The original of this mirror site is HERE. My Blogroll; The archive; My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here. Other mirror sites (viewable in China): Greenie Watch, Political Correctness Watch, Education Watch, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine, Recipes and Australian Politics. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing)
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30 April, 2006

ARAB PSYCHOLOGY

Excerpt from The Autonomist:

Although I'm weak in anthropology, I did get an 'A' in biology years ago, and what I learned has given me insight into these strange organisms we call Middle Eastern Muslims. Every organism alive on the planet is good at something. Each has some sort of defense or capability or behavior that gave them an edge over other organisms of past eras and allowed them to evolve to overcome life's challenges and survive to this day.

Rabbits are fast runners and fast breeders. Tigers are amazingly skilled hunting machines. Elephants are immensely tough and powerful. Monkeys are highly intelligent and adaptable. Frogs have poisonous skin. But Muslims, like the stick bug and the chameleon and the stone fish, have developed, to an amazing extent, the ability to deceive. And it is that ability that confounds their environmental competitors (you and me) the most.

These types of organisms -- "lie-in-wait" predators -- must know the full range of behaviors of the organisms they wish to defeat, so as to position themselves correctly for the strike. They are not necessarily strong or powerful, so they must know what frightens, arouses, lures, relaxes, and weakens that which they intend to destroy. For the Muslim, the idea is to exploit our greatest vulnerability -- PC thinking.

It is no accident that the Muslims chose to openly start attacking the West on their own turf in the '60s and '70s, right around the time when PC ideology in our culture was starting to pick up steam and cloud our collective judgment. Would Muslims have attacked New York while U.S. Grant was president? Or London while King George III was on the throne? How about the Paris riots during Napoleon's time? I don't think so.

The Deceiver picked up on this latest dominant PC, therapeutic, Leftist strain in Western culture, and, patient and shrewd as he is, has successfully exploited it for the last few decades. The only time they seem to have paid any price was when the United States had good old-fashioned cowboys at the tiller -- Bush I and Bush II. They continue to try and deceive by maintaining their false cries of victimhood, blustering lies, and ridiculous charades, for they have internalized and mastered what Sun Tsu's considered the most valuable tactic in warfare:Deception.

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ELSEWHERE

Appalling British Conservative leader: "Laying himself bare to the men’s magazine GQ, David Cameron painted himself yesterday as an achingly trendy nappy-changing metrosexual who wins prizes for his vegetables and shares a hairdresser with Robbie Williams. But for the Tory Right, cringing as “Dave” declares his love of Shameless, a Channel 4 drama about an alcoholic father who abandons six children to live with another woman, there was one crumb of comfort. Asked which living politician he most admires, the Tory leader replied: “It’s got to be Margaret Thatcher.”"

Saudis waking up: "Saudi officials refuse to accept that Wahhabism, the extreme form of Islam which has dominated the kingdom for 70 years, provides a theological justification for terrorism by preaching the absolute renunciation of all non-Muslims. None the less, in the past year, the government has barred a thousand clerics from teaching, in the first concerted move to foster a more tolerant brand of Islam. Moderate imams have been deployed to enter the chatrooms of radical jihadi websites and persuade extremists that their ideology is wrong, as part of a campaign called al-Sakinah (Tranquillity)."

Rare commonsense: "[Black] U.S. Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson shed little light Monday on the future of public housing in hurricane-battered New Orleans, but said that 'only the best residents' of the former St. Thomas housing complex should be allowed into the new mixed-income development that replaced it, according to the information-restricted NOLA.com newslog. ... 'Some of the people shouldn't return,' Jackson said. 'The (public housing) developments were gang-ridden by some of the most notorious gangs in this country. People hid and took care of those persons because they took care of them. Only the best residents should return. Those who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked.'"

Bush should stop grandstanding, get serious on gas prices: "President Bush seems desperate to find someone to blame for continuing high demand for gasoline, which is the result of high economic growth and continuing supply problems. He should take credit for his policies that have contributed to strong economic growth and put the blame for high gas prices where it belongs. He should be traveling across the country blaming the obstructionist minority in Congress that continues to block legislation that would increase domestic energy production. And the president should be building public support for pro-energy, pro-consumer policies."

Solzhenitsyn loses his marbles: "Nobel laureate and former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn has accused the US and NATO of seeking to encircle Russia, and praised President Vladimir Putin for working to restore a strong state. In a rare interview, the reclusive 87-year-old author, who rose to prominence for his accounts of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's repression and labor camps, told the liberal weekly Moscow News that NATO's ultimate aim was the loss of Russia's sovereignty, according to a full text of the interview posted on the publication's internet edition".

Big upset for evolution timing research: "Variability in mitochondrial (mt)DNA is often used to infer population size, history, and diversity on the assumption that mtDNA is essentially evolutionary neutral. Bazin et al. compared a wide range of animal species for polymorphisms in allozymes, nuclear DNA, and mtDNA. Within-species allozyme and nuclear DNA variability correlated with expected species abundance and ecological variables, whereas essentially no difference was observed between a broad range of taxa in terms of mtDNA variability. Instead, mtDNA seem to have undergone recurrent fixation of beneficial mutations and loss of variability at linked loci. Thus, mtDNA is far from a neutral marker; its diversity is essentially unpredictable and may not reflect population history and demography."

GM eat your heart out: "Mazda Motor Corp today said its full-year net profit soared almost 46 per cent to a fifth consecutive record high and predicted further growth ahead led by robust sales in overseas markets. Japan's fifth largest car manufacturer, one-third owned by US giant Ford Motor, said net profit reached Y66.7 billion ($A773.24 million) in the 12 months to March. With sales rising in major markets in North America, Europe and China, Mazda forecast a sixth year of all-time high earnings. The Hiroshima-based company said operating profit jumped 48.8 per cent to Y123.4 billion ($A1.43 billion) on revenue which increased by 8.3 per cent to Y2.92 trillion ($A33.85 billion). Both operating and net income are all-time highs. Global vehicle shipments rose 4.0 per cent to 1.15 million units as sales of Mazda brands grew in China, Australia and the Middle East. Sales in China of Mazda brand vehicles jumped some 36 per cent from a year earlier to a record 130,000 units, giving it a 2.1 per cent share of the auto market there".

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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29 April, 2006

SAUDI ATTACK ON CONSERVATIVE BLOGGERS

Readers who logged on to TONGUE-TIED at various times in the last 12 hours or so found the blog "down". The firm hosting the blog -- Hosting Matters -- hosts a number of big-time conservative blogs such as LGF and Powerline and they came under a DOS (Denial of Service) attack from cyberjihadis in Saudi Arabia. Michelle Malkin has the details. Hosting Matters blocked the attack after a while and restored service, but as I write TONGUE-TIED is down again.

Readers who had bookmarked this site were able to continue reading, however.

In the four years I have had this blog up on blogspot, I cannot recall a successful DOS attack on them. Maybe they are too big for it, or something. They do have plenty of service outages, of course, but that always seems to be the result of their own bungling.

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Brookes News Update

The US economy: things about manufacturing and free trade that you have not been told: "Economists argue that when the NAICU (non-accelerating inflation rate of capacity utilisation) reaches 82 per cent inflation will pick up in the US economy. Their thinking is badly flawed
Unemployment and wages: facts the Liberal Party ignores and the unions refuse to debate: "Union leaders, labour politicians and most journalists argue that the Liberal Party's labour reforms will have terrible consequences for real wages. Not true. Labour reforms will create jobs for those able and willing to work
Mexico screwed up on illegal immigrants -- listen up Republicans: "Democrats abandon their pro-immigration policy in an attempt to beat bush in 06 and take the White House in 08
The myth of technological unemployment: another Liberal Party failure: "The fallacy that technology destroys jobs has re-emerged. This is based on the fallacy of composition, confusing the part with the whole. In fact, technology creates more and better paid jobs
Castro and "truly repellent" minorities: "The Boston elite's belief in witches eventually dissipated. Yet their belief in another fable, that 'we bullied poor little Castro into the arms of Mother Russia,' persists
Bracks' outrageous attack on the Australian dream: "The Victorian Labor Party is going to what it does best whenever it gets power -- it's going to rip off the little people. Its new zoning laws appear to be designed to help the better off at the expense of the least well off
The Iranian head fake: "Iran's dictator says he will use `whatever it takes' to destroy Israel and bring ruination to others in the non-Moslem world. And he means it
How the other half lives: "A luxurious cruise on the Queen Mary 2 sure beats a home for the aged

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ELSEWHERE

Given my great interest in 20th century history, I was quite floored when I recently received an press release from a Sgt. Gehlen of the U.S. Central Command public affairs office in Iraq. If you don't know why I was floored, Google "Reinhard Gehlen". A truly legendary surname. Sgt. Gehlen wanted to draw my attention to the recent Zarqawi Video.

Ex-Spanish premier calls on NATO to add Israel as member: "Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar called for far-reaching NATO reforms to combat Islamic extremism, including expansion of the alliance membership to include Israel, Japan and Australia. The appeal came in an article published Thursday. Writing for the Jerusalem Issue Brief series of the Jerusalem-based Institute for Contemporary Affairs, Aznar said "it is imperative to defend our values and way of life against a new threat: Islamic extremism and terrorism." The article was based on a presentation he made at the institute on March 16. To transform NATO from a military alliance against the now-extinct Eastern bloc into a force that can counter the current threat, he wrote, "NATO must refocus itself on fighting terror, the major threat today".

Newt Gingrich on immigration: "There has been a breakdown of will on the part of America's leaders to control our borders and ensure that new immigrants learn to be American. The thousands of people we now see marching in the streets of U.S. cities over immigration policy is the product of two decades of a fundamentally dishonest immigration system. For two decades, the U.S. government has failed to control the borders while many U.S. businesses have profited by breaking the law. In turn, the U.S. government failure to enforce the immigration laws has encouraged outright defiance of federal authority by certain state and local jurisdictions. Adding insult to this state of affairs is an immigration bureaucracy that has been slow, cumbersome, rude, heartless, and incompetent in the discharge of its duties. This dishonest system has lured millions to enter our country illegally and to obtain work here illegally...."

GOP fuel hypocrisy: ""Few things are less becoming in a political party than desperation, as Republicans are now demonstrating as they panic over rising oil and gas prices. If blaming private industry for Congress's own energy mistakes is the best the GOP can do, no wonder its voters may sit out the November election. Oil prices hit $75 a barrel last week, while gas has reached a national average of about $2.85 a gallon. The Republican response has been to put on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi fright wigs and shout about corporate greed and market manipulation. House Speaker Denny Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist fired off a letter to President Bush yesterday demanding the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department investigate 'price fixing' and 'gouging.' Senator Arlen Specter wants to go further and impose stricter 'antitrust' laws for oil companies, as well as a 'windfall profits' tax. Mr. Hastert also delighted the class warriors in the press corps by lambasting recently retired Exxon CEO Lee Raymond's pay 'unconscionable.' There's been unconscionable behavior all right, most of it on Capitol Hill. A decent portion of the latest run-up in gas prices-and the entire cause of recent spot shortages-is the direct result of the energy bill Congress passed last summer"

Pulitzer Prizes for traitors: "There's nothing wrong with caustic criticism, but two of the award winners went further, into areas that may hamper our battle against Islamist terrorism. The Washington Post's Dana Priest won a prize for revealing the existence of secret CIA-operated prisons in Eastern Europe, and the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won for revealing the existence of a secret program to intercept communications between terrorists abroad and their domestic contacts. The full repercussions of these security breaches remain unknown because, just as in 1942, intelligence officers are loath to publicly reveal the harm done to their activities. But there is no doubt that these were among the government's most tightly held secrets and that, despite personal pleas from Bush, both newspapers decided to publish them anyway - to the approbation of their peers."

Abolish FEMA: "Hurricane Katrina turned FEMA into a "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy" so far beyond repair that it should be scrapped, senators said Thursday. They called for creation of a new disaster relief agency as the next storm season looms on the horizon. The push to replace the beleaguered agency was the top recommendation of a hefty Senate inquiry that concluded that top officials from New Orleans to Washington failed to adequately prepare for and respond to the deadly storm, despite weather forecasts predicting its path through the Gulf Coast."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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28 April, 2006

JEWISH LEFTISM

Excerpt from Dennis Prager

Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion -- especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity -- with anti-Semitism. Jews are taught from birth about the horrors of the Holocaust, and of nearly 2,000 years of European, meaning Christian, anti-Semitism. They therefore tend to fear Christianity and believe that secularism guarantees their physical security. That is what animates the ACLU and its disproportionately Jewish membership, under the guise of concern with the Constitution and "separation of church and state" (words that do not appear in the Constitution), to fight all public expressions of Christianity in America.

Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every "ism" of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew's belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian's belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.

The Jews' religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.

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ELSEWHERE

Data on illegal immigrants kept secret: "Two federal agencies are refusing to turn over a mountain of evidence that investigators could use to indict the nation's burgeoning work force of illegal immigrants and the firms that employ them. The Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration routinely collect strong evidence of potential workplace crimes, including names and addresses of millions of people who are using bogus Social Security numbers, their wage records, and the identities of the bosses who knowingly hire them. But they keep those facts secret... The IRS doesn't fine even the most egregious employers who repeatedly submit inaccurate data about their workers. Social Security does virtually nothing to alert citizens whose Social Security numbers are being used by others... One internal study found that a restaurant company had submitted 4,100 duplicate Social Security numbers for workers. Other firms submit inaccurate names or numbers reports for nearly all of their employees. One child's Social Security number was used 742 times by workers in 42 states. "That's the kind of evidence we want," said Paul Charlton, the U.S. attorney in Arizona. He regularly prosecutes unauthorized workers, but says it's hard to prove employers are involved in the crime".

What happened to limited government? "For some reason, Republicans are scratching their heads and wondering why their poll numbers are crashing, their public support waning, and the fact they might lose seats in Congress during the mid-term elections. Well, here is a reason or two why; over the last six years our Republican-controlled government has produced the highest levels of government spending in history, soaring deficits, excessive government regulation that intrudes even further into the lives of regular Americans, the belief that the best way to solve the problems of a massive, government bureaucracy is to make it even larger, and the systematic replacement of the promises made to the Conservative base with lip service."

Bombs rule: "The 'occupation' to which Hamas refers is not the one that occurred after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza (which it left last year). Hamas is talking about the 'occupation' that resulted from the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The position of the Palestinian Authority, which was created as a result of negotiations aimed at achieving a lasting settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, is clear: All Israel must do to stop the terrorist attacks -- excuse me, the perfectly legitimate acts of self-defense -- is cease to exist. Not a lot of room for negotiation there."

The ACLU has lost another Ten Commandments case: "The American Civil Liberties Union suffered another defeat in its quest to bar the Ten Commandments from the public square today as the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled a display of the Decalogue in Kentucky is constitutional. In the case ACLU of Kentucky v. Mercer County, Kentucky, the court voted 9-5 to uphold the Foundations of American Law and Government display at the county courthouse. The display includes the Ten Commandments, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Charta, the Star-Spangled Banner, the National Motto, the Preamble to the Kentucky Constitution, the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution, and a picture of Lady Justice."

Fascist Hillary: "In her recent address to the Economic Club of Chicago, Senator Hillary Clinton advocated a version of the New Deal's state-corporatism that was patterned on Mussolini's fascist Italy of the 1920s. State-corporatism, as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler, was the economic aspect of Fascism. What the New Deal termed "saving capitalism from itself" and liberals today call "industrial policy" is just fascist state-corporatism under different names. Fascism's essential economic feature is centralized planning, euphemistically called "harmonizing." Activities of businesses and labor unions are to be coordinated by government planning boards. Individual economic liberty must be subordinated to the national interests as defined by the ruling party.

Muslim "thinkers" at work: "On Saturday past in New York City, the Muslim population of the United States revealed exactly how and where they stand for all of Americans to see. This was not just a small group, this was a large crowd; perhaps not as large as the crowd of illegals marching in California but large enough to let everyone here know what they stand for. In front of the Israeli Consulate in New York City, they demonstrated.... The Islamic Thinkers Society marched outside the Israeli consulate Saturday, on the Sabbath and chanted, "The mushroom cloud is on its way! The real holocaust is on its way!" We have given to the Islamic world time and again in terms of troops and aid and this is the thanks we receive."

Turkey's Islamist Dailies Spread Anti-American, Antisemitic Incitement: "Since the AKP rose to power in Turkey, the country's Islamist media has freely disseminated venomous anti-American and antisemitic allegations, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. This campaign has been led by Islamist Turkish dailies such as Vakit, Milli Gazete, and Yeni Safak (which is close to the AKP government and especially to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan). These newspapers have published stories about the U.S.'s alleged use of chemical and low-grade nuclear weapons in Iraq and U.S. soldiers' alleged systematic rape of Iraqi girls, and have blamed the U.S. for the December 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia and for the August 1999 Istanbul earthquake."

Strange Justice has just put up a good post about the craziness that passes for justice in Britain these days.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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27 April, 2006

STRANGE NEW IQ STUDY

We read:

"Girls have big advantage over boys on timed tests

"Vanderbilt University researchers Stephen Camarata and Richard Woodcock discovered that females have a significant advantage over males on timed tests and tasks. Camarata and Woodcock found the differences were particularly significant among pre-teens and teens....

Though males and females showed similar processing speed in kindergarten and pre-school, females became much more efficient than males in elementary, middle and high school." The researchers found that males scored lower than females in all age groups in tests measuring processing speed, with the greatest discrepancy found among adolescents. However, the study also found that males consistently outperformed females in some verbal abilities, such as identifying objects, knowing antonyms and synonyms and completing verbal analogies...

The researchers found no significant overall intelligence differences between males and females in any age groups. The research will be published in the May-June 2006 issue of the journal Intelligence. Camarata and Woodcock compiled their results through an evaluation of three sets of data collected from 1977 to 2001 as part of the Woodcock-Johnson Series of Cognitive and Achievement Tests."

Source

That is a really strange set of findings. Higher mental speed on a whole range of indices is normally associated with higher IQ so girls should have shown up as more intelligent but they did not. Among adults, males show up as having slightly higher IQ scores than females but not in this study. And strangest of all is that males outperformed females on verbal abilities. Probably the least disputed finding in the whole of IQ research is that FEMALES score highest on verbal abilities, with males doing best on visuospatial abilities.

So what the heck is going on here? It would be easy to dismiss the study as too much of an outlier to be anything but a product of poor methodology but I believe that the results are not as mysterious if we are aware of Lynn's huge summary of all the past research on these questions.

What Lynn showed was that results obtained with schoolchildren are not the same as the results obtained with results. And I am now going to say why. And I am going to say why in a way that will offend a lot of people. But I am going to say it that way because it is true and the truth concerned helps us to see a particular finding in a way that all scientists seek -- as being part of a larger pattern. And that fact is that maturation speed is inversely correlated with final level obtained. Since that is a hopelessly academic way of saying anything, however, I will now say it in another brutally frank way: Chimpanzees, blacks and women grow up faster than white males and the faster they mature, the lower is the intelligence level that they finally reach on average.

Yes. I know that most people will accuse me of being worse than Hitler for saying that but, as the old Scottish saying has it: "Facts are chiels that winna ding" (Roughly translated: "Facts are children that cannot be disciplined"). I am sorry to be the messenger of a deeply unpalatable truth but somebody somewhere some day has to tell it to the general public.

And the authors of the study above do note that their results vary with age so that is clearly the decisive factor. In other words, if the study had been repeated with adults, the results would have been different. Females scored equally with males on average simply because males had not reached their peak at the ages studied.

There are still some puzzling parts of the study, though. Although the slower maturation of males explains the male/female parity in average IQ at the ages studied and perhaps explains the higher female processing speed observed, the unprecedented findings with verbal abilities remain to be explained. My best guess is that the tasks used to assess verbal abilities were atypical -- though it does not sound as if they were. Maybe Richard Lynn or J.P. Rushton may be able to shed some light on it in due course.

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ELSEWHERE



Film Banned for Anti-Guevara Sentiment: "Movie star Andy Garcia's controversial new movie The Lost City has been banned in parts of South America because it depicts romantic revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara in a terrible light. The Ocean's Twelve star spent years trying to get the project made, only for film festival bosses and cinema chains to shun the movie because it tells the truth about the Marxist guerilla leader and the Cubans slayed as he fought to revolutionize the country and hand Fidel Castro leadership. Garcia, who wrote, directed and stars in the film, says, "There have been festivals that wouldn't show it. That will continue to happen from people who don't want to see the image of Che be tarnished and from people who support the Castro regime. He still has a lot of supporters out there. Some people think Castro is a savior, that he looks out for the kids and the poor. It's a bunch of hogwash. In the 45 years since Castro came to power, Cuba has been in the top three countries for human rights abuses for 43 of those years. People turn a blind eye to his atrocities."

The Supremes vs "We the People": "Since 5 'supreme' people in our entire nation declared the demise of U.S. private property rights, and since this was not an issue upon which the nearly 290 million American citizens were permitted to vote, 'appointed' power becomes dangerously problematic. Most people are now realizing that America is no longer operating Constitutionally, but rather according to the dictates and profits of elitist intellectuals. Historically speaking, freedom is, and always has been, based upon land and gun rights."

Schizophrenia inborn: "For the first time, scientists have confirmed in human brains what they had already suspected: A large gene that regulates many brain functions is abnormal in people with schizophrenia. The finding, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides clues to how the gene, neuregulin-1, might disrupt brain development and function and put people at risk for all sorts of thinking problems."

I have recently put up another article by wicked Swedish economist Lennart Sjoberg. It deals with the amazing mental contortions accomplished by "fellow-travellers" with totalitarian regimes -- people who were not themselves citizens of the countries concerned but who nonetheless could never find anything to criticize in the deeds of Hitler, Stalin etc.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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



26 April, 2006

ANGER AT BRITAIN'S WARPED WELFARE STATE

From an article by a Labour party member of the British pariament:

This is not about race. Immigration and bogus asylum seekers act like the barium meal of an X-ray, showing up the weakness of the body politic. Yet the revolt of working-class voters is not limited to areas of high immigration. Race merely acts as a flashpoint. In my constituency, Birkenhead, where black faces are still a rarity, the revolt is just as fundamental as in London and other multicultural centres.

Many on the Left imagine that support for the BNP and other extremists represent a cry for the reinstatement of Old Labour values of nationalisation and high state spending. In fact, the objection is much more fundamental. It represents a clash between people's sense of fairness, grounded in a collective social ethic, and what they see as the foreign idea of individualised rights....

Housing remains a flash point. The working-class sense of fairness is mocked by allocation policies that put at the top of the list groups who, in the local community's eye, have less claim than other groups. A policy of housing the homeless is noble. It is the way it is carried out which is so objectionable. I have never heard a constituent - even one who has waited in the housing queue for decades - argue against a policy that looks after the homeless. What so many of my constituents object to, as I do, is the way the homeless jump to the top of the queue and are able to choose the best homes. This policy strikes at the very sense of fairness that working people hold. Fairness demands that those who have striven longest should rise to the top of the queue and take the best housing. The accommodation they vacate should then be offered to the homeless.

In parts of the East End, the housing flashpoint is colour. In Birkenhead, it centres on the advantage that single parents or the homeless have in sweeping the weekly housing jackpots. The objection is the same. Dench and Gavron detail the ways current social housing policy favours the family in crisis against the family that has strengthened the local community.

The values that welfare preaches are equally objectionable to decent poorer families of any colour. Within the living memory of many voters, welfare has been reshaped from a system whose values reflected a working-class collective culture to one based on individual rights. In place of effort and contribution, a welfare system has been rolled out preaching and practising inalienable rights that individuals gain simply by turning up and asking for help....

Political correctness on individualised rights now runs deep in the Parliamentary Labour Party. It will take a considerable amount of courage to realign welfare with the collective values that are crucial to underpinning strong and sustainable communities. Moreover, altruism is sustainable in the longer run only if it is buttressed by a widespread sense of fairness.

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ELSEWHERE

Britain's minority government: "Public support for Labour has slumped to its lowest point since the 1987 general election defeat of Neil Kinnock by Margaret Thatcher. The ICM survey for the Guardian newspaper showed the party had suffered a five-point slump over the past month to 32% - fewer than a third of voters. It is not David Cameron's Tories who benefited from the slide in popularity however but the Liberal Democrats under new leader Sir Menzies Campbell. Despite the personal scandals which surrounded the exit of Charles Kennedy and the search for his successor, the party was up three points to 24%. The Conservatives were on 34%, a two-point lead over the governing party but unchanged from last month. Backing for the British National Party stood at 2%"

Help needed: "Right Wing News has just posted about a woman by the name of Andrea Clarke. Andrea Clarke is a woman with a heart condition and despite her wishes and the wishes of her family, the hospital she's at is about to pull the plug on the respirator and dialysis that are keeping her alive. This is despite the fact that her sister claims that a doctor at that hospital says Andrea has a chance to recover. During the Terri Schiavo controversy, there were big arguments over what Terri wanted, whether Terri was braindead, and who really represented Terri Schiavo's wishes. In this case, Andrea Clarke can speak for herself, no one is claiming she's braindead, and her family doesn't want to see her die. Andrea's sister believes that getting the word out about what's happening may literally mean the difference between life and death for her sister. So spread the word.

It had to happen: Spanish socialists claim that monkeys must be considered as human beings, with all legal and moral protection applicable to humans, human rights included. First Amendment rights for monkeys not included so far. No. It's not a joke.

Some good sense from a black writer: "African-Americans should be among the top supporters of today's domestic surveillance program. Why? Because without it, a terrorist could unwittingly inflict more devastation on the black community than even the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups have inflicted historically. Today's most significant terrorist threats are color blind in the sense they want to hurt and kill as many Americans - black, white or otherwise - as possible. But the reality is that terrorists will most likely target major U.S. cities. And, although blacks make up about 12 percent of our country's population, Census Bureau figures show that we make up the majority of many large cities."

British immigrant urges assimilation: "George Alagiah, one of the BBC's most senior news broadcasters, has urged immigrants to do more to assimilate into the British way of life. Alagiah, 50, who was born in Sri Lanka, believes that too many arrivals are finding themselves isolated because they are putting loyalty to their homeland before their allegiance to Britain. The journalist contrasts the attitudes of new immigrants with those of previous generations who showed a greater willingness to embrace their new home".

Conservatism works best in Catholicism too: "In a nutshell, Catholicism in France is in a state of collapse. Its numbers are in free fall and the only signs of vitality are among those who attend the old rite. The majority of those who go to the new mass, the post-VaticanII liturgy in the vernacular, are over 55. Traditionalists comprise about 5 per cent (and growing rapidly) of the French church but 13 per cent of practising Catholics under 55. More than 70 per cent of traditionalist families have four or more children. Nearly 90 per cent are under 55 and their average age is 26 and falling steadily".

Chris Brand has been blogging up a storm again -- about what he sees as the current exciting times in Britain

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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25 April, 2006

SERVICE OUTAGE

Blogger.com has been having a lot of trouble in the last 24 hours. It has been hard to get posts up and I did not manage to get up today's offering here until several hours later than usual. So forgive me if I once again preach the little sermon I always do on such occasions:

ALL blogs have some downtime. Blogs hosted on blogspot are well-known for it but other hosting services have their failures too. As any systems expert will tell you, however, the key to system reliability is redundancy and I have taken that onboard as the way to beat all the service outages that regularly have all us bloggers weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. So what I do is put up extra copies ("mirrors") of my various blogs. As an old computer hand from way back (I wrote my first computer program in 1967), it takes me only a couple of minutes to do, so I do it. It is compiling the blog that takes the time. Putting up another copy of it is no trouble at all.

So if this blog is unavailable when you try to log on, you have an alternative! You can find the posts elsewhere! Bookmark this site and you will always be able to find a second copy of any of my blogs.

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ANZAC DAY TODAY

Australia's national day, when we remember those who have fallen for their country in our many wars. I have put some comments up about it on AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Being myself an ex-"Digger" (Australian slang for a member of the Army), it is certainly meaningful to me. I rarely go to the traditional Dawn service, however, as I think it is primarily an occasion for those who have lost loved-ones in war. And, blessedly, the only close relative of mine (my uncle Freddy) who died in war, died when I was too young to remember him -- though he was much beloved by older members of the family.

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A GOOD RANT FROM DICK MCDONALD

Some mornings I get up to find I am in an alternative universe. A universe populated with Marxist lunatics directing uneducated and misleading refugees of Pravda who in turn fill the propaganda pipeline with lies, deceptions and omissions. Spend a moment with me reviewing the present views of these moonbats:

1. Almost 60% of Americans believe the economy is in the tank. The reality is America's economy is blowing the doors off the barn. Guess who is misleading the public?

2. America is going bankrupt according to our moon bats. With a country worth $150 to $250 Trillion and a piddling, insignificant, smaller than a gnat $4.9 Trillion external debt, the deliriously misinformred are misleading the public.

3. Islam is believed by these loons to be a "Religion of Peace" irrespective of the fact that Muslims keep telling and showing us they are going to behead us all.

4. The loons fib that we can wait until 2042 before Social Security will go bankrupt; clearly ignoring the $13 Trillion unfunded liability presently hidden from public view. $13 trillion, almost three times larger our ENTIRE external debt. It is a fact the system is more than bankrupt right NOW.

5. One of America's two major political parties ran a traitor for President in 2004; and he almost won. Hailed as a hero in North Vietnam, he fictionalize atrocities and blamed his brother warriors for crimes they never committed. His testimony in front of Congress handed America her first loss in war. The depths to which our MSM will stoop is too far to measure.

6. Following Kerry's treason, I wake up each morning to an entire industry exclusively devoted to losing the Iraq war; never ending innuendos and lies with accompanying visuals. These are truly leftist traitors giving aid and comfort to America's enemies. And Hollywood's patriotism is so lacking, not one motion picture has been made supporting the war; just treasonous excuses and anti-American pap. And Americans are expected to be proud of their "Free Speech"; where exactly do I find that practiced in the good old USA?.

Read the rest here

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ELSEWHERE

Royal Prince is a patriot: "Prince Harry has threatened to quit the Army unless he is sent to the front line, it was reported today. The Prince and his older brother, Prince William, have both previously made it clear they are determined to see active service with their units. Harry, 21, was commissioned earlier this month as a Second Lieutenant in the Household Cavalry's Blues and Royals, the Army's oldest and most senior regiment. The Blues and Royals have been deployed in almost every major Army operation of the past two decades, including the Falklands, both Gulf wars, Bosnia and Kosovo. The Mail on Sunday reported that Harry told senior officers at Sandhurst before passing out on April 12: "If I am not allowed to join my unit in a war zone, I will hand in my uniform." Harry said in an interview to mark his 21st birthday last September: "The last thing I said was there's no way I'm going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country. "That may sound very patriotic, but it's true."

French protest against Islamization: "A far-right French politician launched his 2007 presidential campaign on Sunday denouncing what he called the Islamisation of the country and declaring Islam incompatible with France's secular values. Philippe de Villiers, head of the anti-immigrant Movement for France (MPF) party, also charged that Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport was endangered by Islamist radicals who he said had infiltrated the ground staff there. Villiers has stirred up controversy in recent weeks with increasingly tough statements about Muslims, which critics call racist and officials describe as exaggerated. France's 5 million Muslims make up the largest such minority in Europe. "I am the only politician who tells the French the truth about the Islamisation of France," he said in a Europe 1 radio interview kicking off his campaign for the election next year.... Saying France had to fight what he called its Islamisation, he said Paris should stop all mosque construction, impose a citizen's charter demanding the strict separation of religion and state and freedom to change religions and demand strict respect for the equality of men and women.

Yahoo info helped China jail user? "Yahoo Inc. turned over a draft e-mail from one of its users to Chinese authorities, who used the information to jail the man on subversion charges, according to the verdict from his 2003 trial released Wednesday by a rights group. It was the third time the U.S.-based Internet company has been accused of helping put a Chinese user in prison. Jiang Lijun, 39, was sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for subversive activities aimed at overthrowing the ruling Communist Party. Hong Kong-based Yahoo Holdings Ltd., a unit of Yahoo Inc., gave authorities a draft e-mail that had been saved on Jiang's account, Reporters Without Borders said, citing the verdict by the Beijing No. 2 People's Court. The Paris-based group provided a copy of the verdict, which it said it obtained this week."

Los Angeles to hide its parasites: "For decades, the 20-square-block area in the shadows of L.A.'s downtown skyscrapers has been vexing locals and shocking visitors. Thousands of homeless crowd through a few, small streets of businesses looking for handouts by day and burrowing in cardboard encampments and doorways by night. In recent years, this skid row section has put a grimy, drug-and-crime infested face on what has become -- by sheer numbers -- the US capital of homelessness: a countywide count of 88,000 homeless each night. That number, once roughly equal with New York, has been rising in recent years while Manhattan's has fallen as homelessness and related struggles such as drugs, prostitution, and alcoholism in Times Square have dropped.... Earlier this month, Mr. Yaroslavsky announced approval of a $100 million plan that would remove downtown homeless concentrations, and set up five regional centers intended only for temporary shelter".

Wicked Thoughts has just put up a collection of Hollywood "wisdom" on matters political.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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24 April, 2006

BIRTH ORDER DOES NOT AFFECT IQ

The study partially summarized below is of considerable interest in its own right but has broader implications as well. It does of course once more show that environmental effects on intelligence which were once thought important are not in fact important but, as well as that, it shows large holes in the research procedures of previous birth-order studies generally. The notorious Frank Sulloway is of course known for his frantic pursuit of the quite absurd claim that birth-order determines your politics. According to Sulloway, my younger brother should be a leftist -- because he is a younger brother. Like another younger brother among my relatives, however, my younger brother is "so far Right he is almost out of sight". But Sulloway did not take all the precautions in his research that have been shown as important below so it is no surprise on those grounds alone that he came to strange conclusions. ALL the existing birth-order research must now be considered to be of negligible worth

A recent study provides some of the best evidence to date that birth order really doesn't have an effect on intelligence. The findings contradict many studies over the years that had reported that older children are generally smarter than their younger siblings. This new study, based on a large, nationwide sample, suggests a critical flaw in that previous research, said Aaron Wichman, lead author of the new study and a teaching fellow in psychology at Ohio State University.

Most previous studies compared children from different families, so what they were finding were differences between large and small families, not differences between siblings, according to Wichman. "Third- and fourth-born children all come from larger families, and larger families have disadvantages that will impact children's intelligence," he said. "In reality, if you look at these larger families, the fourth-born child is just as intelligent as the first-born. But they all don't do as well as children from a smaller family.".....

But then the researchers analyzed the data using a variable that could take into account environmental differences between families. That variable was the mother's age at the birth of her first child. "Mother's age encapsulates many variables that could negatively effect the child-rearing environment. The younger a mother was at the birth of her first child, the lower we would expect intelligence scores to be within a family," Wichman said. That's because younger mothers would tend to have less education, more children, lower income, and other factors that would negatively affect the intelligence of their children. When the researchers controlled for mother's age at first birth, the effect of birth order on intelligence was nearly eliminated.

The results, though, are clear, Wichman said. "Birth order may appear to be associated with intelligence, but that's only because larger families don't have the advantages of smaller families," he said. "When examined within families, there is no evidence of any significant association between birth order and intelligence. It's not your birth order that is important - family environment and genetic influences are the really important factors."

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ELSEWHERE

Blacks protest against illegals: "Some African American groups plan to join members of the Minuteman Project tomorrow to protest illegal immigration, which organizer Ted Hayes called the "biggest threat to blacks in America since slavery." The protest is to start at 1 p.m. today in Leimert Park and is organized by Hayes' Crispus Attucks Brigade and the American Black Citizens Opposed to Illegal Immigration Invasion. Hayes, a homeless activist, said most homeless people in Los Angeles are black and that illegal immigration compounds the problem because African Americans refuse to work for the "slave wages" that many illegal immigrants accept."

Bizarre! Australia welcomes Al Qa'ida fellow-travellers: "Australia has granted asylum to five men who claim their membership of an organisation accused of ties to al-Qa'ida would expose them to persecution in their home countries. The men from Syria, Egypt and India sought protection on the basis of their membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned in Syria and is considered the father of terrorist groups including al-Qa'ida. Osama bin Laden's right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri adopted the organisation. And earlier this month, The Weekend Australian revealed that one of the five asylum-seekers, Ahmad al-Hamwi, who arrived in Australia 10 years ago, was a senior al-Qa'ida bagman linked to 1993 World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef. US terror expert Steven Emerson said the practice of allowing Muslim Brotherhood members into Australia was "extremely dangerous"."

YMCA booted out by HAMAS: "The leadership of a West Bank Palestinian city now controlled by Hamas has warned a local Young Men's Christian Association to close its offices and leave town or face likely Muslim violence, WorldNetDaily has learned. The move highlighted long-standing fears Hamas would use its win in last January's Palestinian parliamentary elections to impose an anti-Christian, anti-Jewish hard-line Islamist regime in the West Bank and Gaza. "The face of the new Hamas government is coming to the forefront now that they finally took over and have a lot more confidence. They want to create a territory free of Christians and Jews," said a Christian leader associated with the YMCA in Qalqiliya, a West Bank town under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority."

Fox news increases the GOP vote: "Using a data set of voting data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News. The results are robust to town-level controls, district and county fixed effects, and alternative specifications. We also find a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican".

Conservative Australian Anglicans thrive: "Moore Theological College, which trains clergy for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, is expanding so quickly it will soon outgrow its Newtown premises. The college's director of property planning, Doug Marr, said the rapid growth in trainee minister numbers had forced a search for new premises. The preferred option is the Lindfield campus of the University of Technology, Sydney. There have been discussions about the college buying it, although it would need to sell its premises on Carillon Avenue. "We've had huge growth in the last 20 years," Mr Marr said. "The number of ministers in training has grown enormously . . . we're running out of space." The number of full-time, undergraduate students this year is 314. That has grown from 303 last year, 287 in 2004 and 235 in 2001. Strong demand for training at the college comes as other denominations find it difficult to attract people to vocations. The state's biggest Catholic seminary, The Seminary of the Good Shepherd, at Homebush, has 42 seminarians"

"Carnival of the Vanities" has been having troubles without Sid's steadying hand on it but the latest edition is just up here

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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23 April, 2006

"Racist" party is Leftist

The following letter from Lord Tebbitt about the British National Party appeared in the London "Daily Telegraph". Norman Tebbitt has himself been described as a "hardline rightwinger". He was a Minister in several portfolios under Margaret Thatcher and chairman of the Conservative Party

"Sir - It is of some comfort that the Labour Party at least, even if not yet the Tories, has woken up to the threat posed by the BNP, because it has ceased to understand or listen to its own supporters when they express their concerns about multiculturalism, the levels of immigration and lack of integration that are affecting our great cities.

However, it remains of concern that even The Daily Telegraph (Comment, April 18) persists in so misunderstanding the BNP as to describe it as "an extreme Right-wing party". I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies.

On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to "use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality", to institute worker ownership, to favour workers' co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.

Certainly the BNP poses as a patriotic party opposed to multiculturalism, and it has racist overtones, but there is no lack of patriotic Left-wing regimes; opposition to multiculturalism is now mainstream and racialism was not unknown even in the Soviet Union. So what is "extreme Right-wing" about the BNP?"

The Ku Klux Klan were all Democrats, Hitler was a socialist, Karl Marx was an antisemite, the Soviets persecuted the Jews and the main support for the White Australia Policy was the Australian Labor party -- and it still is!. Any pattern there? Nah!

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ELSEWHERE

BNP winning support: "The British National Party is on course to make significant gains in the local elections in England in two weeks time, according to a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph today. It shows that seven per cent of voters are ready to back the far-Right party and that 24 per cent have considered voting BNP in the past or are thinking of doing so now. In the eyes of almost three-quarters of potential BNP supporters, Britain "almost seems like a foreign country".... The strong showing for the BNP, which has already achieved more success than any other far-Right party, will alarm all the mainstream parties. At the general election last year, the BNP won 4.3 per cent of the vote across the 116 seats it contested. It polled 16.9 per cent in the Barking constituency.... The BNP has said it is putting up more candidates than ever before - 356 - for the local elections. At present it has 15 councillors across England and hopes to win up to 40 seats on May 4.

Pew Survey: Leftists much less moral: "There is a partisan divide in how people judge these behaviors. A majority of Republicans say seven of the ten behaviors are morally wrong; while a majority of Democrats and independents say just three of the behaviors (adultery, underreporting taxable income; drinking excessively) are morally wrong. Independents are the least inclined of the three partisan groups to view the behaviors as morally wrong and most prone to see them as "not a moral issue."" [The ten moral issues were: Married people having an affair; Not reporting all income on taxes; Drinking alcohol excessively; Having an abortion; Smoking marijuana; Homosexual behavior; Telling a lie to spare someone's feelings; Sex between unmarried adults; Gambling; Overeating]

American generosity: "U.S. foreign aid from private sources totaled $71.2 billion in 2004, a sum more than 3? times greater than the foreign aid the U.S. government provided that year, according to a study by the Hudson Institute. "America is often criticized as being stingy in its foreign aid, but that assessment doesn't take into account the extent of private giving," the institute said. The study, titled Index of Global Philanthropy, was presented yesterday at a United Nations conference".

Government Financing Clowns -- Literally: "Fire departments are using Homeland Security grants to buy gym equipment, sponsor puppet and clown shows, and turn first responders into fitness trainers. The spending choices are allowable under the guidelines of the Assistance to Firefighters grant administered by the Homeland Security Department, which has awarded nearly 250 grants since February totaling more than $25 million out of the current spending pot of $545 million."

A vacation to the magical kingdom of capitalism: "On a recent trip to Florida I had the chance to see a good contrast between public works projects and private enterprises. This consisted of traveling through two public airports, Boston Logan and Orlando International and visiting two private entertainment parks, Walt Disney World and Sea World. I could linger long on the deficiencies of the public airports and rail against various aspects of their design, but instead I'd rather focus on the positive aspects of what I saw in the private capitalist dream that is Walt Disney World."

An end run around class action lawsuits: "Alan Kaplinsky is one proud man. For years, the Philadelphia lawyer has been advising financial institutions, leading their defense in class-action lawsuits brought by consumers -- and, more importantly, designing ways to limit such suits by writing arbitration clauses into many credit-card agreements and banking contracts. These clauses, often found in the fine print, have met with mixed results in court, with some judges upholding them, some not. Now, Kaplinsky has found a way to one-up the courts, at least in Utah, where a new law specifically allows these clauses in all consumer loan contracts, including credit-card agreements."

Russia: Surge in race killings as Hitler's birthday nears: "Russia is struggling to contain an upsurge in racist murders and attacks as skinheads in the country prepare to mark Adolf Hitler's birthday. The past week alone has seen a slew of race-hate crimes perpetrated despite condemnation from politicians and threats of heavier jail sentences. Four Roma have been murdered and one Vietnamese man killed, and there have been at least seven 'punishment beatings' of foreigners. Anti-racism activists are warning that Russia's estimated 60,000 skinheads appear to be attacking their victims with increasing impunity and that the problem has spun out of control."

Strange Justice has the latest on the very dubious Duke university "rape" prosecution.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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

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

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



22 April, 2006

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION



Minutemen to build private fence: "Chris Simcox, President of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, today announced plans by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps ("MCDC") to work with local Arizona land owners to build border security fencing on private land along the border with Mexico. At present, six private land owners have partnered with the Minutemen for the commencement of construction of border fencing on their land. Surveillance cameras on the fencing will be monitored via computer by registered Minutemen across the country. Two construction companies to date have offered to inaugurate groundbreaking, coordinate volunteer construction crews and donate the use of the necessary heavy construction equipment. Simcox says those involved in the planning hope to keep costs near $150 per foot."

Illegal alien population CAN be reduced "Proponents of mass legalization of the illegal alien population often justify this radical step by suggesting that the only alternative - a broad campaign to remove illegal aliens by force - is unworkable. One study fancifully suggested that the cost of such a deportation strategy would be $206 billion over the next five years. But mass forced removal is not the only alternative to mass legalization. A third way is to seek attrition of the illegal population through law enforcement, encouraging illegal aliens to give up and leave of their own accord. A new analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies uses a variety of federal government data to demonstrate that such a strategy of attrition, combined with a stronger border security effort such as the administration's Secure Border Initiative (SBI), can significantly reduce the size of the illegal alien population at a reasonable cost. The report, by CIS Senior Policy Analyst Jessica Vaughan, finds that, according to the government's own cost estimates, an attrition strategy could cut the illegal population by nearly half in five years, with an additional investment of less than $2 billion, or $400 million per year - an increase of less than 1 percent of the President's 2007 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security ($42.7 billion)".

GA: Perdue signs immigration bill: "Georgia's governor signed a sweeping immigration bill Monday that supporters and critics say gives the state some of the toughest measures against illegal immigrants in the nation. 'I want to make this clear: we are not, Georgia's government is not, and this bill is not, anti-immigrant,' Gov. Sunny Perdue said at the signing. ... The law requires verification that adults seeking many state-administered benefits are in the country legally."



Some law enforcement happening: "Federal immigration authorities rounded up more than 1,000 illegal immigrants at dozens of sites and charged nine individuals of the firm that employed them, federal law enforcement officials announced Wednesday. Seven current and former managers of IFCO Systems, which has offices in several states, were arrested and charged in connection with the employment of illegal immigrants, said U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby in Albany, New York."

The left splits over immigration: "Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in them a new kind of civil rights movement. They've supported calls to legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right, where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are working against the interests of low-skilled American workers."

Stupid propaganda: "The statistics are quite illuminating. Seventy-five percent of all farm workers in this country were born in Mexico. When one includes farm workers from other parts of Latin America, more than half of these workers (53%) are here illegally. Only 23% of farm workers were born in the United States. ... When it comes down to it this is really a question of supply and demand. Americans love their lettuce. In order to satiate this demand, agricultural employers need to find people willing to pick lettuce in order for it to get to market. But if we are to rely solely on the American labor force to pick our lettuce that demand will not be met. There are simply not enough Americans willing to go to Arizona to work in 100 degree weather on their hands and knees to pick lettuce for $7.25 an hour without health insurance and limited access to clean drinking water." [So how come I can buy all the lettuce I want in Australia for a couple of dollars each even though we have NO illegals to pick it?]

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ELSEWHERE



Iran: Police to arrest women in "un-Islamic" dress: "Iran's Islamic authorities are preparing a crackdown on women flouting the stringent dress code in the clearest sign yet of social and political repression under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From today police in Tehran will be under orders to arrest women failing to conform to the regime's definition of Islamic morals by wearing loose-fitting hijab, or headscarves, tight jackets and shortened trousers exposing skin. ... The clampdown coincides with a bill before Iran's conservative-dominated parliament proposing that fines for people with TV satellite dishes rise from 60 pounds to more than 3,000 pounds. Millions of Iranians have illegal dishes, enabling them to watch western films and news channels. ... The new campaign will hold taxi agencies accountable for their passengers' attire, police will be able to impound cabs carrying women dressed 'inappropriately.' Agencies guilty of repeat offences will be closed."



Waco: "Every year the weeks between February 28 and April 19 are a kind of secular Lent for me, a period of being particularly conscious of everything that's wrong with the world. This span of time corresponds to the 51-day siege imposed by federal troops on a religious community near Waco, Texas. Critics try to justify the raid and firestorm on the grounds that the murdered people were cult members, victims of brainwashing. Of course, defining a "cult" is a bit tricky. Maybe David Koresh and his followers had laughable beliefs - but hey, check out what kind of stuff the more popular denominations believe. Most churches are equal opportunity indoctrinators of very peculiar illogic. To pretend that one has cornered the market on validity is nonsense. We have a thing called freedom of religion, and wrong-headedness is not a capital offense. The people of Mount Carmel didn't deserve to be turned into crispy critters because they were spiritual zealots.

Branch Davidian scapegoats finally released: "Thirteen years after the Branch Davidians' armed standoff with federal agents ended in an inferno that killed nearly 80 people, six sect members who were sent to prison are about to be released from custody. Most of those who will be freed over the next two months escaped from the compound near Waco as it burned to the ground on April 19, 1993 -- 51 days after a shootout that erupted when federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to arrest religious leader David Koresh for stockpiling guns and explosives."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

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

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21 April, 2006

SOME ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION BACKGROUND

An Oregon reader responds to my recent mention of an NYT article about illegal immigrants being pulled up by local rather than Federal police and then being handed over to immigration authorities:

"Back in the seventies and eighties I would get calls, usually in the middle of the night, to help local police book non-English speaking arrestees. Most but not all were Mexicans, and usually they had been picked up for trivial offenses. But the police needed all the pertinent information, such as their street address in Mexico.... Anyway, in those days if someone was illegal they were always handed over to the federal immigration authorities to be deported, but then the practice was abandoned, probably because too many people felt sorry for the poor Mexicans. After all, all they want to do is make a living, right? Wrong. Some certainly do, but in the local crime reports the majority of offenders goes by Manuel or Jesus or Jose. Not long ago a huge methamphetamine-importing gang was busted here - all Mexican, mostly illegal, with a few white trash hangers-on.

What did surprise me was the provenance of the news article, because the New York Times is a leftist rag, and Westchester and Putnam counties, just to the north of the City, are very wealthy liberal enclaves. They were even when I lived there, now 35 years ago. So it says something for the country's mood that the police in such areas are now getting federal immigration into the loop. What most foreigners don't understand about America is that there is no chain of command in law enforcement: local police do not have to cooperate with federal authorities unless they choose to, so when they do there is usually some incentive involved: perhaps a federal grant, or other favors in return. If nothing else, this increase in cooperation could do wonders for local crime rates, too; this may be part of the Putnam county authorities' reasoning".

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"TO HIM THAT HATH, MORE WILL BE GIVEN HIM"

As most readers here will know, I have seven blogs which I update daily. I may be the only septablogger there is (I just made that word up -- but on good linguistic principles!). But in accordance with the wise words of Christ in the parable of the talents, it appears that I have now become an octoblogger!

After many years of sterling service, the founder of TONGUE-TIED, Scott Norvell, wants to take a backseat from now on. That means that instead of doing around half of the posts there, I will be doing nearly all of them. But, as one person doing the work of two, I need all the help I can get. So I am hoping that readers here will be sending me lots of links to stories that might be of interest to TONGUE-TIED readers. It would be particularly good if readers would keep an eye on their local media for cases of censorship etc. I personally can only possibly keep up with the major media.

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ELSEWHERE

Germany ends Nazi secrecy: "Germany's decision to grant access to a massive archive of Nazi Holocaust records means thousands of Australian Jewish families may finally get conclusive information about the fate of relatives. The archives, boxed away in a former Nazi SS barracks in the German town of Bad Arolsen, contain information on 17.5 million concentration camp prisoners, forced labourers and other victims of the Third Reich. In Jerusalem, Holocaust specialist Shlomo Aharonson, a historian at Hebrew University, said the archives were supposed to contain all the names of those who died in World War II, both Jews and non-Jews. Citing privacy concerns, Germany had for decades resisted releasing the records, but yesterday Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries announced the Government had relented. The announcement ends a 20-year effort by the Holocaust Museum, the US, France, Poland and some other countries to pry open the archives. Until now, only the international Red Cross had been permitted to sort through the information, with families and historians denied direct access for the past 60 years".

Australians are rich! (Thanks to a healthy economy): Every Australian is now worth an average of $316,000, with a soaring sharemarket and house prices behind an unprecedented wealth boom. According to a Treasury survey, Australia's private wealth kitty is now $6.5 trillion - the biggest ever, and a rise of nearly 10 per cent in the past year. But while world-leading levels of private share ownership and investment property purchases are two of the reasons behind the wealth boom, experts say the biggest influence is much less personal. Professor Mark Wooden from the Melbourne Institute, a conservative think-tank, said the population naturally grew wealthier as the economy expanded.

Hate-preaching in Britain: "Muslim students training to be imams at a British college with strong Iranian links have complained that they are being taught fundamentalist doctrines which describe nonMuslims as "filth". The Times has obtained extracts from medieval texts taught to the students in which unbelievers are likened to pigs and dogs. The texts are taught at the Hawza Ilmiyya of London, a religious school, which has a sister institution, the Islamic College for Advanced Studies (ICAS), which offers a degree validated by Middlesex University. The students, who have asked to remain anonymous, study their religious courses alongside the university-backed BA in Islamic studies. They spend two days a week as religious students and three days on their university course."

OK to maim babies if you are a Muslim: "A Bangladeshi woman who shook a baby boy so violently that he suffered brain damage walked free from court yesterday because a judge conceded that she did not know how to behave in the West. Rahella Khanom, 24, caused the five-month-old boy in her care to suffer fractures to his breast bone and ribs as she tried to rid him of evil spirits, Southwark Crown Court was told. The injuries inflicted on the child over several weeks had caused one side of his brain to shrink. It was believed that the boy would have been screaming in agony for eight weeks because his injuries went untreated"

BBC blows the people's money on favoured sons: "The BBC suffered a backlash from licence fee-payers yesterday as radio listeners accused stars of failing to provide value for money after learning of their salaries through a series of leaks. Executives are braced for further revelations after Jeremy Paxman was the latest well-known name to find his apparent earnings revealed. He is reported to earn about 800,000 pounds for fronting Newsnight and a further 240,000 for hosting University Challenge on BBC Two. Scotland Yard said that it was ready to assist an internal inquiry by the BBC into the source of the leak, which is suspected to be the work of a disgruntled former employee.... However the figures, not challenged by the traditionally secretive corporation, have disclosed information consistently denied through Freedom of Information requests.... The BBC was also forced to defend an 80,731 pound spend on Christmas parties. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is expected to be asked about the revelations when she answers questions about the BBC's demand for an increased licence fee at a House of Lords committee today.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

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

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20 April, 2006

Medical research is starting to take account of people's race

Some excerpts below from an article in The Economist. I have left out all the agonizing

Last month researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Mississippi Medical Centre published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. They had studied three versions (or alleles, as they are known) of a gene called PCSK9. This gene helps clear the blood of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), one of the chemical packages used to transport cholesterol around the body. Raised levels of LDL are associated with heart disease. The effect of all three types of PCSK9 studied by Jonathan Cohen and his colleagues was to lower the LDL in a person's bloodstream by between 15% and 28%, and coronary heart disease by between 47% and 88%, compared with people with more common alleles of the gene.

In Dr Cohen's work, the race question proved decisive. Of the 3,363 volunteers who described themselves as "black", 0.8% carried an allele of PCSK9 called version 142X and 1.8% carried one called version 679X. Among 9,524 self-described "white" volunteers, a mere 0.02% carried version 142X and 0.04% carried version 679X. By contrast, 3.2% of white people carried the third allele under study, version 46L, while only 0.7% of black participants did. The researchers found that these relatively rare alleles correlated with low LDL, and did so in both blacks and whites, allowing them to conclude that it was the gene change that was crucial. If the team had ignored race and simply compared those who had heart disease with those who did not, and asked which alleles were linked to the risk, they would probably have missed the clinical significance of the alleles... Ignoring race altogether would be to the detriment of medical knowledge about the very people who might benefit.

In some cases, though, the difference clearly is genetic. A gene called UGT1A1 controls the metabolism of a colon-cancer drug called irinotecan. Approximately 20% of African-Americans, 15% of whites and 1% of Asians have two copies of a non-functional version of this gene called *28. Because individuals lacking functional UGT1A1 are at risk for serious complications if given the standard dose of irinotecan, genetic testing of patients before starting irinotecan therapy has become normal. Yet, while only 1% of Asians have two copies of the *28 allele, which is detected by the genetic test, 2.5% of Asians have another non-functional version called *6 which is not detected by the standard test. Indeed, it does not occur in blacks or whites. Thus, testing Asians for the *28 allele does not provide them with the same quality of care as it does for African-Americans or whites. "Identical treatment is not," as Dr Risch puts it, "equal treatment."

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ELSEWHERE

Publicity-seeking district attorney pursues evidence-free accusations: "Two 20-year-old Duke University lacrosse players were arrested early Tuesday on charges of raping and kidnapping a stripper hired to dance at an off-campus party.... The alleged victim, a 27-year-old black woman and mother of two children, told police she was attacked March 13 by three white men in a bathroom at a party held by the lacrosse team.... Defense attorneys have urged District Attorney Mike Nifong to drop the case, saying DNA tests failed to connect any of the 46 team members tested to the alleged victim. Nifong has said 75 percent to 80 percent of rape prosecutions lack DNA evidence. According to court records, a medical examination of the woman found injuries consistent with rape. Defense attorneys have said time-stamped photos taken the night of the party show that the alleged victim was injured and impaired before she arrived. The charges come two weeks before Nifong, appointed to the job last year after nearly three decades as a lawyer in the district attorney's office, is up for election. On Monday, he repeatedly declined to comment on the case."

Mark Steyn has a much-linked article here on the importance of stopping the nuclear program of the mad Mullahs of Iran before it is too late.

U.S. army guns no good: "Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the world's most popular assault rifle, says that US soldiers in Iraq are using his invention in preference to their own weapons, proving that his gun is still the best. "Even after lying in a swamp you can pick up this rifle, aim it and shoot. That's the best job description there is for a gun. Real soldiers know that and understand it," the 86-year-old gunmaker told a weekend news conference in Moscow. "In Vietnam, American soldiers threw away their M-16 rifles and used (Kalashnikov) AK-47s from dead Vietnamese soldiers, with bullets they captured. That was because the climate is different to America, where M-16s may work properly," he said. "Look what's happening now: every day on television we see that the Americans in Iraq have my machine guns and assault rifles in their armored vehicles. Even there American rifles don't work properly." Some US troops in Iraq have reportedly taken to using AK-47s in preference to the standard-issue M-16." [The M16 was prone to jamming from the start. But defence procurement always has been a prime example of bureaucratic bungling and corruption]

Australia takes the baby shortage seriously: "John Howard has signalled to low and middle-income families they can expect substantial tax relief in next month's Budget, after identifying the need to help with the costs of raising children as his Government's top priority. The Prime Minister also dampened expectations for significant change at the top end of the tax scale, saying the Government had already done a lot for high income earners, with the number of people paying the top marginal tax rate of 48.5 per cent falling from 14 per cent to 3 per cent in the past three years. Mr Howard said yesterday rhetoric on tax reform meant little without a focus on the pressures facing families. "My Government places the low and middle-income families of Australia squarely in the foreground of our policy lens," he said. "And strengthening the family - helping them with the costs of raising children - is the best way any government can reinforce social cohesion and stability in a changing world."

Dumb and dangerous: "It is no secret that politicians frequently put all of us at risk because of their real or willful ignorance. Most wars are a result of political miscalculations, but so are many recessions, depressions and other economic calamities. What follows are three examples where the political class is putting us in danger because of economic ignorance or worse. U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, have come up with a particularly dumb and dangerous proposal, and that is to place a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese goods if China does not increase the value of its currency. They claim that this is necessary because the Chinese have a big trade surplus with the U.S.... Contrary to what the senators believe, our trade deficit is a sign of strength. Individuals, businesses and countries want to invest in the U.S. because they can obtain a higher rate of return here than they can in their home market, and they believe their money is safer in the U.S. To invest in this country requires having U.S. dollars, and the way to get U.S. dollars is by selling some goods or service that Americans want."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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19 April, 2006

SEETHING LEFTIST HATRED AGAIN

Excerpt below from an interesting report. That a Leftist who cannot be honest with herself about her own motivations should be dishonest about other things should be no surprise

Journey through the mind of a liberal to understand how pure, naked hate defines the political agenda. A brief glimpse of what passes for gray matter would confirm the worst suspicions of the harshest critics of liberalism. John Morganelli knows better than most that they are motivated by venom instead of virtue..... On Tuesday, Morganelli got more than he asked for. Robin Mekonnen, who hinted she was a lawyer and stated she was an employee of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, started sending e-mail using the court's domain name. Ms. Mekonnen wrote,

"Why don't you talk a little about the effects upon the economy by your fellow slices of white bread with regard to the Timothy McVeighs and the anthrax senders? Your enemies look more like you than you care to believe, but you chose skin color or nationality in lieu of self-hatred. Watch out for the white man. He lies, cheats, steals, murders, rapes, kidnaps, more than anyone else in the world. Get therapy. You're in denial."

A surprised Morganelli responded that she was the racist and the statistics on his site that she questioned were accurate. Mekonnen wrote back that,

"And no, I'm not a racist. In fact I'm an anti-racist. I emphasized that you are white to you so you can confront your own demons. See racism as self-hatred and psychopathology. You want a repeat of what we did to Native Americans, Chinese and Japanese. Why don't you consult a real impartial authority ... before you create a supremacist Web site? I was forwarded your website from an anti-racist government watchdog list server."

Morganelli told Mekonnen he would alert her employers at the Supreme Court about her e-mail.... The court e-mailed back a statement: "Today, we learned that a graduate student, with whom we contracted on a short-term basis ... apparently has made unauthorized use of (the court's e-mail) ... issued to her solely for the conduct of her temporary contractual assignment. The individual's actions were in no way connected with her temporary work ... ." It also said it suspended her contract with the intention of terminating it -- and that she was not an employee. The state bar association also had no record of her.

More on Leftist hate here. Leftists are always accusing conservatives of hate to mask how much they themselves are moved by it. See also here for their latest spew at Michelle Malkin

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ELSEWHERE

Some immigration law-enforcement happening: "Serious criminal charges once typically reserved for drug traffickers and organized-crime figures are increasingly being used to target businesses that employ illegal immigrants, a strategy highlighted last week when three Maryland restaurateurs pleaded guilty to federal offenses and agreed to forfeit more than $1 million in cash and property. The little-publicized approach, which can include charging such employers with money laundering and seizing their assets, amounts to a strategic shift in the enforcement of immigration law in the workplace. As a result, investigations into the employment of illegal immigrants, known as worksite enforcement, resulted in 127 criminal convictions in 2005 nationwide, up from 46 the previous year, according to figures from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE."

Bankers scared of Wal-Mart: "Wal-Mart Stores is learning there is a downside to vanquishing your rivals and leaving them in your wake: You attract a lot of attention when you try to enter a new market. That was clear enough from Monday's rare public hearings on the retail giant's application to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for deposit insurance so it can set up a banking arm, known as an industrial loan company (ILC). Wal-Mart vows that it won't enter branch banking and says it merely wants the charter so it can trim the processing costs of various credit card, debit card and electronic check transactions. But the community banking lobby-supported by consumer advocates-thinks it is only a matter of time before the retailer intrudes on the banks' turf. And the chief objection is that Wal-Mart would give them a run for their money. "There's plenty of competition out there," observed Kenneth J. Redding of America's Community of Bankers. "We don't need Wal-Mart to further the competitive disadvantage we already have."

Arab is murdered for selling to Jews: "An Arab man accused of selling his property in the fiercely contested region of east Jerusalem to Jewish settlers was buried in a traitor's grave yesterday after Palestinian police found his body riddled with bullets in a burnt-out car. Israeli police believe that Muhammad Abu al-Hawa, 48, whose body showed signs of torture, was murdered by Palestinians outraged by the sale to Jews of the three upper floors of a four-storey property on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem".

B'nai B'rith draws the obvious conclusion from the Tel Aviv bombing: "B'nai B'rith International has condemned today's terror bombing at a falafel restaurant in Tel Aviv in which at least six were killed, not including the bomber, and at least 75 were wounded - 15 of them seriously. Responding to media reports that the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) government called the bombing a legitimate response to Israeli "aggression," B'nai B'rith International President Joel S. Kaplan charged, "Anyone who thinks that Hamas is willing to change - or that it is even capable of changing - or who believes that Hamas understands the responsibilities inherent in governing, is simply thinking irrationally."

One solution to German unemployment: "While the construction industry in Germany is stagnating as World Cup 2006 projects reach completion, it is booming in Britain, with 30,000 new homes a year planned in the course of the next 20 years and an Olympic site in East London set to be created. Now German craftsmen are being instructed in how to attack the British labour market. Bettina Hansmeier, a spokeswoman for the German Master Craftsmen's Group, a lobby representing skilled building workers in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which includes Duesseldorf, said that a number of websites had been set up to advise workers on how to get jobs in Britain."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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18 April, 2006

ANOTHER NAUGHTY CARTOON



"The editor of an Italian monthly has apologized for any offense to Muslims over a humorous caption for a drawing showing the Prophet Muhammad in hell, Italian news reports said Sunday. The journal Studi Cattolici (Catholic Studies), which offers a variety of opinions on cultural issues, ran the caption and drawing in its March issue. Italian news agencies on Sunday quoted the journal's editor, Cesare Cavalleri, as "apologizing, as a Christian," for any offense.

Milan daily Corriere della Sera said that the journal had run a humorous caption next to the drawing, which was inspired by Dante's depiction of Muhammad in hell in his "Divine Comedy." The Union of Italian Islamic Communities said it had protested the caption. The organization's secretary, Roberto Piccardo, declined to comment on the reported apology.

Cavalleri was quoted as saying the vignette "was interpreted as being anti-Islam when, if anything, it was a denunciation of a cultural identity crisis in the West," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Cavalleri as saying. "In any case, if, contrary to my and the author's intentions, someone felt offended in his religious feelings, I willingly apologize as a Christian.""

More here

In the cartoon, famous Italian poet Dante is asking the Roman poet Virgil: "That man divided in two from his head to his feet - isn't that Muhammad?" Virgil replies: "Yes, it is him and he is in two because he has divided society - while the man next to him with his arms down represents Italian politics towards Islam."

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A GOOD RANT ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION

Nebraska has just passed a law that resegregates some of its shools -- a law that prominent blacks argued for. I noted the matter on EDUCATION WATCH under the heading "SEGREGATION IS GOOD FOR BLACKS -- APPARENTLY". A reader who is a teacher in Hawaii has responded as follows:

"Numerous lines of evidence indicate:

1) as institutions take from parents the power to determine for their own children the course of instruction and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance (as measured by standardized test scores or, inversely, arrest rates) falls, and

2) political control of school harms most the children of the least politically adept parents ("Well, duh!" as my students would say). Across the US, the correlation between mean district size and NAEP 4th and 8th grade Reading and Math scores is negative. The correlation between the fraction of a State's total enrollment assigned to districts over 20,000 and NAEP test scores is negative. Smaller is better.

There is an interesting exception: the mean score of children of college-educated white parents is slightly positively correlated with mean district size and with the fraction of total enrollment assigned to large districts. There is an instructive exception to the exception: In Hawaii, which maintains a single State-wide school district of 180,000 students, the mean score of white students (NAEP 8th grade Math) is the lowest in the US. The mean score of children of high-school educated black parents is the lowest in the US. Asians dominate the DOE bureaucracy and the State legislature.

This does not yield high performance for Asian students (the mean score of the top one-third of schools in Hawaii is lower than the mean score of three States' bottom one third of schools), but the system harms most the children of the least politically adept parents. Segregation is good for blacks? I would say: "parent control of education is good for everybody except bad teachers, politically-connected construction contractors, and NEA thugs"."

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ELSEWHERE

Drug addiction linked to genes: "New research involving DNA samples from 700 cocaine abusers and 850 non-users in Brazil found people who carried two copies of a gene variant were 50 per cent more likely to become addicted to the drug. Cocaine acts to inhibit the action of a protein, known as DAT, that controls the removal of the chemical dopamine in the brain. The result is a "high" feeling when nerve cells in the brain are overloaded with the good-mood chemical. The study, by a team of British and Brazilian researchers, including geneticist Gerome Breen from the Institute of Psychiatry at London's Kings College, found people who had two copies of the variant that influenced the amount of the DAT protein were at greater risk of addiction. "What seems to be happening is that once someone with this variant is exposed to cocaine they start to produce less of this dopamine transporter protein than they had before and this has a knock-on effect in the brain and knocks the system out of kilter," Dr Breen said".

Hard to change a leopard's spots: "It was a story that touched the hearts of Minnesotans. But now it has taken a surprising turn, in Boston. A homeless, 22-year-old, undocumented immigrant from Mexico was found secretly living inside a Twin Cities high school last year, using the showers and foraging for cafeteria food. Francisco Javier Serrano's story captivated the news media there and moved a wealthy developer to provide him with money, an immigration attorney, and a rent-free apartment overlooking downtown Minneapolis. But immigration officials ordered Serrano back to Mexico. Officials believed that he boarded a plane for his home country Jan. 5, and it seemed to be a closed case. Then, two weeks ago, a tenant in Boston's North End heard a sound inside his apartment. A man with a knife had broken in. The tenant struck the intruder with a kitchen pan, and police responded to find Serrano and the tenant in a struggle, authorities said. Now, Serrano sits in Suffolk County Jail facing charges of home invasion."

Is the US sugar problem solvable? : "The United States' sugar policy has a long history of supporting sugar producers, and the current system has its roots in the agricultural programs of the Great Depression. The policy has been widely criticized both at home and abroad for supporting a relatively small group of sugar producers at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, sugar-using industries, and the environment. The program relies on restricting sugar imports to keep domestic prices high, which especially hurts those developing countries that are low-cost producers of sugar. The artificially high price also provides incentives for domestic sugar producers to increase production into environmentally sensitive areas."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

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



17 April, 2006

WHAT LEFTISTS HATE AND WHY

Some excerpts from a great list by Chris Weinkopf

These are the things that most infuriate "progressives," followed by a brief explanation of why. The mere mention of these words will cause the typical left-winger to see (even more) red:

Cars - especially SUVs; the bigger and safer the vehicle, the worse. For leftists, cars are a polluting, annoying expression of individual freedom - a painful reminder that the longstanding efforts of social engineers to herd Americans into mass transit remain unfulfilled.

Guns - and the irritating insistence of "gun nuts" (anyone who owns a gun legally) to look after their own safety rather than trust in the benevolence and capabilities of the all-protecting state.

Suburbs, AKA "sprawl" - and the selfish desire of so many Americans to own their own homes with their own garages and their own backyards.

Straight white men - especially the dead ones that once dominated classroom curricula, and any institutions where they once flourished, such as military academies, prep schools, and fraternal organizations.

Jokes about sexual orientation, race, or gender - unless they're about straight, white men.

Jokes about most anything else - except for the items on this list.

Traditional families - Heather's mommies both deserve full health benefits now, but married couples ought to be penalized with higher taxes until they either die or divorce.

Abstinence - and for that matter, all traditional sexual mores and anyone so backward as to demand them of their children, politicians, or clergy.

Religious "zealots" - that is, adherents of any faith that that makes claims on truth, especially Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, and Evangelical branches of Christianity (but not Islam).

The rich - anyone who has earned a lot of money no doubt did something wretched to obtain it and deserves to have it forcefully taken away. (Rich leftists excluded.)

Vouchers - a threat to unions, social engineers, and the government monopoly on public education.

Home-schooling - a threat to unions, social engineers, and the government monopoly on public education - and a favorite among the religious zealots.

Standardized testing - or, for that matter, educational standards of any kind.

McDonalds - for selling fatty foods containing red meat and marketing them to minors, and for doing what socialism never could: feeding billions and billions on the cheap.

Pharmaceutical companies - for spending billions developing new, life-saving drugs, then charging money for them.

Successful businesses - they must be ripping off their "stakeholders."

Failed business - they must be ripping off their "stakeholders."

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ELSEWHERE

Blair losing the working class: "White, working-class Britons feel so furious about immigration that they are deserting Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party for the far right, a key Blair ally told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. Employment Minister Margaret Hodge said that 80 per cent of white people in her east London constituency of Barking were threatening to vote for the British National Party (BNP) in the May local elections. Former voters for Mr Blair's governing centre-left party were angry about a lack of affordable housing and blamed their worries on Labour neglect and immigration, she told the weekly broadsheet. "They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry," Ms Hodge said. "When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many, eight out of 10 of the white families, say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before. "Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not." Asylum and immigration is a sensitive topic in Britain, with popular newspapers regularly calling the system "chaos".

Brainless and heartless British bureaucracy at work: "A bailiff was sent to an 80-year-old gran's council home to demand rent arrears of just FIVE PENCE. Alice Nelson was left "terrified" after the official called on her without warning. She has lived at the same address for 45 years and has never knowingly been behind with her rent. The bailiff told Alice, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, she had to hand over the 5p there and then. And the shaken and confused gran, who had received no prior letters about the demand, gave him a coin without knowing if she really owed it.... The bailiff, who gave Alice a potty receipt, was sent by Wigan and Leigh Housing, which manages council homes on behalf of the local authority. A spokesman said yesterday: "We apologise for any distress but we are currently having a strong push to reduce both the amount of rent arrears and the actual number of people in arrears. "In terms of how our performance is measured it's also important to reduce the number of people in arrears, whatever the amount." But the Help The Aged charity said: "It beggars belief that debt collectors can bother a woman of this age for such a measly amount of money."

Gunshops as churches!: "A dreary, five-hour House debate on technical aspects of eminent domain law Wednesday turned into a battle over gun rights and the propriety of research on early stem cells. The issues arose as House members grappled with what limits the legislature should put on the government's ability to take private property when government officials think buying the property is in the public interest. Rep. Belinda Harris, a Hillsboro Democrat, proposed an amendment to prohibit the government from using the power of eminent domain to force the sale of any house of worship. The amendment was approved, 154-0. That prompted Rep. Mike Frame, a Eureka Democrat, to propose exempting any property used as a gun shop. He said such an exemption befitted businesses protected by the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Rep. Shannon Cooper, a Clinton Republican who owns a gun store, said gun shops were not equivalent to churches and should not be placed in a special class exempt from rules that apply to all other businesses."

Coffin finally in his coffin: "The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., a civil rights and anti-war campaigner who sought to inspire and encourage an idealistic and rebellious generation of college students in the 1960s from his position as chaplain of Yale University, then reveled in the role of lightning rod thrust upon him by officials and conservatives who thought him and his style of dissent dangerous, died Wednesday at his home in Strafford, Vt. He was 81. The cause was congestive heart failure"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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16 April, 2006

THOSE PESKY INBORN DIFFERENCES AGAIN

More race differences: "The highly charged discussion about what role, if any, race plays in medicine has taken a quiet but significant turn. The pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough has begun testing a hepatitis C drug, codenamed SCH 503034, and has specifically excluded African-American patients from the Phase 2 trial - the stage that attempts to find the right dosage. The exclusion has led two patient groups to accuse the company of racism. For reasons unknown, black patients have a lower response rate than whites to standard therapies for hepatitis C. Schering-Plough says the exclusion will make the drug trials "more prudent and scientifically valid", and that African-Americans can come on board as the study advances (and as the law requires)."

Another difference between male and female brains: "A key part of the brain involved in processing emotionally influenced memories acts differently in men and women, even in the absence of stimuli, University of California, Irvine researchers have found. Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, and Lisa Kilpatrick, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory, have found that the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found on both sides of the brain, behaves very differently in males and females while the subjects are at rest. In men, the right amygdala is more active and shows more connections with other regions of the brain, even when there is no outside stimulus. Conversely, in women, the left amygdala is more connected with other regions of the brain. In addition, the regions of the brain with which the amygdala communicates while a subject is at rest are different in men and women."

Genes and aging: "In 2003, Nir Barzilai and Gil Atzmon, who study aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered that people with a certain polymorphism of the cholesterol-influencing gene CETP lived longer than those without it (ScienceNOW, October 2003). Now the researchers have identified another part of the longevity code. In a study reported in this month's issue of PLoS Biology, Barzilai and Atzmon examined the genetic makeup of 213 centenarians. All were Ashkenazi Jews, a group with a relatively uniform genetic pool in which differences tend to stand out. The researchers also compared the centenarians' children with a control group comprised of individuals whose parents died before reaching 85. They found that 25% of the centenarians carried a particular variation of the gene APOC3, which helps determine cholesterol levels. The same variation was found in 20% of their children but only 10% of the control group, suggesting that long life runs in families. Those with the polymorphism were 15% less likely to have high blood pressure and had a significantly decreased risk for cardiovascular disease or diabetes".

Another physical basis for IQ: "Fast language learners have more white matter and less symmetrical brains, a new scanning study has revealed. The results among the first to link brain differences to language learning aptitude in healthy people, says Narly Golestani at University College London, UK. "The bigger picture is that we're starting to understand that brain shape and structure can be informative about people's abilities," she says. Those in the study who were quickest to hear subtle differences in sounds from a foreign language were found to have the greatest amount of white, fatty tissue in a brain region responsible for sound processing. "It could be that this translates into greater efficiency in the brain," comments Adam Brickman, who researches brain structure the Columbia University Medical Center in New York".

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ELSEWHERE

There is a carefully-worded article in the NYT about illegal immigrants being pulled up by local rather than Federal police and then being handed over to immigration authorities. The whole tenor of the article is about how unfair it all is to the poor illegals that they can be pulled up over "trivial" matters and then get deported over it. To the NYT, lawbreaking should apparently be condoned. No word of what the illegals concerned cost the U.S. taxpayer.

Very troubling if true: "The key plotters behind the July 7th 2005 London bombings planned to trap and drown tens of thousands of innocent people ... A team of terrorists with a fifth bomb - intended to explode in the tube network directly under the River Thames - was arrested the night before. The arrests were made when uniformed officers in police patrol cars stopped the terror gang, apparently by fortunate accident. Within minutes of their notifying their superiors they were `swamped' by plain-clothes police, Special Branch and/or MI5 officers and the whole affair was taken out of their hands. They were ordered to tell no-one about the incident and several who have since tried to find out what happened to the small group of Islamics they arrested have been unable to do so. The men have vanished without trace".

What BS! Premature babies feel pain-but fetuses don't: "Do unborn children feel pain? Two new reports in research journals shed light on some of the latest scientific thinking on the deeply charged question, an ever-present part of the debate over abortion rights. One paper is a study finding that prematurely born babies feel pain. Anti-abortion activists immediately cited this to support their contention that fetuses, too, feel pain. But a second report dismisses this notion, claiming the true experience of pain can arise only after birth".

NBC fails to entrap NASCAR fans: "NBC News baited the hook, but netted nothing in its "sting" attempt to find anti-Muslim sentiments during the Martinsville race weekend.... The inference is that NASCAR fans are bigots, and NBC News was hoping to bait fans into making insensitive remarks to the Muslim/Arab people it had planted at the track. Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications, said Wednesday that no instances of unrest were reported. "No one bothered them," Poston said. It's hard to imagine that NBC News would try to entrap fans in a ploy to make its Dateline segment juicier. But apparently the network did just that; NBC did not deny its actions when confronted by NASCAR...." (HT Newsbusters)

Bush's October surprise -- it's coming: "One hears not an encouraging word about US President George W Bush these days, even from Republican loyalists. Yet I believe that Bush will stage the strongest political comeback of any US politician since Abraham Lincoln won re-election in 1864 in the midst of the American Civil War. Two years ago I wrote that Bush would win a second term as president but live to regret it. Iraq's internal collapse and the president's poll numbers bear my forecast out. But Bush's Republicans will triumph in next November's congressional elections for the same reason that Bush beat Democratic challenger John Kerry in 2004. Americans rally around a wartime commander-in-chief, and Bush will have bombed Iranian nuclear installations by October."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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15 April, 2006

GOOD FRIDAY

Anne was determined that we were going to go to a church service on Good Friday. Unfortunately, I had had a rather sleepless night the night before so I woke up a bit after 8am. But when I did, there was Anne hovering over me all dressed up for an outing -- complete with red sandals. So I knew it was going to be a happening morning.

Most churches have their Good Friday services at a rather unearthly hour from my point of view but somewhere deep in the ratlike recesses of my brain was a conviction that the Prebyterians would be more humane about such things. So after a good face-washing, a hot-cross bun and a cup of tea we headed out in the direction of the Ann St Presbyterian church, which is for both of us our old church.

I had hoped for a 9.30 am service but it was unfortunately a 9 am service so we were a few minutes late in arriving. As we were walking from the car to the church however I sang the Doxology by myself -- so that got us started in proper form. I sang it in full voice so it is lucky the streets were fairly empty at that hour. Anne of course is used to my eccentricities. We arrived about half way through the opening hymn, "There is a green hill far away", so I was a bit peeved at missing the whole of such a good hymn.

Much to my surprise the old church was packed and we had to do that which all churchgoers avoid -- sit up the front. Sitting up the front meant however that I noticed a few things I had not noticed before. In particular, I was a little surprised to see a plaque beneath the pulpit bearing the legend: AMDG. I thought that to be a bit "Popish" for a Presbyterian church but I suppose Latin is the property of all humanity. It is of course an ancient ecclesiastical abbreviation for "Ad Majorem Gloriam Dei", or "To the Greater Glory of God".

The congregation was of course mostly elderly but it was pleasing to see some young people there too. There were even a few babies! And there was one lady wearing a rather impressive big black hat. It is amazing how hat-wearing seems to have gone out of style among women in congregations these days -- from Catholics to Jehovah's Witnesses. Very strange in the light of 1 Corinthians 11:13. The minister, Archie McNicol, wore his academic gown throughout of course -- though supplemented by a large and attractive royal-blue stole. Wearing an academic gown is of course an expression of the traditional Scottish reverence for education.

Mr. McNicol gave the expected long opening prayer in his delightful Edinburgh accent. There was rather a lot in it that I liked. His petition that people be saved from the "delusions of the Devil" certainly made it clear that we were not in an Anglican church. There is plenty of that sort of lsanguage in The Book of Common Prayer but it is not heard from any Anglican pulpits these days that I know of. Though perhaps you would hear it in the Sydney diocese. Mr McNicol also very traditionally prayed for blessings on the Queen and the members of the Royal family and prayed also for divine guidance for the "authorities that rule over us" -- An allusion to Romans 13: 1, of course. Particularly pleasing however was that he prayed for members of the armed forces overseas who were fighting "for freedom and liberty" -- A genuine appreciation of reality that one expects from a conservative Christian.

You will note that I refer to the minister as "Mr". That is the Presbyterian way. Presbyterianism is a very democratic form of Christianity -- with the congregation and its elders being supreme rather than the minister.

Being Easter, it was of course a Communion service and in the modern way all were invited to partake. But although I have much more appreciation of traditional Christian culture than most atheists do, I did not. I am not that much of a hypocrite. Nor did I join in the recitation of the Apostle's creed or the Lord's prayer. I certainly joined in the hymns however, and our final hymmn -- "Rugged Cross" -- was one of my favourites.

Rather oddly, throughout the service, the organ was supplemented by a solo violinist and, instead of an organ voluntary at the close of the service, the violinist played "He was despised and rejected" from Handel's Messiah -- which was great to hear.

When we got home, Anne cooked us some smoked haddock for a late breakfast, which was at least very Scottish, though not, of course, to everyone's taste. We had it with toast, Rotkohl and pickled cucumbers.

Afterwards we put on Bach's Passio secundum Mattheum, with Fischer-Dieskau singing baritone. You can't get better Easter music than that. When we got to the great aria "Mache dich mein Herze rein" ("Make my heart pure") I was moved to tears as I usually am when I hear it. The combination of supreme Bach music rendered in the incomparable voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is just too perfect.

And so began our day.....

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ELSEWHERE

A narrow escape from British Fascism: "The Government has backed down over the so-called “dictatorship Bill”, which would have allowed ministers to bypass parliamentary scrutiny. This comes after trenchant criticism from a cross-party group of MPs, peers and senior lawyers, including six Cambridge law professors, who gave warning in a letter to The Times that it would allow the Government to rewrite almost any Act. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government said would help to cut red tape, also provoked a grassroots revolt when nearly 2,000 people signed up to a Save Parliament campaign. Jim Murphy, the Cabinet Office Minister responsible for the Bill, has now indicated that he will amend the legislation to make clear “beyond doubt” that it will be used only to tackle red tape, known as better regulation. The Bill was drawn up to give ministers the power to reform legislation or introduce recommendations of the Law Commission, which suggests updates to the law, “by order”.

U.S. Army recruiting: "First, there is the myth that recruiting is down, or as many opponents of the war in Iraq like to say, "Bush can’t find enough high school graduates to send to Iraq." The fact is recruiting is up. If we look at four of the past five years, the Army – which usually struggles more than the other services in terms of recruiting – has met and exceeded its goals for active-duty recruits. But that fact is often ignored because it runs counter to the myth that young Americans, who might have considered military service as a viable career option, are avoiding service like the proverbial plague... The Army’s actual numbers tell a different story. For fiscal year 2004, the Army’s recruiting goal for active duty recruits was 77,000. That number was met and exceeded by nearly 600. The Army’s active duty goal for 2005 was then upped to 80,000 – an increase of 3,000 over the previous year’s goal. And with 73,373 new recruits for 2005 – granted, less than 2004 and 92 percent of 2005 – the actual numbers were still high, and no one was lowering numbers to try and make goal".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

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14 April, 2006

PREDICTING THE VOTE

A reader has written to me as follows:

I've been playing with charting various demographics against the vote in the 2004 Presidential election. The first table from my spreadsheet shows what looks a very significant correlation between Bush/Kerry voting percentages for the 50 states and population density, with the "huddled masses" states strongly pro-Kerry and the low-population states strongly pro-Bush.





What's surprising is that there seems to be an even stronger correlation against the "Generosity index", a measure of what percentage of income people reported as giving to charity on their tax returns (See here for the data). One would think that people who say they are for the common person would be more charitable. In retrospect, the Leftists seem very ready to "give to the poor" as long as it's somebody else's money they are giving.

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Brookes News Update

The return of Robert Shiller's Irrational Exuberance: The economic commentariat is jumping on the Shiller bandwagon in the hope of embarrassing the Bush economy. As usual, they just don't know what they are talking about
Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls smears labour market reform: The free market is a truly callous place, or so Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls seems to think. This economic whiz kid believes that labour market reform could drive wage rates down from $13 an hour to $7 an hour
Taxing the US dollar and taxing Democrats: The Democrats' opposition to tax cuts borders on the hysterical at time. Apart from their insincerity (the only kinds of tax increases they support are those their fabulously rich supporters can easily avoid) there is the utter bankruptcy of their so-called economic arguments
Why are so many journalists like Phillip Adams out and out bigoted liars?: Phillip Adams ranks as one of Australia's most vicious, and certainly most dishonest, leftwing columnists. This apologist for just about every communist regime that ever existed thinks Americans are being carted off to a Republican Gulag
The media can no longer be trusted to side with democracy and common decency: The depraved state of the media and their irrational hatred of America and their support for those who loath the West is becoming more obvious by the day
Interest rates and economic growth - more journalistic stupidity: Keynes never managed to grasp the nature of interest. He thought it was a purely monetary phenomenon that was determined by the supply and demand for money. This, however, is the same fallacious theory that the discredited mercantilists also used to explain the existence of interest and its rate
Not another Clinton Presidency: America cannot afford another Clinton Presidency - be it male or female. The Clintons' brand of politics was poison for the US and we cannot run the risk of moving backward at this critical juncture in our nation's history
Millennium Challenge and Morocco: In May 2005, Morocco's King Mohammed VI launched the 'National Initiative for Human Development' to promote decentralized development projects

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ELSEWHERE

Surprise! American whites are on their best behaviour when blacks are present: "In a study involving 200 participants on 29 mock juries, panels of whites and blacks performed better than all-white groups by a number of measures. "Such diverse juries deliberated longer, raised more facts about the case, and conducted broader and more wide-ranging deliberations," said Sommers. "They also made fewer factual errors in discussing evidence and when errors did occur, those errors were more likely to be corrected during the discussion." Surprisingly, this difference was primarily due to significant changes in white behavior. Whites on diverse juries cited more case facts, made fewer mistakes in recalling facts and evidence, and pointed out missing evidence more frequently than did those on all-white juries. They were also more amenable to discussing racism when in diverse groups."



The BBC has a fascinating article about the history of the Union Jack. Such matters are of considerable interest to Australians as the Union Jack is quartered in the Australian national flag. It was long customary to refer to the Union "jack" but purists point out that a "jack" is a naval flag (even the USA has a "jack" flag -- 50 white stars on a dark blue background) so the term "Union Flag" has come into some use in recent years. For me however it will always be the "Union Jack" and I am pleased to see that the BBC has adopted that as its standard usage too. In my view, nothing could be more appropriate for a country so long dependant on its navy that it should use a naval flag for its national flag.

Anti-terror laws are an affront to justice, says British High Court: "The Government's anti-terror laws were dealt a devastating blow yesterday when the High Court said that they were an "affront to justice" and breached human rights laws. Mr Justice Sullivan ruled that the controversial control order system, which keeps terror suspects under a form of house arrest, were "conspicuously unfair". The anti-terror laws denied suspects under control orders the right to a fair hearing and were incompatible with human rights laws, the judge said. Although the Government had attempted to apply a "thin veneer of legality" to the measure, suspects' rights were determined by ministers with no effective oversight by judges, he added. The Government was forced to bring in control orders after the law lords ruled that holding foreign terror suspects indefinitely without trial was unlawful. Ministers immediately announced that they would appeal against yesterday's ruling. In the meantime, control orders will remain imposed on eight foreigners and four British citizens. The ruling came in a challenge by the first British citizen to have a control order imposed on him as a terror suspect by Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. Civil liberties groups welcomed the verdict."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS . Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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



13 April, 2006

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION UPDATE

An interesting snippet about illegal Mexican immigrant workers from one of my Southern USA readers: "There is a lot of bleeding heart dialog about how "unfair" it is to pay "sub minumum wage" to Mexicans. Wage is about $5.50/hr. But in this Texas town (and elsewhere) the Mexican illegals get $ 8.00/hr. In fact, this is their "union" wage agreed by the underground. Anyone working for less would end up dead (sounds a lot like our Longshoremen). And one of these workers has a thousand acre ranch in Mexico. Not "the poor" as in the "image". American money buys a lot there".

A little-noticed consequence of a "guest-worker" program: "The inevitable drift toward Asian and Middle Eastern guest-workers would have important security implications. America has been fortunate to have a comparatively small Muslim population that is well-educated, prosperous, ethnically diverse, and geographically dispersed - all factors making radicalism and alienation less likely. But a new foreign-worker scheme could replicate Europe's experience, by importing large numbers of poor, uneducated, ghettoized Muslim peasants. And there would be little chance of thorough security screening, given the combination of administrative overload in our immigration agencies and intense pressure from employers to rubber-stamp their cheap labor".

Immigration doublespeak: "The parallel to the abortion debate is telling; both 'amnesty' and 'abortion' (not to mention 'acid!') are things people dislike, so their promoters have to invent new terminology. The National Abortion Rights Action League, for instance, is no more -- now it's 'NARAL Pro-Choice America,' fighting for 'reproductive rights' and 'women's health.' Like in the abortion debate, amnesty was called by its name in earlier, more naive phases of the debate. The legalization portions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act were almost universally referred to as amnesty, by both supporters and opponents. But when it became clear what a debacle that amnesty was (it legalized nearly three million illegal aliens, sparking massive illegal immigration and distorting the development of agriculture and other industries), it became necessary to find a different word for the next amnesty."

Sowell on illegal immigration: "Activists who are organizing mass marches and demonstrations in cities across America may well be congratulating themselves on the huge numbers of people they can get to turn out to protest efforts in Congress to reduce illegal immigration. No doubt that will impress many in the media and intimidate many politicians. But how these marches will be seen by millions of other Americans is another question entirely. The Mexican flags and the strident assertions of a right to violate American laws are a danger signal to this society, as they would be to any society.... Both liberals and free-market libertarians often see this as an abstract issue about poor people being hindered from moving to jobs by an arbitrary border drawn across the southwest desert. Intellectuals' ability to think of people in the abstract is a dangerous talent in a world where people differ in all the ways that make them people. The cultures and surrounding circumstances of those people are crucial for understanding what they are likely to do and what the consequences are likely to be.... "

The Leftists are beginning to realize that all those Mexican flags were a goof: "The Stars and Stripes outnumbered Mexico's El Tricolor in Sacramento Monday as thousands of local demonstrators joined immigration protests nationwide. From tiny plastic flags no bigger than a postcard to giant cloth banners streaming in the breeze, more marchers carried the red, white and blue than Mexico's green, white and red. But many of the protesters proudly displayed both flags. In earlier demonstrations across the country, the widespread waving of the Mexican flag triggered barbed rebukes from commentators who questioned the allegiances of the marchers

If you have broadband, there is a video here with some very comprehensive shots of the Leftist immigration demonstrators and what they are advocating.

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ELSEWHERE

Appeasing Oppressors: A Proud German Tradition Continues: "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust "a myth." He's called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." He's the head of one of the most repressive governments on earth. And, as far as most German authorities are concerned, he's a welcome guest at this summer's 2006 FIFA World Cup"

Another teeth-grinder for the Wal-Mart haters: "Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, is a "good corporate citizen" that should be allowed to own a bank just as other retailers, including Target Corp. and Harley-Davidson Inc., have been, a top Wal-Mart executive told federal bank regulators yesterday."

A California victory for the Wal-Mart enviers: "Cities can outlaw big-box superstores in order to prevent the collapse of local businesses and resulting urban blight, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday in a case that sets a statewide precedent for ordinances aimed at retail giant Wal-Mart. Upholding a 2004 ordinance in the city of Turlock (Stanislaus County) that was backed by neighborhood supermarkets and labor unions, the Court of Appeal in Fresno said the city legally used its power to 'control and organize development within its boundaries.'"

Drug war dropout calls effort a "failure" : "For more than 14 years, Jack Cole fought the war on drugs as a New Jersey state narcotics agent. Now, he's had enough. 'It's not only a dismal failure, but a terribly destructive policy,' he said. Cole said he quit the narcotics force in New Jersey after realizing that the war on drugs not only cost billions in taxpayer money and landed millions of Americans in jail, but also had done little to curb the country's drug problem. In fact, Cole believes that the drug war -- beginning in 1970 during Richard Nixon's first term and continuing today -- may have helped escalate a national drug problem that only the end of drug prohibition can cure, he said."

I am rather pleased with a couple of my posts on Tongue Tied yesterday so I hope readers here go there next.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS . Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

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



12 April, 2006

SELF-DECEPTION

Any student of psychopathology will be aware that self-deception is a very common human frailty. So it is not particularly surprising when I and many others like me constantly point to inconvenient facts (such as the large influence of heredity) that Leftists ignore. Ignoring facts is very widespread generally, not only among Leftists. It may be useful to point to some other instances of it.

Perhaps the most amusing is the way people are always fussing about their diet. There is a constant stream of talk about what food is and is not good for you. And what is good for you today will almost certainly be bad for you in ten year's time -- and vice versa. Wicked Thoughts often reports such ups and downs as part of his coverage of humorous items in the news. But regardless of the details, almost everyone is convinced that eating "healthy" food and exercising more will make you live longer. Except that it doesn't. All the longditudinal studies of lifestyle change (including diet change) show no effect of such change on longevity. See here for just the latest such study. Fussing about your food is unlikely to add one extra day to your life. But people like to feel that they have some control over their health so the fussing will go on forever as far as I can see. And, sadly, some well-intentioned dietary changes are actually bad for you -- e.g. salt restriction.

Another example of blinkers being desperately clung to is the influence of upbringing on child personality. For at least 4,000 years, people have believed that how you bring up a child has a big influence on his or her "character". Except that it doesn't. All the twin studies of personality variables show that family environment has negligible effect on how a kid turns out -- with genetics being the main influence and with peer influence being a distant second. Even political attitudes are largely genetically inherited. So that's another little illusion of control that the facts snatch away.

A third example is the importance of IQ. In the Frank Ellis affair (much commented on by Chris Brand) loud and confident public assertions have been made in the media by practically everyone to the effect that IQ does not exist and if it does it is not genetically inherited. Yet all those who know anything about the academic research on the subject (e.g. here) know that IQ is highly measurable, highly influential in one's life and that it is at least two-thirds genetically inherited. So again we have to accept the hand we are dealt. Our lives are strongly affected by things over which we have no control.

A pity, isn't it?

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A QUIZ!

In case that post above was a bit depressing, let's have something more entertaining. Go here to read what seems to me like a fairly typical anti-Bush rant. Your job is to guess where it comes from. You may be surprised.

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ELSEWHERE

France embraces stagnation: "President Jacques Chirac caved in to protesters on Monday, canceling a law on youth employment that fueled nationwide unrest and raising questions about France's ability to reform rigid labor laws in a globalized world."

More California compassion: "An 82-year-old woman received a $114 ticket for taking too long to cross a street. Mayvis Coyle said she began shuffling with her cane across Foothill Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley when the light was green, but was unable to make it to the other side before it turned red. She said the motorcycle officer who ticketed her on Feb. 15 told her she was obstructing traffic".

Back to federalism: "The Founders designed a vast garment for America that hugs where it should hug and stretches where it should stretch; each state creates its own society, and the Constitution stitches them all together into a comfortable, sensible union suit. 'As this government is composed of small republics, it enjoys the internal happiness of each,' writes Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 9, 'and with respect to its external situation, it is possessed, by means of the association, of all the advantages of large monarchies.' But the collapse of federalism has ruined this valuable arrangement."

The Federal Bureau of Luddites: "Two weeks ago, the FBI's chief information officer admitted that the bureau couldn't afford to provide e-mail addresses for 8,000 of its 30,000 employees. The e-mail shortfall is only the latest in a series of embarrassed confessions the FBI has made about its information technology. The most significant mea culpa came when an attempt to upgrade the bureau's case-management software had to be scrapped last year after $170 million had already been spent. A Justice Department report listed all kinds of excuses, from poor 'enterprise architecture' planning to shifting design requirements. But behind the management analysis is a more implacable problem. Until very recently, being computer-savvy hasn't been considered much of an asset in the FBI, and clues were something you kept to yourself."

Congressional pork includes some real stinkers: "While cutting back on many pet projects, lawmakers have included some real stinkers in federal spending bills for 2006, according to a watchdog group that announced its annual Washington pork menu on Wednesday. $13.5 million for an Irish group that funds the World Toilet Summit? $1 million for water-free urinals? $500,000 for a teapot museum? Those projects, and nearly 10,000 others, account for a record $29 billion in federal pork-barrel spending for the current budget year, Citizens Against Government Waste said."

The latest brainwave of the Wal-Mart haters: Wal Mart threatens U.S. security! "The Dubai Ports World battle has trumpeted the gaping holes in our seaports' security systems, but few ask: Why are U.S. ports so poorly protected nearly five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? Why has the government spent just $630 million -- less than 4 percent of the $18 billion-plus we have spent since 9/11 on airport security -- to make ports safer? House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said it best: '(While we) talk about having strong homeland security, checking 100 percent of cargo containers. In the end, our commercial interests get ahead of us.' Those commercial interests are led by the world's largest retailer and the United States' biggest importer, Wal-Mart."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS . Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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

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

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



11 April, 2006

NEUROPOLITICS

There is an interesting site here that appears to be run by two microbiologists named Brack and Zhang. They have the entirely commendable aim of finding what the biological influences on political orientation are. And some of their findings sound fun indeed. For instance:

"In our most recent survey, Liberals in general were 43% more likely to report general anxiety disorder than Conservatives. They were 115% more likely to report panic disorders, 119% more likely to report agoraphobic symptoms, 118% more likely to report OCD symptoms. and 54% more likely to report social anxiety disorder. When broken down further into Very Conservative, Conservative, Liberal and Very Liberal cohorts, the numbers spread further apart. The Very Conservatives have the lowest rates of anxiety disorders, the Very Liberals the highest.

Sadly, we cannot get too carried away by that finding. It runs contrary to decades of previous research on the subject -- research of which Brack & Zhang seem to be unaware. In properly sampled surveys, the correlation between anxiety/neuroticism and politics has repeatedly been found to be negligible. See for instance here. And the "sampling" employed by Brack & Zhang is ludicrous. They base their conclusions on people who respond to internet surveys -- a group which can in no way be claimed to be representative of the population at large.

Another problem with the Brack and Zhang reports is that they give the statistical significance of the differences they find as if it were a big deal. But statistical significance is only a means of allowing for small sample sizes and their "samples" are large in statistical terms. It may help if I point out that with a sample of 400 people (the sort of "sample" they use) a totally negligible correlation of .10 would be shown as statistically significant. They would be much more impressive from a scholarly point of view if the first report of their findings were in terms of standard descriptive statistics such as (say) the Pearson product-moment correlations between their variables.

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ELSEWHERE

As Economy Roars, Dems Are in Denial: "Building on the nation's historic economic growth under the tax policies of the Bush Administration, the Department of Labor announced today that the economy added 211,000 jobs in March -- 21,000 more than the projected 190,000. Job growth in March brought unemployment to a record low of 4.7%, which is below the average of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The March employment numbers brought total job creation for the past 12 months to 2.1 million, and 5.2 million since May 2003. It looks like the best-kept secret in San Francisco is that tax cuts work".

Protectionism will kill Europe: "Protectionism is gaining ground even in member states such as Italy as a reaction against France -- top politicians from the left and the right have been calling for a retaliation against French companies. As a result, the voice of the European Commission (the executive branch of the EU) is getting weaker, especially if you consider that Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs comes from Latvia, a country whose influence is much smaller than France's, and that Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes can't possibly challenge every single protectionist move. Clearly, the European dream of a single market isn't likely to be fulfilled in the short run."

DoD wants Boy Scout ruling overturned: "The Defense Department wants to continue supporting the decades-old National Boy Scout Jamboree because preparing a military base for the event trains soldiers how to deal with displaced people, government attorneys said Thursday. The government is asking a federal appeals court to overturn a ruling that the Pentagon's support of the jamboree violates the First Amendment because the Scouts require members to swear an oath of duty to God."

GM, France and Albany: "At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power. These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargain, and any private company that allows a union to organize its workers deserves what it gets. But that doesn't mean we should fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organization. On the evidence throughout business and politics today, unions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline".

How Israel can win: "I refrain from suggesting specific steps Israel should take in part because I am not Israeli, and in part because discussing tactics to win is premature before victory is the policy. Suffice to say that the Palestinians derive immense succor and strength from a worldwide network of support from NGOs, editorialists, academics, and politicians; that the manufactured Palestinian 'refugee' problem stands at the dank heart of the conflict; and that lack of international recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital festers. These three issues are clearly priorities. Ironically, Israeli success in crushing the Palestinian war morale would be the best thing that ever happened to the Palestinians."

You can't outlaw a free lunch: "Abramoff and Cunningham ignored existing laws, so it's unclear why their malfeasance is inspiration for new ones. But the faux crackdown on lobbying does reflect a 'hey, how'd that happen?' theory of honest government, a worldview in which lobbyists, and not Congressmen they corrupt, are responsible for the earmarks that snake their way into appropriations bills. Like obese Americans launching lawsuits at McDonalds, Congressmen plead that they are unable to resist free lunch at The Willard without the force of law behind them. Meal restrictions are traditionally got around by exploiting exceptions for 'prior relationships,' so lobbyists and politicos can always claim to be old chums from prep school grabbing a bite. And if the attempt to regulate friendship is futile, the focus on wining and dining is simplistic."

"Pig Book" serves up $29 billion in pork: "For all the hand-wringing on Capitol Hill about larding bills with home-state projects, the latest report from a taxpayer group says lawmakers hit a record last year. Citizens Against Government Waste, in its annual 'Pig Book' released Wednesday, details $29 billion of what it calls pork-barrel spending. For the uninitiated, 'pork' means home-state and home-district projects specially set aside in congressional spending measures, chiefly the 11 annual appropriations bills. ... Some of these earmarks are more audacious than others. For example, last year, there was a 'bridge to nowhere,' a $223 million project connecting Alaska's Gravina Island, population 50, to the mainland. That project drew so much ridicule from the media that an irate public successfully demanded that the bridge be shelved."

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

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

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

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

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

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



10 April, 2006

An expedition into Volkskultur

My previous little personal memoirs here seem generally to have been well-received, so here is another!

Intellectually, I have been an utter atheist for over 40 years but emotionally I am still the Bible-bashing Protestant fundamentalist I was in my teens. And one consequence of that is that I have a great love of Christian music, including popular hymns. So I feel very much at home with ALL the sacred music of my Volk. I would scarcely be a lover of Bach otherwise as his inspiration was very much in German Protestantism and its great music.

So when Anne suggested that we attend a "Festival of Praise" last Saturday night at the Logan Entertainment Centre (a municipal facility in a working-class part of the Brisbane area), I was perfectly happy to go along. Since she came into my life, Anne has done a fair bit towards demolishing my previous reclusive lifestyle!

When we arrived, I noticed that the audience was 100% "Caucasian" (which seems to be the American euphemism for "white" -- a term one uses at some risk these days. Though the connection most "Caucasians" have with the Caucasus is very distant indeed). And I would guess that most of the audience were Anglo-Celtic too. Some people don't like that term "Anglo-Celtic" but seeing I am myself Anglo-Celtic in ancestry, I see no problem with it.

It was a little troubling, however, that only about 5% of the audience were younger than 40. The average age might well have been as high as 60. So perhaps I am writing about something that may vanish rather soon.

The music was provided by "The Brisbane Festival Male Voice Choir", with an average age similar to the audience but who were nonetheless in very good voice. The only accompaniment was a white Yamaha baby grand piano but there were a couple of microphones under the lid so it was completely adequate to its task. The pianist played in a very confident and emphatic style so that helped to give the occasion an evangelical "revival" feel. And a revival meeting it was. The emphasis was on the choral singing (with 15 songs/hymns in all) but there was preaching at every break in the music from the preacher-man MC --preaching in a very familiar evangelical style, with short sentences, lot of pregnant pauses etc. I was there for the music but I didn't mind the preaching. I was pleased that their old-time religion could still give many of our Volk hope and comfort.

And the music was not disappointing. We started out with a rendition of the national anthem, including the "apocryphal" third verse. I reproduce the whole thing below:

Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We've golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature's gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history's page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We'll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.

With Christ our head and cornerstone,
We'll build our Nation's might.
Whose way and truth and light alone
Can guide our path aright.
Our lives, a sacrifice of love,
Reflect our Master's care.
With faces turned to heaven above
Advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia fair.

It's pretty good stuff in my opinion and it was sung with great gusto by both audience and choir.

The next thing I found memorable was a barbershop quartet, who did four songs in all. They were excellent. If you don't know barbershop singing, you are really missing something. They got huge applause of course.

The audience got to sing a few more times too. Our next opportunity was a rendition of "Old Rugged Cross", one of my favourite hymns, so I did my best to belt it out. Later on we had some simple evangelical-style chorus music which I did not know but they were undoubtedly good tunes for their purpose.

Another highlight was a quite remarkable soloist -- a good basso profundo. Very rare to hear a solo in such a low key. I am sure half the females in the audience fell in love with him.

So I greatly enjoyed all the music but one sad reflection I had at the end was that it probably could not have happened in America. After unremitting legal onslaughts from the Left, I gather that Christian preaching in a local government facility would just not be allowed. How sad for Americans!

So that was my Saturday night. On Sunday night we went to a classical music soiree. I guess I am not much of a hermit any more!

(In case anybody has not worked it out yet, Volkskultur literally means "People's culture", but Volk has much greater depth of meaning than "people" -- as I have mentioned previously)

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ELSEWHERE

There is a well-written commentary on the rubbishy "Judas Gospel" at The Volokhs but some Christians seem to be overlooking that the basic message of the fake "Gospel" is in fact quite scriptural. See John 13:27, where Jesus clearly told Judas to go and betray him.

Corruption with a difference: The EU lobbies journalists! "The European Parliament is subsidizing journalists to cover its parliamentary sessions in Strasbourg, a move that legislators say aims to ensure that the EU's only democratically elected body is not ignored. As part of a program dating to the 1980s, journalists from across the EU member states are receiving travel and entertainment subsidies from the Parliament to help defray the cost of covering the legislature when it shuttles once a month to Strasbourg, in eastern France, from Brussels, journalists and legislators say.... Brussels's 1,550 journalists, one of the world's largest press corps outside Washington, benefit from a host of perks and privileges from EU institutions, including free meals and unlimited free phone calls during EU summit meetings and free television studios at the European Commission. At the beginning of every six-month EU presidency, the presiding country invites journalists to a free junket in the capital. In February, Austria, the current holder of the EU's presidency, invited 62 Brussels-based journalists to Vienna, paying for their lodgings in a lavish Hilton hotel and hosting a complimentary dinner in an 18th-century baroque castle where a soprano sang Strauss operettas - all on the tab of the Austrian government".

Nutty German view of bloggers: Spiegel Online, that great German Rosetta Stone of media objectivity, has just located the source media-political corruption in the United States... And who is to blame? Bush and the Bloggers. Who else? In two recent articles, bloggers are characterized as corrupt, partisan, paid-off and out of control. And since no one in Germany currently fits that description, our friends at Spiegel have bravely set out to warn German readers of the grave dangers of the American blogosphere. The first article, entitled "Buyable Bloggers: Sweating Swingers," was authored by none other than Marc Pitzke... His prime example of what he labels "buyable bloggers" is Andrew Sullivan" [Of all people!!!!]

War casualties: An overdue NYT backdown. "An article on Feb. 9 about the military's recruitment of Hispanics referred incompletely to the belief of some critics that Hispanics in the Iraq war and blacks in the Vietnam War accounted for a disproportionate number of casualties. Statistics do not support the belief. Hispanics, who are about 14 percent of the population, accounted for about 11 percent of the military deaths in Iraq through Dec. 3, 2005. About 12.5 percent of the military dead in Vietnam were African-Americans, who made up about 13. 5 percent of the general population during the war years. The error was pointed out in an e-mail in February; the correction was delayed for research after a lapse at The Times."

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

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

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

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

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

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



9 April, 2006

THE U.S. IMMIGRATION DEBATE

I have just posted here some feisty comments from the Minutemen and below are some more comments on the same issue

The immigration question : "The recent immigration protests in Los Angeles have brought the issue to the forefront, provoking strong reactions from millions of Americans. The protesters' cause of open borders is not well served when they drape themselves in Mexican flags and chant slogans in Spanish. If anything, their protests underscore the Balkanization of America caused by widespread illegal immigration. How much longer can we maintain huge unassimilated subgroups within America, filled with millions of people who don't speak English or participate fully in American life?"

Immigration reform, risky business for Congress: "As a 26-year veteran of Congress, I am often asked to explain our system of government to members of foreign parliaments, college students and even high ranking members of our own federal civil service. There is one fundamental feature of our legislative process that I always highlight: it is much easier to defeat something in Congress than it is to pass major changes in law. In other words, the status quo prevails most of the time. A classic example is the current immigration law reform effort. I predict that Congress, after much huffing and puffing, will not pass any significant immigration legislation this year.

Borders and liberty: "Borders play a critical role in our lives. Some of the borders that matter to us are ones we establish ourselves: this is my house and property; that is your house and property. By choosing what is mine and using the legal system to mark it off from what is yours, I create a border. While not quite as invulnerable as suggested by the maxim 'A man's home is his castle,' my property gives me a firm border against you. Borders come from property rights and are essential to a free society."

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ELSEWHERE

Perhaps one should not gloat but one of Europe's proudest boasts seems to be on the verge of coming unstuck. The huge A380 airliner seems to have been swatted by smaller but superior Boeing products. It looks like the A380 will end up as the same huge boondoggle that the Concorde was. But the Europeans love paying taxes so blowing a couple of billion more won't bother them any. One can only hope that the A380 will not be as big a disaster as another "innovative" aircraft -- the the Comet airliner. See here and here for the A380 troubles.

Government goons murder puppies!: "In the course of researching paramilitary drug raids, I've found some pretty disturbing stuff. There was a case where a SWAT officer stepped on a baby's head while looking for drugs in a drop ceiling. There was one where an 11-year-old boy was shot at point-blank range. Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (It's happened with all five.) Yet among hundreds of botched raids, the ones that get me most worked up are the ones where the SWAT officers shoot and kill the family dog."

Top half of US income earners see tax burdens grow: "As the annual tax filing deadline approaches, many public officials traditionally use the occasion to launch into a debate about the fairness of the nation tax laws. Policymakers who believe the federal income tax rewards the wealthy at the expense of the poor are likely to be shocked by the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF). IRS figures released late last year for Tax Year 2003 (for which returns were filed in 2004) show the richest Americans shoulder a disproportionate burden of the federal income tax, and the burden is getting heavier."

Grand jury to review actions of arrogant black: "A federal grand jury will soon begin hearing evidence about Rep. Cynthia McKinney's run-in with a Capitol Police officer, a lawyer familiar with the case said late Wednesday. The lawyer, who declined to be identified because of grand jury secrecy, confirmed that federal prosecutors had agreed to get involved in the case in which a black lawmaker is accused of striking a white officer after he tried to stop her from entering a House office building without going through a security checkpoint."

Meddling damn government again! "America's 70 million poker players say they aren't bluffing in their resistance to the latest congressional efforts to ban online casino gambling. To dramatize that determination, their leader, San Franciscan Michael Bolcerek -- president of the national Poker Players Alliance -- staged some unusual events on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. He brought three big-name professional poker stars to court the press, lobby members of Congress and attend an evening reception for members and their staffs at which a few hands of Texas Hold 'Em were probably played. Not for money, of course. Congress is considering legislation that seeks either to get banks to block customers' transactions with overseas Internet gambling sites or force Internet service providers to block access to poker Web sites. Poker players say the proposed bans attack nothing less than the American way of life."

Putting the cuckoo in our clocks "Shortly after April Fool's Day turned into today, we foolishly set our clocks forward for the annual launch of Daylight Savings Time (DST). Unless you show up an hour late for church, you probably won't think much about it. Thankfully, Congress is thinking about it for you. Not content to make a mess of just the federal budget, which is on pace to post a record $423 billion deficit this year, Congress has imposed chaos on our clocks. The pork-filled energy bill signed by President Bush last year will extend DST by about a month starting in 2007. Why? Congress thinks this little time trick reduces our 'addiction' to foreign oil and cuts electricity use. But the so-called evidence that DST accomplishes any such thing is as suspect as a clock that strikes 13." [I am pleased to say that the "Luddites" of Queensland where I live had a referendum on Daylight Saving and roundly rejected it. So we don't have it. Queenslanders don't like people messing with their clocks, however good it is in theory]

Laurence Simon has the latest Carnival of the Vanities.

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

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

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

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

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

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



8 April, 2006

Brookes News Update

The Wall Street Journal is distorting the truth about immigration: For some weird reason the Wall Street Journal has become obsessed with defending the alleged benefits of increased immigration: even to the point of wilfully ignoring historical and economic evidence to the contrary
The falling dollar: why commentators are getting it wrong: Looking at New Zealand we find that from March 1996 to January 2006 it expanded M1 by 111 per cent. For Australia it was 114 per cent. These are massive increases and should be taken into account when considering the falling exchange rate
Why the Liberal Party is getting it wrong on labour market reform: Australia has a touch of the "French Disease" Thousands have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the Liberal Party's labour market reforms. Meanwhile, the Party finds itself unable to successfully counter anti-reform arguments
Bernanke and the yield curve: Is the US economy heading for a significant slowdown? The yield curve suggests that this might be the case
Liberal Party's labour market reforms attacked by people who destroy jobs: The Liberal Party's labour market reform legislation has brought every lefty journalist wriggling out the political woodwork. What is interesting about these journalists is their utter ignorance of economics and history
How journalists turned a leftwing terrorist into a heroine: A vicious terrorist campaign is being waged in Iraq by reactionary forces, the main targets of which are innocent Iraqis. But to many in our media these sadistic thugs are not terrorists but 'freedom fighters', 'militants' or even the 'resistance'
Iranians give the regime another slap in the face : Millions of Iranians stayed home rather than celebrate the Mullahs' takeover of their country

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ELSEWHERE

A good critique of the confusion in America's "moderate" Left here. Excerpt: "Marxism was not only a catastrophe for all the countries in which Marxists took power, but a disaster for the reformist Left in all the countries in which they did not," according to Rorty. The Nation, by contrast, is wistful for the Soviet Union, whose presence "encouraged thinking and acting toward alternatives that would be neither capitalist nor Communist." The unrequited hope seems to be that if there are enough "annual meetings of an immense variety of groups, organizations and networks" someone will finally figure out how to make two plus two equal five. The case for capitalism doesn't require the belief that it is the best set of arrangements imaginable - just the best available".

It figures: "The secretary general of Italy's largest Muslim organisation, the Union of Islamic communities in Italy (UCOII), has called on Italian Muslims to vote for the Party of Italian Communists at the general election. Hamza Piccardo sent an email late Tuesday to Muslim centres saying that the party's leader Oliviero Diliberto had been sensitive to the needs of Muslim inmates when he was justice minister in the late 1990s"

A good article here about the destructive effects of polygamy. It does help to explain the aggression emanating from Muslim societies -- which have always allowed polygamy. Excerpt: "The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands."

Immigration realism: "Forget the long-running bipartisan concern about creating an educated, highly skilled workforce. What the U.S. economy desperately needs is more high-school dropouts - so desperately that we should import them hand over fist. Such is the logic of the contention by advocates of lax immigration that the flow of illegal labor from south of the border is a boon to our economy. But it doesn't make intuitive sense that importing the poor of Latin America would benefit us. If low-skill workers were key to economic growth, Mexico would be an economic powerhouse, and impoverished Americans would be slipping south over the Rio Grande. The National Research Council reports that an immigrant to the U.S. without a high-school diploma - whether legal or illegal - consumes $89,000 more in governmental services than he pays in taxes during his lifetime... If we really need more poorly educated workers here, we can always rely, unfortunately, on the public schools to produce them indigenously."

The high cost of free lunches: "People like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, recognized that a constant threat to their regimes came from a strong middle class. And so they either killed them, imprisoned them, or re-educated them by means of whips, clubs and electrodes. American liberals, deprived of such tools, have had to settle for the next-best weapon; namely, the very good friend of just about every tyrant who's ever lived, the tax collector. It is the easiest means by which to destroy America's middle class. The less of their own money that Americans get to keep, the more dependent they become on the federal government to provide health, education and housing."

Telecompetition or binary bureaucracy? "Do we want more government control of technology, or do we want less? That's the million-dollar question as the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Joe Barton, Texas Republican, moves to rewrite the 1996 Telecommunications Act. A lot is at stake. The committee can unleash the market's raw potential by getting government out of the way. Or it can give lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats license to dictate the evolution of technology."

I used to be a keen motorbike rider in my youth. My brother still is a keen biker. So I was personally disturbed to hear of the unjustified "raid" on a California motorcycle club by the thuggish BATF just reported on Strange Justice. If memory serves me rightly, the BATF or its predecessors were last heard of in connection with the Ruby Ridge assassination, the Waco holocaust and the Elian Gonzales abduction. I think that dealing with the Mafia would be a more pleasant prospect.

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

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

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

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

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7 April, 2006

SOME WORD FUN

Readers may have gathered that language and languages is one of my great interests and entertainments. In a recent email to me, Scottish blogger Neil Craig (who writes lots of letters to Scottish newspapers) said: "A very short letter in the Herald today. I am glad of this since I was somewhat scunnered that they hadn't published anything of mine since Christmas"

I was delighted to see the word "scunnered". I don't know where I remember it from. Maybe my mother used it. Maybe my Scottish wife used it. It is not really translatable but it means something like disgusted, emptied-out or defeated. Neil was in fact being a little reserved in his use of the word. A more common construction would be "fair scunnered". An Australian would probably say "really shat" under the same circumstances.

There are a lot of foreign words that are not really translatable into English -- which is why English has adopted so many foreign words. Two German words that we have lost from English seem particularly useful to me: Reich and Volk. I discuss the meaning of Volk here. I sometimes use both words in my postings on Majority Rights -- where they are fairly likely to be understood. The reason why they are rarely used in English these days is probably that Hitler used both words a lot, and used them prominently. So part of the reason why I use them is to "stir the possum": I have been waiting for some Leftist to pounce on me and accuse me of being a Nazi for using them. But, sadly, nobody has given me that pleasure. So I have given up waiting and will outline here the crushing reply that I had ready:

On all the products exported from the old Communist East Germany, there was a "brand name" -- which was "VEB". And what does "VEB" stand for? It stands for "Volkseigene Betrieb", which translates as "The People's own Enterprise" (though that translation could be argued about too). So if Communist East Germany put the word "Volk" on everything it produced, how come it is a Nazi word? The truth, of course, is that it is an ordinary German word that was in common use for at least 2,000 years before the Nazis came along.

And as for "Reich": For starters, the East German State Railway was known as the "Reichsbahn".

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GOOD POST FROM THE HORNY-HEADED ECONOMIST

Consider the following proposed amendments to the US constitution:

First, disallowance of immigrant participation in US political affairs. This includes a ban on participation in demonstrations and other public expression of political opinion.

Second, an "Americans first" employment policy, native born Americans having priority over foreigners for all positions in which status of citizenship is not deemed "indispensable."

Third, a ban on all immigrant or naturalized citizens' service as (a) federal elected officials, (b) members of the cabinet, or (c) justices of the Supreme Court.

Fourth, a ban on immigrant service in the clergy.

Fifth, a ban on immigrant ownership of land or aquisition of any rights to natural resources.

Sixth, authorization of private individuals to make citizen's arrests of any individuals suspected of being illegal immigrants.

Seventh, unconditional right of federal officials -- whenever they deem such action appropriate -- to deport immediately and without due process any noncitizen

So, what do you think of these? Are you opposed? Upset? Well stop for a second. Actually, nobody's proposing these as ammendments to the U.S. Constitution -- they are, rather, firmly established features of the Mexican Constitution.

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ELSEWHERE

Some linguistics researchers analysed speeches in the 2004 Presidential campaign and found (excerpt): "The vice president sounded the most honest of the four, and Kerry the least. Kerry's language also was most like that of a depressed person, followed by Edwards. Perhaps that's inevitable; after all, challengers must sound gloomy and doomy about their opponents' records, though in doing so they run clear risks. "Voters are most favorable toward those candidates who are the most optimistic," Slatcher said. "The depressive language that Kerry and Edwards used during the campaign may have contributed negatively to the way in which they were perceived by the public."

Flourishing Australian economy: Australia's unemployment rate was a seasonally adjusted 5.0 per cent in March, compared with a unrevised 5.2 per cent in February, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said. Total employment rose 27,000 to 10.085 million, adjusted. Of this, full time employment decreased by 12,400 to 7.173 million and part-time employment rose 39,500 to 2.913 million. The participation rate in March was 64.4 per cent, compared with an unchanged 64.4 per cent in February.... The male unemployment rate decreased by two percentage points to 5.0 per cent, while the female jobless rate was also down two points to 5.1 per cent."

The pagan Anglican Left: "Then there was the much-publicized dust-up over William Melnyk, the Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, who was asked to resign his post as rector after it became clear he was moonlighting as a Druid priest... Now, thanks to some research by commenter Liz at TitusOneNine, it turns out that Maury Johnston, author of Gays Under Grace: A Gay Christian's Response to Homosexuality and the recent widely-publicized essay "Facing the Spectre of Schism" is also known as "Shadwynn" and belongs to a Wiccan order called "Keepers of the Cauldron." The coven is described as being in the "grail quest tradition," based on the Arthurian legends..."

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

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

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

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

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6 April, 2006

BRAINLESS LEFTISTS



Leftists are great projectors (tending to see their own faults in others) so to know what is true of them, you just have to look at what they say about conservatives. They even accuse conservatives of projection! So they are always trawling for utterances by conservatives that they can characterize as "hate speech", even though they themselves can hardly open their mouths without pouring out hatred of all those who oppose them.

One of their most constant ploys is to accuse conservatives of being stupid and they have done it so often that conservatives seem to be somewhat abashed by it and rarely treat it as the projection it is. For the record, the ONLY adult general population survey I know of that obtained both IQ scores and a record of political attitudes was Martin's study (which I helped write up for the academic journals). And that study showed that it was LEFTISTS who were most likely to be dumb.

One reason why the accusation that conservatives are dumb gains some weight is the great preponderance of Leftists among professors. That overlooks, however, that the situation was not always thus. Up until the 1960s, the professoriate was in general politically moderate. There were of course exceptions. The elite universities have always tended Left. The best known examples of that are England's two great universities, Oxford and Cambridge. We have all I think heard of the Cambridge spies (Philby et al.), and the Bloomsberries were far Left too. Such leftism can perhaps most economically be described as a "spoilt brat" syndrome. Less well known is the prewar fascination of Harvard with Nazism -- which was a popular form of socialism in its day.

The general moderation of the pre-1960s professoriate was however its undoing. Precisely because of its moderation, it came under ferocious attack from the 1960s student radicals and it responded in a typically moderate way -- apologetically. Curricula were revised in response to the radical demands and more and more Leftists were hired and promoted. And when in the course of time the radical academics so appointed rose in seniority and power, they behaved in a typically unscrupulous way and used their power to squeeze out as many conservatives from academe as they could. So smart conservatives these days go on to get rich in business while the Leftist academics fume away in their ivory towers!

Perhaps most amusingly, however, it should be noted that the Dems and the GOP split the college-educated vote about equally in the last Presidential election. In other words, about half of the people whom the Leftist professors themselves have certified as academically able in fact vote GOP!

The intellectual poverty of the Left shows itself very clearly in their lack of ideas. The only way that they can ever think of for bringing about their desired utopias is the brutishly simply one of FORCING people to behave in the "right" way, by way of legislation in democatic societies or on pain of death in Communist societies.

We have an excellent example of such brainlessness in a recent article which argues that the U.S. Left needs to become more socialist. The article consists of nothing but one long wail about the injustices of the world and simply ASSERTS that socialism is the answer -- with no supportive reasoning at all about HOW socialism might fix things -- which is all the more remarkable given the known FAILURES of socialism to fix anything. A few illustrative quotes:

"With corporate capitalism everywhere in command, the outlook is for increased poverty, more environmental degradation, ever more uneven distribution of resources and the undermining of traditional societies and ways of life... Doing battle against the prevailing inequality means invoking the idea that we all belong to a community, as opposed to the illusion, voiced famously by Thatcher, that "there is no society, only individuals." ... On the road to shaping an alternative, the left might respond with a time-honored socialist insight, namely that "I" only exists within a "we," and that unless we look out for everyone, no one is secure.

Note the non sequitur in the last sentence. It is reasonable enough to say that "I" only exists within a "we" but such a statement is only trivially true. Our socialist friend, however seems to think that the truth concerned also implies that "unless we look out for everyone, no one is secure". But England and early America existed in excellent security long before there was any welfare legislation! It is true that private charity at that time looked after the less fortunate but I don't think that private charity is what our socialist friend is advocating!

And another counterfactual assertion above is that capitalism will increase poverty. Since capitalism is provably the the best and surest way of increasing wealth, the statement is deliberately wrongheaded. And it is of course the advanced capitalist societies that have done most to clean up their environment and prevent further degradation of it. You have to be devoid of all knowledge and understanding of how the world actually works (and has worked) to spout the nonsense that our brainless socialist does.

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ELSEWHERE

Feisty Italian PM: "He has vowed to give up sex for the election, compared himself to Jesus and Napoleon, and admitted phoning late-night erotic chat lines. Nothing, it seems, is out of bounds for Silvio Berlusconi. But yesterday the Italian Prime Minister, trailing in opinion polls before Sunday's vote, perhaps went a step too far when he suggested that left-wing voters were "dickheads". Addressing the honourable Federation of Merchants and Shopkeepers, Signor Berlusconi said that only coglioni would consider voting for the centre-left opposition. "I have too much esteem for the intelligence of Italians to think that they could be such coglioni as to vote against their own interests.... For the record, Signor Berlusconi claimed that seven out of nine chatline girls said that they would vote for him".

Cutting regulations and taxes would work better: "The state has launched a new Web site aimed at attracting worldwide entrepreneurs to do business in California. The California Business Portal - www.calbusiness.ca.gov - provides information on starting, growing, financing and relocating a business to California. The site includes many links aimed at foreign businesses that want to work in California, and visitors can also find information on obtaining business permits, California business laws and regulations, and doing business with the state"

The plan to replace the welfare state: "Interview with Charles Murray on his new book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State: "We start with a country that is the richest country in the world, with most of its people having lots of money (compared to any historical standard), ample money to provide for their own retirements, medical care, and the rest of it. On top of this national wealth, we then add more than $1 trillion to help people provide for comfortable retirement and medical care, and so forth. And guess what? We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate medical care. And only a government can spend that much money that ineffectually. The alternative I suggest is give every adult American, age 21 and older, $10,000 a year. And let them run with it."

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

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

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

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

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5 April, 2006

AUSTRALIA'S UNREPENTANT TRUTH-TELLER

Academic Andrew Fraser will defy the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by not apologising to the Sudanese community for his study linking African refugees to high crime rates.

In a landmark ruling that raises fresh questions about the limits to which academics can engage in public debate, HREOC chairman John von Doussa has found Professor Fraser's comments were unlawful because they amounted to a "sweeping generalisation" that was not backed by research. [High black crime rates are shown by ALL research!] Professor Fraser was suspended last year from teaching at Sydney's Macquarie University over his comments about Sudanese refugees in Australia. Sudanese Darfurian Union secretary Safi Hareer complained to the human rights commission that Professor Fraser breached the Racial Discrimination Act in a letter published in the Parramatta Sun newspaper. The letter said experience showed an expanding black population was a "sure-fire recipe" for increased crime and violence.

In a letter received by Professor Fraser yesterday, Mr von Doussa rejected his submission that his comments were made for "genuine academic purposes in the public interest". Mr von Doussa said while the legislation allowed for fair comment on matters of public interest and for genuine academic discussion, the comments were not made with "sufficient constraints and proportionality". Comments for academic purposes were expected to reflect standards such as balanced arguments and be well-researched, but Professor Fraser had made "sweeping generalisations" not supported by research. Mr von Doussa asked Professor Fraser to respond to Mr Hareer's demand that he publish a public apology to members of the Sudanese community acknowledging that he had engaged in unlawful conduct.

But Professor Fraser said he would not apologise to anyone. "Even those who disagree with me should be appalled at this attack on the freedom of academic debate," he said. "This gives the lie to all those politicians who've claimed that racial hatred legislation would not curb freedom of expression in Australia."....

More here. Chris Brand has an update on the similar denial of free speech to British academic Frank Ellis.

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FROM THE HEXAGON (Look at a map of France)

French government surrenders to the mob: "Students and public sector workers stage mass protests against French labour reform today, aiming to seize on a retreat by President Chirac who has been forced to relegate to the sidelines Dominique de Villepin, his Prime Minister.... M Chirac ordered the reduction of the trial period for workers younger than 26 to one year instead of two and the insertion of an obligation on employers to give an explanation if they dismissed a young employee. M de Villepin's law had sought to free employers from the constraints that are widely blamed for keeping France's youth unemployment rate at a crushing 23 per cent."

The French want to be babied: "whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and generated so many first-rate French companies. This hostility appears to go deeper than resistance to painful reform, which is common to Italy and Germany too; or than a desire for a strong welfare state, which Scandinavian countries share; or even than a fondness for protectionism, which America periodically betrays."

A Frog who gets it: "The president of the world-renowned Sorbonne University has branded French students protesting about the country's new employment law "ignorant and stupid". Reacting to protests over the law, which makes it easier for employers to fire, and therefore presumably more willing to hire, young workers, Jean-Robert Pitte said the youngsters had no dreams but believed everything was due to them as a right without having to work for it. "I'm very angry about the demagogy, the ignorance and the stupidity of the young and of the French," said Dr Pitte, 56, a geography professor who has taught at Oxford and Cambridge and holds the Legion d'honneur.

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ELSEWHERE



No-taste Hillary: "Laura Bush has shaken the decorous world of America's unofficial First Ladies' club by taunting Hillary Clinton about poor housekeeping and bad taste while in the White House. Presidential wives traditionally refrain from the political pugilism of their White House partners. But with most of Washington convinced that Sen Clinton will try to emulate her husband Bill by running for the presidency in 2008, the mood has changed. These days even home furnishings are fair game. According to Laura Bush, an Intimate Portrait of the First Lady, published today, the trouble began when Mrs Clinton took the new First Lady on a tour of the White House after the 2000 election. Mrs Bush, famed for her impeccable presentation, disclosed that she was appalled by the state of the carpets and furniture in the West Wing. Many were described as frayed. Furnishings in the East Wing, the official quarters of the First Lady, looked dated, the book says. Mrs Bush was also taken aback by the garish, clashing colours of much of the decor, which included red, blue and gold".

Stuff happens, but why? : "Concentrated power is not only dangerous, it's difficult to manage. Powerful top-down organizations are at best clumsy and wasteful, at worst they are simply disastrous. Our government proves that on a daily basis. The individual players make little difference; the size and power of the system is the Achilles heel that will, sooner or later, fail. The bigger government gets, the more power it wields, the worse the results will be."

Shhh ... Don't mention the gulag: "Lost in last weekend's hubbub over the three year anniversary of the Iraq war was an anniversary from the Western hemisphere. March 18 marked the third year since the Cuban Black Spring of 2003. Tired of internal dissent, Fidel Castro dispatched his secret police that spring day to arrest 75 journalists, librarians, labor unionists and human rights activists on charges of 'anti-state' activities. According to journalist Marc Masferrer of Uncommon Sense, fifteen of the 75 have been released for health reasons. The rest remain in Castro's gulag."

EU bribes Greenlanders: "Greenland, the only place to have left the EU, will be brought back under the influence of Brussels as part of a global scramble for the mineral riches of the Arctic. Brussels will give the semiautonomous part of Denmark, which is home to 57,000 people, 43 million euro a year in return for control over policies including scientific research. Greenland has been of little geopolitical interest, 90 per cent of it being covered in ice. However, geologists believe that it has as much oil as the North Sea basin. Prospecting licences have tripled in the past three years".

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

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

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

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

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4 April, 2006

The Leiter/Burgess-Jackson stoush continues

"Stoush" is an Australian word for a punch-up but it can refer to a physical one or a metaphorical one. I am using it the latter sense

Brian Leiter is an influential Leftist professor, with a presence in both philosophy and law, who is noted for writing a blog which is exceedingly abusive of conservatives. Because of his perceived influence, however, few conservatives say anything in reply to him. They deem it unsafe for their careers.

Keith Burgess-Jackson is the notable exception, however. He is a philosophy professor with a background in law and has an entire blog devoted to exposing the low standard of argumentation used by Leiter. See here.

Until recently, Keith had his anti-Leiter blog on blogspot but the last blogspot meltdown caused him to move his blog to his new site at PowerBlogs. Perhaps a little unwisely, Keith deleted his former blogspot blog in the process.

Another conservative blogger (whom you may recognize) has however just taken over the blogspot address that Keith left unused and has posted there another substantial body of volleys at Leiter. See here. The war may be hotting up!

Because of all Keith's past good work, the new blog is immediately the no. 1 result returned by some searches for the term "Brian Leiter". And if it is not the No. 1 result, it usually at least makes the first page. Google blogsearch has the new version of the blog already -- topmost result when I checked. Handy. I hope anybody with a website reading this will link to both the new and the old sites to help keep the rankings up.

It will be amusing to see if and how Leiter reacts to the new blog. Keith is OK about it. There is also a scorching takedown of Leiter here, including a picture of the great man -- complete with a central European hairline.

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RECENT PAPERS FROM THE CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES

''American Dhimmitude: The road from amnesty,''
''Guest-Worker Programs Are a Dead End,''
''Dropping Out: Immigrant Entry and Native Exit From the Labor Market, 2000-2005,''
''Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Connection Between Legal and Illegal Immigration,''
''Guestworker Programs: Do They Make Sense for America?,'' panel discussion transcript
''Legislature Should Act to Ensure Banks Can Verify the Identity of Account Holders,''
''Verification of Employment Authorization: Federal Basic Pilot Program is an Effective and Employer-friendly Tool for Immigration Law Compliance,''

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ELSEWHERE

One of the most respected historians of Italian Fascism, A. James Gregor, has just published a new book under the title: "Mussolini's Intellectuals : Fascist Social and Political Thought". From the blurb: "Fascism has traditionally been characterized as irrational and anti-intellectual, finding expression exclusively as a cluster of myths, emotions, instincts, and hatreds. This intellectual history of Italian Fascism--the product of four decades of work by one of the leading experts on the subject in the English-speaking world--provides an alternative account. A. James Gregor argues that Italian Fascism may have been a flawed system of belief, but it was neither more nor less irrational than other revolutionary ideologies of the twentieth century. Gregor follows Fascist thought from its beginnings in socialist ideology about the time of the First World War--when Mussolini himself was a leader of revolutionary socialism--through its evolution into a separate body of thought... Gregor's account reveals the flaws and tensions that dogged Fascist thought from the beginning, but shows that if we want to come to grips with one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century, we nevertheless need to understand that Fascism had serious intellectual as well as visceral roots".

Today's wars are less about ideas than extreme tribalism: "Western strategists and policymakers should stop talking about a clash of civilizations and focus on the real problem: extreme tribalism. Recent events -- riots in many nations protesting cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, Sunni-Shiite warring in Iraq, the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan -- confirm that the West is not in a clash with Islam. Instead, Islam, which is a civilizing force, has fallen under the sway of Islamists who are a tribalizing force. Unfortunately, the tribalism theme has difficulty gaining traction. After the end of the cold war, many American strategists preferred the optimistic 'end of history' idea that democracy would triumph around the world, advanced by Francis Fukuyama in 1989. A contrary notion -- reversion to tribalism -- made better sense to other strategists, such as France's Jacques Attali in 1992. Indeed, the emergence of ethnic warring in the Balkans and elsewhere confirmed that when societies crumble, people revert to tribal and clan behaviors that repudiate liberal ideals."

This tosser from "The Guardian" criticizes Jihad Watch for saying that Islam is unreformable and then quotes a lot of Saudis who say that Islam cannot be changed. He seems not to have noticed that he has proved Jihad Watch to be right.

In case you missed it, the bourgeois French youth demonstrating for job security were savagely attacked by Muslim youths -- something the media mostly glided over. Since it is the Muslims that would be most disadvantaged if the bourgeois youth got their way, there is some justice in it.

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

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

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

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

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3 April, 2006

WEEKEND REPORT

I rarely say much about my personal doings but I would not be a blogger if I did not do so occasionally!

Having become something of a recluse in my old age, I rarely go out these days. Only my addiction to classical music occasionally gets me moving. As Mozart is my second favourite to Bach and as this year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, however, I decided (or Anne decided) that it would be a good time for me to go to a Mozart concert. So we went on Saturday night to a performance of the famous Requiem (in the Beyer realization).

To help get us in the mood for some of the greatest of German music, we had some good German peasant food for tea before going to the concert. For starters we had some excellent Zwiebelfisch (raw herring pickled with onions, peppercorns etc) followed simply by ham and mustard on Roggenbrot (black bread). The ham was the strong-tasting Gypsy ham, which I got from our local Croatian delicatessen.

When we arrived at Brisbane's newish and first class concert hall, I was amazed at the crush of people. Every seat was booked. I was of course delighted to see such a robust following for Kunst und Kultur so far from its homeland. The Requiem is rather sombre by Mozart's standards, so had I thought it might not attract a big audience.

The audience was of course overwhelmingly of Northern European appearance, though there was also a good scattering of North Asians -- mostly Han Chinese, I think.

We had the overture from Zauberfloete for starters followed by piano concerto 27 (his last). While I was listening to the concerto I kept thinking that it sounded more like Kammermusik than something for a full orchestra so I was rather pleased to note later that the program notes also decribed it as having "a chamber-music mood".

When we got to the Requiem after intermission, the forces available were excellent. There was a huge choir and a strong string section -- including 4 double basses and six celli. Other than that however there was only a few brass players. The big traditional pipe organ (much acclaimed when it was built) supplied the wind sounds.

Slightly suprisingly, the conductor was European -- Estonian in fact. Half a world away from Europe we still needed European talent. Since by far the greatest part of classical music is of Northern European origin, however, I suppose it stands to reason that Northern Europeans should have the best feel for it.

The Requiem itself was so absorbing that it seemed to me to take only 15 minutes, though I believe it took more like an hour. I greatly enjoyed the complex music of my people and culture -- and I was nearly as pleased to see that it still has a strong following in our society.

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ELSEWHERE

Keith Burgess Jackson recently moved his blog devoted to exposing the unpleasant Brian Leiter from Blogspot to PowerBlogs. Leiter apparently has now threatened PowerBlogs with a lawsuit. Typical bullying behavior. Leiter did not dare take on someone as big as Google (who own Blogspot) but a small firm is fair game.

Muslims destroying German education: "Police have been deployed at a Berlin school after teachers complained that they could not cope with their students' aggression and disrespect. Six officers were posted at the Ruetli secondary school in Berlin's Neukoelln district to check students for weapons. In a letter asking for help, the head teacher said it had become almost impossible to hold orderly lessons. Students were said to be ignoring or even attacking the teachers and fighting among themselves. A teacher who recently left the school told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that ethnic Arab pupils were in the majority and were bullying ethnic Turks, Germans and other nationalities. A student at the school told German N24 television that pupils were coming to school armed. "Things have been getting worse and worse because people seem to be crazy here. They are bringing knives and weapons to school," the teenager said. The education minister for Berlin, Klaus Boeger, said the school would soon be given two social workers and two psychologists to help pupils."

Summit: Arab nations urged to go nuclear: "Secretary-General Amr Moussa called on Arab leaders Tuesday to move toward a goal of 'entering the nuclear club' and making use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. ... Moussa was particularly emphatic about Iraq in his address. 'Any solution for the Iraqi problem cannot be reached without Arabs, and Arab participation,' he said. 'Any result of consultations without Arab participation will be considered insufficient and will not lead to a solution.' Moussa called on Arabs 'to enter into the nuclear club and make use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes,' a plea that comes as the world is wary about nearby Iran's nuclear ambitions."

Buchanan on Europe: "Since World War II, every country in Western Europe has been ruled for a time by socialists. These regimes put in place laws that ensured job security, a living wage, a shorter workweek than in the United States, generous unemployment benefits, early retirement, magnanimous pensions and state-subsidized health benefits. To finance these maternal welfare states, European regimes take 40 percent or even 50 percent of the economy in taxes, as compared with a U.S. federal, state and local tax bite of 33 percent. But with globalization, European companies and workers who fund these munificent benefits are finding themselves in neo-Darwinian competition for survival, not only with American, Japanese and East Europeans who work longer and harder, but Asians who work longer and harder for a fraction of their pay and few of their benefits. European companies are being stretched and stressed, and some are breaking. The capitalist goose that laid the golden eggs for the Eurosocialists is aging, tiring and becoming ever more barren.... What is coming is a time of continuous and constant cutbacks of benefits in every First World country. Public employees will have to work longer for less today and less tomorrow when they retire".

Corrupt army bosses?: "Soldiers will no longer be allowed to wear body armor other than the protective gear issued by the military, Army officials said Thursday, the latest twist in a running battle over the equipment the Pentagon gives its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army officials told The Associated Press that the order was prompted by concerns that soldiers or their families were buying inadequate or untested commercial armor from private companies - including the popular Dragon Skin gear made by California-based Pinnacle Armor. ... Veterans groups immediately denounced the decision."

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on the latest news about IQ.

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

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

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

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

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2 April, 2006

ARTICLES RECENTLY UP ON ICJS

Cancer in its midst
Apathy & Inconclusiveness
Truth seekers and partisans
The last helicopter
ABC staff in no mood to capitulate to Coonan
Olmert:Israel entering a new chapter
Are they all mad?
A Better Idea
The Islamic threat is greater than German and Soviet threats
Duke 1, Harvard 0
Under the scimitar of Damocles
ABC staff lose their seat on the board
The Palestinian-Israeli War: Where It Came From.
West pays price of a delayed invasion
How I learned to love the wall
Our world: Seinfeld vs. Churchill
Iran, Jews and the Holocaust
On balance, Aunty is unworthy of our hard-earned
The undercover zionist: Interview
Media shockingly ignorant of Muslims among us
Iran military options open, says former advisor
The New Threat

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ELSEWHERE

Theodore Dalrymple on the French riots: "The sight of millions of Frenchmen, predominantly young, demonstrating in deep sympathy and solidarity with themselves, is one that will cause amusement and satisfaction on the English side of the Channel. Everyone enjoys the troubles of his neighbours. And at least our public service strikers just stay away from work, and spend the day peacefully performing the rites of their religion, DIY, and not making a terrible nuisance of themselves. In fact, many of them are probably less of a public nuisance if they stay at home than if they go to work. Of course, demonstrating in huge numbers is what the French do from time to time. We should never forget that to break a shop window for the good of humanity is one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. Trying to topple governments by shouting insults is also great fun."

Some resolve in the House: "Conservative House Republicans bluntly warned their leaders Thursday against any immigration compromise that would allow temporary foreign workers and assailed a Senate proposal that would open the way for illegal immigrants to earn citizenship. "My fear is that if we continue down this path that the Senate has established, that we will have created the biggest magnet ever," said Representative Bob Beauprez, a Colorado Republican. "It would be like a dinner bell, 'Come one, come all.' " But the bipartisan authors of a Senate plan that would combine new border protections with a temporary worker program and a process for illegal immigrants to qualify for residency and eventually citizenship said they thought they were gaining support as the Senate moved deeper into its immigration fight."

The Swedes are getting what they foolishly bargained for: "The wave of robberies the city of Malmo has witnessed during this past year is part of a "war against the Swedes." This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant backgrounds when questioned about why they only rob native Swedes, in interviews with Petra Akesson for her thesis in sociology. "I read a report about young robbers in Stockholm and Malmo and wanted to know why they rob other youths. It usually does not involve a lot of money," she says. She interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups. Almost 90% of all robberies reported to the police were committed by gangs, not individuals. "When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes." This argument was repeated several times"

Muslim fanatics become more dangerous: "Iran's military said Friday it successfully test-fired a missile not detectable by radar that can use multiple warheads to hit several targets simultaneously, a development that raised concerns in the United States and Israel. The Fajr-3, which means "victory" in Farsi, can reach Israel and U.S. bases in the Middle East, Iranian state media indicated. The announcement of the test-firing is likely to stoke regional tensions and feed suspicion about Tehran's military intentions and nuclear ambitions. "I think it demonstrates that Iran has a very active and aggressive military program under way," State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said in Washington."

Privileges for smokers abolished: "Workers at a major [Australian] government department have been banned from taking cigarette breaks during office hours, setting a precedent for workplaces nationwide. Under the new rules, public servants will only be allowed to smoke during their lunch hour. Those breaking the ban will be disciplined with verbal and written warnings and counselling. Smoking will also be banned within 15m of the government department's offices. More than 3000 staff employed Australia-wide by the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources and its associated agencies will be hit by the new rules. Department chief Mark Paterson told The Daily Telegraph he issued the new edict primarily because of health issues. "We're moving into a new premises in October that incorporates a childcare centre and I don't want parents and children to be confronted by a phalanx of smokers out the front of the building," he said.

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

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

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

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

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1 April, 2006

ISRAEL

Why America supports Israel: "America's loyalty to Israel isn't engineered by a Zionist cabal that dupes American citizens and hijacks their government. US policy tends to align closely with Israel's because Americans *like* Israel. They instinctively sympathize with Israel's fight for survival in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods. If public opinion weren't robustly pro-Israel in the first place, the White House and Congress would be far less inclined to give Israel's advocates the time of day. There's a name for that phenomenon. It's called democracy.... American history is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian soil, nourishing a special kinship between America's Christians and the Jewish people. The founders of the American republic were deeply influenced by the Hebrew scriptures and believed that they, like the Jews of old, had been taken out of bondage by God and led by Him to a Promised Land. Long before there was a modern state of Israel, American leaders expressed "Zionist" leanings: "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation," former President John Adams wrote in 1819. Nearly two centuries later, millions of American Christians are passionate supporters of the Jewish state."

Harvard hucksters hype Israeli pseudo-historians: "The real rock stars of the Israeli intelligentsia -- Israel's own Ward Churchills -- are the pretentiously self-styled 'New Historians.' This is a group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted: 'We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas'), who've cocked a snook at the liberal country in which they've thrived, so as to gain admittance into the fashionable Palestinian pantheon. They claim 'Zionist imperialists' cheated Palestinian peasants out of their land (which was, in fact, bought fairly and legally), and that these interlopers conducted a systematic and deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing with respect to the 'indigenous population.' (There undoubtedly have been sporadic acts of aggression and even terror against Palestinian Arabs by Jews during the War of Independence. But there is simply no historical evidence that they have been the result of a concerted or systematic campaign.)"

Overstating Jewish power : "If it is Israel that decides on the deployment of American force, it seems odd that the first President Bush had to order them to stay out of the coalition to free Kuwait, and it is even more odd that the first order of neocon business has not been an attack on Iran, as Israeli hawks have been urging. Mearsheimer and Walt are especially weak on this point: They speak darkly about neocon and Israeli maneuvers in respect to Tehran today, but they entirely fail to explain why the main initiative against the mullahs has come from the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Authority, two organizations where the voice of the Jewish lobby is, to say the least, distinctly muted. Their theory does nothing to explain why it was French President Jacques Chirac who took the lead in isolating the death-squad regime of Assad's Syria (a government that Mearsheimer and Walt regard, for reasons of their own, as a force for stability)."

Israel avoids victory : "As Israelis go to the polls, not one of the leading parties offers the option of winning the war against the Palestinians. It's a striking and dangerous lacuna. ... The Arabs fight to eliminate Israel, Israel fights to win the acceptance of its neighbors. The first is offensive in intent, the second is defensive. The former is barbaric, and the latter civilized."

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ELSEWHERE

High IQ Kids Have Different Brain Growth : "The brains of high IQ children show a distinct pattern of development, according to a study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. The cortex, or outer mantle of the brain, starts out thinner and thickens more rapidly in very intelligent children, say the researchers. It then peaks at around 11 or 12 years old before thinning rapidly in the late teens. This developmental pattern, rather than sheer brain size, may have more to do with intelligence said Philip Shaw, lead author of the NIH study. He said the changes are subtle and what is driving them is a mystery. The scientists discovered the association between intelligence and brain development by taking MRI scans of 307 healthy children and teenagers, aged 5-19, over 2-year intervals as they grew up.

Commemorative crosses constitute the establishment of a church??: "The Utah Attorney General's Office has asked a judge to toss out a lawsuit filed against the state over roadside crosses honoring troopers killed in the line of duty. The lawsuit was filed by the American Atheists, who say the crosses are religious symbols that violate the separation of church and state." There is NO constitutional requirement to separate church and State -- only a requirement that no particular church be "established" (State supported)

French winemakers surrender to Anglo-Saxon practices (how that must hurt!): "After failing to hold off the onslaught from New World winemakers, France is to join them in such heresies as adding wood chips and - perhaps - even watering down the wine. The Agriculture Minister has issued a plan to let vignerons compete with growers in the Antipodes and the Americas whose simple flavours and clever marketing have been winning the world's wine drinkers. "We have to make wine for consumers, not wine that producers dream of," said Bernard Pomel, author of the plan, which is likely to be adopted soon as law. France still dominates the wine trade, with 40 per cent of world production by value, but its share of the market has been dwindling for a decade. Brussels is even about to allow France to turn thousands of barrels of unsold bordeaux into vinegar.

New Canadian government shows principles: "Hamas ministers on their first day in office today pledged to continue the battle for Israel's destruction and shrugged off warnings that they were leading the Palestinian Authority into a financial and political abyss.... Canada announced that it was cutting off aid as of today, while Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said that America was reviewing its Palestinian aid programmes to see which ones it would need to freeze. "The principle is very clear. We're not going to fund a Hamas-led government, provide funding to a Hamas-led government," she said".

More pandering to the fragile self-esteem of Muslims: "Posters with the phrase "America's latest hero is a Muslim straight out of jail" has been banned from the Tube [subway] by London Underground. LU said it will not show the posters from a 1 million pound advertising campaign for new TV series "Sleeper Cell" until creators remove the word Muslim from the text. It claims it will offend people and it is trying to be sensationalist".

No homosexual marriage for Australia: "The Federal Government will legislate against any attempts by the ACT to give gay couples the same rights as married couples, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said today. Mr Ruddock said today the Government would investigate what it could do to block attempts by the ACT Labor Government to pass laws that would establish civil unions for homosexual couples. The ACT legislation would allow those in a civil union the same rights as marriage in everything but name. Under the constitution, the Commonwealth has responsibility for marriage and in 2004, with bipartisan support, the Federal Government legislated to effectively ban gay marriage. Mr Ruddock said the Commonwealth was unhappy with the ACT's attempts to work around federal laws. "Let me make it very clear, that will not satisfy the Commonwealth and we would include the introduction of legislation to prevent that from occurring," he said.

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

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

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

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

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