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31 August, 2005

AMERICA NEEDS FEWER BUT BETTER IMMIGRANTS

Both Australia and America are countries founded on immigration and both remain to this day friendly to immigration. But WHAT SORT of immigrant do we want? Both Australians and Americans generally seem to agree that skilled and educated immigrants are a benefit to our society but only Australia has had the guts to put that policy into action. American politicians, by contrast, just run around like headless chooks not knowing what to do about the fact that they are largely getting the OPPOSITE sort of immigrant to what any rational person would want.

So what has the USA done about the problem? Severely RESTRICTED the immigration of skilled and educated immigrants! You couldn't make this stuff up. You can have heaps of Mexican criminals and welfare clients strolling into the good old USA without any significant restriction but you MUST NOT have Indian and Chinese engineers and computer programmers. As the WSJ says:

"What this effectively means is that any number of fields dependent on high-skilled labor could be facing worker shortages: science, medicine, engineering, computer programming. It also means that tens of thousands of foreigners--who've graduated from U.S. universities and applied for the visas to stay here and work for American firms--will be shipped home to start companies or work for our global competitors.....

And let's not forget that these immigrant professionals create jobs, as the founders of Intel, Google, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Computer Associates, Yahoo and numerous other successful ventures can attest. The Public Policy Institute of California did a survey of immigrants to Silicon Valley in 2002 and found that 52% of "foreign-born scientists and engineers have been involved in founding or running a start-up company either full-time or part-time."

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ELSEWHERE

I had a post on 25th. about loopy Leftist history professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan -- the one who thought Iraq was on the Mediterranean. If you read here you will see that the wacky Prof. Cole does not even know that a large part of what is the USA today was taken from Mexico! Leftism corrupts everything it touches -- including scholarship.

Hawaiian fruitcakes: "People are not happy about this latest round of gas price increases; and, not surprisingly, they are demanding answers -- and 'solutions' -- from the wrong people: the political classes. At the cutting edge is Hawaii, where gas prices will soon be controlled by law, not markets. Hawaiians are about to find out in the near future that the 'solutions' they have supported are going to have the opposite effect of what supposedly was intended. People in the Aloha State pay more for gasoline than anyone else in the United States, and anyone with even a basic understanding of economics understands why this is so."

Spooked by the obvious : "If you suddenly learned the government had reduced taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains, would you save and invest more or less? Most people would say more, because saving and investing would be more profitable with lower tax rates. As obvious as this seems, much of the Washington establishment is shocked the deficit is falling rapidly due to surging tax revenues, despite the 'massive' Bush tax cuts."

There is a wonderful article here about how much the life of women has improved in Russia AFTER the downfall of Communism. One excerpt: "They are highly educated, and have plunged rapturously into the ocean of literature now being published in Russia--those famous books by which the world lived in the 20th century and which have only now come to us. These women study with merciless obstinacy, hours and hours every day. Each knows several languages. In spite of their youth, they have already visited the great capitals of Europe, as if realizing the dream (so recently unattainable) of their grandmothers and grandfathers".

What Leftists close their eyes to: "Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income-and disproportionately black-phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal-one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American."

Getting the fox to mind the henhouse: "A Muslim accused of anti-Semitism is to be appointed to a government role in charge of rooting out extremism in the wake of last month's suicide bombings in London. Inayat Bunglawala, 36, the media secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain, is understood to have been selected as one of seven "conveners" for a Home Office task force with responsibilities for tackling extremism among young Muslims, despite a history of anti-Semitic statements. Mr Bunglawala's past comments include the allegation that the British media was "Zionist-controlled".

Fireman abuses cat up tree . A lovely bit of satire: "The firefighter (who happened to be male, but could just as easily have been female) abridged the rights of the cat to determine for itself where it wanted to walk, climb, or rest, and inflicted his own value judgements in determining that it needed to be 'rescued' from its chosen perch. In callous disregard for the well-being of the environment, and this one tree in particular, he thrust the mobility-disadvantaged unfriendly means of ascent known as a 'ladder' carelessly up against the tree, marring its bark, and unfeelingly climbed it, unconcerned how his display of physical prowess might injure the self-esteem of those differently-abled. He kidnapped and unjustly restrained the innocent feline with the intention of returning it to the person who claimed to 'own' the naturally free animal".

I have just put up a couple of amazing postings on EDUCATION WATCH and there is a new, rather disgusting posting on Leftists as Elitists too -- about those great champions of equality, the British Left. And on Tongue-Tied, you can find out why you must not use the "G word"! Bet you can't guess what it is!

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

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

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

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

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30 August, 2005

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I explain what IQ is and why it matters

On Tongue Tied I comment on the latest feminist gospel, adding some personal observations.

On Majority Rights I note Charles Murray's essay rejecting the idea that all groups are equal

On Greenie Watch I note the real story of Easter Island -- unlike the Greenie nonsense Jared Diamond peddles

On Political Correctness Watch I note the new Leftist Puritanism in Britain

On Education Watch I note the meaningless of British High School qualifications, where everyone is a winner

On Socialized Medicine I note how bureaucratic indifference undermines supposed health safeguards

On Gun Watch I tell of a clergyman who shot up some villains

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ELSEWHERE

I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists a dissection of one of Australia's leading Leftist intellectuals -- noting his typical Leftist disregard for facts and accuracy

Total proof that Leftist "principles" are a sham. All they have is hate: "Politics makes strange bedfellows. Stranger still when the odd couple are fundamentalist Islam and the secular Left. The evolving Black-Red alliance is growing in France, Germany and Belgium. But, based on the successful British model, it is now going global to declare war on the war on terror.... If Iraq was the catalyst for the Black-Red alliance, the Stop the War coalition provided the cauldron in which the union was consummated. The result is a pure gestalt: the coalition allows its constituent parts to pack a far greater collective punch than they could have dreamt of on their own. Putting a million people on to the streets of London is not, after all, small potatoes. The steering committee of the Marxist-Islamist alliance consists of 33 members - 18 from myriad hard-Left groups, three from the radical wing of the Labour party, eight from the ranks of the radical Islamists and four leftist ecologists (also known as `Watermelons' -green outside, red inside). The chairman is Andrew Murray, a leading light in the British Communist party; co-chair is Muhammad Aslam Ijaz, of the London Council of Mosques".

If you think most lawyers are only a small step above prostitutes, here's another reason why: "The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans... When the United States Supreme Court endorsed race-conscious admissions policies in 2003, it based its decision on the importance of ensuring the representation of diverse viewpoints in the classroom. Law schools that take race into account in admissions decisions, the study says, "open themselves to charges of intellectual inconsistency" if they do not also address the ideological imbalances on their faculties".

Australian Leftists want power at all costs: How surprising!: "The best way to get ahead in the NSW Labor Party is to become a friend, lover, wife or number-cruncher for the dominant right-wing faction known as the Terrigals, a leading Labor academic says. Professor Peter Botsman launched a blistering attack on the Terrigals last week, saying they were killing party democracy and causing rank-and-file members to leave in droves. "They have no respect for tradition, seniority, the rules of the party, common human courtesies or the customs of democracy," he said. "They live for one thing: becoming a minister or a premier in the shortest possible time".

Democrat decay: "I have some shocking statistics to report. Between 1952 and 2004, inclusive, there have been 14 presidential elections. The Democrat candidate received at least 50% of the votes in only two of them: 1964 (61.1%) and 1976 (50.1%). During that same period, the Republican candidate received at least 50% of the votes in seven elections: 1952 (55.2%), 1956 (57.4%), 1972 (60.7%), 1980 (50.7%), 1984 (58.8%), 1988 (53.4%), and 2004 (50.7%). Republicans have won nine of the past 14 presidential elections. (Each party won an election with fewer popular votes than the other party: the Democrats in 1960 and the Republicans in 2000.) Democrats are in trouble. Their coalition may seem large, since it's composed of many distinct groups (labor unions, abortionists, teachers, trial lawyers, blacks, homosexuals), but in terms of overall appeal, it's failing. Repeatedly. Embarrassingly".

The reputation of another do-gooder bites the dust: "The nun adored by the Vatican ran a network of care homes where cruelty and neglect are routine. Donal MacIntyre gained secret access and witnessed at first hand the suffering of "rescued" orphans.... Earlier in the day, young international volunteers had giggled as one told how a young boy had peed on her while strapped to a bed. I had already been told of an older disturbed woman tied to a tree at another Missionaries of Charity home. At the orphanage, few of the volunteers batted an eyelid at disabled children being tied up. They were too intoxicated with the myth of Mother Teresa and drunk on their own philanthropy to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading..... I saw children with their mouths gagged open to be given medicine, their hands flaying in distress, visible testimony to the pain they were in. Tiny babies were bound with cloths at feeding time. Rough hands wrenched heads into position for feeding. Some of the children retched and coughed as rushed staff crammed food into their mouths. Boys and girls were abandoned on open toilets for up to 20 minutes at a time. Slumped, untended, some dribbling, some sleeping, they were a pathetic sight. Their treatment was an affront to their dignity, and dangerously unhygienic."

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

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

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

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

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29 August, 2005

I've got such a lot of stories that I want to draw people's attention to today, that I am not going to put up a leading post first

Australians more culturally confident than the French?: This is a bit of an old story now but I am mentioning it because it has some personal relevance. Despite Eastern Europe now being in the EU, French police arrest and lock up Eastern European musicians and conductors who dare to give concerts in France. One of the ensembles arrested was led by Volker Hartung, a German from Cologne. Volker Hartung also tours Australia. I have myself enjoyed one of his excellent concerts of Baroque music. Funnily enough, all he got in Australia was generous applause. No sign of police anywhere!

Bolton brings a breath of fresh air to the U.N.: "An international alliance will confront US President George Bush to salvage as much as possible of an ambitious plan to reshape the United Nations and tackle world poverty. The head-to-head in New York tomorrow comes after the revelation that the US Administration is proposing wholesale changes to crucial parts of the biggest overhaul of the UN since it was founded more than 50 years ago. A draft of that plan had included a review of progress on the UN's millennium development goals — poverty eradication targets set in 2000 for completion by 2015 — and the introduction of reforms aimed at repairing the damage done to the UN's reputation by Iraq, Rwanda and the Balkans. But it was revealed this week that Mr Bush's new ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, was seeking 750 changes to the 36-page draft plan to be presented to a special summit in New York on September 14-16. Mr Bolton's amendments, if successful, would leave the plan in tatters".

California Conservative thinks that Australian conservative politicians have got more guts in speaking out about Islamic issues than American politicians do. I am inclined to agree.

The BBC recently ran a programme that was (gasp!) critical of Islam. The Muslim Council of Britain fired back with claims that the programme was biased and inaccurate. The BBC program is defended at length here by an Islamic expert. The transcript of the BBC programme is here

Write Wing is a good blog for brief links to lots of interesting news stories -- with particular emphasis on immigration/multiculturalism.

Rationality triumphant: Australian Leftists want to CUT taxes on the "rich": "The top rate of tax should be cut and the entire system overhauled to help middle- and low-income workers earn more, the Opposition finance spokesman, Lindsay Tanner, said today. Mr Tanner said Labor would promise voters tax cuts during the next election campaign as part of a policy to make tax fairer for everybody. He said he was in favour of slicing the top marginal tax rate of 47 cents in the dollar as part of major reforms to the taxation system. "We don't have a problem with the idea of cutting the top marginal tax rate provided the overall balance is fair," Mr Tanner told the Ten Network."

The troops see Iraq as no Vietnam: "Iraq war skeptics and critics have been invoking Vietnam almost from the day the fighting began.... But of all the ways in which the Iraq war is not like Vietnam, perhaps the most telling is the attitude of the troops. "When I was in Vietnam," retired Army Colonel Jack Jacobs, a 1969 Medal of Honor recipient who had just returned from a fact-finding trip to the Sunni Triangle, told NBC News in May, "if you asked anybody what he wanted more than anything else in the world, he'd say: to go home. We asked ... hundreds of soldiers, low-ranking soldiers, in both Afghanistan and Iraq ... the same question. And the response, to a man and a woman, was, 'To kill bad guys.' ... The morale is just over the top -- just really, really enthused about what they're doing. And I think the reason is they perceive that they're making progress. Success will do a lot to morale." Indeed it will, as the "Today" show's Matt Lauer discovered when he visited Baghdad last week. He tried valiantly to coax some Vietnam-style disillusionment out of the soldiers he met, but as NBC's transcript makes clear, the troops weren't having any of that"

The Sheehan stunt is orchestrated, like most Leftist stunts: "Cindy Sheehan kneels before a cross with her son's name on it, touches his picture, wipes her tears. It's an outpouring of emotion that is part of a scheduled news event organized daily for the television, radio and print reporters who crowd in to capture a mother's grief. Cindy Sheehan: "I'm never going to see him again, I'm never going to hold him again, I'm never going to hear his voice again." Sheehan's message hasn't changed since she got here, but the support staff interested in getting that message out to the world has grown considerably. Organizers are set up in a house trailer. Their meetings closed to reporters. Leading the group is Fenton Communications employee, Michele Mulkey, based in San Francisco. Fenton specializes in public relations for liberal non-profits. Their bills are being paid for by True Majority, a non-profit set up by Ben Cohen -- of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream fame."

High oil prices not slowing economy: "Wal-Mart noted that July results actually "came in stronger than expected." Retail sales are rising briskly across the board. The economy is not coming to a screeching halt because of oil. In fact, the real story is that oil prices are having so little impact. Oil is up 40 percent a barrel this year, and natural gas, used in electricity generation, is up about by about two-thirds. Prices at the pump for premium gas are exceeding three bucks a gallon. It's the minimal effect of these higher oil prices that is so annoying to doomsaying politicians and journalists. The single best indicator of an economy's performance, GDP, the output of all goods and services, is currently about 3.5 percent, and it's not slowing. It's accelerating. The U.S. has created 1.2 million new jobs in the past six months. The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.0 percent from 5.4 percent. Compare those figures with Europe's, where energy conservation through taxation is the norm. In France, GDP growth is an anemic 1.2 percent, unemployment 10.1 percent. In Germany, GDP has flatlined, and unemployment is 11.6 percent".

U.S. policy working: "According to the massive Pew Global Attitudes Survey, views of the United States have been improving. We're not exactly back to the days when Kuwaiti babies were being named George Bush, but the trends are in our favor. The share of people with a favorable view of America went up in Indonesia by some 23 points, in Lebanon by 15 points, and in Jordan by 16 points. Trends in France, Germany, Russia and India have been moving our way, too. But the news gets even better. Support for terrorism and Osama Bin Laden has been plummeting across the Arab and Muslim world (save for in Jordan, where the large Palestinian population plays a big role). Support for democracy, meanwhile, has improved. According to Pew, "nearly three-quarters of Moroccans and roughly half of those in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia see Islamic extremism as a threat to their countries."

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

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

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

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

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28 August, 2005

MORE ON FEMALE IQ

A couple of days ago I made a few brief comments about findings showing that there are far more men than women in the top ranges of IQ. I also put the post up on Tongue-Tied, where I am guest-blogging at the moment. I got a lot of emails about it from "Tongue-Tied" readers and to help answer the emails I have just put up another post on "Tongue-Tied" which I also reproduce below

My post on female IQ got me a heap of emails so, although the subject is a bit off the regular track for "Tongue-Tied", I feel I should comment on the concerns that readers have expressed. In a way, the topic is VERY appropriate for "Tongue-Tied" because it is the unmentionable nature of IQ research that has enabled so many misunderstandings about the subject to flourish. So I think I should spend a bit of time in telling you what nobody else is likely to. Let me start with one well-expressed email that I received:

"As a woman, I don't have a problem with the IQ findings. I tend to believe it, as my personal experience has shown that men tend to be more analytical than women. My issue is with the way IQ is measured. My opinion is that IQ tests place a lot of emphasis on analytical abilities, but not much on "other types" of intelligence, such as creativity, multi-tasking, musical genius or whatever. For example, women tend to be a lot more perceptive than men, especially when it comes to relationships. They also can have more agility of mind; that is, they can do more than one thing at the same time, and do it well (better known as multi-tasking). Everyone has his or her own strengths, which leads me to believe that IQ tests are mostly useless. Instead, instructors/employers should be trained to identify individuals' strengths and how to capitalize on them.

Most of what the lady says is right. There are ways in which women tend to do better than men -- and multi-tasking is certainly one of those ways. What the lady does not know is that the abilities measured in IQ tests are NOT just some arbitrary selection of puzzles. The whole notion of IQ arose from an OBSERVATION: the observation that people who tend to be good at solving one sort of puzzle also tend to be good at solving lots of other seemingly unrelated puzzles. In other words, what Binet discovered in the 19th century was that problem-solving is GENERAL. There is such a thing as general problem-solving ability (often abbreviated as 'g'). So over a hundred years have gone by since Binet's discovery and most people still don't know of it! If that is not a truth that has been thoroughly tongue-tied, I don't know what one would be (actually, I can think of a couple of others but I will save them for another day). So IQ tests are simply collections of different puzzles that do in fact go together. Success on one does tend to predict success on all the rest.

And what that means is that IQ tests are VERY useful. For instance, if you are hiring for a job that requires a lot of problem-solving, you can use an IQ test to predict which applicant will be best at that job -- no matter what the problems may be in the job you are hiring for. And IQ tests are also very predictive of educational success. If you have a high IQ it is much more worthwhile to spend up big on a university education than if you have a low IQ.

As an example of how ability generalizes, take mechanical aptitude: I am very good at all sorts of academic things so lots of people would think I must be hopeless at practical things like mechanics. And it is true that any time my car needs fixing I hand the job over to an expert. But I like fixing locks. I am an amateur locksmith. Locks are just another puzzle to me. So one day, I was at a small gathering where some ladies were having trouble with the deadlock on their front door. So they took it off and opened it up. And immediately, bits and pieces went "SPROING" everywhere. They were of course completely stumped by that and did not for a moment think to ask a hopeless academic like me to help. So I said: "Maybe I can help". They looked at me with great skepticism. But in ten minutes I had it back together and all working properly. I hope they learnt something about 'g' from that episode.

Now I have just used an example above to illustrate what I am saying. But the example is NOT the proof. The proof is the gazillion times researchers have found that problem-solving generalizes. One of my other readers of my post yesterday made that mistake. She said that men got all the Nobel prizes because good education has become available to women only fairly recently. But that was not the point at all. The researchers who wrote the article in The British Journal of Psychology that I referred to yesterday relied for their conclusions on hundreds of studies with IQ tests. The bit about Nobel prize-winners was only an illustration, much like my locksmithing illustration above. Examples prove nothing by themselves. They just help you to understand how generalizations work out in practice.

Incidentally, creativity is NOT like IQ. It does not generalize much. People who are highly creative in one field are usually pretty uncreative in other fields. For instance, I am extremely good at writing articles for scientific journals. And that is a highly creative field. In that field you are creating new knowledge and understanding about something. And I have had hundreds of such articles published. But I could not write a novel for nuts! So even in the single field of writing, there can be different types of totally unrelated creativity!

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ELSEWHERE

An unusual perspective on Israel's rights: “The so-called occupied territories are really disputed territory, gained due to acts of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. There was no Palestinian State in 1967 when the territories were captured. What kind of morality is it, then, to return territory to the aggressor? And where’s the precedent? It rewards aggression — and guarantees it’ll reoccur. If anything, by returning land to the aggressors — the Sinai first — Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor.”

Some uncommon-sense from Australia: "The Centre for Independent Studies, in a report into income tax levels, said there was overwhelming evidence to support deep tax cuts for high income earners because of the benefits that would bring to the economy. It follows criticism of the Government's $22 billion worth of tax cuts announced in the May budget. Average wage earners have already received a $6 a week tax cut under the package, but people on higher incomes - including those earning more than $100,000 a year - will get substantially more. But Dr Sinclair Davidson, an associate professor at RMIT University, said in a paper for the centre that there was far more scope for the Government to go further with its tax cuts. He said the Government could cut taxes further without a reduction in revenue. In fact, an economy buoyed by larger tax cuts would actually lift the amount of money flowing to the Government".

Arabs mostly marry cousins: "Just as modern medicine recognizes genetic sources of many physical illnesses, modern psychology recognizes genetic components in many psychological problems including criminality. Presumably, a region where inbreeding is rife-and reinforced through successive generations-should also have a greater frequency of such mental ailments. Though, not surprisingly, there seem to have been no studies in that regard given the delicacy of the subject, the high levels of social pathology, violence, and terrorism in the Arab world suggest that inbreeding is one of the causes."

I have just put up here the latest article by Arlene Peck. She notes how Israel's voluntary withdrawal from Gaza has won it no credit from Leftists at all. Excerpt: "Already, the rabidly anti-Semitic Los Angeles Times is publishing its ‘editorials': “Israel Leaves but Gaza is Hardly Free!" and articles decrying “...how isolated they are in Gaza now, from the outside world, (not to mention the West Bank and Jerusalem) and as subject to Israeli domination as before”.

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

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

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

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

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

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27 August, 2005

AN EXCELLENT ANALYSIS OF LEFTIST ACADEMICS

"Many academics are inclined to favor redistribution of income. Some economists like Krugman argue forcefully that people care more about relative position than their absolute status. I have been reluctant to accept this position as being very important, perhaps because envy is so foreign to me. I do not resent Bill Gate's billions; I wish I had them. I would be happier if Bill Gates gave them to me, but I certainly wouldn't be happier if Bill Gates lost them. In fact, I think that resenting the wellbeing of others is a pretty strong character flaw. However, at some point, one must accept the fact that many people like Paul Krugman are deeply concerned with status.....

I think academics are inclined to attack the privileges of wealth, because the existence of wealth lowers the relative status attributed to intellectual achievements. If the very pursuit of wealth can be reduced to a zero-sum struggle for status, then wealth loses some of its status. Academics gain status at the expense of businessmen and other high income professions.

Academics of all levels would see their relative status rise, if wealth is besmirched. A professor at a local community typically has a high level of educational attainment but only modest social status given their average level of income.

I think that it is no accident that many of those who are most fervent about redistributing income spend so much time bemoaning the chase for status. This chase is very real for them. As Jane Galt has observed, academics are probably more status obsessed than the typical person. The attack on wealth is one dimension of their chase for status".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Destructive British socialism: "Tony Blair's claims to have extended "social justice" were undermined last night by official figures showing the gap between rich and poor has widened by 90 pounds a week since Labour came to power. A report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also showed that Labour has failed to narrow the gap in achievement levels between parents from working- and middle-class families.... The report, Focus on Social Inequalities, compared average weekly incomes of families in the top 10 per cent of incomes (those now earning more than 658 pounds or more a week) with those in the lowest 10 per cent (those earning 164 pounds or less a week). It found that since the mid-1990s disposable income for both groups had risen by over a fifth. "However," it added, "these increases resulted in a rise of 119 pounds per week for those near the top of the income distribution compared with a rise of 28 pounds per week for those near the bottom. This shows that the absolute difference in the average weekly income has continued to widen."

More privatization in China: "China on Wednesday freed more than 1,300 largely state-owned companies to gradually sell shares of stock now controlled by the Communist Party government, putting nearly $270 billion worth of state assets on the trading block. This unprecedented wave of privatization is aimed at lifting domestic stock markets and furthering the country's transition toward capitalism... The move is "a huge deal," said Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai and author of the book "Exit the Dragon?," which examines China's privatization. "The state-owned shares have been an albatross around the neck of the market. This is a pretty good sign that they're serious about reform".

A corrupt bureaucracy? How amazing!: "A federal judge in Texas, calling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. a "corrupt agency with corrupt influences on it," awarded a Houston financier $72 million to cover his legal fees in a decade-long suit involving a failed savings and loan and the government's efforts to take control of a stand of endangered California redwood trees in the 1990s. The FDIC, a regulatory agency that insures deposits at banks and savings and loans, filed suit against Charles E. Hurwitz in 1995, seeking to collect more than $800 million because Hurwitz indirectly controlled a Texas S&L that failed in 1988. The FDIC, after a series of legal setbacks, dropped its suit against Hurwitz in 2002. Hurwitz then asked the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case, Lynn N. Hughes, to order the FDIC to pay his legal expenses, arguing that the FDIC should never have brought the case in the first place".

Disgusting disrespect for brave men: "The Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the current home of hundreds of wounded veterans from the war in Iraq, has been the target of weekly anti-war demonstrations since March. The protesters hold signs that read "Maimed for Lies" and "Enlist here and die for Halliburton."" [The Left are just so full of hate that they know no decency]

Some Iraq experts think the new Iraqi constitution is great: "The Bush administration finally did something right in brokering this constitution," Galbraith exclaimed, then added: "This is the only possible deal that can bring stability. ... I do believe it might save the country."

Failure of a liberal foreign policy: "If you've ever wondered how a President Kerry foreign policy would have turned out, look no further than the state of play with the two axis states who weren't dealt with in the "Bush unilateral way" - Iran and North Korea. President Bush has been following the Democrats' multilateral route with those two. He's allowed the Europeans to take the lead in dealing with the mullahs and has been working with Asian countries in negotiating with Kim Jong Il. Both tracks have failed, but you wouldn't know that from the silence of the Democrats. After deriding President Bush for "going it alone" and "not working with our allies" against Iraq, there is little for them to say when he follows their policy and it fails".

Historian Prof. R.J. Rummel has some excellent quotes from Hitler and other Nazis showing how socialist Nazism was. I liked this one from Hitler: "In 1919-20 and also in 1921 I attended some of the bourgeois [capitalist] meetings. Invariably I had the same feeling towards these as towards the compulsory dose of castor oil in my boyhood days. . . . And so it is not surprising that the sane and unspoiled masses shun these 'bourgeois mass meetings' as the devil shuns holy water."

There is a BIG reply to the gross claim that the US Army are "mercenaries" here

Chris Brand's news site is down again so I have put up his latest postings here

Below is a good cartoon about how the mainstream media see the world:



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

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

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

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

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26 August, 2005

FEMALE IQ FINDINGS: O VAST INCORRECTNESS!

"The Times" of London is a highly recommendable paper for its straight-down-the middle accounts of most things (unlike a certain New York publication). The fact that it is a Rupert Murdoch publication (think Fox News) probably has something to do with that. But I think even "The Times" was a bit courageous to print the following story (excerpt):

"A study claims that the cleverest people are much more likely to be men than women. Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for "tasks of high complexity", according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded. They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees. When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, said that he was uncomfortable with the findings. But he added that the evidence was clear despite the insistence of many academics that there were "no meaningful sex differences" in levels of intelligence".

Source

Before all my female readers delete their bookmarks to this site, let me explain. I am a psychometrician by trade so I do know a little about this. First, let me point out that British Journal of Psychology is Britain's top academic psychology journal. So it needs to be reckoned with. What it reports, however, has in fact been known to psychometricians for about 100 years. And that is that men and women have the same intelligence ON AVERAGE but the scatter of intelligence differs between the sexes. Female intelligence clusters much more closely around the average -- so there are fewer very dumb women and fewer very bright women. And that, I am afraid, is how the cookie crumbles. The geniuses tend to be men but so do the dummos. And I am sure most women have met plenty of the latter.

Update:

For those who want to look at the male/female ability question more closely, there is an exhaustive (and exhausting) coverage of the question here -- and that's just covering the mathematical ability component of IQ.

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What utter unscientific garbage! "A medical student who has worked for an abortion rights group and the director of a clinic that provides abortions were among authors of a report on the highly charged issue of fetal pain published Wednesday. The report, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, concluded that fetuses probably don't feel pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy". Premmie babies born long before that stage are complete human beings!

Dr Weevil has a nice put-down of that vast ego known as Brian Leiter. In case anybody misses it, the curculionidaceous one (Weevil) heads his post "Hybris in action". "Hybris" (more usually rendered in English as "hubris") is ancient Greek for "overweening pride" or "the pride that comes before a fall" -- pretty apt for Leiter. Keith Burgess-Jackson generally describes Leiter more simply -- as "nuts". Both descriptions have much truth in them.

Bush gives in (maybe) to pressure over illegal migrants: "The Bush administration has signalled a big policy reversal on illegal immigration, telling a worried public that it is "rightly distressed" about the nation's porous borders. The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, made what amounted to a U-turn on immigration policy after months of rising pressure from congressmen and law enforcement officials.... Announcing a series of measures, Mr Chertoff said he would build camps for illegal migrants, speed up deportations by providing more judges and lawyers and raise the number of officers tracking down fugitives ignoring expulsion orders.... Most polls indicate that more than 80 per cent of Americans believe border protection is too lax.... The American immigration system is close to collapse. This year, the federal authorities have caught almost 500,000 illegal migrants, with 142,000 from countries other than Mexico. That has forced officials to release many before they reach deportation hearings.

Vast British muddle: "Islamic extremists boasted of how they would never be thrown out of Britain yesterday as a promised crackdown by the Government turned into a shambles. The hardliners taunted Home Secretary Charles Clarke after he promised action 'within days' to start deporting dozens of foreign preachers of hate living in the UK... Al-Siri's defiance came as Mr Clarke's plans were attacked by leading lawyers and moderate Muslims. They warned the deportations policy would breach international law, create massive confusion and turn Muslims against the Government.... Mr Clarke said the measures were necessary to counter the 'real and significant' terrorist threat facing the country after the suicide bombings in London on July 7. But legal experts said that, under human rights laws, he could not send anybody back to countries where they could face torture or death.... The deportations are likely to be tested in the Court of Appeal, House of Lords and, ultimately, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in a process lasting up to three years. Ten extremists rounded up by officials ten days ago have already lodged appeals."

What Israel needs to do: "Anyone who thinks that more Israeli concessions comprise the magic way to peace should look carefully at the experience of the past 12 years... We agree with Mr. Sharon's argument that the defense resources spent on protecting outlying Gaza settlements could be better allocated to protect the country against terrorism. Israel should adopt a policy of relentless and massive deterrence, guaranteeing that Gaza-based terrorists will be hit very hard every time they fire rockets into Israel. For such a deterrence policy to work, it is essential that Washington support Israel when it defends itself against terror."

I am a bit slow off the mark on this story but note this offensive NYT article from a so-called historian: "The United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today's volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits". And see the article thoroughly taken apart by someone who DOES know his history.

A heartening story here of how the blogosphere helped at least one member of the U.S. military.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big selection of blogospheric reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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25 August, 2005

SCREEN POLITICIANS FOR PSYCHOPATHY?

In business, results count so I doubt that many successful businesses are headed by psychopaths. Psychopaths generally get found out pretty quickly so would not last long in a stable business. In politics, however, judgments of success or failure are much more arbitrary and I have no doubt that Bill Clinton and John Kerry would have been filtrered out of politics if they had had to pass a test for psychopathy. There are a few interesting excerpts from an article on the topic below:

Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters.. Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow. "These are callous, cold-blooded individuals," Hare said. "They don't care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse." He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life's savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said. Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. "Why wouldn't we want to screen them?" he asked. "We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?"

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It's a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren't just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We're worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they're lifting profits and stock prices, we're willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor's expertise in evoking ours. While they don't care about us, "they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them," says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.

Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish. "People see sociopathy in their personal lives, and they don't have a clue that it has a label or that others have encountered it," says Martha Stout, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of the recent best-seller The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books, 2005). "It makes them feel crazy or alone. It goes against our intuition that a small percentage of people can be so different from the rest of us -- and so evil. Good people don't want to believe it."

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it's extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego -- something he promotes rather than plunders. "The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self," Babiak says. "A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game."

My own research papers on psychopathy can be found here and here. Why I think Clinton and Kerry are psychopaths is spelt out here or here.

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ELSEWHERE

I want every one of my readers to read this story of murdered American journalist Steven Vincent. It is a story of great love, great courage and completely discredits an arrogant Leftist academic by the name of Juan Cole. The "expert" Cole even claimed that Iraq is a Mediterranean country! If you've got an old school atlas that you don't want any more, mail it to him!

Have you noticed the "Flag" button that now is placed at the top right of most blogspot blogs? It is there to enable readers to "flag" a blog as "objectionable". I say more about it here

Union thuggery defeated: "Northwest Airlines' success a blow for labor MSNBC "Northwest Airlines Corp.'s success in keeping its planes flying even after its mechanics walked off the job early Saturday could embolden other companies to play hardball with their unions. While the No. 4 U.S. carrier could still hit turbulence in the coming weeks, it has so far effectively used replacement workers and third-party contractors to replace some 4,400 striking mechanics, cleaners and custodians. Its apparent success could send tremors through other unions at Northwest, its beleaguered airline rivals and even other U.S. corporations, further weakening the organized labor movement."

A big airforce restructure: "When his Cabinet tried to get Calvin Coolidge to up the budget for military aviation back in the days of open cockpits and silk scarves, the president is said to have quipped, 'Can't we just buy one airplane and have the pilots take turns?' It is a joke many in today's Air National Guard would not find funny. Under the Pentagon's plan, which its base-closing commission will vote on this week, 30 Air-Guard sites from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Houston to Portland, OR, would be closed or downsized; 29 of 88 flying units would end up with no aircraft."

Drunkablog has a good post on all the Leftist twists and turns that are going on to try to save the bacon of the lying Prof. Ward Churchill.

Ovi Magazine is out again with over 40 illustrated articles inviting you to kick back on the couch for a couple of hours with a nice cup of tea. Iran, Sami culture, Saudi Arabia, catastrophes, Cyprus, Cuba, humour, superstitious people, umbrellas, robbery, iMacs and shocking games are among the content.

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

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

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

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

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24 August, 2005

Brookes News Update

Australian economy, recession and the trade cycle : The RBA's monetary policy is something we should be deeply concerned about, especially when we use a historical perspective
The US economy in the '90s was never what it seemed under Greenspan: The Fed failed to understand what happened to the American economy in the 1990s. This is why it could not explain the impending recession. Now it is repeating the same mistakes
Liberal Government fails on labour market reform and the right throws a tantrum: Why, after more than 20 years of intellectual grandstanding, our rightwing failed dismally to persuade the great majority of Australians that effective minimum wage rates destroy jobs
Labour market reform versus unemployment: Keith Hancock, former research officer for the ACTU is another critic of market solutions who never allows economic reasoning to reveal the role unions played in creating our unemployment problem
Paul Krugman lies about social security and slimes Bush: May Paul Krugman sink like the sun in the West and fade from memory

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ELSEWHERE

Plain speaking from Australia's conservative leadership: "Peter Costello is urging radical Muslim clerics to leave Australia if they do not share the nation's values ahead of today's national terrorism summit organised by the Prime Minister. As Muslim leaders gather in Canberra to discuss the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Treasurer has warned Australia cannot afford to be ambivalent about the teachings of extremists. John Howard has urged Islamic leaders to take a greater role inrejecting violence but he has been more restrained than the Treasurer. "If you don't like those values, then don't come here. Australia is not for you," Mr Costello said yesterday. "This is the way I look at it: Australia is a secular society, with parliamentary law, part of the Western tradition of individual rights."

An excellent speech about Leftist intellectuals: "Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, spoke to the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Iceland about the attraction which intellectuals feel for socialism and similar ideologies. He quoted Hayek's observation that intellectuals are drawn to visions and ideas, as well as to systems which accord them a greater share of influence and power. Intellectuals feel 'under-valued' by the market, in that it puts a value on them less than they think appropriate. The case Klaus put was that the 'hard' version of socialism (ie communism) might be over, but the weak versions, including social democracy, the welfare state, and the 'social model,' now posed the threat of big and patronizing government, high regulation, and large-scale income redistribution. Intellectuals are attracted to this type of thinking because it elevates their importance and the chance to impose their ideas on a world which would otherwise reject them."

What an inspiration! "Mart Laar told the Mont Pelerin Society in Reykjavik that when he became prime minister of Estonia in 1992, after it regained its indepenendence, inflation was at 1,000 percent, the economy was shrinking by 30 percent a year, unemployment stood at 30 percent, and they depended on Russia for 92 percent of their trade. His government championed property rights through privatization, introduced free trade by abolishing tariffs, and pursued tax competition via a flat tax. Guess what? They have stable growth of between 6 and 7 percent. Inflation is 2.5 percent. The budget is balanced, unemployment is low, and they have a very high level of investment.

Canada has still got a navy?? "Canada is sending its navy back to the far northern Arctic port of Churchill after a 30-year absence. The visit by two warships to the area is the latest move to challenge rival claims in the Arctic triggered by the threat of melting ice. The move follows a spat between Canada and Denmark, over an uninhabited rock called Hans Island in the eastern Arctic region. A visit there by Canada's defence minister last month angered the Danes".

Betsy Newmark has an update on the official investigation into the lying Prof. Ward Churchill. Looks like there's a chance he might eventually get the boot.

The latest from the People's Democratic Republic of Venezuela: "Chavez gave a new vote of confidence to Castro's communist government Sunday, calling it a ''revolutionary democracy'' in which the Cuban people rule. People ''have asked me how I can support Fidel if he's a dictator,'' Castro said. ''But Cuba doesn't have a dictatorship -- it's a revolutionary democracy.''... During the nearly six-hour show, Castro and Chavez talked mainly about their joint social ventures, particularly in the health sector. Cuba has sent a fifth of its doctors to work in poor communities in Venezuela, in gratitude for massive shipments of Venezuelan oil under preferential terms."

Anarchists and jihadists: "Bombs, beards and backpacks: these are the distinguishing marks, at least in the popular imagination, of the terror-mongers who either incite or carry out the explosions that periodically rock the cities of the western world. A century or so ago it was not so different: bombs, beards and fizzing fuses. The worries generated by the two waves of terror, the responses to them and some of their other characteristics are also similar. The spasm of anarchist violence that was at its most convulsive in the 1880s and 1890s was felt, if indirectly, in every continent. It claimed hundreds of lives, including those of several heads of government, aroused widespread fear and prompted quantities of new laws and restrictions. But it passed. Jihadism is certainly not a lineal descendant of anarchism: far from it. Even so, the parallels between the anarchist bombings of the 19th century and the Islamist ones of today may be instructive..."

British Muslim leaders 'in denial' claim: "Britain's most powerful Islamic body is "in denial" about the prevalence of extreme views among its members, one of its founders has told the BBC. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) pledged to tackle extremism "head on" after the 7 July attacks in London. But in a BBC Panorama special, Mehbood Kantharia and other prominent British Muslims question the MCB's commitment to meeting this challenge. The MCB has branded the programme "deeply unfair" and a "witch-hunt".... Mehbood Kantharia was a member of the MCB's central working committee between 1997 and 2004, but has since left the organisation. He told Panorama: "It is my personal view that because they are in a state of denial they cannot become real, you know, sort of like, forthright, really forthright about wanting to do something about the kind of extremism that prevails."

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

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

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

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

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23 August, 2005

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week. My three big postings of the week about happiness research are obviously the bit of writing I am most pleased about. I posted them both here and on "Blogger News". The list of all my recent postings on "Blogger News" is here. I have also combined my three postings on happiness research into a single, slightly revised, article, which you can find here or here. Other than that:

On Dissecting Leftism I note the strange birth-order theories of Frank Sulloway. Birth order can be linked to various things but Sulloway thinks it dictates our politics.

On Greenie Watch I note that methane is a far better candidate than CO2 for a gas that is altering our climate

On Political Correctness Watch I note that businesses run by women make lower profits

On Education Watch I note that only about half of this year's U.S. high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college

On Gun Watch I note that New Mexico State University's mascot, Pistol Pete, is to lose his pistol

On Socialized Medicine I note how people can be dying from superbugs in public hospitals with nobody in officialdom being very concerned.

On Leftists as Elitists I note the high life lived by Leftist intellectuals at taxpayer expense.

On Tongue Tied I explain the recent minor drama in Australia about banning the word "Mate"

On Majority Rights I note the joke that is American border control

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ELSEWHERE

The usual Leftist hypocrisy: "How DARE you imply that we hate freedom?" That's what red-faced Liberals say, even as they protest against the war for freedom in Iraq and call our President a war criminal. Liberals are such hypocrites, and I for one am sick of it.... Conservatives, on the other hand, truly love freedom - so much so that when necessary, they are willing to fight to preserve and protect it, as well as to export it around the world and extend it to other peoples less fortunate than we are".

An excellent quote from the Gipper: ""I think the so-called conservative is today what was, in the classic sense, the liberal. The classical liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them. Well, that today is the conservative."

Strip the federal courts of their power: "Congress is guilty of enabling judicial activism. Just as Congress ceded far too much legislative authority to presidents throughout the 20th century, it similarly has allowed federal judges to operate wildly beyond their constitutional role. In fact, many current members of Congress apparently accept the false notion that federal court judgments are superior to congressional statutes. Unless and until Congress asserts itself by limiting federal court jurisdiction, judges will continue to act as de facto lawmakers. The congressional power to strip federal courts of jurisdiction is plainly granted in Article III, and no constitutional amendments are required. On the contrary, any constitutional amendment addressing judicial activism would only grant legitimacy to the dangerous idea that social issues are federal matters."

Meet Christopher Hitchens' other half : "For most American liberals, the name Hitchens is enough to draw blood -- to the face. But for Sunday newsreaders in Britain, it is another Hitchens who has been riling audiences with his blistering polemics: Christopher's younger brother, Peter. Winner of the Columnist of the Year at the 2005 British Press Awards, Peter Hitchens is an authentic conservative, rooted in the classic liberal values of the Enlightenment era. But he wasn't always this way. A former Marxist, Hitchens famously told his university tutor, upon being late for class, 'I am sorry -- I was trying to start the revolution.' It is from the vantage point of a former leftist that he feels he understands his opponents better than most conservatives."

France creeping in the right direction: "France's commitment to economic liberalism will be tested today when the French Government begins to assess bids for the 12 billion euro privatisation of the country's toll motorway network. Deeply held feelings of patriotism in France are sure to create clashes as pressure builds on the country to adopt the kind of free-market economics widely favoured in Britain and North America".

A good post: "I actually felt myself become a Republican today. It was around 10am, when I read the latest update of the Cindy Sheehan saga in CNN.com. I then shot over to read some blogs about it, and perused the comments in some of them, which was nothing but a long series of petty (albeit entertaining) partisan bickering. Then it happend. The good little Democrat in me tied the little noose around his neck and jumped off the stool. He just couldn’t take it anymore. Take what? The whining. The constant whining by the extreme left about the reasons for war, the incompetence of this administration, and how we’ve all been lied to, and how we should pull out of Iraq immediately, because, *gulp* our soldiers were in danger. Guess what folks….they signed up to join the Army, not the boy scouts....."

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

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

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

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

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

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22 August, 2005

IS HAPPINESS RELATIVE?

The one finding from happiness research that seems absolutely secure is that happiness is to a large degree relative. The latest article to that effect is here. Having more of some desideratum like money than others around you do seems to matter much more than the absolute amount of that desideratum that you have. Note this quote, however, "Another survey, by Town & Country magazine, found those with more money tended to have better marriages, were happier with their friends and found their jobs more interesting."

And note that this report shows that although money in general may not buy you happiness, SOME of the expenditures that a higher income enables DO make you happier. And this article summarizes the same set of findings as: "Money can buy happiness and the best investment advice may be as simple as the sports shoe slogan: just do it. That's the conclusion drawn by researchers who set out to identify what sort of spending made people happiest. The psychologists, from Cornell University and the University of Colorado in the US, compared "experiential purchases" – things such as holidays, concerts or dining out – with "material purchases" such as clothing, beauty products, stereos or personal computers."

And money can have an indirect role too. There are here some excerpts from an anti-individual, pro-Green rant by an Australian professor that nonetheless had this good point in it: "The findings fit those of other studies that have shown people for whom "extrinsic goals" such as fame, fortune and glamour are a priority tend to experience more anxiety and depression and lower overall well-being than people oriented towards "intrinsic goals" of close relationships, self-understanding, acceptance, and contributing to the community. These results are, in turn, consistent with other research that shows materialism - the pursuit of money and possessions - breeds not happiness but dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, anger, isolation and alienation. In short, the more materialistic we are, the poorer our quality of life." And that is where capitalism comes in. Because it makes us all richer, it enables us to concentrate more on non-material things instead of spending all our time scrabbling for a living. I have shown elsewhere that materialistic ambition is highest in poor countries and lowest in rich countries.

So we have three mutually-contradictory findings from happiness research so far: 1). Happiness is static. Nothing much alters it for long; 2). Happiness can be improved, but only at the expense of others doing less well than us; 3). Some things can make us happier in absolute terms regardless of what others do. If that does not represent strong confirmation of my previous conclusion that happiness research is still in its infancy and hence not useful for guiding policy, I don't know what would. My suspicion is that what we will eventually find is that happiness is like most other personality traits -- mostly genetically determined but with some room for environmental influences.

In the meantime, however, as this article says: "Psychologists and 'happiness researchers' are using the finding that Calcutta slum-dwellers and Masai nomads are as happy as American businessmen to argue not only that wealth doesn't necessarily make you happy, but that this shows that investment in economic growth should be replaced by social programs. The trouble is that one conclusion doesn't necessarily lead to the other." Or as Tim Worstall notes with only a touch of sarcasm: "So-called 'happiness research' has been discussed at length recently with economist and TCS contributing editor Arnold Kling writing and blogging about it, and economist Tyler Cowen responding at his blog. That exchange, and the mention of a new book on the subject piqued my interest and some further research led me to the answer: 60% marginal tax rates, that's what will make society happy."

In other words, Leftists are arguing from the findings about static happiness that "If we take your money away it won't hurt". Odd that people do seem to get really peeved if you rob or defraud them, though! And ask anybody if they would rather spend their own money or have someone else spend it instead and there is not much doubt about what the answer will be. And that's the point: What people want matters. If some arrogant git claims that he can spend my money better than I can, he deserves to be treated like the con-man he is. The fact that overall level of happiness is mainly a personality disposition or trait which remains fairly stable across a wide range of circumstances does NOT mean that people are uninterested in improving those circumstances or getting the occasional "high". But Leftists don't care what people want, of course. "We know what's best for you" is their arrogant mantra.

When Leftists argue from the relative nature of happiness, however, they have a slightly better point. There is some logic in saying that if everybody had exactly the same amount of money, nobody would be made unhappy by others having more. Leaving aside the totalitarian nature of a society that would be needed to achieve such a situation, however, it overlooks that there are heaps of ways that people envy one-another. If they did not envy the next guy for having more money they might envy him for having better looks etc. Trying to equalize people is just a battle against human nature. But Leftists have always ignored the evidence about human nature of course.

I am going to call my posts on happiness to a halt here but there are some further interesting readings here and here and here and here and here

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ELSEWHERE

Janet Napolitano, governor of Arizona, says: "There is a real emergency at the Arizona-Mexico border. Law enforcement and other county and city entities have been pleading for assistance, and I could not wait any longer for the federal government to do its job. That’s why I declared a state of emergency in Arizona last week. It allows us to allocate more state money to much-needed border enforcement. Arizona’s border with Mexico is in drastic need of federal attention, but the federal government has done little to shore it up. As a result, criminality is alive and well along the border, preying upon Arizonans as well as the people desperate to get into the United States."

We mate with people who are genetically similar: "The reason our friends seem a bit kooky, and our mates may seem strange compared to ourselves, is that opposites attract. Right? Nope. A large body of research suggests that we pick our friends, as well as our mates, because underneath it all they are very much like us. So if our friends are kooky, and our mates a bit strange, chances are we are too. And the latest study in this ongoing research takes it a little further. We can blame it at least partly on our genes. People tend to like others who have the same inheritable traits, so we often choose friends and mates who are genetically similar to ourselves. "People prefer their own kind," says J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. "Extroverts favor extroverts; traditionalists, traditionalists."

What goes around comes around: "The "Chuppies" of China are quite prepared to "Buy American." A public opinion poll of China's emerging urban middle class found that high-quality personal care toiletries and consumer electronics lead the list of most desired American products. Apparel and fashion accessories and music and videos are close behind... "These findings show the urban consumer market in China has a great potential for foreign, and especially American, exporters," said Fei-Ling Wang, International Affairs professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "It confirms there is a sizeable group of urban residents in China with considerable disposable income who are developing brand-name consciousness, becoming savvy consumers and acquiring a taste for foreign goods."

I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists a good article by Andrew Bolt about the taxpayer-funded high life of Leftist intellectuals.

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

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

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

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

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21 August, 2005

HAPPINESS AND MONEY -- CONTINUED

I have just put up here another article that points to fairly static overall levels of happiness despite improvements in economic circumstances. Such observations are of course entirely predictable if we regard happiness as a trait rather than a state.

The trouble is that we DON'T usually think of happiness as a trait. We see it as something that happens to us -- as a temporary state rather than as an enduring trait. We mostly seem to think of it as the sort of thing that happens inside us when we win a prize or a lottery of some sort. And we see UNhappiness as event-related too. If a man's wife leaves him that will usually make him unhappy and if his dog dies that will make him VERY unhappy. But a new love and a new dog will of course immediately restore or even improve the man's happiness. But even without a new love or a new dog, happiness levels will eventually creep back to where they were. In fact even clinical depression (where people are having suicidal thoughts) usually wears off after a couple of years. So it doesn't really matter what a shrink says or does to help a depressed person as long as he can manage to keep the patient alive for a couple of years.

So clearly there is huge conceptual confusion in all this. Perhaps the language we use to talk about the subject is inadequate. And a cross-cultural note tends to confirm that. There have for many years been international surveys done which purport to find out which countries have the happiest people. But the big difficulty that the researchers found was that happiness is not always an adequately translatable concept. Perhaps the most surprising case of that is that even a language as closely related to English as German does not have any real equivalent to our word "happiness" (nor do they have a good equivalent for our word "pink" and nor do we have anything like an adequate translation of their word "Reich"). The commonest German translation of "happiness" is "gluecklich" but that really means "lucky", and I well remember an old German Jewish man with whom I was discussing that many years ago. He told me: "gluecklich I am but happy I am not". He meant that he was lucky to have escaped Hitler but still missed much of his old life. So can we really have as a key economic variable something that is not even translatable into German?

One approach that might seem hopeful for researchers into the subject is to talk about "happiness state" versus "trait happiness" but from my point of view as a psychometrician, however, that seems unlikely to help. I spent 20 years measuring psychological traits and have had many papers published on that subject but I have always regarded the measurement of psychological states as too difficult for me. Why? Because what people say about their states seems to be almost the same as what they say about their traits. The best-known example of an attempt to measure both states and traits in the same field is almost certainly Spielberger's work on state/trait measurement of anxiety and I have myself worked with Spielberger's questionnaires. But I found that the questions used to index the two gave generally interchangeable results: People who described themselves as anxious "at the moment" were also highly likely to describe themselves as anxious "in general". And that is not necessarily just a measurement problem, either. It surely stands to reason that people who are anxious "in general" are also more likely to be anxious on any given occasion. That implies to me that very short-term changes in states may be detectable (e.g. the "high" someone gets on being told they have won a lottery) but the sort of medium term change economists are looking for probably is not.

Yet given that traits are by definition both stable and general behaviour tendencies and given that traits are almost always shown to be highly genetically inheritable, any consideration of traits as an economic variable is surely beside the point. Economists are looking for the results of something, i.e. a change of some sort, and something that is inherently not very susceptible to change is surely a strange place to look for change. So it seems to me that any study of happiness as an economic variable must specifically look at states or "moods" -- and that does not generally seem even to be attempted. And the tradition of mood research in psychology exemplified by Joe Forgas and others usually seems to treat moods as short-lived rather than as being the sort of long-lasting change that economists have been looking for.

So my conclusion is that happiness research is still in its infancy and attempts by economists and others to use it for political purposes are totally premature and irrelevant.

Nobody is going to take the slightest notice of that conclusion, however, so I think I will have to soldier on and continue looking at what is being said about the subject. And I think it time I noted that Leftists are not only using the static nature of happiness to justify higher taxes but they are also using it to attack freedom and variety of choice.

There was a 2004 NYT article (reprinted here) arguing that too much choice can be bad for you. Too much choice is said to be confusing, paralysing and dissatisfying. This is actually a very old idea -- one made much of in Alvin Toffler's 1971 book, Future shock -- and it is ideal fodder for Leftists who want to dictate to people. As good totalitarians have always said, they can say: "See. Choice is bad for you. WE will make all your decisions for you".

This article has some reasonable comments on that: "In a recent New York Times op-ed touting his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, psychology professor Barry Schwartz criticized political reforms aimed at expanding choice. He argued that "for many people, increased choice can lead to a decrease in satisfaction. Too many options can result in paralysis, not liberation."... There is much to be said against this thesis. First, if choice makes us unhappy, why do so many of us stop patronizing mom-and-pop stores and rush to Wal-Mart the moment we get the chance?... Choice in the marketplace grows out of individual freedom. I want shoes. Many people are free to sell me shoes. That presents me with choices, requiring me to pay attention and to discriminate. What's the alternative? Government control aimed at limiting choice. Where's the evidence that that makes people happy?... Schwartz is a professor. If someone were to suggest that too many books, journals, and magazines crowd the shelves, that all this choice makes people unhappy, and that government could serve us better by restricting the number of choices, Schwartz and his ilk would scream like banshees".

There is of course some truth in saying that choice can be "blinding", as Toffler put it, but everything has its costs and the key question to ask is what if YOUR particular choice (of jam or anything else) were taken away? You would not like it. I myself feel irritated by the vast range of jams, mayonnaise etc that I have to go through in the supermarket to find just the one I want -- but I get REALLY irritated if my particular favourite is not among those on offer. The basic conclusion is that if we want our OWN choice of something, we have to tolerate OTHER people being given their choice too. Freedom has its costs. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise. But take that freedom away and you run into REALLY big costs -- in happiness and much else besides.

And there is the larger question of whether getting what you want makes you happy. Often it may not. As Oscar Wilde memorably wrote in his 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan: "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it". And having choices and options may be an instance of something that people seek but which does not make them happy. But surely only someone who thinks he is a very superior being (e.g. the typical Leftist) would see that as a reason to stop giving people what they want. Who are we to sit in judgment on other people's choices and on what will make them happy? As Queen Elizabeth I asked the King of Spain centuries ago: "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?"

Whew! I think that will have to be enough from me on this subject for today but there is heaps more that I COULD comment on so I probably will in due course. For further reading in the meanwhile, Gregg Easterbrook's book on the subject is reviewed here and here. And I haven't even mentioned Martin Seligman yet. As a prophet of happiness, Seligman's surname is very apt. It means roughly "Blessed man".

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ELSEWHERE

Letter to the Left by Christopher Hitchens: "How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of 'missing' Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?"

Elephants in Academia has a comprehensive posting on the absurd attacks on GWB because he tries to keep fit. Australia's Prime Minister also has a well-known daily exercise routine but I have never heard him criticized for it. Since we are contantly told that excercise is a good thing, the attacks on GWB smack of desperation. I would have thought he was setting a good example.

I normally click on to an article by Bush-hating Jonathan Chait just to find something I can laugh at but his comment on the batty Mother Sheehan was actually rather sensible. Excerpt: "There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing. Or maybe liberals think that having served in war, or losing a loved one in war, gives you standing to oppose wars but not to support them. The trouble is, any war, no matter how justified, has a war hero or relative who opposes it." And, unlikely as it seems, there is a marvellous story about Reagan here that is very much to the point.

And, just to lighten things up a bit, a very apt cartoon from Today's Toons by Pookie:



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

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

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

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

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20 August, 2005

HAPPINESS AND MONEY

Happiness seems mainly to be a stable personality trait. We tend to be born as either happy or miserable people. And no prizes for guessing who the miserable ones are. There is a long history of evidence showing that conservatives are happier. The most recent is from Gallup: "Even when accounting for partisan differences in marital status and household income, Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats and independents to be very happy." Leftists are miserable sods, to put it plainly -- but you just have to hear their constant whining about everything in our society to know that.

How happy we are does NOT seem to depend strongly on external circumstances, though it does of course depend to SOME degree on what happens to us. So one person will be happy in circumstances that would make another person miserable. I know. I have observed perfectly cheerful people among the street-sleepers of Bombay. Some people are almost always happy. Some people are almost always whining. Some people just have happy natures and some do not. So looking at what it is that makes people happy is largely futile. In statisticians' terms, you are looking for variance in something that is invariant. Or, putting it another way, correlations with something that is invariant will NECESSARILY be zero. So if you are interested in running a public policy that respects other people, you need to look at what they CHOOSE, not at what makes them happy. And most people choose (for instance) more money rather than less.

And I think that this article shows beyond doubt that degree of happiness is a stable disposition: "Most people who live with serious disability or illness, such as kidney failure, appear to adapt well and maintain a healthy outlook on life, new research reports. This trend may be surprising to some -- the report also found that people without serious illnesses tended to underestimate the level of happiness in these patients. "We think it is encouraging that for at least some illnesses, life seems to (eventually) go on and that people come to experience good and even normal mood levels," study author Dr. Jason Riis of Princeton University in New Jersey told Reuters Health. "We cannot adapt to anything. But we are generally more resilient than we think," he said. In the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Riis and his colleagues note that this is not the first study to show that people can adjust to good and bad life events. For instance, a nearly 30-year old study found that paraplegics were not that much less happy than lottery winners."

And some more evidence that happiness is a personality trait: "In a boost for exam-flunkers everywhere, a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal found the levels of satisfaction with life recorded by 550 Scottish men and women aged 84-85 were unaffected by their mental abilities, either when they were young or much later.... The study group, all born in Lothian, Scotland, in 1921, were remarkable for the fact they had all undergone tests of mental ability when they were about 11 years old, and the records had been preserved. The tests were repeated a few years ago, when they were about 79. They each ranked their happiness on a scientifically validated satisfaction scale."

In recent years, Left-leaning economists such as Ross Gittins have discovered the academic psychology literature on happiness -- and it seems to have given them some relief. The research shows, of course, that higher incomes do not automatically buy you more happiness. Any observer of Hollywood knew that long ago and I guess people have in fact known it for about 4,000 years. In 1 Timothy 6:10 St. Paul probably went a bit too far in saying that "The love of money is the root of all evil" but you get the idea. And the whole story of Job in the Old Testament runs along similar lines. But these days, "If money does not make you happier, then take it away!" is the Leftist reasoning. So that old bit of wisdom has found a new use as the latest pathetic excuse to hike taxes. There is another dummo academic (Richard Layard) reported here who points to the fact that getting richer does not necessarily make you happier and who thinks therefore that government meddling is indicated.

So why are SHOULD we worry about giving everyone higher incomes if that will not make them any happier? The simple answer: "Because almost everybody WANTS higher incomes" does not seem to have occurred to everybody yet. They seem to think that if money will not necessarily make you happy then governments should not bother with efforts to get more of it to you. But satisfaction, comfort, convenience, leisure options, security etc are not the same as happiness. The strongest external influence on how happy you are is probably your relationships with others. Given satisfaction with your relationships, you will probably remain roughly as happy through a wide range of incomes. But you will still want more of the things that money can buy if you can get them. So you will still say "Yes, please" to the possibility of more money.

There is a reply to Gittins on the economic issues here but it should also be noted that money does have SOME influence. As this article reports: "A new survey of national wellbeing has found the people happiest about their lives are those earning more than $150,000 a year. Those least happy earn less than $15,000 a year".

And this article also tends to show that there are ways in which money can buy happiness: "Two studies released yesterday shed new light on the importance of economic circumstances, and undermine earlier findings that poor people are just as happy as the rich. Money doesn't buy Happiness - or Does It? by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at Melbourne University, shows that when wealth - not just income - is measured, the rich are indeed happier than the poor. Earlier research that focused only on income found very little difference in the reported happiness of high-income and low-income people. Mark Wooden, the study's co-author, said: "This has led some people to say money is not that important, relative to other things." However, when people's assets were taken into account - the value of their houses, cars, art works, even stamp collection - a different picture emerged."

This is a big subject so I will undoubtedly have more to say on it later. Maybe tomorrow.

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ELSEWHERE

British coverup coming apart: "A clerk at the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) was suspended last night for allegedly leaking secret documents about the Stockwell Underground shooting of an innocent man to a television station. The suspension will come as a severe blow to the credibility of the commission, which is handling its first big inquiry since it was opened 18 months ago to replace investigations by police themselves".

The Bush boom: "Why President Bush seemingly gets no credit for the strong economy is one of the enduring political mysteries of our time.... Most polls show the president’s economic approval rating around 40 percent or even less. Scott Rasmussen, who does extensive consumer and investor polling, shows that the confidence ratings of both are about 15 percent lower than in late 2003. Meanwhile, a splendid group of economic data points show clearly the effectiveness of the president’s marginal tax-rate reductions of two years ago. The tax-cut package was in large part directed at stock market and business capital formation, both hard hit a few years back. This was the correct target. Share prices have recovered about 70 percent in recent years, with a number of widely tracked indexes, like the NYSE and the S&P small- and mid-cap indexes, now trading at all-time highs. The economy itself is growing at about 4 percent per annum since the tax cuts, with business investment leading the surge".

Great progress in China: "The major reform achievement has been in privatizing state enterprises. The private sector accounts for 70% of gross domestic product. There are 200 large state companies -- basically, they are in utilities, some in heavy industries, some in resource industries. Traditionally, this is where governments have invested. China Mobil and China Telecom are huge, but these are natural monopolies. Even France and Britain had those large state companies for a long time. If you take these away, China is a private-sector economy"

Whew! I have just finished the big job of cleaning out my blogroll -- deleting links that no longer work or links that led to blogs that are no longer regularly updated. If anybody thinks I have unfairly deleted them, let me know.

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

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

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

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

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19 August, 2005

FRANK SULLOWAY: A VERY STRANGE PSYCHOLOGIST

In 2003, there was published in one of the premier journals of psychology an article about conservatism that attracted widespread attention -- most of it derisive. There is a summary of it here. It purported to be a meta-analysis -- a survey of the existing evidence on its topic. It came to the hilarious conclusion that people like Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro were conservatives! As political psychology is my major area of academic expertise, I replied to it immediately here -- pointing out that the authors had not the slightest understanding of what conservatism actually was and pointing out what a strange "meta-analysis" it was -- seeing that it ignored the majority of published academic research papers relevant to its topic. It was, in other words, a champion effort at ignoring any evidence that did not suit its authors.

Most of the authors of the paper seemed to have some UC Berkeley affiliations and one of the authors was Frank Sulloway, who is better known for his theory that birth order is a powerful explanation of political attitudes and behaviour. Firstborns are conservatives and later-borns are the rebels, apparently. Perhaps because of their love of simplistic theories, psychologists generally took this wacky theory seriously. I doubt that there are many readers here who cannot think of examples from among their own friends and relatives who contradict that theory. I can certainly think of some later-borns among my relatives who are so far Right they are almost out of sight. So a suspicion that Sulloway was picking and choosing his cases in the evidence for his birth-order theory certainly springs immediately to mind. And given that he and his colleagues did just that in the article I alluded to initially above, that suspicion firms up immediately into an assumption for me.

And that Sulloway's birth-order theory is very vulnerable to critical assessments of the evidence for it is also shown by Sulloway's extraordinary behaviour when other researchers began to question it. He resorted to threats of lawsuits to suppress the criticisms! As far as I know, this is completely unheard of in science. Criticism is the lifeblood of science. If it were not for criticism of the existing theories were would be no advances in knowledge and we would still believe that the sun revolved around the earth, rather than vice versa.

And, as this article says: "For example, the greatest revolutionary of our time is Che Guevara. He was a firstborn, and Sulloway says that supports his theory. Huh? Mao Tse-tung was a firstborn. Sulloway says that supports his theory. Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the French Revolution, the symbol of revolutionary rebellious behavior, was also a firstborn, and Sulloway says he, too, supports his theory." And look at those facts in the light of something Sulloway said in his New Yorker profile: "If anyone ever, ever discovers a radical revolution led by firstborns and opposed by laterborns, then I'm out of business"

The only amazing thing is that there are still many psychologists who support Sulloway. It shows how much Left-leaning social scientists love their oversimplifications. There is a big article giving an extensive history of the whole affair here. The bit I liked best was this: "In an effort to refute his critics, Sulloway worked with Stanford statisticians and Berkeley researchers to double-check both his findings and the way he carried out his statistical treatment. A large part of the research involved what is known as meta-analysis". In other words, he relied on another Berkeley "meta-analysis" to back up his claims. Given what I know of the dishonesty and incompetence of the other Berkeley meta-analysis I have mentioned, that really puts the last nail in the coffin of Sulloway's theory for me.

If you want another example of the way Left-leaning psychologists cling on to absurd and vastly oversimplified theories, see here

Reference:
Jost, J.T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A.W., & Sulloway, F.J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375. (PDF)

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ELSEWHERE

Civilization goes back a long way in Europe too: "Bulgarian archaeologists have unearthed about 15,000 tiny golden pieces that date back to the end of the third millennium B.C. - a find they said Wednesday matches the famous treasure of Troy. The golden ornaments, estimated to be between 4,100 and 4,200 years old, have been unearthed gradually during the past year from an ancient tomb near the central village of Dabene, about 75 miles east of the capital, Sofia, said Vasil Nikolov, an academic consultant on the excavations. "This treasure is a bit older than Schliemann's finds in Troy, and contains much more golden ornaments," Nikolov said. Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur German archaeologist, discovered the site of ancient Troy in 1868 and directed ambitious excavations that proved he was right. The treasure consists of miniature golden rings, some so finely crafted that the point where the ring is welded is invisible with an ordinary microscope."

The joke that is American border control: "New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson declared a state of emergency Friday in four counties along the Mexican border. The declaration said the region "has been devastated by the ravages and terror of human smuggling, drug smuggling, kidnapping, murder, destruction of property and the death of livestock. ... "[It] is in an extreme state of disrepair and is inadequately funded or safeguarded to protect the lives and property of New Mexican citizens." New Mexico shares 180 miles of border with the Mexican state of Chihuahua. "The situation is out of hand," Richardson said Friday night on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight," noting that one 54-mile stretch is particularly bad.... In announcing the state of emergency, Richardson -- a Democrat who served in President Clinton's Cabinet -- criticized the "total inaction and lack of resources from the federal government and Congress" in helping protect his state's residents along the border. "There's very little response from the Border Patrol," he said on CNN. "They're doing a good job, but they don't have the resources."

Your good old taxpayer-funded U.N. again: "The United Nations bankrolled the production of thousands of banners, bumper stickers, mugs, and T-shirts bearing the slogan "Today Gaza and Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem," which have been widely distributed to Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip, according to a U.N. official. The U.N. support of the Palestinian Authority's propaganda operation in the midst of the Israeli evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip has provoked outrage from Israeli and Jewish leaders, who are blaming Turtle Bay for propagating an inflammatory message that they say encourages Palestinian Arab violence".

British blogger, Snowball thinks it was only partly a bungle when British police repeatedly shot an innocent Brazilian electrician on a London underground train. He thinks they were intent on assassinating someone inconvenient to them. The original police story certainly does seem to be coming apart.

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

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

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

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

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

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18 August, 2005

THE UNABOMBER GOT IT WRONG ABOUT LEFTISTS

From time to time people claim that my account of Leftist psychology is similar to that put forward by the well-known "Unabomber". I generally ignore such comments as they result from a pervasive confusion in modern psychology about the nature and benefits of self-esteem -- which for a time was almost idolized. As I say elsewhere:

"The self-esteem gurus would no doubt argue that Hitler had to have LOW self-esteem to perpetrate his anti-social evils. If, however, the self-proclaimed "leader" (Fuehrer) of the "master-race" (Herrenvolk) was short of self-esteem, what meaning could the concept have? If Hitler had low self-esteem, how would we ever recognize high self-esteem? We would need some pretty circular definitions, I suspect.

This does however highlight the seeming paradox that many of those who seem to have very high self-regard also often seem to a have high need for that self-regard to be reinforced. The person with excess ego also seems to have a high ego-need. This is hardly surprising, however. There is much in the world and in life that tells each of us about our inadequacies, failures and mistakes so any person who has a high level of self-love has a lot of attacks on that self-love to fend off, counteract and defend against. The higher one's self-love, the more there is to attack and the more one will have a need to get it justified in some way. Humility would make life a lot simpler and realism a lot easier. It is no wonder that the inflated ego of the Leftist makes him/her an habitual denier of reality.

My account of Leftist psychology concedes that Leftism can arise from a number of causes but highlights the above "big ego" syndrome as dominant among Leftist intellectuals and ideologues. So my claim is that Leftists have BIG egos -- i.e. they think extraordinarily well of themselves. They think they are beneath any requirements of proof for what they say etc. But I also point out that this will ordinarily be a large disjunction from reality so the Leftist will need a lot of propping up for his ego. Nasty things like evidence contradicting his theories will lead to irrational denial and abuse of anybody mentioning the inconvenient facts.

The Unabomber, by contrast claimed that Leftists have LOW self-esteem. I quote:

"The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization." Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.

By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights advocates"

So as far as I can see, the Unabomber theory is exactly the reverse of the truth!

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ELSEWHERE

An Australian senator has just given a speech in parliament in which he lists innumerable examples of bias on the part of our major public broadcaster -- with biased treatment of stories about Israel and Iraq being the most prominent of course. America's PBS has to some extent been reined in recently but the Australian equivalent is still a Leftist propaganda machine. Give the Senator some feedback. He needs it, and he appreciates it. His email address is senator.santoro@aph.gov.au

A GOP President doesn't veto GOP legislation: How surprising!: "Like pardons and executive orders, vetoes are among the cherished privileges of the Oval Office. Ike liked them. So did presidents Truman and Cleveland - and both Roosevelts. But apparently not George W. Bush. In fact, well into the fifth year of his presidency, he has yet to issue a single veto. It's a streak unmatched in modern American history"

A very unfree country: "On Monday, May 9, a man named Mike Fisher, from the town of Newmarket, New Hampshire, performed an act for which he will pay dearly under penalty of law. He engaged in a consensual commercial transaction with another willing individual. He performed a manicure. Mike Fisher, outlaw, enemy of the realm, planted himself outside the state Board of Cosmetology, invited his customer to join him, and committed the unpardonable sin of performing a manicure without a license granted by the very agents who work inside... He had already been "spoken to" by state Attorney General Kelley Ayotte the week before. When Ms. Ayotte asked him not to perform his "stunt," Mike nicely said he fully intended to provide the service to anyone who was interested in hiring him. When he kept his word, he was promptly arrested by the Concord, New Hampshire, police. Mike spent the night in jail, because he was unwilling to pay for either the license or the mandatory "training" required to get it. Instead, he studied and trained himself, advertised to others that he was going to offer his services at a low price, and willingly accepted a customer, under the watchful eyes of agents of the Granite State".

Mentally deficient TSA screeners: "Infants have been stopped from boarding planes at airports throughout the U.S. because their names are the same as or similar to those of possible terrorists on the government's 'no-fly list.' It sounds like a joke, but it's not funny to parents who miss flights while scrambling to have babies' passports and other documents faxed. Ingrid Sanden's 1-year-old daughter was stopped in Phoenix before boarding a flight home to Washington at Thanksgiving."

"Anti-ACLU" fights for religion in public life: "For years, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have fought to remove any trace of religion from government and public life, and for years they've won. Now the ACLU is facing a challenge from groups such as the Alliance Defense Fund, one of several Christian law firms formed in the 1990s. From its base in Phoenix, the ADF says its goal is to defend religious liberty, the sanctity of human life and the traditional family against any person or group who attacks those principles."

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

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

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

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

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

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



17 August, 2005

TOLERANCE IS A TWO-WAY STREET

There are editorials and opinion pieces like the one below popping up all over the world lately. The one below is by Des Houghton and appeared in the Brisbane "Courier Mail" on Saturday August 13, 2005

I'm getting a little tired of do-gooders preaching the virtues of multiculturalism. would like to see them espouse the virtues of integration with similar vigour. I'm not saying multiculturalism is a dirty word. But there is a risk that by over-stressing its benefits we may encourage some minorities to think their extreme beliefs are superior to the values of this country's majority.

More than 90 per cent of us still proclain a Christian heritage. We have welcomed no fewer than six million migrants since World War II, and more are arriving every day. The peaceful integration of migrants into Australian society is one of our enduring national achievements. I have friends whose parents were born in Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Italy and China, who retain many of the values of their parents' homeland while embracing the values of this grand land.

Most of us now have friends and colleagues from other cultures who have enriched our lives. We welcome newcomers, provided they come through our front door. And we need not apologise to any one for our record on immigration. This country's tolerance of different religious beliefs, social mores and political views is at the heart of what it means to be Australian and no one understands this more than migrants who have sworn allegiance under the Southern Cross.

For years, however, any politician wishing to court public approval - especially in metropolitan regions - has nailed his colours to the mast of multiculturalism. Terrified of appearing "racist", our dripping wet liberal commentators, ignorant schoolteachers and simpering politicians have bent over backwards to appease minorities.

Prove to me that this kind of "multiculturalism" has not encouraged branch stacking by political parties and electoral pork-barrelling that verges on corruption.

In welcoming migrants we also have opened the door to a few extremists who use our democracy to espouse an abhorrent political order which preaches violence and subjugates women. In Dubai recently I went to the mosque and took an introductory course in the six pillars of Islam. It was fascinating. To its true believers, Islam means peace. We must not fear Muslims; only a very small number of them are hellhounds bent on destroying the West.

When John Howard meets Muslim leaders next week he must remind them that while we value their cultural traditions, they must also respect ours. He must also make it clear that migrants of all faiths are welcome, but that our national unity and stability demands a high level of integration, not segregation. This can be achieved with tolerance. Tolerance is the core of civilisation, and it is a two-way street.

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ELSEWHERE

McDonald's bombing mastermind jailed for life: "An Indonesian court today sentenced the alleged mastermind of 2002 bombing of a McDonald's restaurant to life in prison, saying the Islamic militant planned the attack that came just weeks after the Bali nightclub attacks. Agung Abdul Hamid, 38, was found guilty of being the "field co-ordinator and financier" of the early evening bombing that killed three people in the South Sulawesi provincial capital of Makassar. The dead and injured were all Indonesians."

Arlene Peck thinks that Australians are less tolerant of the Islamists than people in the U.S. and U.K. are.

More hate-speech from San Francisco's Mark Morford: "I have never been to a big creepy megachurch. This is my first confession. I have never been to, say, Lakewood Church in Houston, the biggest glossiest megachurch of all, which just dumped a staggering $75 million to renovate the former stadium for the Houston Rockets and turn it into a massive pulsing swaying arm-raisin' eye-glazed weirdly repressed House o' Jesus. ... I mention all this because megachurches are the latest phenomenon, the hottest trend in the Christian godfearin' biz, arena-scaled piety polished up and bloated out and aimed like a giant homophobic cannon straight at the gloomy face of a new and improved God ... But you really don't need to attend one of these surreal spectacles to realize that most of us should kneel down right now in heartfelt gratitude that we have never been forced to endure, say, the all-paunchy-married-male revue of a Promise Keepers rally, or the bizarre pious cheerleading of a Harvest Crusade in L.A."

Nutty Swedes: "In the last four years, 50% of those who have been refused asylum in Sweden have gone underground and have simply vanished from the Board of Migration's statistics. And of the half who have actually been sent home, a full 20% have come straight back to Sweden to try their luck again. That is in accordance with the rules of the Geneva Convention, which states that asylum seekers who have been deported to their homeland have the right to return and have their case tried again. Each time they return must be treated as a new case..... In 2004, a total of 2,026 supervised deportations cost 148.3 million kronor, up 34% on the year before. The rise is blamed on the increasing demands for more staff to help take people out of the country. One deportation requires at least two people, said Tina Hendriksson, a finance inspector at the Prison Service's transport office. "Lately more people have been needed. That's because those who are deported are in poor psychological or physical condition, or simply don't want to be expelled," she told Dagens Nyheter. "We have also been forced to charter whole planes to a greater extent than earlier," added G"ran Stenbeck, head of the transport office. In fact, the transport office chartered 92 planes in 2004 - sometimes for just one person - at a total cost of 12.5 million kronor".

Clueless Norwegians: "New figures from Norway's immigration authority (Utlendingsdirektoratet, UDI) indicate that nearly 7,000 would-be refugees disappeared from asylum centers in 2003 alone. Another 1,136 have disappeared so far this year, reports newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad. Around 60 percent of those who left the asylum centers, which aren't run as locked institutions, are between 18 and 34 years of age. Around 20 percent are younger than 18. No one can say what has happened to those who applied for asylum but left with no forwarding address while their cases were being processed".

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

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

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

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

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

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



16 August, 2005

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I offer an historically-based definition of conservatism

On Majority Rights I note a surprising victory in Britain -- where race-relations law was applied to protect whites from discrimination too.

On Greenie Watch I cast a skeptical eye on the story about Siberia heating up

On Blogger News I look at the controversy over whether the earth's atmosphere in getting warmer -- as measured by satellites and weather balloons.

On Political Correctness Watch I note that it is now officially incorrect in Britain to portray Osama bin Laden as a bad guy!

On Education Watch I look at whether American High School students really are poorly educated or whether they are just lazy.

On Socialized Medicine I note a striking example of how bureaucrats cover up the failures of public medicine

On Gun Watch I have a post called "All the news that's fit to slant" which notes how even FALLING deaths from gun use can be reported as bad news in the media.

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ELSEWHERE

Offensive British class-consciousness: "British Airways faced a fresh row last night over flying with empty seats while refusing to take passengers still stranded at Heathrow airport by last week's wildcat strike... Around 600 frustrated travellers were still waiting for their flights last night and BA admitted that the backlog would take until tomorrow to clear. However, the airline refused to say how many flights had departed with empty seats in first and business class because of its refusal to offer an upgrade to marooned economy-class customers.

How the pathetic British police "get tough": "Police have expressed regret for the treatment of a great-grandmother who was woken by officers at 4am, arrested and kept in custody for 13 hours. Eileen Kearsey, 79, says she was treated like a suspected terrorist when police followed up a complaint made two months earlier by her neighbour. She was eventually released without charge at 5pm the next day, after being questioned, fingerprinted and having a DNA sample taken."

Virginia: Court sustains loyalty oath in schools : "A federal appeals court yesterday upheld a Virginia law requiring public schools to lead a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance Edward Myers of Sterling, a father of three, claimed the reference to 'one nation under God' in the Pledge was an unconstitutional promotion of religion. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling that the Pledge is a patriotic exercise, not an affirmation of religion similar to a prayer. 'Undoubtedly, the pledge contains a religious phrase, and it is demeaning to persons of any faith to assert that the words 'under God' contain no religious significance,' Judge Karen Williams wrote. 'The inclusion of those two words, however, does not alter the nature of the pledge as a patriotic activity.' Myers and his attorney, David Remes, said they have not discussed whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court."

Leftist blogger Balletshootz has an interesting essay about political leadership in which he traces Democrat failure to their namby-pamby and vacillating ways. I think he has a point, though the constant comparisons of GWB to a chimp are pretty juvenile. The Left never seem to have enough of making that comparison, which doesn't say much for the depth of their ideas. I liked this quote: "Along the far left, the rhetoric is too shrill in tone and anti-authoritarian in attitude to signal fitness for any kind of leadership. These are the howls of the malcontented, the powerless, the wounded animals flailing for attention."

Leftists hate the truth: "I think it was Barbara Walters who unwittingly gave away the leftist media's secret the other night while supposedly heaping high praise on the newly dead Peter Jennings. Between gushes of admiration and sighs of sorrow not seen since the apostles lost their Lord, Walters waxed poetic about this Canadian-born socialist whose mother had raised him to hate America. On and on she went until, near the end, she offered the highest praise a leftist could fathom: "What made Peter great was that he knew there was no such thing as the truth." If there is no such thing as the truth then what was Jennings using as the basis for his reporting? Republicans know. He made it up".

A thought-provoking article from Paul Sheehan: "It's time someone praised and defended reckless teenage girls and young women who behave badly, dress provocatively, engage in risky sex, and get pregnant. They are the normal ones. The rest of us are the deviants. They are behaving in the most natural way. The rest of us are mutants.... Children are the most important asset in our culture, so society should be structured around this central reality. Instead, we are structuring society around consumerism - a treadmill of bigger homes, more possessions, more holidays, more glamour - for which we run the risk of becoming impoverished. When the pattern of peak reproduction at peak fertility is broken, as it is now, women are forced by economic circumstances or social pressure to postpone pregnancy. Collective fertility inevitably falls, usually below replacement level. Societies such as Australia's and most in Western Europe now depend on imported fertility. Immigrants".

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

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

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

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

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

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



15 August, 2005

ASIANS -- SOME COMMENTS FOR WHITE NATIONALISTS:

I have lived my entire life in a highly multicultural society so I am acutely aware of racial and ethnic differences. I grew up in an Australian country-town (Innisfail) that was only half Anglo. The rest were Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Maltese, Yuogoslavs, Chinese, Sikhs, TIs (Melanesians) and Aborigines (blacks). And when with that perspective I look at my fellow Anglo-Australians I see people of admirable restraint, fortitude, good humour and moderation in all things. But that is only the majority. There is also a minority who are shitheads and morons.

Now I could sound like an uncomprehending elitist in saying that. Maybe I am just wiping off working class people and glorifying middle class people like myself. It is however if anything the reverse. If anything I find something like three times as much good sense in the workers as I do in the bourgeoisie. But there are shitheads in both camps. And I find that even the difficult cases among the workers are not much of a problem to me personally. Because I was born into an Australian working class family, working class thinking and conventional wisdom is an open book to me. I know all the key words and key phrases and I defer to no-one in my knowledge and enjoyment of the brilliant Australian slanguage. And I certainly did put all that to the test when I spent a couple of years as a boarding house proprietor in a "depressed" area (Ipswich) of Brisbane. I was really dealing with the hard cases there. A significant number of them in fact came to me directly from "the big house" (jail). Yet such is the power of a shared culture that I was in all cases able to handle to my satisfaction the people concerned. I always knew the right words to use. The people concerned were a considerable problem to others (and to themselves) but they were well within my capacity to handle -- though the time I threw a druggie through a closed door was approaching my limits. Words are wasted on druggies. So there is no doubt that I am as much an insider to basic Anglo-Australian culture as anyone ever will be. I am of my culture and I appreciate it and enjoy it.

But much as I am at home among my own people, I am still delighted at the sterling qualities I find in Asians. I find scarcely any shitheads among them. And I put my money where my mouth is. I actually share my large house with Asians -- mostly South Asians. None of them are of course flawless human beings but when I think of their relaxed good humour, their intelligence and their unfailing politeness and restraint I cannot see that they are inferior to anyone or that they are anything but an asset to any environment they inhabit.

Now somebody will want to tell me that it is different in England. And it certainly is different superficially. The way just about EVERY small business in London is run by South Asians is pretty amazing (though the way English shop-assistants treat their customers makes it a lot less amazing). And when I am in England and I walk into one of those Asian shops I am greeted with the wariness and reserve that experience has taught the proprietors concerned. But I only have to exchange half a dozen words with the people concerned before all that changes. Because I genuinely like and admire Indians, that message gets through almost as fast as a bullet and it is soon smiles all round. I remember once when I was in an Indian shop in London and some old English prick was telling the Indian proprietor how great the English were and how the world owed them a living. As I walked out, I "accidentally" shouldered him hard enough to knock him over. I felt embarrassed that a fine Sikh gentleman had to put up with such crassness from the prick concerned.

And nor am I talking about immigrant Indians only. I have also lived in Bombay and I can only admire the cheerfulness, enterprise and good humour of the street-people there.

I certainly don't think that all races are equal any more than I think all people are equal but I also think it is absurd to say that there is something special about someone just because his skin is pink. Each case must be judged on its individual merits but it seems to me that on any non-racial scale of values the Asians average out well ahead. And we live in a century that will see that proven. Ironically, the poison that has held the Asians back so far is of Western origin -- socialism. If any people are instinctive capitalists it is the Indians and Chinese.

And the claim that Asian cultures are tribal is a grave misconception. Asian culture is a culture of reciprocity. So if you treat them well or do them a good turn you generate enormous feelings of obligation in return. So when I walk into an Indian shop where I am known and buy three samoosas for my lunch I will occasionally get a fourth one popped into the bag as a gesture of goodwill. What is problematical about a culture like that?

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ELSEWHERE

Sanity creeping in to the TSA at long last: "The federal agency in charge of aviation security is considering major changes in how it screens airline passengers, including proposals that an official said would lift the ban on carrying razorblades and small knives as well as limit patdown searches. The Transportation Security Administration will meet later this month to discuss the plan, which is designed to reduce checkpoint hassles for the nation's 2 million passengers. It comes after TSA's new head, Edmund S. "Kip" Hawley, called for a broad review in hopes of making airline screening more passenger-friendly. An initial set of staff recommendations drafted Aug. 5 also proposes that passengers no longer have to routinely remove their shoes during security checks. Instead, only passengers who set off metal detectors, are flagged by a computer screening system or look "reasonably suspicious" would be asked to do so, a TSA official said Saturday. Any of the changes proposed by the staff, which also would allow scissors, ice picks and bows and arrows on flights, would require Hawley's approval, this official said, requesting anonymity because there has been no final decision".

Arizona: Challenge to law on illegals dismissed: "A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 200 in Arizona, which prohibits illegal aliens from receiving some public benefits, has been dismissed by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The suit, brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Friendly House, a Phoenix-based nonprofit social service agency, was dismissed by U.S. Appeals Court Judges Alfred T. Goodwin, Johnnie B. Rawlinson and Thomas M. Reavley, sitting as a visiting judge. The panel said the plaintiffs had not shown they had been injured by implementation of the new law. 'The appeal is dismissed for want of jurisdiction. The district court record reveals that there was no case or controversy between plaintiffs and the state of Arizona when pleadings were before the district court,' the panel said."

An interesting argument here in favour of splitting Germany up into East and West again. The still socialistic East keeps Leftist politicians in power in the country as a whole. Rather like the way the socialistic North keeps Labour politicians in power in Britain as a whole.

Chris Brand has just done some new posts with lots of news about the increasing media acceptance of IQ

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

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

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

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

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

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



14 August, 2005

THE MOST MORONIC ARM OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

Or the most visibly moronic anyway

The obnoxious TSA again: "No, I haven't got some great alternative but do I need to in order to notice that there's something amiss with the way the matter is dealt with? Here a coat must come off, there it doesn't matter; here you should remove your glasses, there it's unnecessary. Here the wrist watch needs to be put into that little tray, there it can stay on your wrist. And it goes on like that, from one airport to the next. And if you assume you have a clue what the next one will demand of you, you are in for a surprise. And for threatening looks, even words, should you make mention of the fact. Yes, words. Several times, after I make polite mention of the inconsistency of their procedures, a gruff TSA official has told me to 'shut up.' Other times I have been told that if I say another word, I will be arrested. And I do not mean a word like, 'I am about to carry some bombs on this plane,' but, rather, 'Why is there no consistency in how this procedure is being administered?'"

Does the TSA take the prize for bureaucratic stupidity? "Pretend you work for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You're a high muckety-muck at Houston Hobby Airport, and you've learned that a flight with 136 passengers and 5 crew will make an emergency landing there. It seems some passengers discovered a note in their seat pocket claiming a bomb was on board. You're responsible for getting these 141 souls off the plane before they're blown to kingdom come. Do you: 1. prepare to evacuate them ASAP when the plane touches down; or 2. find your airport's most isolated runway, order the plane to land there, and then leave everyone aboard for an excruciating hour. We can all guess which option the TSA brainiacs chose when Southwest Airlines Flight 21 was diverted to Houston Hobby last Friday."

Still no precautions against another Lockerbie: "Nearly four years after 9/11, Americans flying on passenger planes remain vulnerable to another terrorist attack in the air because of lax screening of the millions of tons of cargo loaded into the belly of aircraft, a three-month CNN investigation shows. While screening of passengers and their luggage has been shored up dramatically since hijackers commandeered four planes and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, little has changed regarding the security of cargo, according to an FAA inspector and the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission."

DHS might let air passengers keep shoes on: "The Department of Homeland Security is seeking new security screening technology that would allow air travelers to board flights without removing their shoes. The department also is testing a privacy-sensitive version of an X-ray machine that has drawn complaints because although it is able to detect weapons beneath clothes, the initial version also provided a nude image of travelers. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is asking companies to develop a machine that can examine shoes while still on passengers' feet. Agency officials hope to begin testing this winter. The agency also is testing a version of the contentious backscatter X-ray machines that will outline the human form while screening for weapons, unlike the current design that shows a realistic image of naked bodies."

More like perverts than security people: "Consider if one is looking for a needle in haystacks, and haystacks are passing through one's presence on an hourly basis. Would anyone grab a random handful of each haystack that passed by and expect to find said needle by examining in minute detail each piece of hay in that handful? Of course not. Yet most air travelers think an invasive search of a 45-year-old man traveling with his wife and kids, or running a rod down the skin-tight top between the breasts of a pretty 16-year-old blond girl with a tan and painted nails (all 20 of them -- I counted) makes them safer. I might join the march in the streets protesting this idiocy, but of course I'd be the only one on parade. My fellow citizens might even be provoked by my lack of support for our nation's hardworking security people."

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Big victory for Arnie (and California): "In a victory for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Supreme Court overturned two lower courts on Friday and put back on the ballot a voter initiative that will determine who draws up California's state legislative districts. If voters approve Proposition 77 in November, it would take the responsibility for drawing the state's political map out of the hands of California's Democratic-controlled legislature and give it to a panel of retired judges. Schwarzenegger hopes the idea will enable more moderate politicians to win legislative districts that in the past have been carefully divided into Democratic and Republican strongholds. A legal battle erupted long before the election because its sponsors changed the language of the petition voters signed in 17 places before submitting it to state officials. Two lower courts ruled that the changes tainted the process but California's top court disagreed in a 4-2 decision, saying the changes were unlikely to have misled those who signed the petition.... The ruling ordered election officials to proceed with putting Proposition 77 on the November ballot."

A Leftist repents: "What he and a large part of the mainstream liberal-left don't and won't confront is that they have become the fellow travellers of the psychopathic far-right.... If you start by refusing to look Baathism or Islamism in the face, the logic of blaming everything on Tony Blair and George W Bush pushes you into making ever more excuses for the extreme right.... good motives of tolerance and respect for other cultures have had the unintended consequence of leading a large part of post-modern liberal opinion into the position of 19th-century imperialists. It is presumptuous and oppressive to suggest that other cultures want the liberties we take for granted, their argument runs. So it may be, but believe that and the upshot is that democracy, feminism and human rights become good for whites but not for browns and brown-skinned people who contradict you are the tools of the neo-conservatives. On the other hand when confronted with a movement of contemporary imperialism - Islamism wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar - and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal to boot, they feel it is valid because it is against Western culture. It expresses its feelings in a regrettably brutal manner perhaps, but that can't hide its authenticity.

Immigration and the welfare state: "More and more of my constituents are asking me when Congress will address the problem of illegal immigration. The public correctly perceives that neither political party has the courage to do what is necessary to prevent further erosion of both our border security and our national identity. As a result, immigration may be the sleeper issue that decides the 2008 presidential election. The problem ... will not be solved easily, but we can start by recognizing that the overwhelming majority of Americans -- including immigrants -- want immigration reduced, not expanded. Amnesty for illegal immigrants is not the answer. ... We must end welfare state subsidies for illegal immigrants. ... Without a welfare state, we would know that everyone coming to America wanted to work hard and support himself."

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

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

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

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

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13 August, 2005

A DEFINITION OF CONSERVATISM

Leftists talk a lot of nonsense about conservatism being opposition to all change, when every conservative I know would like to see a HEAP of things about the world changed. So what IS the basic core of conservatism? Below is how Keith Feiling, an eminent historian of the British Conservative party, defined what he saw as the lasting core of British conservatism over a couple of hundred years:

"It is a scepticism, amounting to disbelief in any purely intellectual process as a means to explain rights and duties or to justify political obligation. They distrust general notions such as "the community" and would argue that the despotism of reason may cloak as much sinister self-interest and self-deception as any other tyranny. Burke made eloquent how he hated 'the very sound' of abstract rights, insisting that men do not act on metaphysical speculations. And even more. His teaching was that the rules of politics are but morality enlarged, and that all moral questions are mixed questions; not to be resolved by pushing some one abstract principle to its extremity which must end in force, open or concealed, but always by reference to relation and circumstance and moral effect......

And it is not hard to see how that caution flows through to distrusting government, distrusting theory-based "reforms" and advocating individual liberty etc. (if my link to Feiling's article gets overloaded, you can also find it here and here)

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Anti-democratic "liberals" (so what else is new?): "Liberals have been beating their collective breast in recent years over the Bush administration's post-9/11 assault on civil liberties. But Michigan Democrats--from Gov. Jennifer Granholm to the State Board of Canvassers--have joined ranks with a radical, 1960s-style Trotskyite group to deny state residents the most basic of all rights: the right to vote. The group, which lives in a Malcolm X-inspired fantasy world and calls itself By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), has been engaged in a long guerilla campaign to prevent the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) from getting on the state ballot. This initiative, backed by Ward Connerly, the California businessman who successfully spearheaded a similar effort in his home state, seeks to end, once and for all, racial preferences in public universities and state government. Polls have repeatedly shown that over 60% of Michigan voters oppose preferences"

Big labor destroys American jobs: "It is truly an amazing thing that the MSM (main stream media) has covered the breakup of big labor so much over the last week without mention of how anti-American labor always has been.... A union seeks to reverse economic progress out of economic ignorance and Democratic exploitation. Instead of getting a higher wage by being worth a higher wage to a free employer, the union seeks to get it through extortion: "give it to me or I'll go on strike, and with my Democratic friends in Washington I'll make it illegal for you to fire me while I'm on strike." This has nothing whatsoever to do with economic progress. It is one part economic ignorance and one part the Democratic exploitation of labor for their money and votes. It is shameful, disgusting, and anti American.... While the Democrats have legalized this domestic extortion, they have not been able, despite their best efforts, to prevent Americans from raising their standard of living by buying cheaper and better goods from overseas. This means that unionized American companies must close down and eliminate the union labor that made the higher priced, lower quality domestic goods. Unions therefore have destroyed major American industries, caused huge unemployment, not raised the general wage level, stolen from the poor, and deposited workers in the unemployment lines without a sense of how to contribute in a free country".

Far-Left lawyers: "the ABA opposes even laws that prohibit adult incest -- a position that would disgust the vast majority of Americans. The ABA also advocates not just abortion on demand but federal and state funding of it -- a position far outside the mainstream. And even in this time of war, the ABA opposes the federal law that requires universities accepting federal funding to allow the armed services to recruit on campus. ...the ABA's "Special Committee on Gun Violence," ...advances the view (according to its Web site) that "the perception that the Second Amendment is somehow an obstacle to Congress and state and local legislative bodies fashioning laws to regulate firearms remains a pervasive myth." This is a stunningly extreme (not to mention misinformed) statement. ...Within the ABA there is some hushed concern about its stagnating membership and creeping irrelevance to the practice of law. But precious few insiders are willing to recognize that the ABA is reaping what it has sown for decades: Its increasingly vocal advocacy of an increasingly extremist agenda appeals only to a minority of the profession."

A great post from an American expatriate in Tokyo. One excerpt: "Night or day, the Ginza district of Tokyo is impressive (actually Ginza is just one urban marvel in greater Tokyo), a cacophony of lights and pristine shop windows containing some of the most creative contemporary commercial art I've seen a longtime -- far better in design and aesthetic impact then some of the crap (to use Morgan Spurlock's word) that the non-commercial art elite tells us to digest (occasionally financed with tax dollars). The architecture and general design scheme around me was something I'd call postmodern sci-fi. The future had finally arrived and capitalism's mark was something that would have made Ayn Rand proud. I couldn't help but contrast the beauty, life, and dynamism around me with the stale and oppressive conformity and drab ugliness of an anti-capitalist ambience ("art" by bureau decree). The free people who walked around me were not obedient clones to an ideology "for a better world," they were manifestations of a better world - bourgeois materialism taken to its limits".

What a narrow escape America had from getting another psychopath (after Clinton) as President! There is still more coming out about the defamatory lies John Kerry told about Vietnam. Without the media covering up for him he would never have got past first base. Note this article: "Vietnam veteran Steve Pitkin claims that John Kerry pressured him to lie in 1971 when he claimed U.S. soldiers engaged in atrocities during the Vietnam War. Pitkin had been a key participant in John Kerry's infamous "Winter Soldier" hearings of the same year, which concluded that the U.S. military was allegedly engaging in war crimes against the Vietnamese..... Pitkin discloses that his lack of candor in the 1971 film clip actually reflected his efforts to avoid giving Kerry what he so desperately wanted: war stories about how American troops in Vietnam were daily committing war crimes in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide in that 10-year conflict. In the end, Pitkin said, he gave in to Kerry's pressure and made up allegations of war crimes."

Realism about nukes: "Yet the notion that the nuclear genie can be willed out of existence through the efforts of right-thinking people is as absurd as it is wrongheaded. Just as guns and knives will be with us forever, so too will the bomb. We need bunker busters because North Korea and Iran are using underground facilities to build weapons that threaten us, and we must be able credibly to threaten in return. We need to have nuclear tests because the reliability of our principal warhead, the W-76, has been seriously called into question, and China must not be enticed to compete with us as a nuclear power. In neither case does the U.S. set a 'bad example.' Rather, it demonstrates the same capacity for moral self-confidence that carried America through World War II and must now carry us through the war on terror. Looking back after 60 years, who cannot be grateful that it was Truman who had the bomb, and not Hitler or Tojo or Stalin? And looking forward, who can seriously doubt the need for might always to remain in the hands of right? That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it is one we ignore at our peril"

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

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

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

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

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12 August, 2005

Brookes News Update

Is the world suffering from a glut of global savings? Explains why the idea that there is a glut of global savings is nonsense
Liberalism breeds terrorism Being a rational thinker, it is often impossible to understand how Democrats can be so stupid
Why should Israel retreat from Gaza? Will the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza be a victory for Muslim terrorism
Islamic fundamentalism? It just snuck up. Thanks to Muslim terrorists Britain's 'Bobbies' no longer just carry a nightstick as they have for generations but are touting submachine guns through London's theatre district
The ACLU: abortion right, death penalty for serial killers wrong? The Left are hypocritical in their arguments. They want to protect the guilty while saying it's OK to kill those helpless victims who can't defend themselves
Sewer Art Has Become "The Art of Law" California Attorney General Democrat Bill Lockyer used taxpayers' money to fund anti-American 'art'
Environmentalists Demonize CAFTA Objections leveled against the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by the environmental establishment organizations are exaggerated

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I have to laugh a bit at the pomposity of Leftist blogger Neiwert. Apparently the Califonia chapter of the Minutemen has gained some Nazi hangers-on and one of them unfurled a Swastika flag at a recent rally. Neiwert is of course condemnatory. If it had been a hammer and sickle banner, however, it would no doubt have been seen as quite chic. Being myself a libertarian, the evil twins of Communism and Nazism are abhorrent to me and in my view anything associated with mass-murder should be abhorrent to all decent people. But that puts Neiwert's type outside the realm of decent people as they are only too quick to at least excuse, if not admire, such mass-murdering creeps as Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Trotsky etc.

Confirmation of my analysis of Leftism from an unlikely source. The following (dated August 11) appeared on a site called "Revolutionary Left": "In my attempts to research the contribution of the Hippocratic school to psychiatry I came across [Dissecting Leftism]. Not sure how it came up in a search, but anyway; I just thought I'd share this piece of sheer idiocy with everyone. I mean, this guy equates "leftism" with Nazism... rrright- and he has a PhD? Look at the list of his other websites- "PC watch," "Greenie Watch" and "Education watch." Why does education need to be "watched?" .... He's right on about me though, I'm a leftie because I want attention"

There is an hilarious story from Germany's major newsmagazine here saying that America is collapsing in the face of economic growth in China: "China's steep climb has left America in a collective state of shock. The era of American dominance is heading towards its end, the century of Asia - with China as its central point - has begun. . For most experts, it is only a question of time until the Chinese economy surpasses the American. .nearly everyday the Americans experience a feeling that was earlier unknown to them: They are being trumped. .Two unequal competitors are facing off in this struggle: There are the Chinese bursting with self-confidence . and there is the USA, economically and militarily number one by a long distance, but weary and increasingly plagued by self-doubts". The fact that America is in fact surging ahead economically because it can give all the shit jobs to impoverished Chinese to do somehow gets ignored. Leftists never can see the obvious.

Amazing media hypocrisy: "Nothing heroic done by American troops in Iraq is likely to make headlines in the New York Times or be featured on the big three broadcast network news programs. That fact has now been belatedly recognized in a New York Times opinion piece, but with a strange twist. After briefly mentioning a few acts of bravery in Iraq -- including a Marine who smothered an enemy grenade with his own body, saving the lives of his fellow Marines at the cost of his own -- the Times' writer said, "the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II." Think about that spin: The reason we don't hear about such things is because of the Pentagon, Bush and "the culture at large."

Black racism: Leftist, of course: "Conservative African Americans Tuesday slammed liberal black activist Dick Gregory for referring to a Cybercast News Service reporter as a "white boy" during a nationally televised cable news program Monday night. Gregory later apologized for the remark. The exchange took place during the "Hannity & Colmes" program on the Fox News Channel. Gregory and Cybercast News Service Senior Staff Writer Marc Morano discussed comments Gregory made during an Aug. 6 march in Atlanta commemorating the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Reading from Morano's article, co-host Sean Hannity asked Gregory to confirm whether he had made a number of controversial remarks during the event. The activist readily acknowledged that he had referred to Republicans as "white racist thugs" and called the United States "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet." But, when Gregory hesitated in his responses, Hannity turned to Morano for confirmation. "You don't have to confirm what I said," Gregory charged. "I've already said it. So I don't need no white boy to come on and say yes, he said it."

Good comment from Medved: "Media stories about the London bombing suspects suggest they became radicalized because of the 'oppression of Muslims around the world.' While it's true that hundreds of millions of Muslims live in miserable circumstances, who's actually responsible for that oppression? Fifty nations boast Muslim majorities and not one of them boasts economic prosperity and a functioning democracy. ... The true oppressor of Muslims is Islam itself, with teachings that destroy any chance of progress, peace or freedom."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again and quite well-done this time. Too often you get desperate attempts to be funny that just make the whole thing hard to follow.

There is also a big new lot of posts up from Chris Brand, with his usual total disregard for political correctness.

And Wicked Thoughts put up quite a range of funny-but-serious posts yesterday.

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

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

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

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

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11 August, 2005

A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF LEFTISM

This was written back in the 50s but there is still much truth in it. Some excerpts:

Strictly speaking, although he calls himself one, the modern liberal is not a liberal at all, but a collectivist. He is strongly defended by a dogma and when this is attacked he becomes contemptuous, derisive, and replies with verbal formulas and sarcasm. He has an unshakable, unrealistic conviction of his own infallibility and intellectual superiority.... Although modern liberals are actually few in number compared to true liberals or environmental liberals, their influence is felt out of proportion to their number because their anxiety presses them to force acceptance of their needs and since, by nature, they are clever, vociferous, and exceptionally articulate. They are the policymakers behind the scenes in government or the writers of articles of opinion in intellectual magazines and other media of communicatio

Characterologically this liberalism represents a misfired solution to the problem of guilt and anxiety: the anxiety gets bound up in political attitudes and ties, fixed to a specific and characteristic ideology. These "self-evident" truths the modern liberal sees as unshakable and unarguable, since any attempt to challenge them shakes the very core of his defenses and stirs up intolerable anxiety. The modern liberal ... is further from genital primacy [than the true liberal] and less capable of rational functioning. He expounds all the ideas of the true liberal, not any longer for their own sake, but because they give him the feeling of righteousness and purpose. His humanitarianism is largely rationalization. His concern for others is not at all sincere, as in reality he is quite venomous, and his sympathy for the underdog is merely a reaction formation. The modern liberal lives almost entirely in his intellect.

the [modern] liberal uses intellectual contempt, arrogance, and clever verbal castration. His wit is barbed, amusing at the expense of others. He is void of kind or gentle feelings, except superficially in his causes, and that of course stops all argument, since anyone who "feels so deeply" about the injustices of the world must be above reproach. This intellectualism is his chief defense against feeling, especially his guilt and anxiety which color and pervade all his attitudes. His anxiety makes immediate fulfillment of his needs imperative, so he tends to favor revolutionary rather than evolutionary tactics. Since his real problem lies elsewhere, he is never satisfied, but needs to advocate constant change and expediency rather than long-range goals

He can allow himself to be aggressive only in causes and abstractions. Any other aggression fills him with intense anxiety and leads him to pacify, compromise, appease. For this reason he is unable to assume responsible leadership whether it be in government or in raising a child. Privilege he wants as a right and not something that must be earned competitively. The liberal's intellectualism, guilt, and fear of the father leads directly to his egalitarianism. He feels guilt at his own success or advantages and is thus opposed to differences in social structure. Basically he needs to feel that all people are the same. They are brothers and should fraternize freely.

Many injustices are committed on the altar of social consciousness.... I do not mean to imply that a sense of social justice is pathological. One has to look at the source. In the [modern] liberal the express motives are not the real motives. There is a great difference between a stock altruism based on hidden guilt and a genuine feeling for the golden rule, reality based. This stock altruism is not open to argument, because the [modern] liberal does not argue rationally, rather he uses sarcasm to imply that any intelligent and reasonable person would think as he does. He supports his premise by rhetoric rather than logic. He mentions reason often in his arguments-and even enthrones it as a panacea but seldom is he open to it.

The modern liberal is contemptuous of capitalism. The expressed reason is that capitalism is cruel and heartless: the real reason is that capitalism is cruel to him, because it is a system in which individuals must compete on their own, which he cannot tolerate.[Thus the modern liberal advocates that the government interfere in the constructive work of others]. The expressed motive is to help those unable to succeed; the real motive is to eliminate success, so that he will not have to feel anxious and inferior.

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Lord love us! What has the world come to? In The Guardian, of all places, we find an article reporting that there is such a thing as general mental ability (popularly known as IQ) and that it is highly hereditary! I guess that after around 100 years of scientific evidence to that effect, the truth is getting just too hard to ignore. Excerpt: "Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry are trying to unravel how much genes, rather than environmental factors, affect a child's academic prowess. By analysing the test results of 6,000 twins, they were able to see clear genetic factors emerging for both numerical skills and reading ability. They compared test results for seven-year-old identical twins, who share the same DNA, with the results from non-identical twins, who only share 50 per cent of their DNA, to assess how much was down to genes. Yulia Kovas, who led the investigation, said: 'Our work shows that there is a substantial genetic overlap between maths and reading, but also between maths and general intelligence. 'It seems that there is a group of "general" genes that govern our achievements at school."

Further to my comments yesterday about Bruce Kovner, a regular reader who was once himself a NYC financial trader writes: "I knew him when I worked at CS in the early 90's. He was/ is everything he is described and even more. He was also fair in his dealings with banks when other hedge fund operators were complete shitheads. We sat down once for a conversation about markets. That conversation taught me a few things about trading which I haven't forgotten".

Blair gets a deserved boot up the backside: "Two of Britain's closest allies in the war on terrorism made scathing criticisms of the Government yesterday for being soft and indecisive in dealing with Muslim extremists at home. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both countries that co-operate closely with Britain against al-Qaeda, said that Tony Blair's Government had consistently failed to tackle Islamic militancy. In a farewell interview with The Times, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the outgoing Saudi Ambassador to London, said that he had been "going around in circles" during his 2«-year posting in a failed attempt to make Britain understand the danger posed by Saudi dissidents in London linked to al-Qaeda".

U.N. corruption: "A federal prosecutor investigating corruption in the $64 billion oil-for-food program issued the case's first criminal charges against a U.N. official, accusing a former Russian procurement officer of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from companies doing business with the United Nations. Alexander Yakovlev, 52, pleaded guilty to three counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, said David N. Kelley, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The charges could carry a penalty of up to 60 years in prison. The case against Yakovlev grew out of the United Nations' own investigation of its marred oil-for-food program, and it came on a day when a U.N.-appointed panel accused Benon V. Sevan, the program's former director, of receiving nearly $150,000 in kickbacks from a company run by relatives of former U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali"

There is an amazing post up on Strange Justice that shows what a huge problem are wrongful convictions in the USA and why so few get reversed.

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

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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10 August, 2005

EGO AND POLITICS

I often make the point that Leftists have big but weak egos. They think they are wonderful but need constant approval from others to reassure themselves of that. So they advocate anything that sounds good at the time regardless of any adverse long-term consequences that it might have.

The converse of that, of course, is that conservatives have no need of all that hoopla. They just quietly get on with lives that they are broadly satisfied with. Ronald Reagan, of course is an excellent example of conservative humility. As Nancy Reagan said: "I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie. He had absolutely no ego, and he was very comfortable in his own skin; therefore, he didn't feel he ever had to prove anything to anyone." And as Cal Thomas said: "He was hated for precisely the same reasons he was loved. He had convictions and made those without them look weak. ... He knew who he was before he came to office; he did not need the office to complete him." And Eamonn Butler noted Reagan's lack of egotism too:

"The pompous conceit of the media Establishment is parried by Reagan's own epitaph on his administration, which reveals his own complete lack of both pomposity and conceit, tempering his pride in having changed minds and changed events: "Men and women across America for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends, we did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.""

But Jeff Jacoby sums up Ronald Reagan's humility best. A small excerpt:

"But one trait has gone largely unmentioned: His remarkable humility.... But if no man was his better, neither was he the better of any man. That instinctive sense of the equality of all Americans never left him -- not even when he was the one with fame and power. I don't think I have ever heard a story about Reagan in which he came across as arrogant or supercilious. In a number of reminiscences this week, former staffers have described what it was like to work for the president. Several have recalled how, even when they were at the bottom of the pecking order, he never made them feel small or unworthy of notice. To the contrary: He noticed them, talked to them, made them feel special. Reagan climbed as high as anyone in our age can climb. But it wasn't ego or a craving for honor and status that drove him, and he never lost his empathy for ordinary Americans -- or his connection with them"

But, as great an example as Reagan was, one swallow does not make a summer so I thought readers might be interested in another example of an American conservative with vast influence but who nonetheless needs and seeks no praise or fame -- so much so that most people have never heard of him. I quote a few excerpts from an article about him by a Leftist journalist who, in a typically uncomprehending Leftist way, can only see the self-effacing manner of the man as "nutty"!

"If no one knows anything about Bruce Kovner, it is because he likes it that way. Yet the unassuming manner is camouflage for one of the most powerful people in the country, culturally, financially, and politically. Kovner, 60 years old and divorced, manages the largest hedge fund in the world and every year ratchets higher on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.... He's a neoconservative godfather. He is among the backers of the Manhattan Institute and the fledgling right-wing daily the New York Sun.... Most important, Kovner is chairman of the American Enterprise Institute. The right-wing think tank has supplied the government with the most powerful ideas in foreign policy in a generation... This is perhaps Bruce Kovner's signal (and shared) achievement: to underwrite what had been extreme ideas and bring them into mainstream discourse.... Now and then, Kovner's spending is directly political; last year, he spent a lot to re-elect President Bush. But his main interest has been quietly strategic: the idea factory. "Bruce is an intellectual. He understands the world of ideas," says Norman Podhoretz, the legendary editor of Commentary.... But again there is his outward manner: self-erasing. His press has been mostly limited to financial journals.... A socialite who encounters him at the opera is surprised by his schlumpy dress and regular-guy mien: "You'd never know he's a jillionaire." "One of his distinguishing characteristics is humility," says Thomas Carroll, president of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability. "If you meet him on the street, you would never know who he was. There's no fanfare, no pomposity, no effort to get people's attention." .... Kovner, over two decades, has underwritten the infrastructure the neocons have used to achieve their current prominence. On the fifth floor of the AEI building, the Project for the New American Century helped lay the ground for the Iraq war .... He plays visionary and psychiatrist to the AEI board. "He's brilliant," says Perle. "He's intellectually rigorous, balanced, and thoughtful.".... I gained the impression that everyone I had talked to gave me: that of a thoughtful, unpretentious, and highly reserved person, a man with a musical voice and a self-effacing manner"

And one of the comments about Kovner that the journalist records is insightful. It is a comment from another whizz in financial trading:

"Kovner's objectivity made him great. "If you can find somebody who is really open to seeing anything, then you have found the raw ingredient of a good trader-and I saw that in Bruce right away." Weymar told me that one of the most important qualities of a trader is ego strength, the self-confidence that allows a person to acknowledge his mistakes and not fall in love with his ideas. "The biggest risk in trading is hubris."

So we see again that a really strong ego leads to humility. It is weak egos who need to boast and cannot admit that they are less than wonderful.

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A reader has pointed out to me an amusing response to the Guardian article I mentioned yesterday. The article said basically that the poor were in desperate need of having more money shovelled at them. More money would reduce their stress and make them happy. But another constant Leftist theme that goes back at least as far as Marx is that money does NOT make you happy (See e.g. here). So which is it? Why bother redistributing such useless stuff? One never expects logic or consistency from the Left, of course.

What a relief! The shuttle got home safely. More from good luck than good management, though. NASA has a lot to answer for.

AFL-CIO splitup ominous: "Despite wide coverage of bickering among Big Labor's top brass, the mainstream media overlooked the real story: The acrimony among several union chiefs amounted to little more than political posturing, blame-shifting, and a wrestling match over control of more than $10 billion in compulsory union dues. These developments only mean that America will face even more union militancy and even more coercive organizing. All the fireworks aside, the power to force more than twelve million workers to pay union dues or be fired - the crown jewel of all Big Labor special privileges - was unaffected by the shake-up. At its core, the controversy was simply a debate over tactics toward achieving the same end: corralling even more workers into union affiliation.... These militant tactics involve attacking companies until they agree to herd their employees into forced unionism without even so much as a workers' vote."

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

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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9 August, 2005

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Blogger News I look at how to improve majority rights.

On Dissecting Leftism I note that up until the 1990s Sweden was Fascism in slow motion

On Greenie Watch I note that the antarctic is the key to sea-level rise but that the antarctic is COOLING overall

On Political Correctness Watch I report the failure of a religious vilification trial in Australia

On Education Watch I note that homeschooling in Germany is FORBIDDEN! You must obey! Not much has changed since Hitler's day.

On Socialized Medicine I report a case of public hospital waiting times forcing a British boy to go all the way to India for surgery

On Gun Watch a psychiatrist examines the anti-gun mentality

On Leftists as Elitists I note the colossal and unjustified arrogance of the Art world

On Majority Rights I look at ideology and IQ and note that Leftists are in fact DUMBER.

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There is a review in The Guardian of a book (The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier by Richard G Wilkinson) which claims to show that poor people suffer more stress and therefore die younger on average. So shovelling more money at the poor will save their lives! I expect that this will be a staple Leftist argument for a while now. But to say that the problem is money is just a typical Leftist kneejerk reflex. As a former boarding house proprietor in a poor area, I can emphatically confirm that the poor do indeed suffer more stress. But it is not for want of income. Australian welfare benefits are generous. When I was a student many years ago I lived on them myself with no adverse effects. No. The reason that the poor are stressed is because of one-another! The people they associate with tend to be stupid, dishonest and violent. And that leads to no end of stress, believe me! But it is too much to ask that a Leftist make any serious inquiry about WHY people are poor in countries that do so much to help them. To Leftists, it's "the system". In the Middle Ages it would have been "demons". Both explanations are equally empty.

There is a good critique of the incoherence of Marxist and socialist theory here. It's rather amazing that intelligent Leftists still think that way but the hate-filled conclusion they come to matters far more to them than how they got there.

Paul Johnson on antisemitism: "What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one). In Japan, anti-Semitism was and remains common even though there has never been a Jewish community there of any size.... Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts. Like all mental diseases, it is damaging to reason, and sometimes fatal".

A good quote from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Historically, Democrats had "rewarded the articulation of moral purpose more than the achievement of practical good."

Democracy demands ousting the incumbent class: "These days, there are fewer and fewer competitive congressional elections. That is a very worrisome trend, because political competition matters a great deal. More candidates for office and the increased turnover of representatives produce better choices for voters. Political competition also heightens voter interest, stimulates the adoption of distinctive policies by candidates and parties, and produces higher voter turnout. This is not the outcome our constitutional framers intended. The House of Representatives was designed to be the legislative body most responsive to public opinion. But the decline in competitiveness makes the House less representative. This is not the outcome our constitutional framers intended."

Don't get into a lather over sweatshops: "San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing the city council to adopt an ordinance that forbids the use of municipal funds to purchase uniforms and other clothing made in 'sweatshops.' Across the country, colleges often adopt similar standards for clothing displaying their school logos. North American unions, such as Unite Here, the apparel and housekeeping workers' union, often lobby to impose working standards for developing countries similar to San Francisco's proposed ordinance. Though these efforts are intended to help poor workers in the third world, they actually hurt them."

Huge savings by cutting out the government middle-man: "Extracting taxes and administering their redistribution is also very expensive and inefficient. Imagine the army of bureaucrats servicing that perpetual round-robin. His first modest proposal is that as much as possible of the money churned out via tax and then back via transfers and services to the self-same individuals should be left in their pockets. About $85 billion is churned in this way every year. If left with taxpayers, it would represent vast tax cuts. If all churning could be stripped out of the system, it would allow personal income tax to be reduced to a flat rate of 10 per cent, with a tax-free threshold of $20,000. That would enable a great many people to self-fund their health and welfare needs, to save, to buy income insurance during their working lives and buy annuities or otherwise provide for retirement".

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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8 August, 2005

HOW TO IMPROVE MAJORITY RIGHTS

We live in an era where it is a reliable source of acclaim to campaign for minority rights. I think however that there is a case for arguing that majority rights have become neglected in the process. I have a whole separate blog -- Political Correctness Watch -- where I document the favouritism that is extended to minorities of all sorts. It is of course a matter of mere logic that to extend favouritism to one group is to discriminate against other groups.

In my moderate, tolerant Anglo-Saxon way, I am not greatly disturbed by some degree of favouritism towards disadvantaged groups -- though I think that any help should be aimed at the individual with problems rather than at any group that he or she might belong to. The situation today, however, has got very much out of hand. Discrimination against some groups who are conceived of as the majority has become almost as brutal in its effects as the discrimination that was once aimed at blacks and Jews. Far from being defeated, racism of one sort has been replaced by racism of another sort.

And the target of most racism today is in fact itself a rather small minority -- straight white middle-class males. There are special favours for women, special help for the poor and all sorts of favoured treatment for sexual and racial minorities. The target for all hate, blame and discrimination are straight white middle-class males. This is enormously unjust in almost any morality and would be regarded as thoroughly obnoxious were any other group so targeted.

But again in my tolerant, balanced way I don't see that group -- one to which I belong -- as suffering greatly from most of the measures aimed against it so am inclined to write most of the discrimination off as just another one of the many follies of the world.

There is however one way in which the pervasive racism of the modern world DOES badly effect my minority group and it is also something that this time really does affect the majority -- the fact that group favouritism greatly impedes law enforcement and has led to considerable danger and suffering for many innocent and decent people. Some of the especially privileged groups -- blacks and illegal immigrants in particular -- have a very high propensity to crime and are yet allowed to rampage more or less unchecked in many instances. So I think every effort should be made towards eliminating this form of discrimination. Whether a gang is black, Latino, Asian or white should not matter a hoot. It should be cracked down on with all the force that the law can muster. And regardless of what the population of a particular neighbourhood might be, if there is a lot of crime there then there should also be a heavy police presence there. If the "zero tolerance" policies of Giuliani and Bratton drastically reduced crime in NYC, tough policing procedures can work anywhere.

There are of course many other ways in which the racism of the current era is offensive and I sympathize with the offence that many people feel in that connection but if we REALLY want to make a difference it is no good just sitting down and praying for utopia: We have to concentrate on the one most urgent problem -- crime. And only when we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement does it make sense to start pursuing less urgent goals. And it is my personal belief that once we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement, other forms of discrimination will be much weakened and other problems will be much reduced.

So how do we go about removing the handcuffs from our police and other law-enforcement officials? It will not be easy. The publicity that the Minutemen give to the silly games that go on at the U.S./Mexico border is an excellent start but ultimately the solution has to be political. And I can see no way in which what I have advocated is at odds with the claimed ideology of either of the major political parties. So people who share my concern should join whichever of the major political parties they feel most comfortable with and become single-issue campaigners within that party. There really is no other way.

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I must confess to being enormously relieved at the rescue of the Russian submariners. They were facing an awful death from suffocation. I am so glad that sanity prevailed and Western help was immediately requested -- and, of course, given. The Brits must be cock-a-hoop.

What the envious Wal-Mart haters ignore: "Wal-Mart hasn't just sliced up the economic pie in a way that favors one group over another. Rather, it has made the total pie bigger. Consider, for example, the conclusions of the McKinsey Global Institute's study of United States labor productivity growth from 1995 to 2000. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics and an adviser on the study, noted that the most important factor in the growth of productivity was Wal-Mart. And because the study measured productivity per man hour rather than per payroll dollar, low hourly wages cannot explain the increase. Second, most of the value created by the company is actually pocketed by its customers in the form of lower prices. According to one recent academic study, when Wal-Mart enters a market, prices decrease by 8 percent in rural areas and 5 percent in urban areas. With two-thirds of Wal-Mart stores in rural areas, this means that Wal-Mart saves its consumers something like $16 billion a year. And because Wal-Mart's presence forces the store's competitors to charge lower prices as well, this $16 billion figure understates the company's real impact by at least half".

Islamic perverts: "Last Sunday, an American journalist, Steven Vincent, had an opinion piece published in The New York Times, written from Basra, in southern Iraq. He warned that the British Army was allowing the power vacuum in Basra to be filled by Shiite religious groups engaging in a campaign of religious assassinations and constraining the freedoms of women: "At the city's university, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women's attire and make-up are properly Islamic." Retribution was swift. Vincent was still in Basra and he was abducted within 48 hours. His body was found on Wednesday. To call him a casualty of a war or the victim of terrorists would be a mistake. He was murdered by perverts. "Pervert" does not remotely confer the same aura and power of "terrorist". This murder was committed in the name of religion but, at its deepest level, was another manifestation of envy, impotence and sexual repression.

Brian Micklethwait seems to be getting more and more eccentric as time goes by. I always suspected that there was a crusty old Tory underneath his libertarianism.

There is a petition on Strange Justice that desperately needs more signatures. Please read it. It is the first online petition I have ever signed.

I have just put up on a Leftists as Elitists an article that rather blows the pretensions of the Art world out of the water.

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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7 August, 2005

THE MISERABLE LEFTIST MINDSET

From an interview with media veteran Bernard Goldberg about his book "The 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America"

One of those essays in those first fifty-four pages quotes a piece that James Piereson wrote for The Weekly Standard.com on the occasion of President Reagan's death last year. Called "Punitive Liberalism", it's a great touchstone connecting the patriotic liberals of the FDR through LBJ era with those who came afterwards in the wake of George McGovern's failed 1972 presidential campaign.

Goldberg says, logically, that most liberals have never heard of Piereson's phrase. But its symptoms resonate with them nonetheless, "because they see themselves as more sensitive, and more concerned about their fellow man. They say, 'well, this is a country that polluted our air and water', which it did. 'This is a country which had racist policies towards blacks', which it did. 'This is a country that treated women as second-class citizens', which it did."

Goldberg is quick to add, "All these things were wrong", repeating the phrase slowly for added emphasis. "But most of us say, 'let's fix it. Let's make sure we don't do that anymore, and move on.'" In contrast, he says, the modern left dwells on these past transgressions. "It doesn't occur to them somehow that people are literally killing themselves to get to this country. That poor people all over the world want to come to America, because this is a land of great opportunity.

Despite that, Goldberg notes that many, but not all of America's cultural elites are uncomfortable with America's power (and possibly with the idea of power itself). "I think it stems from the fact that we do have a history where we did things wrong in this country. But for them it's always yesterday-they can't look forward. They enjoy that. They enjoy the fact that America isn't the perfect place. And it isn't."

"But you know what?", Goldberg asks rhetorically, "It's a lot more perfect than most other places."

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Poor old Michael Totten! He seems to be a pretty reasonable guy in general but, like most products of a modern-day American education, he knows bupkis about history. His recent claim that Fascists are not Leftists is ludicrously ill-informed, as you can see here and here but his key problem is one that he shares with most people alive today -- a total unawareness about how different politics were before World War 2. Most people assume that the Left then were just like the Left of today. They were and they weren't. The big difference is that the prewar Left were as nationalist and racist as they are today anti-patriotic and anti-racist. More precisely, a prewar Leftist could be either a nationalist or an internationalist but it was the nationalist stream that predominated. Hitler was in fact part of the prewar Leftist mainstream. See here for a detailed description of what that mainstream was like. Even Marx and Engels were frantic racists. Marx mainly hated the Jews and Engels thought Germans were the greatest. Put them together and you get: Adolf! Marx died in 1883. Hitler was born in 1889. So Marx's ideas were very current in Hitler's day. The old patriotic prewar Left did carry over into postwar politics for a short while -- which is why Presidents Truman and JFK did and said the sort of thing that GWB is doing and saying today.

Forgive me while I laugh, but some historians have just discovered not one, but TWO new "Hitler Diaries". The only historian who immediately spotted the fakery in the last bogus "Hitler Diaries" was the much decried David Irving so I will wait to hear what he says before I take any further interest in the matter.

South Africa following the Zimbabwean road to disaster: "South Africa's 50,000 white farmers are threatened with forced land expropriation after a government land summit called for a 'fast-track' programme of redistribution. The weekend summit was convened by the government to review the slow pace of land reform in South Africa. Significantly, it rejected the market-based willing buyer/willing seller policy as the basis on which redistribution must proceed.The South African government has set a target of voluntarily transferring 30 per cent of productive farmland from whites to previously disadvantaged blacks by 2014. But President Thabo Mbeki's government is worried the target will not be met, at the very slow rate at which white farmers are offering land for sale. It also claims farmers are asking for unjustifiably high prices."

The Dallas Morning News gets it right: "Today, this editorial board resolves to sacrifice another word -- 'insurgent' -- on the altar of precise language. No longer will we refer to suicide bombers or anyone else in Iraq who targets and kills children and other innocent civilians as 'insurgents.' The notion that these murderers in any way are nobly rising up against a sitting government in a principled fight for freedom has become, on its face, absurd. They drove that point home with chilling clarity Wednesday in a poor Shiite neighborhood. As children crowded around U.S. soldiers handing out candy and toys in a gesture of good will, a bomb-laden SUV rolled up and exploded. These children were not collateral damage. They were targets. The SUV driver was no insurgent. He was a terrorist. People who set off bombs on London trains are not insurgents. We would never think of calling them anything other than what they are -- terrorists. Words have meanings. Whether too timid, sensitive or 'open-minded,' we've resisted drawing a direct line between homicidal bombers everywhere else in the world and the ones who blow up Iraqi civilians or behead aid workers. No more. To call them 'insurgents' insults every legitimate insurgency in modern history. They are terrorists."

The brainless Leftist chant about poverty: ""Though evidence shows that the terrorists are interested in acquiring nuclear weapons to use against our cities, a learned writer for the New York Review of Books insists that the real weapons of mass destruction are world poverty and environmental abuse. Of course, world poverty is rarely mentioned by terrorists, and those known to be involved have almost all been well fed and are well to do."

There is rather a good article here about Australian slang. I use it a lot in everyday speech because I find it far more vivid and expressive than standard English but on this blog I have to stick to what will be most widely understood. Though I know that I do occasionally let bits of academic jargon slip out.

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

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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6 August, 2005

"Racist": A few thoughts about one of our most serious terms of abuse

I particularly like Indians. And if we are going to use the term at all, Indians are clearly a race. I also like the Han (majority) Chinese. And almost any member of the Han will assure you that the Han are a race apart. I also admire the Japanese and regard Israel as one of the great adventures of the human spirit. So I am clearly a racist, am I not? If not, why not? Just using the word "race" is pretty close to taboo in much of the modern world. The fact that I DO use it probably keeps this blog much more marginal than it otherwise would be.

How has that come about? It's no mystery is it? The deeds of Hitler showed the world what colossal evil can be done in the name of race and, in their usual way, the Left hopped onto that bandwagon and pushed the idea to simplistic extremes. Not only unreasonable uses of ideas about race were condemned but ALL ideas about race were condemned. So the Left absolutely shriek and go ballistic about any mention of race. Which tends to make people think that there really is something wrong with even using the term. It's rather like the woman who has bad experiences with one or two men and who then concludes that ALL men are "no good". Her response just puts a roadblock in front of her finding out WHICH men are good or bad and probably denies her much happiness that she could have. Similarly, talk about race can be good or bad. The intelligent thing is to discuss and look into the matter. Up until 1945 the whole world did just that. So all our ancestors were "racists"?

Don't get me wrong: As both a conservative and a libertarian, I think that the individual comes first and that each case (or each person) must be judged on its (his/her) individual merits. So while I like most Indians and Chinese I don't like them all. And I don't like all Jews either. Jews who hate Israel I find particularly contemptible. The United Nations charter says that each case must be judged on its individual merits and that is one of the few things about the United Nations that I agree with. That must have been the bit that the conservatives put in.

Because the Left DO judge people in terms of race. The entire Leftist mentality is group-oriented. The individual hardly exists to Leftists. Individuals are too complicated and messy. Leftists can think only in terms of vast groups of people -- such as "blacks", "Hispanics" and "Native Americans" (and "gays", "women", "the workers" etc.). So you can talk about races after all -- just as long as you don't CALL them races.

What utter stupidity! The only way to combat such stupidity is to defy it and talk about race in sensible ways and just ignore all the hypocritical Leftist shrieking. I do. For example, I make no apology for saying that people of Northwestern European origin (principally the Anglo-Celts and the Germans) are the ones who have made the modern world what it is and I am delighted to be myself of that ilk. I have pictures of my Australian pioneer ancestors on my walls and I am forever grateful to them for what they have bequeathed me.

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Gutless Australian response to jihadist: "A Melbourne radical Islamic teacher last night described Osama bin Laden as "a great man" and declared he would be betraying his religion if he told students not to train in terrorist camps. Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakr, said: "My religion doesn't tolerate other religion . . . Jihad is a part of my religion." ASIO revoked Mr Benbrika's passport earlier this year, the ABC reported, and it recently raided and questioned him. But although it took papers, charges had not been laid".

Hooray for Hitchens! "Islamo-fascists gave us no peace and we shouldn't give them any. We can't live on the same planet as them and I'm glad because I don't want to. I don't want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murders and rapists and torturers and child abusers. Its them or me. I'm very happy about this because I know it will be them. It's a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure. I don't regard it as a grim task at all".

Utah: PETA protest brings more customers to KFC: "A protest against the manner in which chickens are slaughtered for fast-food chain KFC drew additional customers rather than drive them away from the local outlet in this northern Utah city. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protest against KFC drew 10 sympathetic people, including someone dressed in a chicken costume, on Monday. But at one point, around lunchtime, more than 30 people stood in line to order chicken to eat. ... Jacqueline Newbold, a supervisor at KFC, said an uncommon rush of customers required the store to call extra employees into work. 'We had a line going out the door and through the lobby,' she said."

America Coming Together falls apart : "A year ago, the liberal group America Coming Together was on the cutting edge of national politics, spending tens of millions of dollars on a massive voter-mobilization project in every presidential battleground state. The dream was that ACT -- heavily funded by billionaire George Soros -- would play a decisive role in getting Democratic nominee John F. Kerry elected president and then remain in business as a permanent force in liberal politics. Instead, the group this week began sending e-mails to most of the 28 people who make up the remaining ACT staff warning that their paychecks would stop at the end of August. All the state offices have been, or are soon to be, closed."

This is a good warning for the mad Mullahs: "In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option".

Like Leftists generally, the New York Times would not know the meaning of the word "ethics" -- as their outrageous attempt to break into confidential adoption records shows. After all, "There's no such thing as right and wrong" is there? But you can rely on them for "All the news that's fit to slant".

I have just put up here a summary of a new book: Top 10 Politically Correct Myths About Islam and the Crusades by Robert Spencer. It sounds good. Available from Human Events.

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

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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



5 August, 2005

SWEDEN: FASCISM IN SLOW MOTION

I have previously pointed out that modern-day Sweden is rather fun for conservatives to know about but what about the Sweden of the past? I argue below that the old Swedish model -- the "folkhemmet" (people's home) -- gradually became a version of the Fascist "corporate State" with government, business and labor all intertwined to the detriment of the economy

Although it is a commonplace that Hitler got good co-operation from Sweden both before and during the war, the idea that Sweden was itself in any sense Fascist must seem like one of the most absurd suggestions ever made. Has not Sweden been the great icon of the Democratic Left in the postwar period? It has indeed, though these days conservatives have better reasons for mentioning the Swedish experience than Leftists do. Nonetheless, little-recognized though it might be, there are substantial reasons for seeing interwar Sweden as Fascist. Like all Fascisms, however, Swedish Fascism had its own unique national characteristics and its most unusual characteristic was how slowly it developed, with much of its development taking place AFTER WW2 rather than before.

I have set out at considerable length elsewhere the historical details which show that Fascism was nothing more than a particularly authoritarian and nationalist form of Leftism so we only have to ask here whether Sweden in the interwar years was nationalist, authoritarian and Leftist. And the answer to all three questions is undoubtedly: Yes.

And that answer does not depend on the various small explicitly Fascist and pro-Nazi movements that arose in Sweden in the 1930s. It flows from a look at the dominant political party in Sweden from 1932 on: The Social Democratic Party. The program and policy of the Social Democrats centred around transforming Sweden into a folkhemmet (Volksheimat in German). This became the dominant Swedish concept of Sweden in 1932 with the accession to power of the Social Democrats but was well in evidence before that. The concept is usually traced to a book, The State as a Live Form ( Staten som livsform ), written by Rudolf Kjellen in 1910. Like all versions of the word Volk it is not exactly translatable into English as Volk means both "people" and "race" even though there are separate words for people (Leute) and race (Rasse). So folkhemmet is probably best translated as "a home for the Swedish people". And this idea of what Sweden should be was what the Swedish Social Democratic Party preached. The concept is the core of the "Swedish model" and what it brought about was essentially just another version of the characteristic Fascist "corporate" or "collectivist" State. So, like Fascism generally, the Swedish model was seen as a Third Way between Communism and Capitalism.

The Swedish corporate State really got going only in 1938, however, with the Saltsjobaden Agreement between the unions and the employers. This agreement outlawed strikes and created a central wage-fixing system for the whole country.

And the ideology of the Social Democrats did originally include racial elements. The folkhemmet was seen as including only a racially defined folkgemenskap (Volksgemeinschaft, people's community) with members being only people belonging to den Svenska folkstammen (Volkstum, Swedish racial group) with minorities such as the Tornedal Finns being excluded.

And Sweden did have a charismatic leader, in the form of Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson from 1932 to 1946 -- which rather neatly brackets Hitler's years in power (1933 to 1945).

And it was at the initiative of the Social Democrats that Sweden's eugenic laws were set up, with "undesirables" being forcibly sterilized. Does that remind you of anyone?

And Sweden has been essentially a one-party State since 1932, with only a very brief interlude in the 1990s. But what exactly the folkhemmet should consist of evolved and developed only very slowly and gradually. Change in Sweden is glacial even in the hands of Leftists so the fundamentally paternalist folkhemmet took many years to develop a sweeping dominance of Swedish life. Bit by bit taxes were raised, business was regulated and taken over and welfare programs were expanded. It was not in fact until the early 1990s that the whole edifice came crashing down. So the concept of a fatherly government was there from the beginning, the one-party State was there and a quiet conviction of Swedish superiority and unique wisdom was also there.

Like all Fascist ideologies, however, folkhemmet had its own unique national character. Sweden experienced nothing remotely like the huge interwar disruptions that took place in Germany and Italy -- for the excellent reason that Sweden stayed out of WW1. So Swedish nationalism was much calmer and less excitable. Which led to it being neither strident nor expansionist. Swedes felt perfectly comfortable with the burgeoning wealth being produced by their own country and so felt no need for foreign adventures or huge and sudden changes. It should perhaps be noted, however, that there is nothing intrinsic to the Swedish character that is opposed to foreign adventures. That should be obvious both from the Viking age and the perambulations around Europe of Gustavus Adolphus in the 17th century.

One thing that was NOT greatly different, however, was that the power of the Swedish Social Democratic party was founded on its popularity and was achieved by constitutional rather than revolutionary means. Mussolini and Hitler too were very popular and achieved power legally rather than via revolution. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, however, the Swedish party had no hesitation in renewing its mandate by way of regular and properly conducted elections. And, like the Franco regime in Spain, it kept out of WW2 and thus stayed in power much longer than the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

So the Swedish folkhemmet State was welfarist, nationalist, paternalist and essentially all-powerful. Because it used its power very sparingly and cautiously, however, and respected civil liberties, it was undoubtedly the mildest of the Fascist States. Fascism varied greatly from country to country (to take a rather striking example, Sir Oswald Mosley initially used to expel from the British Union of Fascists anyone who made antisemitic remarks!) and the distinguishing feature of the Swedish version was undoubtedly that it was the least authoritarian. And after the war the Swedish Social Democrats did as all Leftists did and abandoned overt nationalism -- though a sense of Swedish superiority undoubtedly continued and discreetly made itself apparent from time to time.

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

ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald silences the Left: "Yesterday I got a call from the host whose radio drive-time talk show I have appeared on three times. Kyal informed me that prior to my appearance people from the left would call the show on Social Security matters and scream and call him names. Strangely after my three appearances, the left has left the building. He gets no calls from the left whatsoever. Almost all his calls are positive and his ratings have shot up. All of which proves the point, the left is barren of and unable to discuss issues. We need to confront them. When we do, we win. If you want to tune in, you can listen over the internet at http://www.k-talk.com/ns/Hosts.asp at 4:20 PDT, Thursday August 4, 2005 to my fourth appearance.

Ed Morrissey of "Captain's Quarters" points out how strange is the silence of the mainstream media about the Air America scandal. If it had been a conservative radio network stealing money from the poor it would have been continuous headlines across America for days on end.

Why "Made in China" is good news for the US: "Today, China makes about 8 percent of the world's chips; by 2010, that number may be up to 20 percent. From nowhere to world domination has been the story of China and globalization for the past decade. Textiles, toys, televisions and cellphones -- one global industry after another has succumbed to Chinese competition. Why should chips be any different? Because the chip industry can be an example where globalization works right."

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

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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



4 August, 2005

Brookes News Update

Liberal Party, labour market reform and the unions' minimum wage myth: Union officials are using economic quackery to defend the minimum wage and Liberal Party adviser are letting them get away with it
US deficits and government spending - more fallacies: What Democrats and their media supporters' make a point of downplaying is that deficits occur because spending exceeds revenue
The Murdoch journalist who whitewashed treason: Journalists like Wynhausen have got the gall to slime our society while turning a blind eye to atrocities carried out by the socialist likes of Fidel Castro
G-d save me from the politically correct : The Jews were the canary in the coalmine. Now the terrorists are coming after the 'Sunday People'
America is "Grateful to Almighty God" : Why America truly is a Christian nation
The Liberal Party and social contract nonsense: The striking thing about Australia's Liberal Party is the extent to which many of its supporters, including some in Parliament, are divorced from genuine liberal principles

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ELSEWHERE

More airport madness: "The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has won another victory over the terrorists lurking among American airline passengers. Last Wednesday, it secured a conviction for assault against Phyllis Dintenfass, a 62-year-old schoolteacher who gave as good as she got to a TSA screener. When the screener molested her at a regional airport last September, Mrs. Dintenfass molested her right back, asking, "'How would you like it if I did that to you?'" We ordinary folks might mistake Mrs. Dintenfass for a mild-mannered, neatly coiffed instructor at Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisconsin. The clairvoyants at the TSA know better. They perceived she's really a terrorist plotting to blow up a plane"

A good article here about the Islamic menace from German publisher Doepfner. Excerpt: "Today we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in The Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere in Europe? By suggesting - wait for it - that the proper response to such barbarism is to initiate a Muslim holiday in Germany. I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of Germany's Government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people -- actually believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists. One cannot help but recall Britain's Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, waving that laughable treaty signed by Hitler, and declaring the advent of peace in our time. What atrocity must occur before the European public and its political leadership understands what is really happening in the world?"

Blacks don't want to fight: "The Iraq war is drying up at least part of a pool of recruits the Army has relied upon for decades: black Americans. The Army has long enjoyed a special relationship with black Americans, who have filled its ranks at rates far beyond their share of the population since the draft was abolished in 1973. But in a trend compounding the Army's recruiting woes, those days may be over.... "We saw the most precipitous drop immediately after Sept. 11," Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said at the Pentagon this year. In fiscal 2001, which ended 19 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, nearly 23 percent of all new Army recruits were black - as in each of the previous five years. So far in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30, only about 14 percent are.... The Army exceeded its total recruiting goal for June, enlisting 507 more soldiers than its target of 5,650. But that followed four months in which it badly missed its goals, leaving it more than 7,800 short for the fiscal year."

Mad-cow "threat": "For one who would like to see more Democrats in Washington, I spend a disturbing amount of time trying to save the party from itself. Polls show Democrats on the popular side of many big issues: healthcare, Social Security, the environment. But then they go out and lose it on the small stuff. Case in point is their recent tango with the mad-cow 'threat.' Mad-cow disease is a nonissue in the US. As far as we know, not one person has ever died from eating an American cow infected with mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). And it's not as if Americans haven't been testing beef safety. How many millions of burgers go down every day?"

Some progress in France: "Two months on, Mr de Villepin has, by and large, steered clear of his caricature. He has made employment his priority, dropping in on a job-centre for his first official visit. He is creating a new two-year job contract for companies with fewer than 20 employees, with much-needed easy-dismissal rules, which will come into effect as soon as September. He has promised to tighten controls on welfare benefits. And he has accelerated privatisation, selling a first stake in Gaz de France in July, and announcing a controversial plan to sell three motorway-toll companies this summer."

The insanity of Indian socialism: "When I once went to visit a public sector electricity-generation plant in New Delhi, one of their top officers told me this: I dump the ash (the residue from burning coal) in the river, I do not pay the railways for delivery of the coal, I do not pay the coal company, and I will keep running it this way. Forget about the so-called charitable thoughts of public servants, I could not believe that I was talking to a human being. He was corrupt and irresponsible to the core. Why is someone in such a high position like that? Is it a special racial trait of Indians? Or is it a result of the irresponsible system that socialism, and collectivist cultures create?"

Now 14 million blogs!: "The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati. In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March. It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months" [In that context, the current NZ Bear ranking of this blog (no. 527) looks pretty good]

Lots of good articles about Israel from a Christian perspective here

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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



3 August, 2005

SOME ECONOMICS

Death tax abolished in Russia: "President Vladimir Putin will in the next few days sign off on a law newly approved by both chambers of parliament that does away with inheritance tax, as well as canceling payment of gift tax by close relatives and spouses. Other transactions will remain subject to real-estate, vehicle, stock, equity and participatory interest gift tax of 13%, the same as Russia's unified income tax rate. The law, due to come into force on January 1, 2006, was drafted by the government with record speed after Putin stated in his April state of the nation address that he thought that it would be a good decision to abolish the inheritance tax".

Death tax boneheads: "Florida Governor Jeb Bush ought to send his counterpart in Connecticut, Republican Jodi Rell, a thank-you note with a box of chocolates and a ribbon tied around it. Last month Ms. Rell marked her first anniversary as Governor by signing into law a tax bill that might as well be called the "Palm Beach Economic Development Act." The law requires that any resident of the Nutmeg State with an estate of more than $2 million pay a death tax of up to 16%--merely for the privilege of dying in Connecticut. The legislators in Hartford hope that the tax will raise $150 million in revenue each year--money that will come in only if the legislators in Hartford are also planning to build a Berlin Wall around the state. Otherwise, expect a stampede of retirees and family businesses out of Connecticut into the many states without a death tax, such as Florida, which has a constitutional prohibition against estate taxes. Thanks to the Connecticut death levy, a successful small business owner with a $10 million estate can save about $1 million by packing up and heading south".

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

Dumb CAFTA opponents: "Here's what a leading Democrat opponent said in opposition to CAFTA: "I don't see any benefits for workers, for sugar people," said Democratic Rep. Charlie Melancon, who said his family owed everything to 225 years of sugar production in his home state of Louisiana. "We've given away textiles. We've given away steel. We've given away fruits and vegetables," Melancon said. "Now let's just go ahead and give away everything and be dependent on every other country for our food and our defense." The Democrat Melencon forgot his kindergarten economics. If each American were free to trade with Central America for sugar, instead of being forced to buy high priced American sugar, each American would be richer by the amount saved on sugar. The extra money that had been spent on sugar, could then be spent on other things to raise their standard of living. Yes, American sugar workers would lose their jobs but employment would be stimulated in others industries where the extra money was being spent. This is the nature of economic progress. There is no net lose in jobs. We have had growing free trade, despite Democratic insanity, for 200 years. Unemployment is now at 4.9%, a 30 year low. Homeownership is at an all time peak, average home size is bigger than ever, $3000 TV sets are now common, there are now more cars than drivers"

New Zealand expert highlights inferiority of European social model: In a recent speech, Roger Kerr of the New Zealand Business Roundtable compares the robust performance of Anglo-American economies with the stagnant - and statist - economies of Japan and continental Europe. Kerr cites the work of Olaf Gersemann's Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Realities to dispel myths that American success is associated with social costs: "The big world story of the last two decades of the twentieth century was the demise of communism as an economic system and power bloc, and with it the end of the cold war between East and West. At the same time, another story has been unfolding, not as dramatic as the ending of an entire political and economic system but still of great long-term significance. That story is about the pre-eminent success of the Anglo-American economies (which include not just the United States but also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the United Kingdom) and the relative failure of the various versions of the so-called social market economy or managed capitalism in Continental Europe and Japan. In the last dozen years or so, economies based on free trade, private ownership, light regulation and moderate taxation have opened up what looks increasingly like a decisive lead over economies characterised by active state partnership with business and trade unions in steering the economy, high levels of taxation and social spending, a greater role for banks than for stock markets in corporate ownership and control, and intrusive regulation of business. ...I fully expect American ideas and practices to continue to exert in the twenty-first century the all-pervasive influence they did in the twentieth century and to set the standards by which all societies are judged, however much they may also be resented and subject to bogus criticism. It seems unlikely that hard-working Chinese, Indians and other Asians will be attracted to the European model"

Japan is privatizing its postal system. If it gets through the Japanese parliament it will set a great precedent. Private enterprise has worked miracles for Japan so one hopes that other countries take note. I think Westerners should be a bit embarrassed that Japan has to show the way.

There is an interesting interview with Ghanaian economist George Ayittey here. He says that both democracy and markets were originally part of the African tradition and that abandoning them in favour of socialist ideas is what keeps Africa poor. I am sure that there is a lot of truth in that.

Wal-Mart enemies are no friends of the poor: "If a capitalist corporation gets to be a big success, it inevitably finds itself in the cross-hairs of leftist political activists who don't much like capitalism, and especially don't like large corporations. In the 1980s, General Motors found itself in this position when Michael Moore made the movie "Roger and Me." More recently McDonald's has been a target, attacked by (among other people) film maker Morgan Spurlock in "Super Size Me." Wal-Mart, now the largest business corporation in the world, could hardly escape the activists' ire. The huge retailer has been charged with underpaying and mistreating its employees, destroying communities, and oppressing workers in the Third World.... When economist Emek Basker of the University of Missouri looked at the employment effects of having a Wal-Mart move into a community, he found it actually increases employment. Nostalgia can be gratifying, but it's not a good basis for preferring fewer jobs rather than more. I suspect what the critics really dislike about Wal-Mart is not economic, it's cultural. Wal-Mart is very "red state." It's headquartered in Arkansas. It's mentioned in country songs. The crowd that likes to say it's on the side of poor Americans ought to appreciate a place whose prices make a modest paycheck go a long way. But they prefer to fight the culture wars, and Wal-Mart is their bugaboo".

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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



2 August, 2005

LEFTISTS ARE ACTUALLY DUMBER

An age-old technique for deflecting blame and criticism from oneself is to accuse others of what are in fact your own faults. If done unconsciously, psychologists call it "projection". But whether conscious or not, it tends to confuse the issue and makes people think that there is blame on both sides. So it is a very effective strategy in general. And since Leftists have a very great need to hide the hate and destructivesness that are their real motivations, they have used such a stratgey to the full. So much so that you just have to see what they say about conservatives to know what is true of them. They for instance call conservatives closed-minded, simplistic-thinkers, dogmatic and hate-filled when it is they themselves who in fact are spectacularly charaterized by all those attributes (See e.g. here).

And one of their routine accusations is that conservatives are dumb. They get away with that because it is true that most intellectuals tend Left (see here for why). But intellectuals are only a very small part of the population. What about Leftists in general? Are they more or less intelligent than conservatives? As far as I know, I am the only person who has ever had survey data published in an academic journal that answers that. And I found that, by the standards of what one generally observes in the social science literature, the relationship between core Leftist beliefs and LOW intelligence was quite strong. Leftists in general are dumb. See here.

And the emails I get from Leftists certainly confirm that. Usually their only real content is abuse and they usually cannot even do that without making frequent errors in spelling and grammar. I reproduce below one of the briefer such examples of towering intellect that I have received:

OH ! so now we know , your a Nazi .Then fuck off to Washington and join your buddies ( do they even know you exist), you nasty little hate filled jerk. And when you go do fly Al quieda only their pilot was trained by the yanks too !!

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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I dissect the latest nonsense claims about racism

On Political Correctness Watch I note Methodists putting homosexuality ahead of the Bible

On Greenie Watch I note the controversy about the Maldives -- where sea levels are actually FALLING

On Education Watch I show how the Left use schools to create racial tensions

On Socialized Medicine I note that there is often no dignity for patients in public hospital systems

On Gun Watch I note a would-be rapist who got shot by his victim

On Leftists as Elitists I reproduce a savage critique of the Hollywood elite

On Majority Rights I manouvre some white nationalists into saying that fair skin does not matter!

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ELSEWHERE

Capitalism is healthier: "A new study shows that heart disease in Poland has dropped dramatically, probably due to economic and political transformation. A recently published report by the British Medical Journal aimed to explain a dramatic drop in ischemic heart disease (i.e. heart disease resulting from localized tissue anemia due to obstruction of the inflow of arterial blood) in Poland since 1991. By 2002, deaths from coronary heart disease had dropped by 38 percent for men and 42 percent for women aged 45-64 years old. "The fall in death certification rates for ischemic heart disease seems to have been larger than that previously observed in any country in peacetime," the report says. The results were surprising. The report found that: "Reporting biases are unlikely to have exaggerated the true fall in ischemic heart disease; neither is it likely to be mainly due to changes in smoking, drinking, stress, or medical care. Changes in type of dietary fat and increased supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables seem to be the best candidate." And the study links those changes in diet directly with the political and economic changes Poland experienced during the early 1990s".

The British as "useful idiots": "Elements within the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West's apologists for the Soviet Union - useful idiots. Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam, Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same".

The Democrats do not have philosophies, they have constituencies: "The Democratic "platform" has several odious components. Primarily, the Democrats are totally lacking on ideas on governance. They are unwilling or incapable of stating the simplest political position. Of the many important problems facing the nation, the Republicans are left to carry on alone: Social Security, foreign affairs, War for Democracy, reform of the UN. You name it, and try to find a coherent Democratic position on any of these matters. No such position can be found; no such position exists. In place of considered policies on governance, the Democrats have adopted an unrelieved negative position on all political questions. For example, Social Security is a known problem area, and has been for years; President Clinton was warning about the need to address SS problems a decade ago. Today, Democrats largely deny that any problem exists, and if they are willing to talk about Social Security at all, they want to raise taxes (of course!)"

Chris Brand is blogging up a storm about Australia's "racist" professor -- who had the temerity to say that blacks have a high crime-rate and are therefore undesirable as immigrants.

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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

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



1 August, 2005

SOME RECENT POSTS ON ICJS

The myth of moderate Islam
ABC / Willacy complaint
Beware of Islamics bearing rocket launchers
Beards and scarves aren't Muslim
Letter about PM
Blair takes on 'obscenity' of terrorism
What do Islamist terrorists want?
Democratic Universality and Its Adversaries
Academic Freedom - a continued response
Abbas `condemns' attack on Israelis
When Denial Can Kill
In London, one may seek the Truth under the ground
Discussion of two anti-terrorism Fatwas.
ISRAEL, THE MEDIA AND THE DISENGAGEMENT FROM GAZA
No alternative
Terrorists don't listen to reason
The war within the west
Useful idiots have always apologised for terrorists
A betrayal of trust
Europe's culture clash

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ELSWWHERE

Good one!: "On December 10th 2004 , inner-city minister, Rev Wayne Perryman, - filed a class action Reparation lawsuit (in the United States District Court in Seattle Case No. CV04-2442), alleging "that because of their racist past practices the Democratic Party should be required to pay African Americans Reparations." Perryman said "he based his case on the research that he gathered during the past five years while writing the three editions of his latest book... In his 100-page brief, Perryman concludes that the past racist policies and practices that were initiated against African Americans by the Democratic Party - were no different than the policies and practices that were initiated by the Nazi Party against the Jews. In both situations millions of lives were destroyed (physically, mentally and economically)."

Christian v communist in China: "Richard Spencer reports today from Beijing that there may now be more practising Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party. The precise figures cannot be known, in a country in which Christians are still persecuted. But the evidence suggests that there may be as many as 80 million or even 100 million members of underground Christian churches in China, unapproved by the state. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, has only 70 million members. If those figures for worshippers are even roughly accurate, then we are looking at a very remarkable development in the history not only of Asia but of all mankind.... Xun Jinzhen, a Christian convert who runs a beauty salon in Beijing, put it eloquently when he said: "We have very few people who believe in communism as a faith. So there's an emptiness in their hearts."

Bush Bashing Fizzles: "This summer, one big story is replaced by another--the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media--the New York Times, etc., etc.--to delegitimize yet another Republican administration..."

When Castro took over Cuba: "In fact, a high proportion of Batista's army was black and mulatto, especially the officer corps. Castro and Che murdered 600 of them without trial in the first three months of 1959. Even the New York Times admits it. Had these massacres taken place anyplace else, they'd be called lynchings and the United Nations, NAACP, etc., would raise holy hell. Imagine, in any other setting, a lily white regime (like Castro's) lynching several hundred blacks, dumping them in mass graves, then getting a standing ovation by the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and Hollywood! Tom, compared to what Cuban-Americans see in the news every day, what Alice found on the other side of the looking glass seems perfectly logical".

Resistance is not futile, it is highly effective: "Recently the Florida State University department of Criminology released a study indicating that people who employed self protection strategies reduced their likelihood of injury when compared to nonresistance. Old research seemed to indicate that resistance to confrontational crime contributed to victim injury. New information reveals the old assumptions were found to be largely attributable to confusion concerning the sequence of self protective actions and injury. In crimes where both occurred, injury followed self protection in only 10 percent of the incidents. Combined with the fact that injuries following resistance are almost always relatively minor, victim resistance appears to be generally a wise course of action."

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

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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

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