles. William Jensen Cottrell, 24, was convicted in November of conspiracy to commit arson and seven counts of arson for an August 2003 vandalism spree that damaged and destroyed about 125 SUVs. Prosecutors estimated the total damage was about $2.3 million. U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner sentenced Cottrell to 100 months and ordered him to pay $3.5 million in restitution. Cottrell hung his head upon hearing the sentence..... Cottrell was arrested in March 2004 after authorities tracked e-mails that Cottrell, using an alias, sent to the Los Angeles Times. He told the newspaper in the e-mails that he was involved in the SUV attacks and affiliated with the Earth Liberation Front.

"Liberals" show their anti-democratic mentality: "Five Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers, including the sons of two prominent Milwaukee Democrats, were charged Monday with the election day tire slashings of 25 get-out-the-vote vehicles rented by Republicans. Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann announced the felony charges each of which could result in a 3 1/2-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine - in a rare news conference. This isn't what goes on all the time in Wisconsin, McCann said. I dont think that it takes a great deal of acumen to estimate what the intent was. The men charged with flattening 40 tires include Michael Pratt, 32, the son of former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, and Sowande A. Omokunde, 25, the son of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee)." [Note some more attacks that happened around the same time]

The enormous cost of litigation: The swelling trial law industry in the United States could soon cost each family of four $4,000 each year, according to a trio of tort reform advocates speaking in San Francisco Thursday. The experts were on hand at the Westin St. Francis Hotel to discuss the findings of Trial Lawyers Inc., California, a report on the lawsuit industry in the state conducted by the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank. "Civil justice costs $246 billion year - money all of us pay in lawsuit taxes," said Steven Hantler, assistant general counsel at DaimlerChrysler Corp. and a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. During the panel discussion, also sponsored by the Pacific Research Institute, Hantler and his colleagues detailed far-reaching consequences of excessive litigation on businesses, construction, investors and the public."

Anything would be an improvement on the previous bureaucracy: "Florida has become the first state in the nation to fully privatize its child welfare programs, after signing a $75 million contract to hand over those responsibilities in its last two counties. The deal Friday with Our Kids Inc. gives the group the right to handle all foster care, adoption and child welfare licensing operations in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, where about 5,000 children are now under state care. "The entire state will now benefit from qualified experts that are equipped to know and meet the needs of their communities," Department of Children and Families Secretary Lucy Hadi said. The effort has been a cornerstone of Gov. Jeb Bush's plan to improve the state's troubled child protection system".

A Leftist says the Left are on the wrong side of history: "How has it happened that the Left of politics across the world has ended up opposing a foreign policy philosophy of spreading democracy in favour of supporting the traditional conservative agenda of stability, sovereignty and the status quo? Because that is what the Left is doing in its hostile reaction to George W. Bush's second inaugural address.... Bush said in his second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." This is resonant of John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address in 1961, when he said: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." .... True, Bush and others are over-claiming progress and underestimating the dangers that lie ahead. We accept democracy as normal; it is not. Democracy is the most radical and revolutionary political idea in the world.... The key thing for those on the Left to understand is that intense dislike of Bush and echoes of Vietnam do not make a foreign policy. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Bolton - they too will pass. What will go on is the great human desire to be free, which should be at the core of our foreign policy. The great danger for the Left is that its Vietnam and Bush obsessions may mean that it will end up on the wrong side of history."

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows Engels being derogatory about Polish Jews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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19 April, 2005

LEFTISM AS IRRATIONAL RAGE

How sad it must be to be a Leftist. They are so devoid of rationality and logic that, when someone disagrees with them, all they can do is spew abuse. A recent comment by a Leftist blogger (Brian MacKenzie, a.k.a. "Liberal Avenger") on one of my posts is a case in point -- a rather lengthy post with not a shred of rational argument in it -- just sustained hate-speech. Brian has obviously learnt nothing since my last comment about him.

David Horowitz on the incoherence of the Left: "Most people on the left, for example, embrace positions in advance of understanding either their rationale or implications, or attempting to square them with their progressive theories. How otherwise explain "compassionate" progressives who are opposed to the death penalty for serial killers of small children supporting the court-ordered killing of Terry Schiavo, a severely handicapped individual who committed no crime? How do we explain the determination of progressives to defend a dictator, and oppressor of women, gays and minorities, like Saddam Hussein?"

Some comments by a certain cover girl on Leftist "intellectualism": "Liberals enjoy claiming that they are intellectuals, thrilled to engage in a battle of wits. This, they believe, distinguishes them from conservatives, who are religious fanatics who react with impotent rage to opposing ideas. As one liberal, Jonathan Chait, put the cliche in the New Republic: Bush is an "instinctive anti-intellectual" and his administration hostile to "fact-driven debate."... I'm not sure how these descriptions square with the fact that liberals keep responding to conservative ideas by throwing food. (Remember the good old days when liberals' "fact-driven" ideas only meant throwing money at their problems?) Last October, two liberals responded to my speech at the University of Arizona - during question and answer, no less - by charging the stage and throwing two pies at me from a few yards away. Fortunately for me, liberals not only argue like liberals, they also throw like girls.... Unfortunately for them, Republican men don't react favorably to two "Deliverance" boys trying to sucker-punch a 110-pound female in a skirt and heels. The geniuses ended up with bloody noses and broken bones. It's really outrageous how conservatives respond to liberals who are just trying to engage in a "fact-driven debate." How typical of Republicans to go on the offensive just because a female has been physically attacked. Instead of capturing and subduing my attackers, those strong Republican men should have been trying to understand why they threw the pies.

What lies behind Leftist violence: "they return to their posture of primitive protesting -- a wild, speechless style of protest that throws light on liberalism's essential hostility to reason and morality. Why do liberals who regard themselves as apostles of Enlightenment reason resort so quickly to intimidation and primitive exertion of will? Because fundamentally liberalism is based not on reason but on force. It is a willfulness writ large that becomes more vivid as liberals lose power and fail to control a people unpersuaded by claims that find no basis in reality and thus cannot be calmly demonstrated by reason".

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RivrDog has some pretty scathing comments on Goldman Sachs -- saying that they were largely to blame for the 1929 stockmarket crash. He concludes that stockmarket investing is an unsafe destination for retirement funds and that real estate is a much better bet. I used to think that way myself and I still do own substantial real estate but seeing that my stockmarket investments (all in blue chips) have nearly doubled in value in the last 4 years, I am now much more positive about stocks. But I too would avoid any managed funds or stockbroker advice. There is far too much crookedness and self-serving there. Retirement savers should be allowed to invest in companies directly. If you invest in blue chips the few crashes will be greatly outnumbered by the gains. If GWB's retirement accounts ever become reality, the list of approved investments should be companies, not "funds".

A very graphic reminder here of what the Communist takeover of Cambodia led to.

Another defeat for socialism: It looks like the Airbus A380 superjumbo programme will be as big a loser for the European taxpayer as the Concorde was.

Theodore Dalrymple has a big essay on the degradation of the character of the British people that socialism has brought about: "Hayek thought he had observed an important change in the character of the British people, as a result both of their collectivist aspirations and of such collectivist measures as had already been legislated. He noted, for example, a shift in the locus of people's moral concern. Increasingly, it was the state of society or the world as a whole that engaged their moral passion, not their own conduct. "It is, however, more than doubtful whether a fifty years' approach towards collectivism has raised our moral standards, or whether the change has not rather been in the opposite direction," he wrote. "Though we are in the habit of priding ourselves on our more sensitive social conscience, it is by no means clear that this is justified by the practice of our individual conduct." In fact, "It may even be . . . that the passion for collective action is a way in which we now without compunction collectively indulge in that selfishness which as ind! ividuals we had learnt a little to restrain." Thus, to take a trifling instance, it is the duty of the city council to keep the streets clean; therefore my own conduct in this regard is morally irrelevant-which no doubt explains why so many young Britons now leave a trail of litter behind them wherever they go. If the streets are filthy, it is the council's fault"

Antisemitism among Leftist British academics: "Union delegates calling for a boycott of Israeli academics were condemned yesterday by the Board of Deputies of British Jews for damaging the Middle East peace process. Jon Benjamin, the director-general of the board, said that a boycott would create an extra obstacle to peace at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are building bridges. The motion is to be debated this week by the Association of University Teachers (AUT). Closer links with the Palestinians will also be debated. Mr Benjamin said: "A boycott of Israeli academics, and Israeli academics alone, has worrying signs of anti-Semitism".

Does this dummy realize that her "good deed" is going to get high-risk borrowers (which minorities often are) denied loans altogether? "Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager on Saturday called for changes to state law to allow her office to seek remedies for black and Latino car buyers who are charged higher rates than their white counterparts for auto loans from dealers in Wisconsin".

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx approved of British rule over India.

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

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

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

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

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

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18 April, 2005

WHAT DOES "LIBERAL" MEAN?

Joe Engel thinks the term is now used in a way that is totally out of touch with what the term used to mean in the days of JFK, Truman and others. Some excerpts:

* Rooting against the United States and for "insurgents" who delight in slaughtering innocents is many things (stupid, for one, also sad, evil, and short-sighted), but it is assuredly not liberal.
* Decrying the American "religious right" for advocating a "culture of life" while simultaneously praising the neck-slicing Islamofascists is many things (start with pathetic), but it is not liberal.
* Calling 3,000 workers who died when the buildings fell "little Eichmanns" is many things (vile, as well as repulsive and morally repugnant), but it is not liberal.
* Marching against war every time the United States is involved--in fact only when the United States is involved--regardless of the war's purpose, is many things (reactionary for sure), but it is not liberal.
* Crying that you're being persecuted for exercising your right of free speech, when what happened was that other people less famous than you reacted to your ill-considered and offensive comments by exercising their own First Amendment rights, is many things (solipsistic comes to mind), but it is not liberal.
* Pretending that the abuses committed by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison were on a par with the wholesale torture, rape, and murder committed there over decades is many things (overwrought, unenlightened, an insult to intelligence), but it is not liberal.
* Depicting Condoleezza Rice in editorial cartoons as a big-lipped mammy who speaks Ebonics to her massa is many things (offensive, sickening), but it is not liberal.
* Marching if you're gay in support of "Palestine"--from which gay Palestinians try to escape to Israel before they're tortured and murdered for their sexual orientation--is many things (nuts, as well as hilariously ill-informed), but it is far from liberal.
* Equating Israeli self-defense measures against bombers who hide among civilians to the murders committed by the bombers who intentionally target civilians is many things (foolish, and probably anti-Semitic), but it is not liberal.
* Believing that ethnicity determines identity--and accusing anyone of being "a disgrace to his race" because his views fall outside what's considered orthodoxy--is many things (primarily racist), but it is definitely not liberal.
* Shouting down speakers in the name of free speech is many things (fascistic, tyrannical, churlish), but it is not liberal.
* Excusing Kofi Annan and the United Nations for the worst palm-greasing scandal in history--one that lengthened the reign of a tyrant and led to the deaths of countless thousands--is many things (inexcusable, also shameful), but it is not liberal.

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Sowell: "Liberalism at one time referred to liberty, to making people as free as possible from the control of their presumed betters, and especially free of excessive control by the government. More broadly, liberals tended to favor change while conservatives defended the status quo. All that has been turned upside down. Liberals today are for preserving not only historic landmarks but also the status quo in the welfare state, obstructing the building of new housing, fighting against letting parental choice be introduced into the school system, and are digging in their heels against letting even a small fraction of Social Security be privatized. As for freedom from government controls, liberals have pushed ever more regulation of ever more details of people's homes and businesses. In some places where liberals have been politically dominant for years, you don't dare cut down a tree on your own property, even if it is about to fall over and smash your house or smash you. Whatever the merits or demerits of any of these policies, the liberal label would never fit if the word still meant what it once meant. Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, conservatives are pushing all sorts of sweeping changes. Milton Friedman is widely regarded as the epitome of conservatism, yet for 50 years he has been arguing for radical change in our school systems by providing vouchers to let parents choose where they want to send their children to school, whether public schools or private".

A blogger has caught out the The New York Times in a bit of deceptive reporting. The NYT portrayed a critic of Tom DeLay as a Republican when she in fact has a long history of Democrat sympathies. Where was that fact-checking that is supposed to make the MSM so superior to bloggers?

The Democrats generally are in a well-justified panic over new Supreme Court appointments. They love the existing judicial dictatorship. So it is no surprise that The L.A. Times gets it exactly backwards: "Now, the battle over the confirmation process has become enmeshed with this third and most extreme stage of conservative thinking. What we are seeing, for the first time, is a fundamental challenge to the rule of law itself". It's not the GOP that is undermining the rule of law. The GOP want the rule of law back. It is arrogant Left-leaning judges who have ignored the law and replaced it by rule of their own opinions that are the problem.

With relentless use of awkward facts, Andrew Bolt puts the boot into the sick Leftist claim that the late Pope killed people by opposing the use of condoms to prevent AIDS.

Socialism impoverishes even oil-rich Norway: "In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list..... After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks. In 2003, when my partner and I took his teenage brother to New York - his first trip outside of Europe - he stared boggle-eyed at the cars in the Newark Airport parking lot, as mesmerized as Robin Williams in a New York grocery store in "Moscow on the Hudson.""

V.D. Hanson has a good roundup of past Leftist "wisdom" about Iraq so that we don't forget how comprehensively wrong they were.

There is a pathetic Leftist anthropologist here who manages to compare America today with Cambodia under Pol Pot. If they can convince us that the socialist Hitler was a Rightist, anything is possible, I guess.

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Engels thought the French conquest of the North African Arabs to be a triumph for civilization.

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

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

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

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

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

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17 April, 2005

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER BLOG

I have started reading the blog associated with the Orange County Register newspaper recently. Like a lot of newspaper blogs it is more conservative than the paper it is associated with. With less managerial censorship hanging over their heads, even journalists can be surprisingly down-to-earth sometimes. I reproduce below a few recent excerpts that I liked. The headings are mine:

Health Fascists

"The American Lung Association, one of those mammoth, anti-freedom charities, now is pushing to ban smoking in your own apartment. The ALA "will roll out plans today to make smoke-free complexes more widespread." The article notes that apartment complexes already are offering more non-smoking areas. So why the campaign? Because these sorts of health campaigns always end up with legislation mandating no-smoking areas, then total smoking bans. Indeed, an L.A. councilman is sponsoring legislation to mandate non-smoking apartments. Pretty soon, tobacco is going to be as illegal as crack cocaine".

A good summary of FDR

"Today marks the 60th anniversary of one of the world's worst tyrants: Franklin "D. for Dictator" Roosevelt." Elected on a 1932 platform that promised to end the Great Depression with cuts in taxes, tariffs, government programs, and regulations, he did the opposite -- and extended and deepened the Great Depression. In 1935, he imposed on America a German- (as in Third Reich by way of Bismarck) retirement scheme, Socialist Security, which to this day has plagued young famlies with strangulating taxes and soon will go broke. In World War II, Franklin "D. for Dictator" allied closely with his good friend, Josef Stalin, affectionately dubbing him "Uncle Joe," to defeat Uncle Joe's own former close ally, Hitler. At the Yalta conference, FDR "gave" Uncle Joe Eastern Europe -- enslaving those people until the Berlin Wall fell.

Unions destroy business again

It's not just taxpayers who are footing the bill for out-of-control union pensions, but car buyers. Today's Wall Street Journal had an excellent column by Holman Jenkins Jr. on why GM cars are so awful and show no sign of getting better (except for Cadillac). Outdated engines, old-style transmissions, horrible styling, dreadful performance -- that summarizes GM. Only Caddy got a huge new infusion of dollars to allow it to compete with other companies. GM, according to Jenkins, dropped its plans for the new Zeta platform because it has to spend the bulk of its money paying up for pension deals that are busting the bank. GM isn't a car company, argues Jenkins, but a social welfare agency dedicated to providing benefits to retired union workers. And GM's market share fades away. A well deserved fate. Unfortunately, in the public sector, the taxpayer rather than the shareholder has to pay up to deal with monumental overpayments to government workers. Note that San Diego is facing bankruptcy because of pension deals, and city attorney Aguirre last week called for new taxes.

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Blue Staters want to cut a tax that hits them: "Miracles happen, even to liberals, and the latest proof is their discovery of the horrors of the alternative minimum tax, or AMT. They've finally found a stealthy, soak-the-rich tax increase they don't like--and, better yet on this annual tax-payment day, their revelation may make tax reform possible. As our readers understand all too well, the AMT is a kind of IRS surprise double jeopardy. Claim too many deductions against a high income under the regular tax code, and the AMT sweeps you into its maw.... the AMT is biting hardest in the most liberal, high-tax states. That's because the AMT doesn't allow deductions for state and local taxes the way the regular code does. So middle-class taxpayers in New York, California and other states with high income-tax rates are getting hit sooner than people in, say, Florida or Wyoming. It is the ultimate blue-state tax. This helps to explain why people who normally thrill to higher tax rates are suddenly up in arms. Liberal newspapers are now denouncing the AMT as a "tax increase" and blaming the White House for not doing more to stop it. "The AMT needs to be fixed," moans Senator Barbara Boxer's spokesman, in what has to be a tax-reform first. "We need to address the AMT, which is trickling down to catch more and more middle-class families in New York," says Empire State Senator Chuck Schumer, another Saul on the road to Tarrytown".

Statement by a 1950s tax commissioner: "The income tax is bad because it has robbed you and me of the guarantee of privacy and the respect for our property that were given to us in Article IV of the Bill of Rights. This invasion is absolute and complete as far as the amount of tax that can be assessed is concerned. Please remember that under the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress can take 100% of our income anytime it wants to. As a matter of fact, right now it is imposing a tax as high as 91%. This is downright confiscation and cannot be defended on any other grounds. The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs are the result of indolence or lack of pride, self-respect, personal dignity or other attributes of men. The income tax is fulfilling the Marxist prophecy that the surest way to destroy a capitalist society is by steeply graduated taxes on income and heavy levies upon the estates of people when they die."

A good article on the socialist origins of the income tax here

There is an interesting summary of the current big corruption scandal in Canadian politics here which foresees a new Canadian election soon. It looks like Canadian voters will be offered a choice between corrupt Liberals and pro-American Conservatives. Given the childish envies of many Canadians, it seems possible that they will choose corruption. By contrast, Australians feel perfectly confident of their own identity and culture and so envy no-one.

Moronic Leftist Senator: "President George W. Bush traveled April 5 to Parkersburg, West Virginia to visit the so-called Social Security Trust Fund: a filing cabinet filled with paper. "There is no trust fund - just IOUs," backed by no economic assets whatsoever, Bush noted. Senator Jon Corzine (D., N.J.) called the president's remarks misleading. In a conference call with journalists, Corzine said: "U.S. Treasury securities have the ability to be paid under any circumstances based on the ability of the government to print money." While Corzine's press secretary denies this comment was a concrete proposal, at this writing, the senator proudly highlights this quote on the front page of his website. So, as Corzine sees it, come 2041, when the federal government's plunging tax revenues will cover only 70 percent of its exploding pension obligations, Washington will trigger Treasury Department printing presses to finance Social Security checks. Inflating the currency is a dreadful idea that has landed much of Latin America in massive trouble. Like a latter-day Evita Peron, Corzine smiles upon the Argentine economic model: skyrocketing prices, a currency as disposable as Kleenex, and rising social chaos. Democrats have said many silly things in their crusade to scuttle President Bush's personal retirement accounts, but this must be the stupidest. And to think that Jon Corzine once ran Goldman Sachs! Corzine's statement has left economists aghast".

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows Marx managing to denigrate Jews and blacks all at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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16 April, 2005

FROM BROOKES NEWS

The Left and John Paul II's Death How Phillip Adams and the ABC tried to diminish Pope John Paul II, even as he was being prepared for burial
Castro Spies on Hollywood Celebrities Has Castro blackmailed Hollywood celebrities like Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Kate Moss and Steven Spielberg into supporting his regime?
Clinton fuelled Beijing's militarism It is true that President Bush is no Clinton, for which the rest of the world - if it had any sense - would thank God. However, Beijing knows that eventually Democrats will regain the Oval Office
US economy: why the recession stumped Alan Greenspan With all the resources at his disposal Alan Greenspan felt forced to publicly admit that he did not know what was happening to the economy
The day the American Eagle was castrated There should be dignity in our passing.Terri Schiavo wasn't allowed that dignity. She wasn't even allowed last communion, or the comforting hands of a mother's love

Details here

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Message from David Horowitz (via email): "What happened at Butler: As I stepped to the podium, a group of four students -- juvenile delinquents, really -- rushed the stage and slammed a chocolate cream pie into my face. Fortunately my glasses weren't broken. Officials caught and arrested three of the students -- including a female who spewed racial epithets at Butler professor Marvin Scott, a good friend of mine and yours in this battle, and the Republican candidate for Senate in last November's election. There was nothing comedic about it. This attack was one in an increasing string of violence against conservative speakers. Ann Coulter, William Kristol and Pat Buchanan have suffered similar assaults as well in recent weeks. These assaults are in addition to leftist attacks on armed services and Homeland Security recruiters at campus job fairs in an effort to silence them, too. This type of thuggish behavior is not only being encouraged by radical faculty members who regularly deride conservatives and conservative students but tacitly condoned by school administrations that tolerate these acts, as well! This is precisely what you and I are fighting against! These students and their academic consorts are underscoring our point -- and they've taken to violence in response to the success of our National Campaign for Academic Freedom! But here is some great news! I received heartfelt apology from Butler University President Dr. Bobby Fong following the assault. Dr. Fong told me that contrary to what the mainstream media reports, there is widespread support in the academic community for our Academic Bill of Rights. Our opposition consists mainly of radical ideologues."

Another triumph of Dutch liberalism: "A survey has indicated that 32 percent of Dutch people want to emigrate abroad and that just 51 percent are proud of the Netherlands.... The research indicated that Dutch people think more positively about China than they do the Netherlands. Some 46 percent of people think negatively about the Netherlands, compared with 35 percent for China. A large amount of the spontaneous reactions over the Netherlands were negative. This was due to political developments, multiculturalism, over-population, criminality and socially distant people".

Blacks and Muslims in France despise French Leftists too: I noted this article on April 2nd. but lots of my readers have subsequently drawn my attention to it so perhaps I too should draw attention to it again. Excerpt: "On March 8, tens of thousands of high school students marched through central Paris to protest education reforms announced by the government. Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths--about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism. Some of the attackers openly expressed their hatred of "little French people." One 18-year-old named Heikel, a dual citizen of France and Tunisia, was proud of his actions. He explained that he had joined in just to "beat people up," especially "little Frenchmen who look like victims." He added with a satisfied smile that he had "a pleasant memory" of repeatedly kicking a student, already defenseless on the ground".

Kissinger on the current scene: "When I started in government 35 years ago, one had many opponents. But there was a bedrock of people who were quite well informed at the outset of many of the aspects of the issues. But it's much less today. People take positions before they've studied the issues. Their views on issues reinforce set positions rather than the other way around.".... "When I was a graduate student and a young professor at Harvard, we used to have faculty seminars with scientists and political scientists and others to discuss the implications of the nuclear age," Mr. Kissinger said. "Most of them were Democrats, but the emphasis was national, not partisan. And it was never personal. Every point of view was welcomed."... But as the 1960s and 1970s evolved, he said, America's intellectual community split into two groups: "Job applicants - people who wanted government jobs- and revolutionaries, who denied that anything valid could be done unless the system was changed or destroyed. "It was really about access to power," Mr. Kissinger said. "It was no longer about access to ideas. The nature of the intellectual community has changed. If more and more see themselves as advocates rather than as generators and debaters of ideas, then it's a different society"

There is a categorized list of political blogs here that should be a good aid to finding your way around the blogosphere.

Another choice quote from far-Left cartoonist Ted Rall: "My theory is that essentially, people don't like to think they're living in a country that's led by an evil, dictatorial madman. But they are, they are living in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia.". Les Bates has some appropriate comments. I think Ted would not be out of place in one of his own cartoons. He has long ago abandoned reality.

Patriot Act hysteria: "When the Patriot Act was introduced 45 days after the events of September 11, liberals were up in arms. They claimed that, in the hysteria which followed the attacks, a hasty policy was being passed which impeded upon the civil liberties of American citizens. For the next four years, the very mention of the Patriot Act incited anger or demeaning scoffs from the left. Now that this important piece of legislation is up for renewal, liberals cling to their same tired points of contention, all of which have been proven false during the years when the Patriot Act was in effect. The most controversial points of the legislation seem to the provisions that allow the FBI to expedite its proceedings by obtaining evidence before their search is authenticated by a court, the fear that governmental organizations would have access to information such as library and medical records, and the "delayed notification" policy in which the FBI is only required to provide a search warrant after searching a premises. While much of the information regarding the use of the Patriot Act must be kept quiet, the Justice Department has released the following information. The power to seize personal records has been used 35 times, none of which involved medical, library, bookstore or gun sale records. In addition, the delayed notification search warrants have been used only 115 times. The Justice Department also released information regarding specific instances when the Patriot Act has been used. In addition to preventing international terrorist attacks, the policy has been used to prevent many local acts of terrorism."

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx considered negroes to be a degenerate race.

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

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

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

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

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

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15 April, 2005

POLICE STATE USA?

Some Leftists are having orgasms over this story:

Secret Service visits art show "Organizers of a politically charged art exhibit at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery thought their show might draw controversy. But they didn't expect two U.S. Secret Service agents would be among the show's first visitors. The agents turned up Thursday evening, just before the public opening of 'Axis of Evil, the Secret History of Sin,' and took pictures of some of the art pieces -- including 'Patriot Act,' showing President Bush on a mock 37-cent stamp with a revolver pointed at his head. The agents asked what the artists meant by their work and wanted museum director CarolAnn Brown to turn over the names and phone numbers of all the artists. .."

"Police state"! They are crying. "Fascism!" "Censorship!"

It is of course nothing more than another example of zero tolerance -- the view that small threats and offences matter -- the strategy that drastically reduced crime in NYC and which is now applied nationwide in U.S. schools by Leftist teachers in their campaign against weapons of all sorts -- so that kids are sent home or expelled for possessing a butterknife or drawing a picture of a gun. So if zero tolerance is evidence of Fascism, America's Left-dominated schools are a hotbed of it. I somehow think that Leftists would not like to argue that. I personally think that zero tolerance is what it says -- intolerant -- and hence I dislike it, but what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

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GRRR.... I HATE THESE MSM DISTORTIONS: BANKRUPTCY

This is the AP "news" report just out:

"Tens of thousands of people who want to wipe out their debts in bankruptcy court would have to work out repayment plans instead under legislation Congress approved Thursday. A 302-126 vote by the House sent the legislation to President Bush, who said he was eager to sign the measure, the biggest rewrite of the bankruptcy code in a quarter-century. It marks the second major change in law to benefit business since Republicans increased their House and Senate majorities in last fall's elections... After eight years of strenuous efforts by congressional backers, banks and credit card companies, the legislation was catapulted toward enactment starting earlier this year. The legislation, which garnered some Democratic votes, cleared the Senate last month on a 74-25 vote. The measure would require people with incomes above a certain level to pay credit-card charges, medical bills and other obligations under a court-ordered bankruptcy plan."

These robotic Leftist journalists don't mention that businesses are doing very well without this legislation. They just pass on their bad debts to everybody else in the form of higher charges. It is CONSUMERS who will benefit by not having to pay other people's debts.

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Wow! Steve Sailer seems to have totally shot down Steven Levitt's claim that legalized abortion was the cause of the drop in the crime rate

IQ tests revived in Britain (but not under that name, of course): "Teenagers face a nationwide examination to test their aptitude for university, in an attempt to identify the brightest students. The generic admissions test, to be piloted in September using 1,500 students across the country, adds to the burden of examinations that schoolchildren face and demonstrates a lack of confidence in A levels. Vice-chancellors have complained that the present admissions system, which relies on predicted grades, is no longer adequate. Half of predicted grades turn out to be wrong and many more A-level students are getting A grades than in the past. Designed and implemented by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate and the Australian Council for Educational Research, the new test is intended to ease the problem of oversubscription and justify selection procedures".

Death tax on way out: "The House voted 272 to 162 yesterday to permanently repeal the estate tax, throwing the issue to the Senate where negotiations have begun on a deep and permanent estate tax cut that can pass this year, even if it falls short of full repeal." [Australia abolished it years ago]

Minutemen success: "There aren't many border-control success stories these days, but Arizona's Minuteman Project is quickly becoming one. ... How ironic that the people who President Bush derided as 'vigilantes' are acting as much-needed extra eyes and ears for law-enforcement officials. The Minutemen have all but sealed the U.S.-Mexico border in the 23-mile stretch they patrol. Their success suggests that, organized in larger scale with a cooperative federal government, groups like Project Minuteman could be a substantial contribution to border security. At the very least, the Minutemen are bringing some much-needed attention to the nation's woefully porous borders. We hope President Bush and others who prefer the status quo are watching."

Euro on the way out? "European Central Bank watchers have begun to speculate on the fate of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) should French voters reject the European constitution next month. "The euro at risk" was the headline of a Deutsche Bank report to its clients on Monday. "Its life expectancy may soon be regarded as finite," Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Munchau wrote the same day. Supporters of the constitution say it is vital for ensuring that the European Union functions properly after the bloc's expansion last year. But opinion polls show a clear majority of French voters plan to reject it in a referendum on May 29. The constitution needs backing from all 25 member states and some analysts say its failure could lead to a reversal of European political integration. "The EU could disintegrate toward a free-trade zone," said WestLB Financial Markets on Tuesday. "Such developments would spell disaster for EMU and the ECB.""

Reliapundit also has a roundup of news suggesting that the EU is in big trouble.

Nathan Tabor notes that the father of the unborn is the third victim of abortion.

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx thought the Russians were mainly Asiatics and should be chased out of Russia. Hitler, of course, tried to do put that into practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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14 April, 2005

THE EU DISASTER

Alarming for Brits: "Veritas at the London Assembly is calling on the Mayor to join its members in condemning the government's acceptance of EU police officers operating in Britain with lifetime immunity from prosecution. These Europol officers will have authority to steal, lie and even kill in the course of their duties. Members of the public will have no right of redress. The European Communities (Immunities and Privileges of the European Police Office) Order 1997, already in force, states: "such persons shall enjoy immunity from suit and legal process in respect of acts, including words written or spoken, done by them in the exercise of their official functions."

The good news (1) "Once they were seen as the most loyal of all Europeans, but this week President Jacques Chirac faces one of the biggest battles of his political career as he launches a crusade to persuade the French to vote 'Oui' in next month's referendum on the EU constitution. Chirac will use a televised debate on Thursday to lay out his arguments in favour of the draft European constitution, amid mounting hostility. Yesterday the president of the European parliament, Josep Borrell, warned the French that they would plunge Europe into crisis if they rejected the constitution. Alarmed by opinion polls which show the 'Non' campaign in the lead, Borrell warned that rejecting the treaty on 29 May would have far more serious implications for the future of Europe than they imagine."

The good news (2): "The CIA has predicted that the European Union will break-up within 15 years unless it radically reforms its ailing welfare systems. The report by the intelligence agency, which forecasts how the world will look in 2020, warns that Europe could be dragged into economic decline by its ageing population. It also predicts the end of Nato and post-1945 military alliances. In a devastating indictment of EU economic prospects, the report warns: "The current EU welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalisation could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the EU, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role." It adds that the EU's economic growth rate is dragged down by Germany and its restrictive labour laws. Reforms there - and in France and Italy to lesser extents - remain key to whether the EU as a whole can break out of its "slow-growth pattern". Reflecting growing fears in the US that the pain of any proper reform would be too much to bear, the report adds that the experts it consulted "are dubious that the present political leadership is prepared to make even this partial break, believing a looming budgetary crisis in the next five years would be the more likely trigger for reform"."

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ELSEWHERE

Sounds good: "A measure to oust the four justices who voted for same-sex marriage in Massachusetts will be considered today by the state legislature's Joint Judiciary Committee. As WorldNetDaily reported, the Massachusetts-based group Article 8 Alliance is promoting a "bill of address," a Massachusetts provision allowing lawmakers to remove judges who fail to fulfill their duties. The measure, filed by Democratic state Rep. Emile Goguen filed in April 2004, contends the justices violated multiple articles in the state constitution prohibiting courts from nullifying existing laws and requiring that laws remain in effect until the legislature repeals them, regardless of the actions and opinions of the judiciary branch"

Maybe I am simply showing that I am an irrelevant old pedant but I am afraid I have to agree with this German court decision: "German prosecutors have provoked outrage by ruling that the 1945 RAF bombing of Dresden can legally be termed a "holocaust". The decision follows the refusal by the Hamburg public prosecutor's office to press charges against a Right-wing politician who compared the bombing raids to "the extermination of the Jews". German law forbids the denial or playing down of the Holocaust as an incitement to hatred. So delicate is the subject of the slaughter of Jews under Hitler that any use of the word "holocaust", or comparison with it, faces intense scrutiny and sometimes legal action. But prosecutors have declined to pursue further the case of Udo Voigt, the chairman of the far-Right NPD, who likened the RAF's raids to the Nazis' "final solution".. For a start, I have always been appalled by the mass-murder by fire-bombing of German civilans -- men, women and children -- in Dresden and Hamburg by the Allied airforces of WW2. The raids concerned had little military relevance and were in my view occasions when Britain and America descended to the moral standards of the Nazis. More to the present point however, the court is precisely correct in calling the result of both raids a "holocaust". The word "holocaust" means consumption by fire -- from the Greek "kausis", meaning burning. Originally "holokauston" was the Greek word for a burnt offering -- something common in primitive religions -- including the original Hebrew religion as recorded in the Old Testament.

For anybody who wants a good brief reference on why the Nazis were Leftists and not Rightists there is a neat summary here. The writer references quite a few of my articles but tells the story a lot more briefly than I do. At the other end of the scale Charles Coulombe has three articles here and here and here under the general heading "The Return of the Swastika" -- which largely go beyond what I have written in showing how derivatives of Nazi ideas are still influential among Leftists in our society today.

There is a new conservative site with lots of stuff on it here

Email received: "My name is Seth Spores; I am one of the three editors and co-founders of College Tree Publishing. We contacted hundreds of university and college conservative and liberal groups, political science departments, and university news papers and requested essay submissions from people in the 17 to 25 year old age group on political and social issues. The end result was What We Think: Young Voters Speak Out, which was put out nationally in late October. The book was meant to be a running forum for political expression of America's youngest voting demographic, and in that regard has been a success.... We are a non-partisan company possessing a Republican, Democrat and Libertarian leaning editor, trying to give fair and equal voice to all ideologies present among college age youth. We are currently accepting submissions for our next two books, What We Think 2 and What We Think About God and looking to increase the number of well written pieces". If you want to submit something, email: seth@collegetreepublishing.com

Carnival of the Vanities is up again in the hands of the very Leftist "Dr. Zen" (Freddy Vessant). He refers to a previous correspondence he had with me. You can read it here. When you have read it, you might be amused to note whether Freddy has comments on his blog or not.

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Engels admired America and scorned Mexico.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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13 April, 2005

SOME MORE ECONOMICS

There is a really brain-dead article about the current bankruptcy bill on Real Clear Politics by some woman who obviously knows nothing about either economics or business. She says banks are to blame for lending money to the poor at high interest rates. What she overlooks: People have to take responsibility for their own actions -- if you cannot afford the repayments, don't borrow; If the banks DIDN'T lend to the poor they would be condemned for "discrimination", "paternalism" or even "racism"; Poor people are frequent defaulters on their debts so banks have to charge high interest to cover all those who don't pay; The new bill will make it harder for people to dodge their debts so will reduce the interest that banks have to charge and thus make loans more affordable to the poor. What is wrong with any of that?

Competition is sweet: "If American consumers and taxpayers have learned any lesson over the years it's that sugar producers don't like competition. In fact, they loathe it. Always have. Since 1820, when Louisiana sugar planters successfully argued for high tariffs to prevent a collapse in the value of slaves, the industry has used political influence to fleece consumers and taxpayers and avoid competition. No other industry has used its deep pockets and vast political clout ($22 million of campaign contributions to both parties since 1990) to restrain trade and competition. American consumers have been the victims. In 2004, government price controls through trade quota restrictions and loan guarantees priced U.S. sugar at more than 20 cents a pound, about 2r times the world price. This means Americans spend about $2 billion more yearly ... than if we had a free market in sugar."

How awful! Cheap clothing for the people! "The Bush administration took a giant step yesterday toward imposing new caps on imports of Chinese clothing, responding to complaints that China's export juggernaut is starting to dominate the worldwide apparel market since the system governing the global industry was changed on Jan. 1. A U.S. interagency panel said it will initiate proceedings to determine whether new limits should be slapped on imports from China of underwear, cotton trousers, and cotton knit shirts and blouses"

The rich get richer and the poor really do get poorer in socialist Britain: "Britain's poorest 10% of households are becoming even poorer, according to devastating official figures revealing that Chancellor Gordon Brown's tax-and-spend agenda is hurting Middle Britain while failing to help the most vulnerable. The poorest 5.8m Britons are the only group whose take-home incomes are falling, according to figures discovered by The Business buried in a 357-page Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) study slipped out last week. The real income after tax, welfare and housing costs of the poorest 10% of households fell from 91 pounds (E131.90, $170.20) a week in 2001-02 to 90 pounds in 2002-03 and 88 pounds in 2003-04. Their annual incomes are down 3.3% to 4,576 pounds a year, suggesting that an underclass is being left behind despite a relatively strong and prosperous UK economy. The incomes of this poorest group are also down over the past two years before adjusting for housing costs. When housing costs are included, post-tax take-home pay of the top 10% of Britons rose by 1.4% between 2002-03 and 2003-04; during the same period, the poorest 10% saw their income drop by 2.2%. The next worst-affected group was the middle earners, who suffered from a 12.9% rise in council tax and a 1% rise in national insurance contributions over the year. NOTE: This article now seems to be offline so I have rescued it from the Google cache and reposted it in full here

Possibly the best explanation of economics ever written, Henry Hazlitt's Economics in one Lesson is now free online here (Big PDF).

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ELSEWHERE

USA Today has an editorial defending the American judiciary from conservative dissatisfaction with it. The editorial makes what would in general be a reasonable point: "Frist is also considering an unprecedented ruling to prevent Democrats from blocking judicial nominees - crushing the valuable principle that judges appointed for life should be acceptable to a broad political mainstream and thus beholden only to the law and the Constitution.". That would be a reasonable point if America had a judiciary that stuck to judging instead of making the law up as it went along but what the paper says refers to an idealized past, not the present reality. It has got to the point now where tough action is needed. The existing system has failed.

Stories like this one from AP really give me the pip: "Iraqis are increasingly calling on U.S. forces to leave their troubled nation". A less biased lead would be: "Followers of a small minority group who got virtually no support in the recent Iraq elections are about the only visible opposition the US now has in Iraq"

Aggressive U.K. pacifists: "Anti-war activists are borrowing the tactics of animal-rights extremists to intimidate staff at a factory where weapon parts used in the Iraq war are made. They are the latest group of protesters whose activities could be stopped by High Court injunction..... Activists are accused of shining laser lights into employees' eyes when they are driving, putting glue in external locks, dumping concrete and manure in the reception area and throwing red paint bombs. They also allegedly assaulted a security guard, photographed staff and their vehicles, dismantled air conditioning vents and wrote to the neighbours of a director saying he was a mass murderer. Protesters set up a roadblock last May, preventing access to the site for five hours. In June an employee was boxed in his car for 15 minutes. In September demonstrators staged a 24-hour rooftop sit-in."

Eyewitness Border report from two "Minutemen": "Witnessing with our own eyes what is going on at the border has really been mind-boggling. Unless you see it for yourself down here you would never believe it. The local media reports some of what actually transpires on the border here but it never reaches the interior of our country and the majority of our citizens. In plain language we are being invaded, not by armies, but by literally thousands of illegal aliens every single day of the year. The Border Patrol doesn't even catch half of the people that come across and they catch an unbelievable number of them. I've heard the number 1 in 4 that come through. When they do catch them they send them back into Mexico where they try again the next day. ... I hear they don't have half the manpower they need so a lot of calls go unanswered. Of the hundreds arrested in March in this area alone the newspaper reported 20% of them had criminal records."

Germany: "When US President George W. Bush visited Germany last February, tens-of-thousands of angry demonstrators turned out in Mainz and all across Germany to vent their outrage at the Iraq war and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Now, less than two months later, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Germany. And a whopping 30 protesters showed up to demonstrate the bloody Russian war and widespread human rights violations in Chechnya. Putin and Schroeder were all smiles as they tipped champagne glasses and signed multi-billion dollar business deals for everything from Russian natural gas imports to German bullet train exports in Schroeder's hometown of Hannover. Naturally, with the cash registers busily ringing away, Chechnya never came up and the German media has all but ignored the topic".

My latest quote on MARXWORDS finds Marx expressing contempt for the Indians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



12 April, 2005

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I lookat the problem of rogue judges and note that they CAN be sacked.

On Greenie Watch I note how Greenies depend on ad hominem arguments

On Political Correctness Watch I note that "tolerant" Sweden has re-banned prostitution

On Leftists as Elitists I report a survey showing that Leftist activists are mostly from privileged backgrounds

On Gun Watch I note an incident showing how lifesaving guns can be on yachts.

On Education Watch I have a report about another academic fruitcake

On Socialized Medicine I report how an incompetent Pakistani doctor known informally as "Dr Death" worked for years in a public hospital.

On Marx Words I have quotes showing that both Marx and Engels thought that the Chinese suffered from hereditary stupidity

On Majority Rights I look at "The Simpsons" as an antidote to political correctness

On Blogger News I ask whether the late Pope was a conservative. I have subsequently spelt that out a bit more here (or here)

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ELSEWHERE

The ADL has just put out its summary of antisemitic incidents for 2004. Most incidents occurred in that bigoted redneck South, of course. Any Leftist would tell you that. Just look at this list of the States with the most incidents and note how redneck they all are: New York; New Jersey; California; Florida; Massachusetts and Connecticut. Disgusting rednecks! Isn't America lucky to have all those "tolerant" blue States?

Tom Heard says the U.S. should pull out its troops. lock, stock and barrel -- not from Iraq but from Germany.

Les Bates delivers pizzas to help pay his bills. An interesting comment from him: "One thing that I noticed is that hardcore leftist activists are extremely parsimonious when it comes to tipping. One even laughed in my face when I suggested that he could write in a tip on the credit card slip. Shows how much they really love the real workers".

An insider comment on the BBC: "BBC journalists are aware of their duty to be impartial but they understand it intellectually not instinctively. While the BBC would never endorse one political party, its dominant attitudes are rigidly social democratic. Those values are so dominant that they are treated as virtues not opinions. It is why a BBC correspondent cried when Yassir Arafat died and a Today presenter referred to the Labour Party as "we". These political prejudices are innate because too few BBC employees have ever experienced life in the free market and those who have are often refugees from it. The corporation grows its own managers in preference to recruiting from outside and advertises for staff in left-wing newspapers".

The decay of the Democrats: "Those of us who label ourselves Democrats have stood for economic fairness since the New Deal, but in the last three decades our once-majority party has embraced a take-no-prisoners cultural agenda that now threatens to relegate Democrats to permanent minority status. The hostile takeover driving this drift to irrelevance is especially painful to cultural moderates, who remember that social democracy was born of traditional values.... Today's Democratic Party leaders have apparently forgotten, however, that the social programs that came of age during the New Deal had their origins in Judeo-Christian tradition, even more than in secular humanism. Indeed, it might be argued that popes were as influential as politicians in shaping policy."

There is a disgraceful story here about undemocratic goings-on in Canada. I can't say I am surprised. Leftists only put up wuith democracy to the extent to which they have to. Excerpt: "Murray was grilled by a Commons standing committee and he revealed how pathetically unqualified he is for the job. He even acknowledged his shortcomings and apologized to the committee for them. The House of Commons rejected Murray's appointment by a vote of 143-108. But junior Environment Minister Bryon Wilfert said Murray will keep his job anyway."

Why the Left hate Christians: "Left-wingers are fundamentalists of their own breed. Yes, it's true that despite mountains of evidence, some conservatives refuse to accept the theory of evolution. But so what? At the very same time, despite mountains of evidence, most liberals refuse to accept the theory of press bias. So what's the difference? Similarly, fundamentalist liberals "know" global warming is the world's greatest threat. Fundamentalist liberals "know" Israel brutalizes the Palestinians. Fundamentalist liberals "know" Fox News is fascist, even though it leans to the right just exactly as much as the New York Times leans to the left. And fundamentalist liberals "know" Bush is stupid, even though his IQ is 126, while John Kerry's is 122. Yes, they "know" all this stuff, and why? Because of blind faith. Nothing more. The very same kind of blind faith they attribute to their religious "inferiors." So tell me: What's the difference between a fundamentalist of the Religious Right and a fundamentalist of the Secular Left? Pot, have you met Kettle? I have a theory about religion mockers. Like me, they were raised to be faithful, but they gave up their beliefs in their teens..... But deep down, they doubt. Their gut says: "What if the priests and rabbis are right after all? What if there really is a heaven and hell? Man, am I going to be in deep (bleep) then." To hide their anxiety, they snark. It's unseemly. They pretend to be contemptuous of believers. But they're really contemptuous of themselves. They haven't the courage to walk their walk. In fact, you could call them self-hating atheists. Secretly they fear they're doomed to go to hell and burn".

My latest quote on MARXWORDS finds Engels saying that most Slavic nations have no past and no future (!).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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11 April, 2005

THE WASHINGTON BULL-SESSION ON THE JUDGE PROBLEM

This article by the egregious Dana Milbank, about a meeting of a small group of prominent conservatives in Washington, seems to have stirred up a hornet's nest in some circles -- which is, of course, what it was meant to do. Even Arthur Silber -- who is a pretty level-headed guy most of the time -- seems to have got his knickers in a knot over it. Milbank is very good at subtly slanting the news and hinting at things without actually saying them and this is a prime example. He reports a whole series of statements that are mostly not unreasonable by themselves and manages to weave them into a rather alarming tapestry. He also presents the report as if he were present and taking notes at the meeting but nowhere actually says that he was so the accuracy of what he does say is for a start a matter of some conjecture. But so far everybody seems (in my view unwisely) to be taking his report as gospel. One can only imagine what he has left out.

What transpired was apparently a general discussion about what should be done about America's current problem of lawless Supreme Court judges -- and different individuals suggested different solutions -- broadly falling into restrictions on what the judges can do or finding ways to remove the irresponsible judges from office. What seems to have induced near-ecstasy in some Leftist bloggers is that one of those present quoted Stalin to the effect that removing the man removes the problem -- implying that Stalin's METHOD of removing the man (execution) was being advocated. The fact that the person who quoted Stalin is a constitutional lawyer who wrote "How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary" LEGALLY was mentioned by Milbank but seems to have been glided over by everyone else.

The Left seem determined to take what was obviously a brainstorming session among a small group of people as proof of some heinous plot but that is to be expected, I guess.

The basic submission of those present at the meeting -- that recent constitutional decisions which turn to foreign opinions rather than to the text of the constitution are grossly unsatisfactory -- is a submission in which I myself would heartily concur. I might perhaps go along with the argument that the constitution should be treated as a "living document" but that is NOT what the Supreme Court is doing. They are in fact treating it as a blank slate -- finding in it all sorts of things (such as abortion rights) that are not remotely there. There is only one democratic way for the constitution to change with the times and that is via amendments voted for by the people.

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

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NEWT GINGRICH SAYS YOU CAN SACK ROGUE JUDGES

(From an interview with Pat Robertson)

GINGRICH: I think we are a covenant society, and I think part of the message has to be to our elected officials that we expect Congress and the President to stand up to judges who don't understand America. And in the case of the two appeals court judges, of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who said they were going to outlaw saying `one nation under God' in the Pledge -- my position would be Thomas Jefferson's, which would be to abolish their two jobs. Let them go back into the private sector, because clearly those two judges do not understand America and should not be sitting on the federal bench.

ROBERTSON: Is it possible for Congress to selectively take out a couple of judges? You'd have to abolish the whole Ninth Circuit.

GINGRICH: No, in 1802, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who knew a fair amount about the Constitution, passed a law abolishing 18 out of the 35 federal circuit court judges. That is over half the federal circuit court judges. They were given unemployment slips, and told to go find work. So clearly there is a precedent. The Congress can say this particular office is now closed. You are not going to have hearings. You might have to pay their pension under a constitutional provision that's a lifetime appointment. But you don't have to let them have clerks, you don't have to let them have an office, you don't have to let them serve in court any more.

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ELSEWHERE

There is a Leftist law professor here who has had a bright idea about how to solve the judicial bias problem. He just redefines Left and Right to suit himself. Without one shred of supporting argument he redefines Left-leaning judges like Sandra Day O'Connor as "conservatives" and calls conservative judges "neo-cons". And neocons are people who "throw caution to the winds"! Do you want to know which parallel universe he is living in? It is called Yale.

There is an instructive story on PC Watch today about the re-banning of prostitution in Sweden. It shows what a sham is the Leftist defence of liberty in the moral sphere.

Hurray for Frankenstein! : "The 'Frankenstein Report,' is what outraged critics are calling a new report, Human Reproductive Technologies and the Law, that signals welcome sanity on the cloning front in Western world politics. The report was issued on March 24 by the cross-party Science and Technology Committee of the British House of Commons. What's got the critics' knickers in a twist? First, the U.K. Members of Parliament (MPs) dare to suggest that a wide range of current and potential interventions in human reproduction can, in fact, be done ethically."

NYC misses Giuliani "A woman with a three-month-old baby was mugged at gunpoint on a sunny morning in Central Park last week, heightening fears that New York is sliding back into disorder. Catherine Collins, 34, a freelance television producer, was walking with her son Jackson in a pushchair when a robber pulled out a gun and demanded her rings. "I was terrified," Collins said. "I was trained never to resist. I saw the gun and I saw my baby. There was nothing worth contemplating." Central Park, once a muggers' paradise which came to symbolise the breakdown of the city in the 1980s, has been cleaned up and reclaimed by families. It has rarely been safer. Yet there are signs that the city's public spaces are deteriorating. A 28-year-old actor was murdered in Manhattan in January when she challenged four muggers. "What are you going to do, shoot us?" she asked. One of the assailants fired a bullet into her chest and she died in her fianc,'s arms. Dealers are peddling drugs in city squares at night, the homeless are sleeping rough on subway benches, beggars are roaming the carriages and graffiti are returning to city walls."

One of my readers has sent in an essay about the moral corruption of academe and its consequences. See Here.

My latest quotes on MARXWORDS show that both Marx and Engels thought the Chinese to be hereditarily dumb!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



10 April, 2005

WHY THE LEFT SUPPORT SO MUCH EVIL

Excerpt from Evan Sayet. More wisdom from Evan here (or here)

"So, if they're not evil and they're not stupid what is it the Modern Liberal hopes to accomplish by siding always with evil over good, wrong over right, death over life (except in the case of child rapists and murderers) and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success? The answer can be found in the John Lennon song of the Sixties era (1970) "Imagine." Note the be all and end all of Lennon's paradise, a world in which everyone "lives for today."

Suddenly the childish "war is not the answer" makes sense. It's not the answer because war -- today -- is unpleasant and the terrorists are not likely to hit until tomorrow. Suddenly it makes sense why the leftist believes that children who fail tests should still get the reward of a promotion to the next grade. After all, their inability to read and write won't really affect them until they join the workforce somewhere down the line. For TODAY why not make them "feel good" with the gift of graduation?

This idea of "living for today" is what is behind the left's arguments for homosexual marriage -- something that may well destroy civilization TOMORROW but for today, well, it feels good. And it explains why the left's ideological brethren in France would refuse to get up from their Chablis to go check on their parents during a heatwave that saw 15,000 of their moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas suffocate to death two summers ago. Sure they'd have to bury their loved ones...tomorrow...but today? Well, they had just barely gotten a good buzz on.

Doing what is right often doesn't pay off immediately. Sacrificing today's pleasures for tomorrow's gain, well, that's just not what John Lennon -- or the Modern Liberal -- imagines".

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ELSEWHERE

There is a new site up which shows people how much better off they would be with even partial privatization of Social Security. And who benefit most? The poor, of course. No wonder Democrats hate the idea!

Wicked Thoughts has the story behind the recent blogger.com meltdown

Want a laugh? Read this Leftist nutjob's definition of "good" Christians. A few excerpts: "They are the legions of recovering Catholics, people for whom the radiant and positive aspects of this most intense of faiths still hold powerful sway but who just can't abide by the ridiculous and outdated and often homophobic and sexist doctrines hurled forth like so much flaccid manna from the unhappy red-robed automatons of Vatican City. They are the moderate Christians, the ones who do not support illegal wars or the killing of all doctors who perform abortions and who are all for social justice and who think Bush is a bit of an imbecile, and even if they find themselves for some unfortunate reason in support of the Republican cause overall, they still think it's rather abhorrent that the man dares invoke God to support his lie-ridden wars and the smashing down of women's rights and gay rights and abuse of the environment et al..... And these Christians -- let us call them "normal" or perhaps "natural" or even "organic" (i.e.;, devoid of poisons or preservatives or Sanctimonious Growth Hormones) -- they are filling all manner of funky or progressive (or Unitarian) churches across many a large city in America, right now. They are streaming into huge beautiful nonjudgmental buildings all over San Francisco and Chicago and New York and Boston, etc., places that welcome gays and oddballs and spiritual nomads and pantheists and anyone else who might be feeling a divine pull, and please leave your Jesus extremism at the door and let's talk about Sufism".

Poisonous judges: "The judiciary is supposed to be the ultimate protector of our freedoms, the Constitutional creature that guards us against the depredations of Congress and the presidency. Instead, it has become our greatest source of anguish. The other branches of government produce enough on their own. The President often reduces liberals to sputtering outrage and has the same effect on conservatives when the subject of illegal immigration comes up. Congress -- when it's not performing its primary role of inside-the-Beltway comic relief -- often leaves us scowling and mumbling (especially in April which, thanks to them, truly has become the cruelest month). But it falls to the courts, and not just the Supreme Court, to produce the gut-wrenching, feel it in your bones kind of anguish that simmers constantly. We feel powerless about what they do because, for decades, we have been."

Religiousness is genetic too: "A study published in the current issue of Journal of Personality studied adult male monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins to find that difference in religiousness are influenced by both genes and environment. But during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, genetic factors increase in importance while shared environmental factors decrease. Environmental factors (i.e. parenting and family life) influence a child's religiousness, but their effects decline with the transition into adulthood. An analysis of self-reported religiousness showed that MZ twins maintained their religious similarity over time, while the DZ twins became more dissimilar. "These correlations suggest low genetic and high environmental influences when the twins were young but a larger genetic influence as the twins age" the authors state."

Don't hold your breath: "Larry Summers hinted that women on average might not be as qualified as men to be science professors. Paul Krugman wrote that Republicans en masse are categorically not as qualified as everyone else to be professors. Larry Summers was almost universally condemned by academia for his comments, not because they were necessarily wrong, but because it was considered wrong for him to make negative generalizations about an under-represented group. In academia, Republicans are far more under-represented than women are. So if Paul Krugman is not widely condemned by academics it will constitute pretty strong evidence that academia is biased against Republicans."

Canadians rediscovering Christianity: "A Gallup poll late last year showed 37% of Canadians are attending church services at least on a monthly basis. It is a far cry from the old days when churchgoing was the Golden Rule, but it is the highest level seen since the early 1980s. Bibby's own national survey, done with the Vanier Institute, found weekly church attendance had increased to 26% in 2003 from from 21% in 2000.... A recent OMNI-Maclean's poll found 58% of Canadians consider themselves to be religious while 70% claim to be spiritual.... Evangelical churches have seen booming business for years, in part as a spillover from their soaring success in the United States. What is new, the sociologist says, is that his surveys show the decline in weekly attendance at mainline Protestant churches has "bottomed out" while the Anglicans and the United Church of Canada have actually seen an increase in the number of younger people becoming involved. Roman Catholics outside Quebec have also witnessed a similar spike among the young -- especially after the Pope's visit to Toronto for World Youth Day. It is a phenomenon Father Pat O'Dea has witnessed first hand as he looks out at overflowing pews as pastor at the Newman Centre Catholic Mission at the University of Toronto. He has seen attendance at his Sunday masses almost double in two years"

My latest quotes on MARXWORDS show that the hate-filled Friedrich Engels despised both Scandinavians and the Irish.

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

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

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

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

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

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9 April, 2005

ARLENE PECK IS SKEPTICAL ABOUT CHANGES IN THE ARAB WORLD:

We are deluding ourselves with our mistaken belief that "the vote" is going to change the Middle East and that we're going to be liked by any one of the twenty-two Arab lands, which we largely support. That old expression holds true - you just can't buy love. The American government keeps sending those checks, and the Arab cartel keeps voting against us at every chance.

How do we rationalize with a twelfth century mentality? The Arab culture has been stuck in the Middle Ages for, what, a thousand years? Can any of you out there name me anything positive that they have done since the fourteenth century? And don't mention how they have invented algebra. All they have taught in their schools for decades is hate and how to kill. When they 'play dead' in the school yard the classmates cheer the dead 'martyrs'.

Do we actually think that a culture of 1.3 billion people, many of whom still routinely mutilate the genitals of their women and are prone to treat their farm animals a bit better, are really going to grasp the real meaning of democracy? They have never been able to excel in medicine, but they have mastered the art of surgically removing the clitoris. Gawd, what does a trip to the polls mean to them? Their entire culture is based on submission. They live for death, but possibly in a hundred years they might be ready for board meetings.

In the meanwhile, we have to contend with the wild savages that our televisions are showing us nightly, who kill everything in sight and for whom sawing off a head is a good night's work. This is not the fodder for democracy as we know it. But it is the basis for theirs.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

More Leftist intolerance: "Someone threw a pie at conservative commentator David Horowitz during a lecture at Butler University in Indianapolis Wednesday night. It's the second time in a week a conservative has been hit by a pie at an Indiana school".

Fair unions coming? "A pro-business group whose leader is closely connected to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is funding the signature-gathering effort to make it tougher for public employee unions to spend their members' dues money on political campaigns. The Small Business Action Committee has contributed $375,000 to the Coalition for Employee Rights, which is trying to get the "employee consent" measure on a possible special election ballot this November. The committee is headed by Joel Fox, the former president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association who worked as senior policy consultant to Schwarzenegger during the 2003 recall. A Schwarzenegger spokesman said that at the moment, the administration has "no intention or interest" in participating in what is shaping up as a volatile fight between unions that view the initiative as an attack on their political viability and proponents who say they are only protecting the political choices of public employees."

The British election campaign: "In Nick Herbert, Conservatives in Arundel could not have found a better prospective MP to replace Howard Flight. In choosing a radical thinker who successfully led the all-party "no" campaign against the euro, and who then created a think-tank that makes a forceful case for lowering taxes, the constituency has backed a serious candidate. The fact that he is also gay makes the constituency's choice a loud and clear statement that the Conservative Party hosts a diverse range of candidates and views. It would be ludicrous to confine political discourse to wrangling over whether public spending should be 42 per cent or more (it was 37.4 per cent in 1999-2000). Mr Herbert has eloquently made the case that this is a staggering proportion, and that the money is inevitably used less efficiently in the public sector.... It is a vital part of the Tory creed to aspire to lower public spending, and never more so than when taxes, both patent and stealth, keep rising. With almost one worker in four employed by the State, Britain is hardly the Wild West of leftist imagination, plundered by capitalist rednecks. Far from being the beachhead for a government-free economy railed against by President Chirac, Britain is burdened with government at every turn. Businesses struggle under a growing mountain of misguided, often poorly drafted, overweening regulation that attempts to determine everything from door widths to inflexible flexitime."

Corrupt Canada. A big summary of Canadian government corruption here. A small excerpt: "Captain's Quarters exemplifies the best of what blog reporting can be in its recent handling of the Canadian AdsScam case. To add context, the following analysis details more than a decade of potential corruption and media suppression by Canada's Liberal Party that likely set the foundation for such egregious abuse of power by the Canadian Government. Beginning with the election of Prime Minister Jean Chr‚tien in 1993, which crushed the Progressive Conservative opposition, Canada's liberal Party has known over a decade of scandal coupled with a suppressive attitude toward the press unimaginable within the United States. The first issue to arise went mostly unnoticed in 1994 and involved Chretien's minister of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) when it was discovered the minister had lobbied the commission he headed in support of a radio license for a supporter. The next and perhaps most appalling scandal for Canada's Liberal Party - one never widely reported within in the United States, involves the Krever Inquiry. Some may recall it as having been launched in the wake of the disastrous public blood supply issue that damaged the health of tens of thousands of Canadians by infecting them with Hepatitis C and HIV".

The media rarely mention this: "UN peacekeepers were sent to the Congo to relieve the significant humanitarian crisis faced in the region. However, they have only worsened the situation of these people since their arrival. During their stay, they have raped women and girls as young as twelve, taken hundreds of pornographic and sexually humiliating photographs and videotapes of children, coerced women into prostitution for food and money, impregnated several women, and spread the AIDS virus to many women, who afterwards spread the virus to their partners and offspring. Many of these events have been documented in film and the UN has acknowledged its members' involvement in these despicable crimes. In response to this, Kofi Annan has instituted a "zero tolerance" policy against sexual abuse and has condemned fraternization between these "peacekeepers" and local women. As is to be expected, this rhetoric has made no difference and the crimes continue".

Some revealing pictures of present-day Cuba here. Some remarkable scenes of decay.

We all remember the huge fuss the media made about the wicked capitalists at Enron. But it appears that the government sponsored Fannie Mae organization is in similar trouble but on a bigger scale. How odd that the media are not rushing to condemn a corrupt government body!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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8 April, 2005

SOME ECONOMICS

Candle-makers, blacksmiths ... and the Post Office: "Candle-makers were none too happy with the invention of the light bulb, for obvious reasons. Ditto blacksmiths with the invention of the automobile. So you can imagine how the post office must feel today about cheap long distance rates, faxes and email. While candle-makers and blacksmiths still roam among us today, like the buffalo their numbers have greatly diminished since the country's founding years. I assume they fought the tide of progress tooth-and-nail, but in the end their fate was inevitable. So, too, is the fate of the once great United States Postal Service (USPS). Its demise is a foregone conclusion. The only question is when and how the USPS as we know it today will be put out to pasture for good."

Realism comes to Germany: "A website that gets unemployed Germans bidding against each other to work for the lowest wages is set to spark fresh controversy with plans for an August launch in Britain. Trade unions have accused jobdumping.de of promoting "slave labour" with reverse auctions that see workers compete against each other in a downward bidding spiral for odd tasks and short-term contracts.... Jobdumping.de invites employers with openings for waiters or construction yard workers to offer a maximum fee and wait for a crush of eager workers to knock down the price. It's a nightmare come true for defenders of Europe's cosseted social model, already consumed by angst over a "race to the bottom" with low-wage economies in eastern Europe and Asia".

California shame. What happens when you spend all your money on bureaucracy: "When it comes time for the state to send monthly paychecks to more than 200,000 employees, someone in the controller's office in downtown Sacramento downloads the data from a mainframe computer onto a tape the size of an eight-track and walks it over to the room that houses the printers. The information-transfer process takes so long that the controller's staff has to start it before the end of the pay period to get the checks mailed out on time. And if anything goes wrong, only the old-timers on the controller's staff know how to fix it. The payroll program was written about 30 years ago in a computer language so ancient that to recent computer-science graduates, it looks like hieroglyphics. Decades after the birth of the computer industry, much of it right here in California, the state's massive information technology systems are disorganized, outdated and deficient".

Invisible foreign aid -- America subsidizes new drugs for the world: "Health care is expensive, but inadequate treatment is even more expensive. This is a lesson the German government has yet to learn. For years much of the world has been a free rider on U.S. medical R&D. Most industrialized states rely on a mix of price and volume controls to limit pharmaceutical spending. These governments expect American drug makers to keep supplying their products, almost irrespective of price. As a result, U.S. citizens are bearing a steadily increasing medical burden: Since 1999 America has accounted for 71% of the sales of new chemical entities, up from 62%. Japan and Germany, the next two largest pharmaceutical markets, account for just 4% each. Washington is under increasing pressure to end this sweet deal for other nations. In fact, the U.S. has started to raise the issue in trade negotiations. The real solution, however, is for other nations to pay a fair price for what they use."

Another jealous attack on business success: "Maryland lawmakers yesterday approved legislation that would effectively require Wal-Mart to boost spending on health care, a direct legislative thrust against a corporate giant that is already on the defensive on many fronts nationwide".

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ELSEWHERE

Another win for blogs: "An American blogger has suddenly emerged as a force in Canadian politics. Edward Morrissey, a 42-year-old Minneapolis area call-center manager who runs a Web log, or blog, called Captain's Quarters as a hobby, last Saturday began posting allegations of corruption that reached the highest levels of the Canadian Liberal Party. The postings violate a publication ban instituted a few days earlier by a federal judge, Justice John Gomery, who is leading an investigation into accusations of money laundering and kickbacks in a government program from the 1990's that was aimed at undermining Quebec separatists. The scandal, which involves government payments of up to $85 million to a handful of Montreal advertising firms for little or no work, has dominated national politics for a year and led to the Liberals losing their majority in the House of Commons last June.... According to Mr. Morrissey's blog, recent testimony for the first time links people who have been close to Prime Minister Paul Martin to the scandal.... While the Canadian news media have not reported explicitly what Mr. Morrissey is posting, their newspaper articles and television features about his work have led Canadians to visit Captain's Quarters (www.captainsquartersblog.com) to read the latest scandalous details. Mr. Morrissey said his blog had been flooded since Canadian CTV television first reported on its existence and contents Sunday night, and that he was now getting 400,000 hits a day."

Jeff Jacoby has a touching article about the late Pope's lifelong opposition to antisemitism -- which is all the more remarkable considering how antisemitic Poland has always been. There is another similar story of this truly righteous man here. That Leftists refer to a man of such great integrity as a "conservative" is a great compliment to conservatives. But Leftists would not know integrity if they fell over it, of course.

Frank talk about Muslims a crime in Britain: "The leader of the anti-immigration British National Party was charged yesterday with inciting racial hatred last year at a party gathering, in a development likely to shift the focus of Britain's general election campaign increasingly to immigration. Nick Griffin, who was expected to appear overnight with BNP founder John Tyndall at Leeds Magistrates Court, is standing as a candidate in next month's election in the seat of Keighley, where race is seen as a flashpoint issue and where the party won two seats in last year's council elections. Mr Griffin faces four counts of using language likely to stir up racial hatred, while Mr Tyndall is charged on two similar counts.... Mr Griffin said he welcomed the martyrdom that the race-crime charges represented. He said they were the result of speaking the truth and would lead to electoral success for the BNP."

If you have not seen it yet, have a look at the stereotyped view of America that a major German newsmagazine has just presented to its readers. How they hate America for being what they would like to be!

There is a big article here about Britain's huge numbers of NEETs (dole-bludging dropouts, mostly single mothers or criminals). Welfare payments that enable people to live adequately without working are of course the cause of the problem but nobody seems to be mentioning that.

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Engels despised Greeks too. Germans and Hungarians (Magyars) seem to be about the only peoples he liked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7 April, 2005

WHY I AM A LIBERTARIAN CONSERVATIVE

I normally mention my own political outlook only in passing. I am more interested in understanding what is happening in the world about me than I am in proposing my own grand theories. And in that respect I think I am a mainstream conservative. Conservatives don't like grand theories. I do however find libertarian ideas a very useful framework for thinking about problems. I think that most of society's problems are caused by governments usurping choices that could better be made by individuals and that government is just about the worst way of doing almost anything. So libertarians normally have a good answer to most social problems -- allow more freedom for individual choice. Libertarians have ideas and concrete proposals with a clear rationale and persuasive precedents. And that is a great contrast with the dismal Leftist reflex of solving everything via ever more pervasive coercion. And libertarian proposals in most spheres are normally congenial to conservatives too.

Where libertarians normally part company with conservatives is over moral issues. Conservatives want less regulation than Leftists but they do want some regulation. Exposing part of a black woman's breast at a major sporting event upsets some conservatives dreadfully, for instance. I am afraid that I remain a total libertarian on such issues. What people do with their own bodies seems to me to be supremely their business. And all arguments that some idea or claim should not be uttered or made known simply suggest to me that the idea or claim concerned is a powerful one that cannot easily be opposed. I would not go so far as to say that any censored idea or claim is automatically correct but I think there is a strong presumption in that direction. So the argument that sexual restraint should be fostered by censorship of sexual expression suggests to me that the arguments in favour of sexual restraint are weak.

Where I part company with many libertarians is that I find them too doctrinaire. I DON'T believe that there is one simple recipe that solves all problems. That to me is a Leftist outlook. As conservatives generally do, I see the world as infinitely complex and as not reducible to any simple rule. And in fact many libertarians agree with that. The extreme form of libertarianism is anarcho-capitalism -- the idea that NO government is needed for any purpose. I know all the arguments in favour of that view but see them as contrary to all human experience. Man is a social animal who has always throughout history felt at least some need for a government to perform certain tasks and I am perfectly confident that that will always be so. So as far as I can tell, most libertarians are not anarcho-capitalists. They are Minimal Statists. They believe that there are certain functions (such as defence) for which a government is needed. I am one of those.

So the distinction between Minimal Statists and Conservatives is one of degree. Conservatives have always wanted to limit the size and power of the State (I document 1500 years of history to that effect here) but they still want a much bigger State than Minimal Statists do. And I am a pretty minimal Minimal Statist. I think the USA could abolish its whole alphabet soup of government agencies (FDA, EPA, DEA etc) to great net advantage (for instance).

Where I appear to be in a minority among libertarians, however, is over the issue of immigration control. I am in favour of control. I am far from totally alone in that view among libertarians but I think it is pretty clear that a majority of libertarians believe in open borders. I think that is naive. Not all people are equally compatible with one-another and if a householder has a right to say whom he will welcome into his house then I think nations have an equal right to say whom they will welcome into their nation. Fortunately, I live in one of the few advanced countries in the world (Australia) that does effectively control its immigration. And my views on that matter make me very much a mainstream Australian. A huge majority of Australians agree with our government's policy of control.

Another way in which I depart from most libertarians but am very much in harmony with conservative traditions is that I do believe us all to be limited in various ways by human nature. Libertarians have no obvious place in their thought for the concept. They know it is a factor but see it as simply one of the many mysterious factors that determine people's preferences. For them only the preferences matter. What determines those preferences is for them unimportant. But conservatives think human nature is VERY important. They think it greatly limits what we do and can do and use it to explain WHY collective action is to be avoided where possible. They give reasons for preferring liberty, instead of simply asserting the desirability of liberty, as libertarians usually do.

That is not to say that libertarians have the same view of human nature that Leftists do. Leftists normally insist that human nature does not exist and that therefore any human being can in theory become anything he wants to be or can be "educated" into being. Libertarians, by contrast, are simply uninterested in whether that is true or not. Leftists think little boys can be "educated" into preferring dolls to trucks as playthings whereas conservatives think they cannot. A libertarian, by contrast, simply says that little boys should be given a choice of what to play with and who cares what they choose. Unfortunately, however, a lot of people do care so the conservative argument does have to be made. I personally agree with the libertarian policy in the matter but I think that policy does normally have to be backed up with conservative arguments about human nature to get it implemented.

Conservatives also have to make more of an issue of individual differences than libertarians do. That people are different and should be allowed to make different choices is axiomatic to libertarians but they normally take that as given rather than arguing for it. With their perennial "all men are equal" doctine, however, Leftists are always trying to deny or minimize individual differences. Conservatives believe that doctrine to be disastrously wrong and argue vigorously against it. Conservatives believe, for instance, that some people work harder and smarter and therefore rightly get more money for what they do. Leftists however think (or claim to think) that all men are equal so unequal rewards must be unfair and the work of a flawed system. So whether or not individual differences are important is a major Left/Right issue -- but libertarians simply assume it away without debate. I spent most of my academic career researching individual differences so I am obviously in the conservative camp there.

And one way in which I differ from almost everybody these days is that I say out loud that there are some differences between the major races and nations of mankind and that some (but only some) of those differences are important. Up until the middle of the 20th century just about everybody believed that but the fact that Hitler used arguments of that general sort in justifying his deeds has made such arguments generally unmentionable in the modern world. I am however a psychometrician by trade. My expertise is in measuring psychological differences between people. I have had over 200 papers published in the academic journals reporting research in that connection. And perhaps the most solidly proven and replicated finding in psychometrics -- a finding that has always emerged in around a century of research -- is that people of African ultimate origin do have much lower average scores on general problem-solving ability (IQ) than do people of European ancestry and that variations in IQ are largely genetic. So, knowing what I know from my own field of expertise, I HAVE to say that the Leftist approach of treating blacks and whites as intellectually equal is doomed to failure. Somebody has got to say that the emperor has no clothes and I am prepared to be that person when required. Most people seem to think that makes me a "Right-wing extremist" or a "white supremacist". I think it simply makes me an honest scientist.

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ELSEWHERE

A good comment from a reader about "Bishop" Robinson's claim (see yesterday) that Jesus was a homosexual: "Either Robinson is utterly ignorant of the Jewish culture of 2000 years ago or hopes that a lot of his parishioners and supporters are. It's not hard to imagine how a poor itinerant would have a bit of trouble coming up with the bride price of that day, no matter how little it might have been. And, since the security situation back then was probably a bit dicey, Pax Romana notwithstanding, it would have better to travel in the company of other men in order to ward off trouble. If I recall my Bible stories correctly, didn't Peter take the ear off a Roman soldier in Gethsemane?"

There is a good article here about Jim Wallis, the "Leftist evangelical" (really a pacifist who loves dictators). Leftists are hanging on his every word these days but he is pastor to only "a few dozen" people. What a great evangelist! He sure knows how to inspire people with Christ's message! Still, a lot of Anglican priests preach to only about half a dozen old ladies on Sunday so I suppose he does well as Leftist preachers go.

There is a report here (PDF) showing that "Women's Studies" programs at universities are as empty of students as they are of real content. They are just a "Jobs for the Girls" racket and serve no real academic purpose. It looks like very few students are foolish enough to waste an education on learning hopelessly biased propaganda.

The party of the rich in the 2004 election was ....... ? ... "Pointing to the left's success in using tax-exempt organizations to raise funds, Mr. York puts paid to the meme that Republicans are the party bankrolled by the rich. Mr. York records that 92% of contributions of $1 million or more went to Democrats. Pro-Democratic 527s, meanwhile, spent more than twice as much as their GOP counterparts".

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual big range of select reading.

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows again that Engels regarded the Slavs as an inferior race who deserve to be oppressed. How ironic that it was a Slavic nation (Russia) that first put Marxist ideas into practice!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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6 April, 2005

ABORTION

There is an interesting article here pointing out that in Britain the abortion issue is not politically polarized: Members of all political parties are allowed a conscience vote on the matter. There are many anti-abortion Leftists in good standing, for instance. The author argues that the U.S. Democratic party too should adopt a neutral stance on the matter and sponsor a constitutional amendment to short-circuit the Supreme Court and return to the State legislatures the decision on what abortions are legal or not. He says that to do so would detach a lot of Christian votes from the Republicans. He concludes:

"Of course, there's a very big "if" here. The pro-choice activists in the Democratic Party have to be willing to give up their court-enforced privileged position, trading their elite judicial bastion for the give-and-take of (small "d") democratic politics. They will lose ground in some states. But wouldn't that be a small price to pay for heading off "the theocrats" at the national level and for the opportunity of taming them at the state level?

Or is the fanaticism of the pro-choice wing of the Democratic Party just as much an obstacle to "grown-up" British-style politics as are the views of those deluded souls in Kansas who don't know what their real interests are?"

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ELSEWHERE

Was Jesus homosexual? "Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual bishop of his denomination, has angered traditionalist Anglicans by suggesting that Jesus Christ might have been homosexual. Robinson, who left his wife - and mother of his two daughters - to cohabit with his male lover, Mark, made his inflammatory remarks during an address titled, "Homosexuality and the Body of Christ: Is There a New Way?" at Christ Church of Hamilton and Wenham, Massachusetts. The bishop was asked by a congregant how Christians could both accept homosexuality and the Bible's emphasis on redemption for sins. "Interestingly enough, in this day of traditional family values," answered Robinson, "this man that we follow was single, as far as we know, traveled with a bunch of men, had a disciple who was known as 'the one whom Jesus loved' and said my family is not my mother and father, my family is those who do the will of God".

The real opponents of change: "On almost every significant area of public policy the Democrats are atrophied, rusty, and calcified. They're dependent upon old (condescending) notions about blacks, the patronage of teacher's unions which care very little for the facts, and feminists who define liberation almost exclusively as the freedom to abort pregnancies despite all of the new, inconvenient facts science is bringing to bear. Liberals are not the 'reality-based community, they are the status-quo based community. They wish to stand athwart history yelling 'Stop' -- in some rare cases, even when history is advancing liberalism in tyrannical lands. The Buckleyite formulation of standing athwart history yelling 'Stop' was aimed at a world where the rise of Communism abroad and soft-liberalism at home were seen as linked trends. Today, liberals yell "Stop' almost entirely because they don't enjoy being in the backseat. If they cannot drive, no one can."

Jane Galt has put up the best version of the conservative argument against homosexual marriage that I have seen. It is in fact an excellent argument for caution about change in general. I have in fact done an excerpt of what she says about reasons for caution in social policy generally and posted it here.

More U.N. corruption: "Freedom House today released its annual list of the world's most repressive regimes at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Six are members of the UN body, charged with monitoring and condemning human rights violations."

Sometimes, there oughta NOT be a law: "To see the national trend toward 'overcriminalization' in action, consider New Mexico. In his 2005 State of the State address, Gov. Bill Richardson labeled 2004 'the year of the legislature.' And it looks as if some Santa Fe lawmakers have no intention of relinquishing that title -- or the accompanying breadth of jurisdiction -- in 2005. Exhibit A: The Recycling and Illegal Dumping Act, introduced on Jan. 21 by Sen. Dede Feldman and recently passed by the State Senate. This bill makes it a criminal offense to use, store, transport or dump scrap tires or tire-derived products. ... Possession of old Firestones could get you three years in the slammer. You also might find yourself doing time over a conviction based on guilt by association. Under the bill, knowingly saying nothing about 'any substantive information [regarding tire derived products]' is a fourth-degree felony, punishable by up to 18 months in prison."

Centrist Democrats get the message: "The Democrats' postelection war about what they should stand for is heating up again, with centrists challenging liberals to 'real fights' within the party about staking out a tougher position against terrorism. In an attack on the party's dominant left wing, anti-war base, and a warning for new Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean 'to do no harm,' the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council said it is 'a delusion to think that if we just turned out our voters, we could win national elections.' Instead, the DLC called on the party to dramatically change its message to 'recapture the muscular progressive internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy and convince voters that national security is our first priority.'"

The age of judicial activism must end: "With the looming departure of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist from a heavily divided United States Supreme Court, the stakes are high for President Bush. What sort of Justice will replace Rehnquist? Will he or she be a judicial activist or stick to the original intent of the Constitution? Since the days of Marbury v. Madison, the meaning of judicial review has been a complicated issue in American public life. Over the years, several Justices have used their positions of power to become legislators--overstepping their bounds and creating law in the process."

British voting system fraud-prone too: "A judge investigating vote-rigging in Birmingham's local elections has ruled there was widespread fraud and has ordered new elections. Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC upheld allegations of postal fraud relating to six seats won by Labour in the ballot of 10 June last year. The results have been declared void and the polls in two wards must be rerun. Judge Mawrey said evidence of "massive, systematic and organised fraud" in the campaign had made a mockery of the election and ruled that not less than 1,500 votes had been cast fraudulently in the city. The deputy high court judge said the system was "hopelessly insecure" and expressed regret that recent warnings about the failings had been dismissed by the government as "scaremongering". Speaking outside court, a spokesman for the People's Justice Party called for postal voting to be outlawed at the general election.... Mr Mawrey ordered that none of the six councillors be allowed to stand for the vacant seats at the next election".

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows again that Marx believed in superior and inferior races.

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

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

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

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

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

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5 April, 2005

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I look at Black/White income disparities

On Political Correctness Watch I have some news about Britain's gypsy problem

On Greenie Watch I look at the latest Greenie scare about us "running out" of things

On Education Watch I note an argument in favour of "spare the rod and spoil the child"

On Socialized Medicine I note that with 1.4 million employees to serve 60 million people, Britain's NHS still cannot provide adequate medical care

On Gun Watch I say that the latest school shootings show that gun banning has plainly failed

On MarxWords I show that Engels thought Aryans were superior

On Leftists as Elitists I note a seemingly endless parade of unproven assertions by an elitist who thinks he knows what's best but who cannot even spell

On Majority Rights I say that Winston Churchill WAS a neocon

On Blogger News I note that homosexual conservatives are being persecuted by the Left

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WAS THE POPE A CONSERVATIVE?

Lawrence Auster has a heap of posts and comments up at the moment about the late Holy Father. Auster is derisive of the view that John Paul II was a conservative. But that depends on what you mean by conservative and Auster has an unusual view of that. It is certainly clear that JPII was a political centrist but I think one could say much the same of GWB. So is GWB a conservative? NO! I can hear some people shouting. But no real-life politician wins universal approval even from his own side of politics so I think we have to say that in the ordinary meaning of the term GWB IS a conservative.

From my own libertarian conservative viewpoint both GWB and JPII are/were not nearly conservative enough but I think that real-world conservative politics at least from Disraeli on have almost always consisted of finding a safe balance between competing political claims rather than pursuing some hard-line ideology. Hard-line ideologies are for Leftists. So I think Auster's view of the matter misses the point that JPII was of necessity a real-world politician -- so compromises were to be expected of him. Even my great hero, Ronald Reagan, signed into law some pieces of legislation I would rather not think about.

What I think Auster also misses is that political centrism is thoroughly Papal. The attitudes of JPII were simply modern adaptations of traditional Papal thinking. I go into that at slightly greater length here. Papal thinking is in fact the ancestor of the Blairite "third way". The syndicalism that was recommended in the famous 1891 encyclical De rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII also tried to strike a balance between capitalism and socialism.

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ELSEWHERE

George Watson's latest article on the great similarites between Nazism and Communism is now online. The similarities are even greater than is commonly known and Watson sets out well their common origins in the ideas of Marx & Engels. Excerpt: "Racialism was already widely accepted as the mark of the Left in many countries, including England. There the Fabians led. In 1900, in Fabianism and the Empire, they announced in imperial vein that "the state which obstructs international civilisation will have to go, be it big or little". Two years later H.G. Wells, another Fabian, wrote Anticipations, where in its last pages he called for the extermination or all non-white races to build a universal socialist utopia; and in August 1913, in the New Statesman, Sidney and Beatrice Webb called for the endless domination of the world by the white races"

Interesting excerpt from a review of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?: "And yet Frank's portrait of Kansas conservatives is often brilliant. One of the high points of the book is his interview of Tim Golba, the organizer of Kansans for Life. Frank is impressed that this man of power is a mere line worker in a soda-pop plant. Frank visits him in his little house, unscreened by trees, baking in the prairie sun, far from the leafy neighborhoods of the bourgeoisie. Apparently Golba is not conducting his crusade out of an economic interest. "Ignoring one's economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed in a different way it is an act of noble self-denial," Frank writes. "This is a man who has turned his back on the comforts of our civilization - who defies the men in great palaces. He smites their candidates; he wastes their money; he ends their careers." [So it is conservatism that offers the little guy a share in power]

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx believed in superior and inferior races. And guess whom he thought to be superior? (Hint: Adolf agreed).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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4 April 2005

SOME ECONOMICS

Amtrak: "If the federal government had supplied stagecoach service in the 19th century, we would still have stagecoaches in operation. Luckily, Washington was wise enough to stay out of that business. It was not wise enough to stay out of the passenger rail business, which is why we still have Amtrak. President Bush finds it hard to overhaul Social Security, which may not be surprising: It's a huge program that plays a large role in the life of virtually every American. But he may find it equally frustrating to shift federal policy on Amtrak, even though it's a small program that affects hardly anyone. This is one of those programs that demonstrates eternal life is not just a religious hope for the next world but a fact in this one. It was launched in 1971 with the hope that, in the words of President Nixon's transportation secretary, it 'could be profitable within perhaps three years.' That forecast proved, well, premature."

U.S. foreign debt too LOW: "Here's another reason to be bullish: everyone is worried sick that America is overindebted, but it's not. This country could profitably take on more loans from abroad and invest the money in productive assets. We're underindebted. The debt worriers have been with us for a long time, and they've always been wrong. Their economic prescriptions are born of a moral philosophy that says debt is bad and more debt is worse. They don't like to see the U.S. importing capital from abroad at the rate of $600 billion a year. What the worriers fail to contemplate is the uses to which that capital is put. What is the right debt level for society to carry? The answer is: that level where our marginal borrowing costs approach our marginal return on assets. This is, in fact, the same formula that a corporation would use. If you can borrow at 6% to build a factory that will yield a return of 12%, you should borrow. The U.S. is nowhere near there"

Bye Bye German jobs: "Volkswagen is traditionally thought of as a German manufacturer yet four of its six passenger cars are produced outside of Germany. Volkswagen spokesman Matthew Wiesner says there is a mix of reasons behind the trend. "It's the same with so many of the various producers around the world. It is a mix of where the plants are positioned around the world, currency rates and the fact that Europe is becoming very expensive to produce things," he says".

Coyote Blog has some excellent case studies on the effects of raising the minimum wage. He lists from his own real-life experience four effects: 1. The jobs just go away; 2. The jobs get outsourced to contractors; 3. The jobs get automated away; 4. Prices go up to customers. That brief summary is only a start, however. This is definitely a case of "Read the whole thing".

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ELSEWHERE

Don't blame the religious Right: "The speed with which issues that excite the passions of people of faith have arrived at the center of American politics is not surprising given the forced march that the courts have put those issues on. It was not the "religious right" that pushed gay marriage to the center of the public debate; it was courts in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts. It wasn't the "religious right" that ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed; it was a Florida Supreme Court that struck down a law passed by the Florida legislature and signed by Governor Jeb Bush which would have allowed Terri Schiavo to live. And it isn't the "religious right" that forced the United States Supreme Court to repeatedly issue rulings on areas of law that would have been better left to legislatures".

How many divisions has the Pope? "Stalin famously asked, "How many divisions has the Pope?" The tyrants successors of the Evil Empire found out when the Pole Karol Wojtyla became Pope. Steve Hayward considers (from segments of his work-in-progress, The Age of Reagan: Lion at the Gate, 1980-1989) what the Karol Wojtyla meant when he proclaimed "Be not afraid!" when he was selected Pope. The Polish Pope brought a transformation of consciousness among Poles that had massive consequences for the whole world. Poland was the first country he visited after becoming Pope, and Hayward recounts how that went, what the Soviets thought, how they were out-thought and out-gunned by the Pope. He broke the sorcerer's spell. The rest you know"

Go India!: "With the news from Iraq relegated to the back pages recently, last Friday's State Department briefing -- especially since it was not devoted to Condoleezza Rice's latest fashion statements -- attracted little attention. The subject: the evolving strategic partnership between the United States and India. The news? It is the 'goal' of the Bush administration 'to help India become a major world power in the 21st century.' This is indeed a monumental and welcome development; it's the clearest sign to date that the Bush Doctrine has a genuine strategic logic, that it's more than a justification for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan."

How embarrassing! Air France is buying Boeing. See here and here.

More California justice: "A 43-year-old Vacaville man who was out on bail on a child molestation charge has been arrested in a new molestation case, police said. Mark Woolums was taken into custody Friday on 10 felony charges, including rape and child molestation. Police Sgt. Charlie Spruill said Woolums apparently met the girl through a day-care program being run out of his home. Woolums was arrested on child molestation charges in a separate case last September but was released after posting $133,334 bail. This time bail was set at $500,000".

Mother sues cops for failing to protect kids: "Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Town of Castle Rock, Colorado v. Gonzales. At issue is whether Jessica Gonzales can sue her local police department in federal court for violating her Constitutional rights when they did not enforce a restraining order. The decision, expected in June, could revolutionize the way police departments across America handle such orders. Hopefully, it will spark discussion of how they are issued as well."

A small step forward: "The Los Angeles Police Department is tightening its policy on handling illegal immigrants to allow officers to check the status of suspected felons. If approved, the new rules would be a shift from a 1979 policy that prevents officers from inquiring about a person's immigration status to encourage illegal immigrants who had witnessed or been victims of crimes to cooperate with police without fear of deportation. Assistant Police Chief George Gascon said the proposal would direct officers to report suspected felons in the United States illegally to their supervisors, who would then consult with immigration officials. Officers would be able to arrest felons if it's determined they are illegal immigrants, Gascon said. Several months ago, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department changed its policy and began checking the immigration status of foreign-born inmates and turning illegal immigrants over to federal authorities"

My latest post on MARXWORDS shows that Engels despised the Russians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I PAY MY RESPECTS TO A GREAT POPE



There is a fitting tribute to him here

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3 April, 2005

WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS A NEOCON

I am sometimes amazed by how little history even my fellow conservatives seem to know. Lawrence Auster is of course well-known for the way he joins Leftists in his paranoia about the "neocons" so I guess that helps us understand his latest lapse. He has put up a post consisting mainly of a letter from an historian claiming that Winston Churchill was NOT a neocon. In the narrow sense that Churchill was not Jewish and that the term "neocon" is only a recent invention, that does, of course, have to be true.

In the broader sense -- a neocon being a former Leftist who favours foreign military intervention in favour of democracy -- however, to say that Churchill was not a neocon betrays no knowledge of history whatever. He joined the British LIBERAL party in 1904 and served as Colonial Under-Secretary under Campbell-Bannerman and as president of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary under Asquith. So he was in his early years a promininent Leftist in terms of British politics at the time. But, like the neocons, he later (1925) changed his tune and became a prominent Conservative.

And as for foreign interventions in favour of democracy, who was Secretary of War under Lloyd George when Britain sent troops to join the "white" Russians in fighting the Bolsheviks in 1919? It was Winston Churchill! And there is no doubt that Churchill did not repent doing so. One thing he never changed was his fierce opposition to Communism -- an opposition that is also characteristic of the neocons.

And though Churchill was not Jewish, he was at least philosemitic. As Auster notes, Churchill once said: "Where the Jew goes there is oasis. Where the Arab goes there is desert."

So on the four primary neocon identifiers -- Jewishness, anticommunism, Leftist early life and support for military intervention in the cause of promoting democracy -- Churchill scores 3 out of 4 -- and on the Jewishness angle he might be said to have done his best! I gather that not all neocons are Jewish anyway -- particularly if you include the Straussians in what is after all a pretty loose classification to begin with. Some people also say Churchill was a neocon because he was an unabashed defender of the British Empire but for that to be relevant we have to accept that the neocons want an American empire -- which is in my view a brain-dead claim. The idea of America as an empire is antithetical to all American values and traditions and the neocons are far too smart to be unaware of something as basic as that.

Auster does not link to it but the article which started the recent discussion about Churchill as a neocon is here

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ELSEWHERE

British kids can't be conned: "Children as young as 13 are displaying signs of Islamophobia and are voicing their support for the British National Party, researchers have found. Young teenagers are increasingly saying they have negative views towards Muslims and do not want Islamic culture expressed in the classroom. The study of 1,500 students aged 13 to 24 was presented at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Manchester yesterday. Researchers asked students from 14 secondary schools and one further education college in York for their views on Islam since 11 September 2001. Three of the schools were from the independent sector and the others came from a wide geographical and socio-economic area".

Al Qa'eda members learnt their hatred of the West in the West: "Strikingly, 70 per cent joined the jihad while away from home. Sageman describes them as the `elite of their country' sent abroad to study because the schools in Germany, France, England and the US are better. Egyptian-born Mohammed Atta, who crashed the jet into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, became a violent-minded extremist while studying architecture in Hamburg. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the Briton convicted of murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl, attended the London School of Economics. Al-Qa'eda's `breeding ground', it seems, is as much in fragmented cities in the West as in hotbeds of Islamism in the East". [How unsurprising that they learnt hatred of the West in Western universities!]

Strom Thurmond, famous Southern segregationist, had a black ex-nuptial daughter. Some things she recently said about him: "However, in his personal life, he was doing many things to help black people - things many people didn't know about. Since I came out, so many black people have called and told me about the many good things that he did for them.... I didn't want people to know he was my father. But he later did other things that I am proud of. He helped pass the bill recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, and he was the first senator to hire a black administrative aide.... I didn't warm up to him at first; it took time for me to grow to like him. All we did was shake hands when we saw each other. After a while, he would hug me and kiss me on the cheek. And we became close after that... he visited me when I lived in New York. And he suggested that I attend South Carolina State, a black college. And he visited me when I was there and helped me financially. He also helped me with my children. He helped my son get into medical school and the Navy, and he helped my daughter with her business endeavors".

There is around a century of test data to show that men on average are much better than women at mathematics, despite what the feminist opponents of Larry Summers at Harvard say. The latest is this set of statistics from recent SAT results: "But the score distributions show that among the test takers in the higest score range (750-800), males made up 50.5% of that group on the verbal reasoning portion of the test and 68.7% of that group on the math reasoning portion of the test. In fact, males are disproportionately represented in the score ranges on the math section for all score ranges above 600. Looking at the most extreme tail of the distribution, the coveted 800, males were 49.3% of the population achieving that score on the verbal portion, and 72% of the population achieving that score on the math portion". (From Discriminations via Peg Kaplan)

Stupid Belgians: "Belgium's interior minister was left red-faced yesterday after it emerged that photos comparing US President George W Bush to a chimpanzee had been used in a police training manual..... The pictures in question - reprinted by the newspaper - showed a series of the US leader's facial expressions next to shots of a chimpanzee making apparently similar faces. They were intended to help trainee police officers in the western city of Bruges to recognise the importance of body language in dealing with the public. Bush is shown in poses ranging from pensive to finger-waving debating mode". [Lots of Leftists have been calling GWB "chimpy" but now that many are admitting that they were wrong and GWB was right to say that the Muslim "street" wants democracy, what does that mean? That they were dumber than a chimpanzee? I think it does!]

My latest post on MARXWORDS shows that Marx & Engels believed that human races emerged naturally but that eugenics could and should alter that.

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

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

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

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

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

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2 April, 2005

BLOGGER.COM BLUES

Blogger.com have been very erratic this week. One day it took me four hours before I could get this blog up. And others have had worse experiences. Hopefully blogger.com have now got on top of whatever problem they had but I guess this is a good time to remind readers to bookmark one of my mirror sites (here and here) for times when this blog does not seem to have been updated at the usual time. I update it each and every morning my time -- which translates to some time in the afternoon of the "next" day for American readers (Brisbane time is 18 hours ahead of California time). At the foot of each day's postings I also give links to mirrors for five of my other blogs as well. It only takes me a couple of minutes per day to put up a mirror site but there is no point in my doing it unless people use it occasionally. So if there have been no recent updates here, the fault lies with blogger.com, not with me and the mirror sites should always be up to date.

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LIBERALISM WITHOUT COMPASSION

This morning President Bush offered his condolences to the family of Terri Schiavo:

The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.

"The strong have a duty to protect the weak": Didn't that use to be a liberal sentiment? To be sure, some prominent left-liberals--Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Sen. Tom Harkin--joined the effort to save Mrs. Schiavo, and 47 House Democrats out of 100 voted in favor of the law that would have done so had the courts not defied it. But it seems clear that liberalism is not as compassionate as it once was.....

In a fascinating essay for The Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen argues that what went wrong in the Schiavo case was that "procedural liberalism"--the respect for Mrs. Schiavo's right to make her own decisions--gave way to "ideological liberalism"--the presumption that because she was unable to make such decisions, her life was worthless:

Treating autonomy as an absolute makes a person's dignity turn entirely on his or her capacity to act autonomously. It leads to the view that only those with the ability to express their will possess any dignity at all--everyone else is "life unworthy of life."

This is what ideological liberalism now seems to believe--whether in regard to early human embryos, or late-stage dementia patients, or fetuses with Down's syndrome. And in the end, the Schiavo case is just one more act in modern liberalism's betrayal of the vulnerable people it once claimed to speak for.

Opinion on the Schiavo case did not split along traditional left-right lines, of course; libertarian-leaning conservatives tended to side with those who wished to pull her feeding tube. Autonomy and compassion are both important values, and there are dangers in overvaluing either at the expense of the other.

It does seem, though, that the "religious right," for better or worse, has supplanted the liberal left as the political faction that most strongly and consistently advocates compassion in social policy.

(Above post excerpted from Taranto. The Leftist claim to compassion always was a con job. Look at the millions killed by Communism -- and back in the USA look at the thousands killed as a result of Leftist support for eugenics prior to 1945)

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ELSEWHERE

There is a good short summary of the truth about Michael Moore here

Amusing: The "pro-Palestinian" French Left have been awoken from their dreams. The Muslim immigrants in France have begun to attack the French Left too.

Kristol makes it clear: "A pie in the face didn't silence conservative pundit William Kristol during a speech at Earlham College. A man who later was identified as a student at the private Quaker college jumped onto the stage and splattered Kristol with the pie Tuesday night about 30 minutes into a speech about U.S. foreign policy. Members of the audience jeered the student as he walked off the stage, then applauded as Kristol wiped the goo off his face with a paper towel and said, "Just let me finish this point," the Palladium-Item reported".

From Nathan Tabor: "What do the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall, and Monticello have in common? The average American with a smattering of historical knowledge might say that those historic sites are all symbolic of America's unique heritage of freedom..... What about the Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone Park, and the Grand Canyon? Well, these priceless natural resources are all managed by the U.S. National Parks Service. They are among the most frequently visited natural recreation areas in America, where millions of American families vacation every year. Would it surprise you to learn that every one of these unique American landmarks is also controlled by the United Nations? It's amazing but true.... For example, in 1995, Bill Clinton got the UN to declare Yellowstone Park a "World Heritage Site in Danger." That gave him the "international obligation" to close down a coal mine on private property three miles away - despite the fact that coal had been mined in the area for 150 years before Yellowstone Park was created, and the Crown Butte Mines had won an award for excellence in 1992".

Academic study confirms Leftist bias: "Nearly three-quarters of faculty members at U.S. colleges and universities describe themselves as liberals, and at elite schools, the proportion is 87 percent, a survey has found. What's more, half say they are Democrats and 51 percent indicate they seldom or never attend church, according to the survey, published in the March issue of the online political journal Forum. 'You would expect the majority of English literature and sociology professors to be liberals, but our survey found that 66 percent of those in physics and 64 percent of those in chemistry are liberals,' said S. Robert Lichter, a communications professor at George Mason University and an author of the study."

French finally admit that water flows downhill: "After seven years of rising unemployment, economic stagnation, and general malaise, French socialists' war against self-determinism ended in defeat last week when France's parliament rescinded a law that made it a crime to work more than 35 hours a week. Essentially a lunatic scheme to create wealth sans labor, the law instituted a de facto lowest-common-denominator egalitarian society by shackling anyone with motivation to a sinking raft of bureaucrats and the lazy. In a sort of fiscal policy version of the Maginot Line, French socialists had argued that legally limiting the number of work hours would force companies to create millions of new jobs."

I am also Canadian has an amusing post arguing that killing seals reduces global warming. How awful for the Greenies!

My latest post on MARXWORDS shows that Engels thought that race made a big difference to historical development.

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

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

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

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

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

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1 April, 2005

AMERICA'S IMPERIAL COURTS

A list of just some recent and appalling usurpations of power by the courts -- from Qando.

* A Federal Judge in Missouri ordered Kansas City to raise property taxes in order to pay for his court-ordered remedies. Several state courts are now embroiled in similar controversies over court-ordered tax increases.

* By invoking a non-existent "right" to privacy, the courts have increasingly legislated social outcomes from the bench, including finding a right to abortion in the 14th Amendment, and most recently, a right to homosexual marriage in some jurisdictions such as Hawaii and Massachussets.

* Federal Courts have repeatedly struck down voter referenda, such as Prop 209 in California, that ended affirmative action through race-based classifications, or Prop 187, which would have denied taxpayer benefits to illegal immigrants. Federal courts in Washington overturned a state referendum to ban assisted suicide.

* Federal Courts have ruled that states may not compose their state senate of representatives from geographical districts, but must proportionally represent the state's population. Essentially this says that it is unconstitutional for states to fashion their legislatures in the same manner that the Constitution requires the national legislature to be composed.

What lots of people fail to realize is that these judgments have happened only because Congress has let them happen. Congress can legislate to limit the power of the courts in any way it likes. Article III of the constitution says so. Maybe they will start to use that power now that there is all-round control of the U.S. government by the GOP. The courts are certainly doing all they can to push Congress into doing something.

Qando has much more

And the latest rubbish verdict: The Supreme Court "ruled that workers can sue for age discrimination without proving that the discrimination was intentional". So you can now be sued for something you did not know you were doing!

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ELSEWHERE

I was going through my old files looking for something else the other day when I came across an interesting Table in J. Ethnic Studies of 1982 (10:2), pp. 106ff. It uses NORC data to tabulate the ethnic composition of the U.S. population as of 1980. I am not certain what the precise NORC question was but the survey appears to have asked people what their predominant origins were. Germany was cited by 15.6%, England and Wales 11.9%, Ireland 9.5%, Italy 4.7%, Poland 2.8% and Scotland 2.6% -- giving only 24.7% for the entire British Isles. Blacks were 11.5%. So I think it will surprise many to hear that the U.S. population is more German than English. And if we take 80% of the England & Wales figure to get (VERY roughly) WASPs, we find that WASPSs are a minority of only 9.5%. These days of course all the percentages above would have been trimmed back by the Hispanic influx. But the whole set of results does make very stupid the current American code of referring to blacks and Hispanics as "minorities". WASPs are a minority too -- a smaller minority than blacks in fact. Maybe WASPs should demand affirmative action on their behalf! (For those not up with the jargon, WASPs are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).

Illegal immigration: "We've reached a very strange moment in the immigration debate. On Wednesday, President Bush condemned a group of good American citizens worried about the breaking of U.S. immigration law. He condemned the organizers of Project Minuteman as 'vigilantes' even though they have broken no law and pledge not to do so. An hour or two later, Mr. Bush welcomed to his Texas ranch a man [Mexican President Vincente Fox] who insults the United States for its immigration policy and leads a government that routinely flouts U.S. immigration law. ... Mr. Bush's description of the Minutemen as vigilantes is a misreading of American history. The vigilantes were a lynch mob. The Minutemen are an expanded version of the Neighborhood Watch programs popular in many American cities. It's sad to see an American president roll out a royal welcome to a foreign dignitary so openly contemptuous of U.S. law, while simultaneously condemning Americans who are trying to help duly constituted authorities enforce the law."

If this guy were white he would be in jail, not still in his job "A federal jury in New Orleans yesterday determined that the city's first black district attorney discriminated against dozens of white employees in January 2003 by summarily replacing them with black employees days after he took office. The jury found that Eddie Jordan acted illegally but did not hold him personally responsible. The plaintiffs were awarded almost $1.8 million in back pay and damages. "What I wanted was a win. Money was not the issue," plaintiff Clemens Herbert told reporters. "He was trying to disguise racial discrimination through politics, and the jury saw through it.""

Moderate Muslims cheer bin Laden rebuke: "The condemnation of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda by the Islamic Commission of Spain on the first anniversary of the train bombings in Madrid that took 200 lives is making waves throughout the Muslim world. The Spanish commission's fatwa, or condemnation, follows other signs of the kind of public theological debate rarely seen in the Muslim world, openly challenging the dominance of Saudi Arabia's wealthy Wahhabi fanatics. One Islamic scholar even calls it a sign of 'a counter-jihad.' In a recent interview with the Qatari daily newspaper Al-Raya, for example, Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, the former dean of Shariah and law at the University of Qatar, urged his fellow Muslims to purge their heritage of fanaticism and adopt 'new civilized humane thought.'"

Leftists ignore history -- as usual: "Two years ago this week, the American invasion of Iraq was underway. Why had we gone to war? In the months leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush repeatedly gave his reasons. Saddam Hussein, he said on Oct. 7, 2002, "has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States." ... The president had also made the case for taking action before the UN General Assembly on Sept. 12, 2002. "If we meet our responsibilities," he said, "the people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. ... Isn't it odd that such clear and compelling justifications for the war and where it might lead have been largely forgotten in what passes for debate these days? Instead, the talking point we hear -- over and over -- is that the casus belli for the invasion was simply and exclusively Saddam's possession of stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That is usually followed by the assertion that since no such caches of WMD have been found, the war was unjustified and, it is customary to add in an outraged tone, based on a bald-faced "lie."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- this time in April Fool's mode

My latest post on MARXWORDS shows that Engels thought Aryans were superior.

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

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

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

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

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

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