The original of this mirror site is HERE. My Blogroll; Archives here or here; My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here. Other mirror sites: Greenie Watch, Political Correctness Watch, Education Watch, Immigration Watch, Food & Health Skeptic, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine, Recipes, Tongue Tied and Australian Politics. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing)
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31 August, 2007

Sarkozy returns common sense to French foreign policy

Nicolas Sarkozy made headlines this week by telling his diplomatic corps that "an Iran with nuclear weapons is for me unacceptable." But the French President did more in his speech than name the gravest current threat to global security, itself a feat of clear thinking. He also signaled that France means to be something more on the international scene than an anti-American nuisance player.

That's worth applauding at a time when the conventional wisdom says the next U.S. President will have to burnish America's supposedly tarnished reputation by making various policy amends. In Germany, under the conservative leadership of Angela Merkel, foreign policy views have been moving closer to the Bush Administration's, not further away, while new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made clear he will not depart significantly from the pro-American course set by Tony Blair.

But it is Mr. Sarkozy who, true to his reputation, has been the boldest in stepping up to his global responsibilities. On Afghanistan, he told the assembled diplomats, "the duty of the Atlantic Alliance as well as that of France," is to "increase efforts." He then announced he would be sending additional trainers to assist the Afghan Army. On Israel, he said he "would never budge" on its security. He warned about Russia, which "imposes its return on the world scene by playing its assets with a certain brutality," and he cautioned against China, which pursues "its insatiable search for raw materials as a strategy of control, particularly in Africa."

More here

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Left is losing Vietnam War again

In political battles--and all too frequently in war itself--victories are rarely complete, defeats are rarely final, and the real significance of a battle is often not evident for years, even decades afterward. America's defeat in Vietnam, for example, was seemingly a triumph for the anti-war left, which had long proclaimed the war to be unwinnable quagmire. Yet the years following that defeat--the era of American retreat and "national malaise"--proved so traumatic that the American people have never wanted to repeat them. Thus, what the anti-war radicals regarded as a vindication ended up discrediting the left on foreign policy for a generation. You could say that they won the political battle over the war--but they lost the peace.

Today, we may be seeing the final chapter of that process. The left is losing the Vietnam War itself--losing Vietnam, that is, as a rhetorical high ground from which to pillory any advocate of vigorous American military action overseas. In a speech last week, President Bush surprised everyone by citing Vietnam as an analogy to Iraq. Just as we paid a "price in American credibility" for our abandonment of Vietnam, he argued, so we will suffer an even worse blow to the credibility of American threats and American friendship if we retreat from Iraq.... This certainly has caught the left by surprise, since the history of the Vietnam War is territory they thought they owned and controlled

More here

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There is an article on FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC today titled, THE BIG BOWEL CANCER RETHINK, which is a must-read for anyone who trusts in "consensus" science or the wisdom of governments.

Incredible New NY Bill Will Make Staring at Women a Crime: "This year, a couple of women complained to New York City Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr., about a man standing under the subway steps at their station and looking up their skirts. "He has responded with city legislation, introduced yesterday, that would make all voyeurism in New York a misdemeanor. "Staring at women is rude. But, if it were turned into a crime, we all know what would happen. "You get all types of people on the subway here, everyone from rude men looking for cheap thrills to mentally ill, paranoid women. These problems are best handled by the individuals involved. Passing laws just to appease a couple of female constituents is just not a good idea. "Peter Vallone is a relatively moderate voice on a city council dominated by wild-eyed extremists. I was surprised at this move. The New York Chapter of the ACLU recognizes this legislation as too broad and have recommended against its passage." I would agree with Jeff that staring at women can be rude. Making it a crime is quite another matter. I would also add that some women do everything they possibly can so men will look at them. Or if that's not their intent, they sure make it seem that way."

Where did the money go? "It's hard for the average working stiff to contemplate a number as vast as the $23.5 billion the federal government has allocated to Mississippi for Katrina recovery. Think of it this way: It's enough money to buy two average-sized houses for each of the 65,000 families in Mississippi who lost their homes. And, there would be enough left over to buy each family a brand-new Honda Accord to drive between their two $166,000 houses. That's the EX-L, V-6 four-door sedan Accord, with all the extras and navigation, not a base model."

New Virginia Law Says If You Have Sex You Must Register with the State: "My new co-authored column criticizes an outrageous new anti-father Virginia law. The law has been debated in the press, but commentators have missed its central purpose--to remove fathers' rights to prevent their children from being put up for adoption against their will. The law asks any Virginia man who has had non-marital sex to register with the State. Men who fail to register waive all parental rights to children they may have fathered."

Democrats want Alms for the rich: "One of the first issues the Senate may address when it returns from recess is whether or not the federal government should provide public assistance to millionaires in Washington, D.C., to pay for their children's college tuition in other states. Despite the fact that one in three children in D.C. live in poverty, the mayor and D.C. public officials oppose ending public assistance for millionaires' families."

Taliban blow another ambush : "Taliban forces ambushed American and Afghan troops in Kandahar province today -- and now probably wish they hadn't. They killed one Afghan soldier and wounded three others, but lost over 100 men when the Americans called airstrikes down on their position"

Bush goes soft on Iran: "The Bush administration has notified Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois that it "can't support" the bills intended to help states and funds divest from Iran and Sudan, Haaretz learned on Tuesday. In a letter sent to Durbin within the past four weeks, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department Kevin Fromer explains the reservations the administration has regarding these bills, among them, the fear that such legislation "could jeopardize the support of our allies for multilateral actions against the regimes in these countries."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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30 August, 2007

Brookes News Update

The US trade deficit and Chinese' surpluses: economics vs. paranoia: American economy is not under attack by China. What we are experiencing, including China, is a massive monetary disorder. Irrespective of what the economic commentariat says, current economic problems are due to a failure to understand both the nature of inflation, money and capital. Until this situation is reversed I fear we are just going to continue to get more of the same
Bottlenecks and monetary policies: more economic fallacies that damage economies: It's an unfortunate fact that much of what we are told by the media about economics - in fact, most of it - is grossly misleading and thus highly damaging. Their ignornance of capital theory, monetary policy, inflation, interest rates, demand for labour, bottlenecks, etc., is something that the public needs to be armed against
George Soros: economic buffoon and enemy of democracy: Soros is a liar, and economic ignoramus and an enemy of democracy. He spent close to US$15,000,000 to help get the McCain-Feingold bill passed. The effect of this legislation, now upheld by a slim majority of the Supreme Court, is to restrict political speech in defiance of the First Amendment. Another effect was to increase his influence in the Democrat Party
Global warming: Chasing a "Will o' the Wisp" while ignoring a real monster in the sky: The Carbon Sense Coalition has called on the State and Federal Governments to stop wasting community resources on useless schemes for carbon trading and carbon sequestration and focus on some real world pollution crises
Iraq: the surge in action: Colonel Wayne Grigsby, 3rd Brigade commander: said to me. 'We're in these areas that no soldiers have been for months and years, we've got al Qaeda, JAM , and JAI discombobulated, and we're showing the people there - people who might not have seen an American soldier in years - a sustained presence, catching bad guys, building checkpoints, and making life safer for them'
Remember when the word "Leadership" meant something? Ah, the Good Old Days: My neighborhood in Marina Del Rey has always been a lovely beach city. But that was before Mr. Bush and his 'open door' and 'guest worker' policies for those from across the border. Now, I feel as though I'm living in a third world nation
Revealed for the first time: Goebbels' plan to destroy Britain's radar defences: The same arguments that are being levelled against the Bush administration's proposed missile defence system could just as easily have been levelled against Britain's expenditure on radar development and installations. Fortunately for the world they were not and because of that we are a free people
US financial markets rocked - what is really happening: Money lies at the heart of every financial crisis. Yet money, particularly in the form of credit expansion, is the one thing that is not mentioned by the economic commentariat. The possibility that policy of "pumping liquidity into the financial system" is the same policy that caused the crisis in the first place is never considered

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Google bias again? Gerry Jackson has just emailed me: "Early this year Google search results for Brookes News brought up 52,000 pages. After that it was down hill -- very quickly. Research results for today were only 798! I asked Google for an explanation. Naturally I didn't get one." I just did a Google search on "Brookes News" and got 15,500 mentions listed. Maybe Google have already acted on the complaint without admitting that they have done so. I have repeatedly found that they do that. They are too grand to talk to us but they do take notice. Since Google will no doubt read this, I guess I should complain that they have not got a lot of the files on this list

Bush Poverty Rates Continue to Plunge Below Clinton Years: "The current US poverty rate dipped to 12.3 percent last year. The AP reported today: "The nation's poverty rate dropped last year, the first significant decline since President Bush took office. The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that 36.5 million Americans, or 12.3 percent - were living in poverty last year. That's down from 12.6 percent in 2005. It is interesting that the AP didn't mention that the current poverty rates under this president are way below what they were during the Clinton years. Odd, isn't it? Official government figures have the poverty rate at 12.8 in 1968 and 12.6 in 2005."

The real problem of the chocolate city: "To see how New Orleans is doing, consider two recent stories: This past weekend, seven family members and friends were enjoying a quiet night outside their home in a tranquil neighborhood of the city's eastern region, which was badly flooded by Katrina. Their evening was interrupted when, according to New Orleans police, gunmen forced them into their house, herded them together and robbed them. Then the robbers shot them all - killing two. That was the second horrific crime in the same neighborhood in two weeks. Two weeks ago, gunmen killed a couple in a similar double murder (leaving unharmed their infant and toddler). As The New Orleans Times-Picayune notes, other victims just have been luckier. "The slayings . . . were the latest in a series of armed home invasions and robberies in eastern New Orleans," wrote reporter Brendan McCarthy. "Several crews of gunmen . . . have robbed and shot workers . . . and homeowners in the area, where many residents are rebuilding their flood-damaged homes." Also just last week, gunmen lined up six home laborers and shot three of them, killing one."



Alleged 9/11 memorial honors Islam: "Tons of you are stunned, outraged, and sickened by the new Flight 93 Memorial, the "Crescent of Embrace." I called the architect responsible for the redesign, Paul Murdoch of Los Angeles, yesterday for comment. He did not return my call, but he did speak with the Johnstown, Pa., Tribune Democrat, as quoted in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Neither Murdoch nor his supporters see any problem with the red crescent wrapped around the crash site near Shanksville, Pa., where 40 innocent people were murdered at the hands of Islamic terrorists"

Castro endorses Hillary: "Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential election. Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee for the November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make a winning combination. "The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate," he wrote in an editorial column on U.S. presidents published on Tuesday by Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma."

MSM sides with defeat: "Freedoms Watch has placed its ads on Fox and CNN, but CNBC and MSNBC have refused to run the ads. Ari Fleischer wrote this morning on behalf of Freedom's Watch to let us know that CNBC and MSNBC have stubbornly refused to air the pro-war ads, even though they have run issue ads on other controversial topics. Freedom's Watch has written to CNBC and MSNBC to protest their decision.

There is a big new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly incorrect themes of race and IQ.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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29 August, 2007

Strange "poverty"

The Census Bureau will release its annual report on poverty in America tomorrow. The report will show, as it has in recent years that around 37 million people live in official poverty. Presidential candidate John Edwards, who hopes to lead the nation in a new crusade against poverty, will, no doubt, seek to reap much publicity from the report.

In the past, Edwards has claimed that poverty in America is a "plague" which forces 37 million Americans to live in "terrible" circumstances. According to Edwards, an amazing "one in eight" Americans lack "enough money for the food, shelter, and clothing they need," caught in a daily "struggle with incredible poverty." However, examination of the living standards of the 37 million or so persons, the government defines as "poor," reveals that America's poverty "plague" may not be as "terrible" or "incredible" as anti-poverty crusader Edwards contends.

If being "poor" means (as Edwards claims it does) a lack of nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, then very few of America's 37 million official "poor" people can be regarded as actually poor. Some material hardship does exist in the United States, but, in reality, it is quite restricted in scope and severity. The following are facts about persons defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau, taken from a variety of government reports:

46 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only six percent of poor households are overcrowded; two thirds have more than two rooms per person. The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars. 97 percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions....

As a group, America's poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100-percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, super-nourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and ten pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II......

More here

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"Fallen" mankind: "One of the things that a classical liberal realizes that a leftist doesn't is that human beings are the problem. And this is why the classical liberalism embodied in the conservative intellectual movement will always be a tougher sell than contemporary left-liberalism, because people naturally don't want to believe that they are the problem. Rather, they prefer to imagine that there is some simplistic political solution that will cure the disease of man. But if you have even a modicum of personal insight, you know bloody well that no political program could ever cure you, you sick bastard, any more than socialized medicine could make Michael Moore just put down the freaking fork, okay?

State Treasurer Switches to GOP: "More than any other state, Louisiana has paid the price for big, corrupt government. Two years after Katrina, Democrats in the Bayou are in total meltdown. Not only is Bobby Jindal likely to cakewalk into the Governor's mansion this fall, but State Treasurer John Kennedy just switched to the GOP, setting up a likely Senate run against Mary Landrieu next year.

"There is no such thing as Moderate Islam" says the (Muslim) Prime Minister of Turkey: "Speaking at Kanal D TV's Arena program, PM Erdogan commented on the term "moderate Islam", often used in the West to describe AKP and said, `These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it."

ONLY six years away: "The federal government is expected this week to award a contract worth more than $1 billion to build the key components of its next-generation air traffic control system -- a high-tech network that officials say will alleviate chronic flight delays. The system comes at a critical time, officials say, with flight delays at record levels and commercial aviation expected to continue growing steadily. The network will rely on satellites, rather than radar, to guide aircraft, and it is expected to allow planes to fly closer together and take more direct routes, saving fuel and time while reducing pollution. Government officials say it will also improve safety by giving controllers and pilots more precise information about planes. Controllers could begin using the system to manage traffic nationally by 2013"

Federal program ONLY 20 billion in the red: "Despite promising changes, Congress has shown little enthusiasm for taking the unpopular steps that experts say are necessary to fix the nation's main flood insurance program. Recent flooding in the Midwest has brought the issue back to the forefront. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, back-to-back storms in 2005, dispelled any notion that the insurance program was self-sustaining. They threw it roughly $20 billion into debt and called attention to major structural flaws. Nearly everyone acknowledges it cannot pay off the debt, much less pay for losses in future storms. But so far, Congress has done little more than raise the program's borrowing limit, essentially handing taxpayers a series of shaky IOUs."

Islamic tolerance in Iraq: "They have been threatened because of their religious faith, their distinctive clothing and their success in business. They have been killed because of a Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammad. Many have sought safety by fleeing to the countryside, north to Kurdish-controlled territory or abroad to Syria. They have seen their churches bombed, their clergy murdered and community members threatened with kidnappings. The Christians of Mosul, once a substantial and predominantly middle-class community, have suffered the same fate as most other Iraqi citizens. Christians are hardly the only religious minority under attack, as witnessed by this week's coordinating bombings against members of the Yazidis community, which left more than 250 dead. But their religious faith has made them especially vulnerable in a city where the rule of law is non-existent and Islamic militant intimidate and kill with impunity."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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28 August, 2007

One episode in the defeat of American Fascism

That the American Left in the first half of the 20th century were essentially Fascists is extensively documented here. Roosevelt even referred to Mussolini as "That admirable Italian gentleman" and he tried hard to emulate Musso's "corporate state". Only the Supreme Court defeated him -- as we see below.

Do free-marketeers need their own judicial pantheon? In a recent forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, argued that conservatives and libertarians ought to induct Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States into such a pantheon.

In a nutshell, Schechter is the case that saved us from a centrally planned economy. Although, Roosevelt ultimately bullied the Court into abandoning Lochner, after Schechter the New Dealers were chastened, and they never again tried anything as massive and intrusive as the NRA. Indeed, I think that you could plausibly argue that since 1935 no one in the United States has dared try anything on the scale of the NRA. Had it stood, we would have been saddled with an economy where every major sector was regulated by detailed codes that not only dealt with issues of safety or working conditions, but also things like prices, permissible production levels, the scope of consumer choice (the New Dealers thought it was bad), and the terms of agreements between government regulated cartels. Gauche as Red-baiting is in New Deal history, there is no denying that many of the New Dealers were enamored of totalitirian economic planning, and, while the NRA never came close to the state-owned monstrosities of Stalin, it would have created an economic world in the United States closer to Fascist Italy than the modern welfare state. It was ultimately less of an exercise in economic redistribution than of political domination and control of economic life.

As a myth rather than a historical or legal theory, Schechter has much to commend it. A small, religious, family business built by immigrants searching for the American dream of advancement and self-improvement gets shut down by arrogant government bureaucrats hell-bent on imposing economic idiocy on the nation. They push back, and David-like force the government Goliath to its knees. The chicken triumphs over the eagle.

Source

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The Approach Of The Arab Pol Pot: "Peter Rodman has a column on the aftermath of the American abandonment of Vietnam which is timely since the old legion of anti-war propagandists are assembling on the virtual Mall in response to the president's speech yesterday. When I heard a radio interview with octogenarian Stanley Karnow last night --was it the first time he had been rung up by the MSM since the Bill Clinton-dodged-the-draft stories of 1992?-- I knew the president had not just touched a nerve, he'd touched the nerve in American history: Complicity in foreseeable genocide is, after all, a big deal. This is the ghost haunting the anti-war left, and the left shudders and screams whenever it floats into the room. All those millions of Cambodians didn't have to die, and all those Boat People didn't have to sail into death or exile. The Kennedys didn't have to topple Diem any more than Senators Levin and Clinton have to work to force the toppling the Maliki. And the Democratic Congress elected in 1974 didn't have to abandon South Vietnam to North Vietnam."

The UN sends itself up yet again: "The UN is lining up its 2009 Anti-Racism Conference with the same collection of players that made the last Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa a shocking anti-Semitic international scandal! UN member states Libya (the Chair), Cuba, Iran and Pakistan will meet at the Second Durban Preparatory Committee in Geneva on, August 27, 2007 to make preparations for this next disgusting Jew-bashing conference planned for 2009. As Iranian Fars News reported- Iran is very excited about leading this next UN racism conference. It was nice of the UN to allow the genocide advocates to lead the effort, wasn't it?"

Iraqi leaders sign unity accord: "Iraqi Shia, Sunni and Kurdish leaders have signed a reconciliation deal, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki says. The accord was the second step towards rebuilding Iraq's political process, Mr Maliki said, after four Kurdish and Shia parties formed a new alliance. A committee formed by the parties had "accomplished some solutions", he said. Issues under discussion include holding provincial elections and easing a ban on former Baath party members in the civil service and military. Mr Maliki was speaking at a news conference alongside Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, Shia Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Massoud Barzani - president of the Kurdish region."

India is the No. 2 terrorism target: "India has since 2004 lost more lives to terrorist incidents than all of North America, South America, Central America, Europe and Eurasia put together. All of these vast swathes of the globe lost a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years and three months."

US Strikes Inside Pakistan!... 30 Rebels Dead! : "US-led forces and Afghan troops struck Taliban positions inside Pakistan in fresh clashes with the Islamic militia that left at least 19 local Taliban dead, security forces said on Sunday. The US-led coalition said it received permission from Pakistan to attack across the border on Saturday, but this was denied by the chief military spokesman in Islamabad. Afghan and coalition forces used mortars and artillery fire to destroy insurgent attacking positions on both sides of the border after a military post in Afghanistan came under attack, the coalition said in a statement. "The Pakistani military gave permission for the Afghan National Security Forces to fire on the targets located within Pakistan," it said. Six insurgent positions were destroyed, three on each side of the border, and more than a dozen insurgents were killed."

The brains of men and women are, indeed, different: "Women really are better than men at shopping. And they really do prefer pink. And, surprisingly, it is possible that these facts are connected. The first conclusion was drawn by Joshua New of Yale University and his colleagues. The second was drawn by Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling of Newcastle University in England. The connecting theme is that in the division of labour that forms the primordial bargain of human hunter-gatherer societies, it is the men who do the hunting and the women who do the gathering.

Czech Republic Joins the Flat Tax Club: "The cabinet's package of public-finance reforms passed the final vote in the Chamber of Deputies yesterday thanks to two unaffiliated opposition MPs who voted with the governing coalition. ... Starting next year, the legislation will gradually reduce corporate and personal-income taxes, cut social spending and introduce cash fees for health care. It still requires Senate approval and President Vaclav Klaus's signature, but no resistance is expected from either. .The reform package will gradually lower the corporate tax rate from today's 24 percent to 21 percent next year, 20 percent in 2009 and 19 percent in 2010. The existing progressive taxation of personal income at 12 to 32 percent will be replaced by a flat tax of 15 percent in 2008 and 12.5% in 2009. The personal income tax will be calculated from super-gross income, including social and health insurance contributions paid by the employee and the employer. This means effective taxation will be 23.1 percent of gross income in 2008 and 19.4 percent in 2009."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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27 August, 2007

The Horror! The Horror! The paranoid style of the American left

The second part of the heading above is an allusion to a famous article, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", by Richard Hofstadter, published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964. Hofstadter argues that both the Left and the Right can be paranoid but the examples he gives of paranoia on the Right are a little unfortunate in view of subsequent events. He said that a suspicion of covert Communist influences at the highest level of American government was paranoid. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, it was revealed that the FDR/Truman government was in fact riddled with Soviet agents

The fascists are coming! Or rather, they're already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America's increasingly unhinged left. If only, sigh many Bush partisans, wondering when this administration will get out of the fetal position and show some fighting spirit. To them, as to most reasonable observers, the White House shows the chronic fatigue of a two-term presidency reaching its final year. Nonetheless, paranoia about what Bush and Co. are up to preys on the minds of many progressives, who have progressed, in this case at least, beyond reason.

It Can Happen Here, says Joe Conason, in his book of the same name, and in fact it already has started: George W. Bush and his coterie are the very picture of the pious and scheming homegrown fascisti that Sinclair Lewis described in his 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. Similarities abound. In Lewis's novel, "Buzz Windrip" (Bush), an illiterate dweeb with sleazy charm and low animal cunning, backed by Lee Sarason (Karl Rove), a smooth and duplicitous political mastermind, becomes president, cooks up a fake war to extend his own power, cows Congress, corrupts the courts, bankrupts the country, and all but destroys the free press. The core of his power is a sinister nexus of theocrats joined at the hip to corporate interests, and you can tell how evil they are by their proclaimed love of country, and their incessant talk about God. In their endeavors, they are backed by the Hearst newspaper empire (Fox News), the only one left after all other outlets have been shut down.

Fox News looms large in the liberal panic about creeping fascism--an immense smoke machine pumping poison gas into the atmosphere 24/7, against which there is neither escape nor defense. This theory of the pervasive malevolent power of Fox rests on a quip by anchor Brit Hume that the network played a decisive role in the 2002 midterms, which Conason seems to take seriously, and the scholarly output of two obscure professors arguing that Fox swung the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 as well. "Citing what they call 'The Fox Effect,'" Conason informs us, "professors Stefano Della Vigna of the University of California at Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of the University of Stockholm found that the network convinced 2 to 8 percent of its non-Republican viewing audience to 'shift its voting behavior toward the Republican party.'" If they say so. But there is no corresponding mention of the NBC-ABC-CBS-Time-Newsweek-New York Times "effect," and what its impact on voters might be.

At the same time that Conason is looking back to a fictional past in America, Naomi Wolf--last heard from in 2000 advising Al Gore to dress in earth tones--is looking back to a real past in Europe, and seeing troubling parallels. In 4,600 overwrought words, she explained to the readers of the Guardian that there are ten steps to "Fascist America" and Bush is taking them all. He has whipped up a menace (the war on terror); created "a prison system outside the rule of law" (Guantanamo, to which public dissidents, including "clergy and journalists" will be sent "soon enough"); developed "a thug caste .... groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens" (young Republican staffers who supposedly "menaced poll workers" during the 2000 recount in Florida); set up an "internal surveillance system" (NSA scanning for phone calls to and from terrorists). An airtight case, this, and leading to just one conclusion: "Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable.... that it can happen here."

Well, this explains many things. It explains why poor Cindy Sheehan is now sitting in prison; why Bush critics like CIA retiree Valerie Plame have been ostracized by the corporate media and are wasting away in anonymity; why no critic of Bush can get a hearing, why no book complaining about him can ever get published, and why our multiplexes are filled with one pro-Bush propaganda movie after another, glorifying the Iraq war and rallying the nation behind its leader.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Cindy Sheehan is running for Congress; Valerie Plame is rich and famous; the young Republican "thugs" made all of one appearance seven years ago--chanting "Let us in!" when Miami-Dade County vote counters planned to move to a small inner room with no observers present; and press censorship is now so far-reaching that you can't even expose a legal, effective, and top-secret plan to trace terrorists without getting a Pulitzer Prize. " .....

Over and over, they do what they claim their opponents are doing, want to do, or have done: make vast leaps of faith on almost no evidence, get carried away on large waves of emotion, build towering edifices on small collections of factoids, omit, deny, or denounce all contrary evidence, build fantastical schemes which they project on the enemy, put two and two together and get 384. People are entitled to say what they want, but it takes something other than reason to look at raging debates and discern in them fascistic oppression, to look at large Republican losses (wholly in line with a sixth-year election) and see massive fraud on the part of the losers, to look at today's South and see John Calhoun's, to draft both the Bushes (and the entire Republican party) into the Confederate Army, 150 years after the fact. Facts on the ground have no effect on their fantasies, which exist in a realm of their own.

Let's give the last words to Mark Crispin Miller [Himself a well-known paranoid of the Left so he speaks from experience], as he told the blog Buzzflash in February 2006. [See also here]:

"That sort of warped perception comes from extreme paranoid projectivity: the tendency to rail at others for traits or longings that one hates and fears inside oneself..... We're dealing with a movement that is anti-rational. It's faith-based ..... it's a movement that believes what it believes, and it believes what it believes is right. ... It believes what it wants to believe. If it hears contrary evidence, it comes up with evidence of its own. .... This is not a movement that the rational can ever shame into surrendering by merely demonstrating its illogic to its followers. ... Paranoia .. is based on fear, and therefore on a kind of 'logic' that's impervious to evidence and quite incapable of learning from experience. ... Paranoia is an atavism, deep within us all."

Much more here

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Brookes News Update

Financial markets reach hurricane force: Right up to the second half of July, world equity markets were still raging ahead in utter denial of the spreading cracks in the credit boom, with both the S&P and the emerging markets indices making new highs in that time. This was despite the fact that all the technicals were signalling the need for caution
Labour market reform and productivity: who got right and who got it wrong: Our right has completely buggered up labour market reform. The actual consequences for productivity of freeing labour markets were completely overlooked. The same goes for investment and growth. This has allowed leftwing critics of reform to gloat over its 'failures'
No-show Castro on his last legs: Good news from Cuba: Castro's failure to make a public appearance on his 80th birthday suggests that the dictator is now too ill to govern. Further reports reinforce the opinion that this sadistic thug is nothing more than a barely breathing cadaver
The New York Times' treasonous propaganda: The New York Times has become a criminal organisation that systematically traffics in treason and disinformation. It's hatred of America becomes more transparent with each passing day
It's not just the Scott Beauchamp media scandal: Media offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias. Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier. But the point is that media dishonesty and bigotry has reached plague proportions

There is a big new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly incorrect themes of race and IQ.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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26 August, 2007

The Racist EU

What fun! That old British stirrer, Gerald Hartup, has scored a hit. Hartup regularly draws attention to Leftists violating their own regulations

The European Commission is to remove the comic "What me a racist?" from its Europa website following a complaint from civil liberties group Liberty and Law taken up on its behalf by the Commission for Racial Equality [CRE].

The glossy A4 comic produced in 1998 to combat racism was published in all the official European Union languages. It was "designed for teachers to use when addressing the subject of racism with young people" and has been on its website since 2001.

Liberty and Law complained about the offensive racial caricatures of the black characters portrayed, reminiscent of the treatment given to Africans in Herg,'s 1931 book Tintin in the Congo.

The CRE made rapid progress with the Commission for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. On 21 August the CRE told Liberty and Law that the Commission underlined to them that it was "not their intention to be offensive to any group or individual and are looking into the matter". Just a few hours later Commissioner Spidla's spokesperson asked the Communications Directorate General to remove the comic from its website.

Source. The comics concerned are at the moment still up here.

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"Prisons are worth every penny"

Post below lifted from Surber. See the original for links

Norwegian officials estimate that after sentencing, 20 percent of Norway's criminals don't bother to show up for prison. That is because until very recently it was not against the law in Norway to skip out of prison. Norway's legislature recently changed that law, but prison officials haven't gotten around to implementing the law. This makes me wonder about the 80 percent of Norway's convicted criminals who do show up for prison. Are they really that stupid?

Not surprisingly, Norway's crime rate is double that of the United States. In 2006, Norway had 86.3 crimes reported for every 1,000 people, according to Statistics Norway. In the United States, reported crimes were 39.8 per 1,000 people, according to the FBI. The violent crime rates are similar: 5.5 per 1,000 people in Norway, 4.7 per 1,000 people in the United States.

No, for violent crime, one has to head north to Canada, where there are 9.5 violent crimes for every 1,000 people. That figure is down 5 percent from 1996. The numbers are from Statistics Canada. That's double the violent crime rate in the United States.

Anyone who is surprised has not been paying attention. We are told that the United States leads the world in its prison population. This may be true. Roughly 1/2 of 1 percent of Americans are in prison. The upside is that is nearly 1.4 million robbers, muggers, killers and rapists who are not out robbing, mugging, killing and raping.

A certain percentage of inmates are in prison for drug offenses. One estimate is over 20 percent. But drug offenders are mainly dealers who are serving time in federal prison. Getting into Mount Olive usually requires more than smoking a joint or two....

The state of West Virginia spends about $100 million on prisons. That is about 2.5 percent of the state's $4 billion general revenue budget. The prisons are worth every penny. Prisons keep more children from being molested. Prisons keep more people from being killed. Prisons keep more drunken drivers off the road. Some say the nation is becoming a "prison state." I grew up in a high crime area in Cleveland where no one ventured out after dark. That's a prison state. The choice is this: Either have a high incarceration rate or have a high crime rate. Norway and Canada have made their choice. America has made hers.

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ELSEWHERE

Iraqi terrorists caught along Mexico border: "President Bush's top intelligence aide has confirmed that Iraqi terrorists have been captured coming into the United States from Mexico. The confirmation comes from National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, who talked about the situation in an interview with the El Paso Times recently. "Coming up through the Mexican border is a path," McConnell said. "Now, are they doing it in great numbers? No, because we're finding them and we're identifying them and we've got watch lists and we're keeping them at bay." But, he said, "There are numerous situations where people are alive today because we caught them (terrorists)."

Humans not just "big-brained apes," : "In discussions on animal intelligence, it's fashionable to play up animals' smarts and their similarities to humans. And many studies provide fodder for such thinking. But a new study, reassessing much past research, offers a different perspective: it argues that key humananimal differences are often overlooked. Humans are more than just "bigbrained apes," as Charles Darwin called them in 1871, wrote the author, psychologist David Premack. Premack didn't challenge the findings of past studies. But he argued that they often focus on animalhuman similaritiesstriking us repeatedly with examples of how animals are "so like us"while glossing over the vast realms of activity where they're really quite unlike us. That leads to the false idea that animals have humanlike abilities, he said. Only since the late 1990s has research challenged that notion, by revealing microscopic features unique to human brains, Premack wrote. These studies have found "enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal." One such finding, he added, involved a newfound type of neuron, or brain cell, that's far more numerous and larger in humans than in any of their ape relatives.

TV losing out -- good for bloggers: "Time spent on the internet is set to surpass time spent watching TV in the average American household, according to the results of an IBM survey released Wednesday. Overall, 19% of respondents said they spend six or more hours a day on the Internet, versus 9% for TV. More telling, 60% reported that they spend one to four hours using the Internet, versus 66% who spend the time watching TV. Of course, the time spent on the Internet includes growing consumption of online video, according to the global survey of about 2,000 respondents (including 885 Americans) conducted in April-June of this year. Globally, 67% of consumers say they watch video on the Internet, or would like to do so.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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25 August, 2007

Russia: "At least it's patriotic"

The year 2007 may well be best remembered in future as the year Russia completed its transition to Fascism. All the pieces are now in place. Critics of the government have been imprisoned or murdered; there is virtually no independent media left; homosexuals are persecuted; the major industries are once again under government control; military muscle is being flexed with resumed bomber patrols around the world and -- as we see here -- the Vladimir Putin personality cult is ratcheting up. And I have posted previously on the "Nashi" youth movement -- pic below.



As a Libertarian, I regard Fascism as thoroughly antithetical to what I would like to see but I do see one redeeming feature of Russian Fascism: At least it's patriotic.

The Left in the Western world have slimed their way into power across the board. Whether or not right-of-centre politicians are elected, the Left still controls most of academe, the media and the bureaucracy. And the Left do their best to squash the feelings of love of country that come naturally to those of us blessed enough to live in the advanced societies of the world. Patriotism may even be legally suppressed as "hate speech" on occasions. "Hate" is so broadly defined by the Left that any belief in the superiority of Western civilization can qualify as "hate".

And yet we live in a world where cultural self-confidence is badly needed. The Islamics have plenty of confidence in their culture and are quite determined to shove it down our necks any way they can. We could squash them like bugs if we wanted to (nuke Mecca, for instance) but the Left have created a climate in which any defence of our own values is disallowed. So we let the Islamists continue with their depredations and killings. We seem unable to say that our culture is superior and that those who attack it will live to regret it.

I see no such self-doubt in modern Russia. They will not allow the Islamics to browbeat them in any way and will squash them like bugs if they try. It could be that Russian Fascism ends up as the only remaining alternative to Islam outside of Asia. I don't really think that is likely but if it should, I would be emigrating to Russia. Russian scientific and cultural achievements are of the first rank, even if their political leadership has always left much to be desired -- and with my blue eyes and fair skin I would look right there.

And let it be noted that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a strong supporter of the Church. As a Russian, he may even be a believer. The Russians are a very religious people, despite all that the Communists could do. So Russia will undoubtedly continue to be a transmitter of the great heritage of Christian thought.

I am an atheist but sitting in a great stone cathedral and reflecting on the wonderful words of the wise men of the Bible while listening to (say) the Twofold Litany of St. John Chrysostom would be a great pleasure to me. If you have not seen an Orthodox church service, you aint seen nothin'. They do all the stuff that we in the West have long forgotten: Rude screens, golden crowns, the lot. There is a short (excerpt) sound file of the Twofold Litany here -- sung by the great Russian bass, Feodor Chaliapin. I find it heart-stopping.

There is of course the unhappy possibility that Putin's Russia will be expansionist -- like Hitler and Mussolini -- but a comparison with Franco and Peron -- Fascists who kept out of international involvements -- would be equally defensible. Only time will tell. Some sort of re-absorption of Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia is certainly on the cards and would be greeted by little more than raised eyebrows in the West.

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ELSEWHERE

The big issue: "The current political squabbles in America between the liberal, socialist left and the moral capitalist conservative right are merely a skirmish line on the edge of two colliding civilizations. The combatants are not the free market, individual centric conservatives and libertarians vs. the Nanny State, socialist plantation liberal straw bosses. Not at all! The Elephant in the room is Islamofacism - and President Bush and his brilliant General Petraeus, at the head of the greatest Army of our lifetime, are decisively engaged. What is at stake dwarfs the '08 elections topics of single payer medical care, unfunded social security, or our billions of dollars held by China and Saudi Arabia, for economic blackmail. Life as we know it -- the profound blessings of the Age of Enlightenment and the spectacular technological progress in the arts and sciences that resulted -- is, absent a courageous defense, doomed to be devoured in the maws of a barbarian Islamofacism if President Bush's war leadership fails."

Some justice -- The lost-luggage airline is also now the out-of-pocket airline: "British Airways was fined $US300 million yesterday after pleading guilty to antitrust charges and admitting fixing some prices on international flights. Britain's largest airline could have faced fines closer to $US900 million but the US Justice Department credited the company with cooperating in the case. A federal judge agreed. Representatives of British Airways pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy for colluding with rivals to fix fuel surcharges on international flights. Earlier this month, authorities in London announced $US246 million in fines for the company in the parallel trans-Atlantic investigations. As part of its plea deal, British Airways is admitting that between mid-2004 and early 2006, it colluded with Virgin Atlantic over the surcharges, which were added to fares in response to rising oil prices. Virgin Atlantic is not named in the Justice Department case and is not expected to face a fine in Britain because it reported the misconduct to authorities."

Pathetic Britain is riddled with gang crime and they worry about this: "Two 21-year-old women will appear at Chichester Crown Court to answer charges of outraging public decency after they lifted their tops and exposed their chests to CCTV cameras as they sat on a beach. The gesture at Worthing, West Sussex, last month could lead to a six-month jail sentence for Abbi-Louise Maple and Rachel Marchant. The prosecution told Worthing magistrates that two 15-year-old boys were walking past when the women flashed, and that there was a family play area near by. The women deny the charges."

Belgium: Muslims want ban on Easter eggs: "If headscarves are banned for employees who work at the desk at city services in order to guarantee neutrality of services, then we demand that no Christmas trees be set up in city buildings and that no Easter eggs be given out." Antwerp trade union representative Badia Miri said this on Wednesday in the Gazet van Antwerpen."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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24 August, 2007

Speculation as news

It is worth noting that the Sunday Times, it seems, went into hyperventilation mode yesterday, with a front-page article headed, "Britain faces Iraq rout says US." It then picked up the theme in a focus piece, this one headed "Army chiefs fear Iraq exit will be Britain's Saigon moment," telling us that: "British troops will start to pull back from Basra next month, and the withdrawal is predicted to be 'ugly and embarrassing'".

However, not only are both pieces co-authored by Mick Smith, the man who thought RG-31s were "too big for Basra", with Washington input from Sarah Baxter, the pair rely for the substance of their reports on an American called Stephen Biddle. He, it appears, is the "US".

Yet, although he is described as a "military adviser to president George W Bush", he is no such thing. The best he can claim - like many of his ilk - is to have presented "briefings" to the president and senior political and military leaders - as well as "White House staff". This Washington-speak for being one of the numerous denizens of the beltway who is called upon by the White House and the Pentagon to air his views. By no measure can he be considered an "advisor" in the sense that his views are either influential or trusted - or in any way representative of the official US view.

More prosaically, Biddle is a senior fellow in defence policy at the left-leaning Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). According to a 2006 paper, he was a strong critic of Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq but, in a presentation to the House of Representatives in July, he was edging to qualified support of the surge.

Nothing of the main thesis that the two Sunday Times journalists have to offer, therefore, has any more status than informed (but sometimes partisan) speculation from a minor-league American academic.

More here

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ELSEWHERE



Above is a bit of Leftist propaganda that quotes verses from the Old Testament which command severe punishments -- including stoning -- for various misdeeds. It is another example of the Left's desperate attempts -- attempts that I mentioned yesterday -- to assert "moral equivalence" between Christians, Jews and Muslims. The fact that Christians and Jews DON'T go around stoning people whereas Muslims (particularly in Iran) regularly DO stone people, is not mentioned. But Leftists always have had an uncomfortable relationship with reality. They much prefer simplistic theories.

Failure of female radio: "To thunderous acclaim from the liberal intelligentsia, a team of feminist icons - including Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda - last year launched a women-run radio network. The mainstream media dutifully parroted press releases describing the launch as a "breakthrough" for women in the male-dominated world of talk radio. The Boston Globe, for example, proclaimed that "GreenStone gives women an outlet." Business Week described the venture as "Talk Radio Minus The Testosterone." Last Friday, GreenStone Media signed off for good... No doubt Laura Ingraham has a bigger audience than the whole network had."

Democrats insult the troops and undermine their leaders : "Democrats and their allies in the political activist media are working hard to pre-empt the September report on Iraq by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They live in fear of the facts that, if delivered without political spin, could be fatal to their party's lose-the-war-at-all-costs White House strategy. They are also fearful that General Petraeus himself may become a powerful public symbol untarnished by partisan politics. So they are doing the only thing they know how: slinging mud at Petraeus himself."

UK More "Islamophobic" Than US & EU: "Britons are more suspicious of Muslims than Americans and other Europeans, according to a poll for the Financial Times newspaper published on Monday. Just 59 percent believe it is possible to be a Muslim and a citizen of their country, a smaller proportion than in France, Germany, Spain, Italy or the US - the other countries surveyed. The poll findings suggests terrorist plots against the UK, including the deadly 7 July 2005 London bombings, have hardened attitudes towards Muslims living in Britain. [Odd that!]

The "Democrats" cheer as Bush democracy agenda fizzles: "The Washington Post today writes about the Bush plan to promote global democracy as outlined in his courageous 2005 Inauguration Address. This democracy plan, you would think, would be something that both parties could agree upon. After all, don't the democrats like to believe that their party stands for human rights and women's rights? Sadly, this was not the case. Since his reelection, Democrats could not even agree with the president on promoting global democracy. Sick. Democrats declared war on Bush a long time ago. They were not about to start working with their enemy when there was much more important work to be done like destroying his presidency at all costs."

Brits fleeing crazy Britain: "The number of UK residents leaving the country in search of a better life abroad has soared and migration experts said that this year's non-existent summer [Global cooling?] will only add to the exodus. Figures released today by the Office of National Statistics showed that 385,000 people left Britain in 2005-2006, more than in any year since the current method of counting was introduced in 1991. Of those, around a quarter of a million were British, although there was a sharp increase in those of foreign origin leaving the country. The flow of long-term migrants into the UK hit 574,000 - 25,000 lower than in the previous year - meaning that there was net immigration of around 190,000. Last year, about 3,000 nurses and midwives left Britain to work in Australia - more than double the number making the same trip ten years ago. Around 8,000 nurses emigrated to work abroad last year."

The primitive roots of Islam: "Historians say that pre-Islamic Arabs worshipped the moon-god by bowing in prayer toward Mecca several times a day. They would also make a pilgrimage to Mecca, run around the Kabah seven times and throw stones at the devil. And they fasted for one month, which began with the appearance of the crescent moon and ended when the crescent moon reappeared. These same rites form the core of Islam today: Muslims bow in prayer toward Mecca; they make a pilgrimage to Mecca and run around the Kabah seven times; and they still throw stones at the devil. They also observe the fast of Ramadan, which begins and ends with the crescent moon. Moreover, the ancient symbol of the pagan moon-god, the crescent moon, is the official symbol of Islam; it appears on the flags of Muslim countries, as well as on the tops of mosques and minarets everywhere."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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23 August, 2007

Wising up to newspapers

Excerpt:

I noticed that there were two sorts of topics in the papers. They were topics I had first-hand knowledge of, and things of which I knew little. And I noticed that without fail, articles written about anything I had intimate knowledge about were absolute nonsense. And I began to notice the little word shifts and shimmies and angles that the authors and editors would use to grind whatever sort of ax they had. And I'm pretty dumb, of course, just like God made us all, but I figured out that it was unlikely that the newspaper was only getting the stuff I knew about wrong, on purpose. And by looking for the method of obfuscation I recognized in things I knew about, I could see what they were trying to fool me with in things I knew nothing about.

You can read the newspaper and find things out, still. But the process is like panning for gold. There's a lot of sand you've got to swish around to get the tiny, glittering pieces of information. And so I abandoned the papers with a heavy heart, because I loved them so. They were the nursemaids of Twain, and Mencken, and Bierce, and a multitude of others that I adore. The people working there now can't even spell, or figure out the difference between nouns and verbs. I wouldn't allow them anywhere near an adjective, even though if they could, they'd print only adjectives. Nouns and verbs lead to the reporting of facts. I think they'd get a rash if they tried it now.

The New York Times et al., like to tell people that the internet is killing their business. Please. I can't be the only one that noticed that the front page is the editorial section now, and the editorial page has the quality and usefulness of unhinged rants. I'm not really in the market for either. And I'm too young to read the obituaries.

More here

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ELSEWHERE



"Moral equivalence" is an old preachment of the Left. Since they say that there is no such thing as right and wrong they may even believe it (though what would be "moral" about the equivalence in that case I do not know). They used to say that the Soviet Union was no better or worse than the USA but that lie exploded long ago. The latest version is that Muslims are no worse than Christians and Jews -- and the evidence is just as selective as it was in the days of the USSR (Does anybody even know what USSR stands for these days?). So the Communist News Network has just aired a program which makes a pathetic attempt to prove that Jews are just as bloodthirsty as the Jihadis are. There are some derisive comments on the program here and here.

Are Americans getting poorer? The NYT (predictably) says so. But it is a crock.

Sickening: Hillary says: "I'm in an Inter-Racial Marriage". And they let her get away with it.

More airport idiocy: "For seven-year-old Javaid Iqbal, the Florida holiday was a reward for schoolwork. But he was left in tears after he was stopped repeatedly at airports in both Britain and the US as a suspected terrorist. The alerts were triggered because Javaid, from Manchester, shares his name with a Pakistani deported from the US, prompting staff at three airports to question his family about his identity. The family missed their flight home after officials cancelled their tickets in the confusion. Javaid's passport is now marked that he has been security checked."

More Leftism from Amnesty: "A senior Roman Catholic bishop has resigned from Amnesty International in a row over the human rights group's new policy on abortion. The Right Rev Michael Evans, the Bishop of East Anglia, stood down after 31 years in protest at support for abortion facilities in developing countries. His highly critical comments come as thousands of other Catholics who belong to Amnesty are considering resigning after the policy change at a meeting last week. The organisation's international committee voted to support the decriminalisation of abortion and women's access to legal and safe abortion facilities. But Bishop Evans, 56, who recently composed a prayer that has been printed on postcards for an Amnesty campaign, said that Catholics would find it difficult to support a human rights group that advocated violence against unborn children"

Men don't like Hillary: "Appealing to female voters as a sister-in-arms won't be enough to win the White House, and a potentially worrisome gender gap has emerged in polls between levels of male and female support for Clinton. A July poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers by the University of Iowa found that Clinton had 30 percent support among women and 18 percent among men. By comparison, there was no difference in gender support for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who got 21 percent from both men and women. The same poll found that 32 percent of women strongly agreed that Clinton was electable, while only 14 percent of men did."

France becomes helpful: "The surprise visit paid to Iraq by France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, this week is another move by Sarkozy to shed Chirac's legacy. No better man than Kouchner could have been chosen to signal France's change of policy. For Kouchner is one of a handful of people in the West who recognized the murderous nature of Saddam's regime and called for its overthrow as early as the 1980s... The French change of attitude destroys one of the key arguments of those in the United States who opposed the liberation of Iraq. The argument is that by toppling Saddam, the United States alienated its major allies, notably France. Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, used the argument as a campaign theme, echoing the views of other leading figures of the American left such as Michael Moore, Jane Fonda and Noam Chomsky, not to mention the financier George Soros. The message coming from France is all the more discouraging for the American left because Kouchner, a lifelong Socialist, is the most popular figure of the French left, according to opinion polls... Sarkozy has made it clear that he wants France on the side of the United States and other democracies in the global war against terrorism. No one expects France to send troops to Iraq; nor is that necessary. But by clearly indicating whose side France is on, Sarkozy has already repaired part of the damage done by Chirac and his entourage."

Democrat mantra coming unstuck: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her outspoken anti-Iraqi war colleague, Rep. John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, are licking their wounds after a popular fellow Democratic leader - Washington Rep. Brian Baird, a senior Democratic whip on the Democratic Steering Committee, who was president of his 1998 freshman class - just returned home from Iraq to say that the U.S. military is "making real progress" in the war-torn country. Furthermore, Mr. Baird told the Olympian newspaper, and despite Mr. Murtha's long-standing wishes for an immediate U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, "the consequences of pulling back precipitously would be potentially catastrophic for the Iraqi people themselves ... and in the long run chaotic for the region as a whole and for our own security."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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22 August, 2007

Why bloggers enrage journalists

Excerpt:

All of these arguments about the need for reporters to report facts are dishonest. No one challenges this notion. No individual blogger could conceivably devote enough hours of his spare time (or his blogging time, if he does this full-time) to develop, confirm, and write a true bit of first-hand journalism once a week or so.

And the MSM knows that. They know their job on that score is secure -- simply because no one but a salaried reporter could put in forty hours a week working on a single story. (Especially because 99% of stories are not terribly important or remarkable, but still need to be reported -- but obviously no blogger could write up the Kalamazoo Crime Blotter three times a week and expect to be read by more than three thousand people as an absolute ceiling.)

What they are worried about is the decline in their influence as to matters not directly related to data-collection and not even remotely related to reportage. They're worried that they're losing their ability to shape (and mislead) public opinion in ways they find best for the public good. These people did not get into journalism, after all, to report on 3M's quarterly earnings advisory. They got into journalism to change things.

And they're desperately scrabbling to hold on tight to that bit of undeserved, undue influence by leveraging their entirely-unrelated qualifications to collect and disseminate raw information into a role they actually desire and feel they are worthy of-- a certified, credentialed priesthood of general wisdom, weighing in expertly on matters of politics, scientific and technological ethical dilemmas, foreign policy and of course military strategy, etc.

Source

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Brookes News Update

Blame central banks for sinking share markets: What a bizarre monetary spectacle. With one hand central banks raise interest rates to curb credit expansion while using the other hand to inject liquidity (credit) into the economy to prevent a recession that they think is caused by rising interest rates. Talk about economic schizophrenia
It's not the housing market that threatens the US economy: The recent financial turmoil had analysts and investors sweating bullets. What is being ignored is that the central banks that are seen to be salvaging the situation are the ones that caused it, particularly the fed. The US manufacturing index reveals that there could still be a lot of steam left in the current boom, assuming the fed allows the monetary expansion to continue
Stock market, interest rates and the business cycle: The turbulence in America's subprime market is being blamed for the current international financial crises, proving once again that our economic commentators are largely clueless on such matters
Is Russia's Power on the Decline?: Russia's power and influence are waning. If it were not for oil revenues and an unattentive Western media this would be reported, along with speculation about how long the thuggish Putin can hold on to power
Standing up to Islamic terrorism: Organizations that apologize for Islamic terrorists on a regular basis, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, are engaging in character assassination when they equate honest criticism of Islamic extremism with anti-Muslim or anti-Arab prejudice
Muslim terrorists chiefs have been igniting their followers by the word 'Jihad' - Holy War: Even the leaders of some Muslim countries are not able to resist temptation. Their true intent is a war against everything that is un-Islamic - that includes the West.
Monetarism and the US economy: Economic commentators are badly misreading economic history in comparing America's monetary policy with that of Japan's. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the Fed has swallowed the myth that money supply cannot be controlled and that there is no link between inflation and artificially low interest rates

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ELSEWHERE



According to Vanderleun, the individual above is female.

Brussels: Anti-American demonstration OK, anti-Sharia demonstration banned.

Norwegian woodenheads: "Norway had a unique way of handling crime. Criminals were tried, convicted and sentenced just like anywhere else. But then it was left up to the convict to decide if he would actually serve his sentence. And of course, this does not work. Small wonder that Norway's reported crime rate is double that of the United States. Police in Oslo are overwhelmed by crime. And a Norwegian newspaper reported that 70% of "Norwegians have no faith that they'll get any help if someone breaks into their home." The problem is that until recently, there was no law that required a criminal to report to prison to fulfill his sentencing."

UK TV provides a forum for Islamic supremacism and the delegitimization of Christianity: "There was no manger, Christ is not the Messiah, and the crucifixion never happened. A forthcoming ITV documentary will portray Jesus as Muslims see him. With the Koran as a main source and drawing on interviews with scholars and historians, the Muslim Jesus explores how Islam honours Christ as a prophet but not as the son of God. According to the Koran the crucifixion was a divine illusion. Instead of dying on the cross, Jesus was rescued by angels and raised to heaven... However, Patrick Sookhdeo, an Anglican canon and spokesman for the Barnabas Fund, which works with persecuted Christians, accused broadcasters of double standards. Mr Sookhdeo, who was born a Muslim and converted to Christianity in 1969, said: "How would the Muslim community respond if ITV made a programme challenging Muhammad as the last prophet?"

Black South Africa: "Thabo Mbeki's presidency faced a crisis yesterday after sensational claims that his controversial Health Minister was an alcoholic who jumped the queue to receive a new liver. The allegations about Manto Tshabalala-Msimang came as Mr Mbeki was already facing growing criticism for standing by the minister, who believes that a diet of olive oil, beetroot and garlic is the best way to combat South Africa's Aids pandemic. The claims were made across three pages of the Sunday Times, the country's biggest-selling weekend newspaper. They included allegations that the minister, while in exile in neighbouring Botswana in the 1970s, was convicted of stealing jewellery, hats and handbags from hospital patients."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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21 August, 2007

WESTOPHOBIA?

Comment received from Larwyn below -- finding a common thread in some recent reports. Her links are very up-to-date and worth following:

Dr Sanity would like to call what Islam preaches daily to their masses, the hatred and fear of the West A SERIOUS CASE OF WESTOPHOBIA. I would be happy if we would finally call it something to counter "Islamophobia", if Infidelophobia or Kaffirophobia won't do, Westophobia is fine with me, with this one disclaimer: Westophobia can't really be used to only label Islamists, it encompasses every sect and ideology who hates Western civilization. The LEFTISTS suffer from Westophobia and Condi's getting a case of it, trying to talk the vibrant capitalistic democracy of Israel into an appeasement of the thugs of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and therefore, also Iran.

What other than Westophobia can explain the gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair by the left over the Jose Padilla Conviction? For Le Monde -- Al Jazeera on the Seine -- "Jose Padilla's guilty verdict symbolizes the excesses of America's war on terror."

Had certain parties in our State Dept and Media not suffered from Westophobia, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq would have been handled quite differently with some real "excesses" of America's power. Too worried about the Arab Street , who hate us anyway, Powell & Armitage allowed Turkey to deny us our assault route down from the North via Turkey, who the ADL does not wish to offend by calling the genocide of the Armenians, genocide. Of course, 80% of ADL members probably vote for Dems, which proves their self hate. Has to be self-hate when a people make decisions to fight a war with Rules of Engagement that give all the benefits to the enemy.

So the big question now, will Westophobia, this self hate, influence G. W. Bush to become LBJ in planning the bombing of Iran? That's what SANE is asking, that's what Pierre is asking. That's what this cadre of "where do we find such men" are probably wondering, as they deal with the many, who should long ago have felt our full wrath -- those responsible for Defeating the enemy at Donkey Island near Ramadi

And what is an even greater proof of the rampant Westophobia than the Bestialization of Intelligence and Lost Posterity as we build monuments to our enemies. Some get it Burnett Sr: "Withhold my son's name from 9/11 Islamic Memorial"

And some wish to hurry our destruction by any means: Global Warming Litigation Planned By Blue States, even though the climate alarmists were wrong before

They would burden us with taxes for Socialized Medicine the Hillary Way and even Soviet Sanitarium Redux.

No wonder we're confused and some think Hurricane DEAN is God's Wrath against Bush

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ELSEWHERE



The airheaded John Edwards, a would-be President, did not even know that Cuba's healthcare system is government-run! It seems that he is even more of an empty vessel than Obama. No wonder his wife so often has to speak for him. But facts never do matter to Leftists. They just KNOW what should be done.

The Associated Press has a crazy Leftist fantasy story about U.S. police being unable to get enough ammo because it is all being used in Iraq! Have these guys no idea about how the market works? The whole fantasy is amusingly debunked here

Blind man wins case after Muslim cabbie refused dog: "A blind man denied service from a Muslim taxi driver for "religious reasons" has been awarded $2,500, the result of a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal discrimination settlement reached on Friday and made public yesterday. It was cold outside, and raining. Mr. Gilmour was attempting to return home after spending time with two friends at a West Vancouver coffee shop. A taxi was called. On arrival, the driver would not allow Mr. Gilmour's golden retriever, Arden, into the car. An argument ensued and the cabbie then drove off, without his two passengers. Mr. Gilmour complained to North Shore Taxi the next day. He was told that the driver's Muslim faith prohibits him from associating with dogs, hence his refusal to provide service. Mr. Gilmour decided to fight back. He hired a lawyer, himself a Muslim, and filed a formal complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal, alleging discrimination. The tribunal was to hear Mr. Gilmour's case on Monday; however, a settlement was reached last week with Mr. Saidy and his taxi company."

Deadly British bureaucratic bungling: "Emergency services were expected to begin a search this morning for two people still missing after a fire erupted in a Cornish hotel. The fire has already claimed the life of a man who tried to escape by jumping from the third or fourth floor of the Penhallow Hotel, in Newquay. Anybody left in the rubble would have little chance of survival, police said. As the rubble of the hotel smouldered yesterday, the Fire Brigade faced criticism that firefighters were hindered by a 90-minute wait while vital equipment arrived from Plymouth, more than 50 miles away. The fire spread at devastating speed in the early hours of Saturday as firefighters waited for an aerial ladder platform. Both Newquay and Truro, 15 miles away, possess the equipment but both were under repair."

Anti-Israel "Greens": "Young "climate change protesters" attacked an Israeli warehouse yesterday near the Heathrow Airport outside of London where they are campaigning against Heathrow's planned expansion. They took down the Israeli flag at the warehouse... And... They hoisted the Palestinian flag. It was part of their protest against carbon emissions(?)"

There is a big new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly incorrect themes of race and IQ.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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20 August, 2007

Another Leftist blames Israel

British Liberal politician, Jenny Tonge, is best known for her remark that the "pro-Israeli lobby has got it financial grips on the Western World" -- a classic bit of antisemitism in which the money-grubbing Jew is pictured as controlling the world's financial system. So it should come as no surprise to see the following fantasy from her:

"The Palestinians have been brought to their knees. A cultured and well-educated society with high skill levels has been reduced to a Third-World country. The statistics are there for all to see."

I have no doubt that there have always been some cultured and well-educated Palis but to call cultured and well-educated a society mainly made up of peasant farmers and goatherders is just the usual Leftist lying propaganda.

Tonge is more airheaded than most, however. Leftists are supposed to love primitive tribes but she forgot that bit after a trip to Botswana paid for by an agency of the Botswana government. Speaking of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen of the Kalahari, she suggested they were trying to "stay in the Stone Age", described them "primitive" and said they were "holding the government of Botswana to ransom" by refusing to be evicted from their lands. The Left rounded on her over that so her latest fanciful remarks may be an attempt to restore her credit in Leftist circles.

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ACORN not so nutty

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has its roots in a coalition of welfare rights organizations which, since 1970, has fought for "social and economic justice" - in this, the land of social and economic freedom. The coalition experienced serious internal stresses when it was joined by organizations such as the Vietnam Veterans Organizing Committee (VVOC) and the Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee (UWOC), presumably a group that would punish the rest of us by...what?...refusing to accept their unemployment checks?

ACORN claims to represent more than 350,000 member families and 850 neighborhood chapters in 100 cities across the US, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and the Dominican Republic, and they credit themselves with successful campaigns for better housing, healthcare, schools, job conditions, etc. Their members participate in local meetings, work on campaigns, and pay the organization's expenses through membership dues and grassroots fundraisers."

That is the public face of ACORN and it all sounds quite benign...until we take a much closer look at the role they play in helping organized labor swell the ranks of uninformed, disinterested, but obedient Democrat voters. For example, just what are those "grassroots fundraisers" that ACORN relies on to pay their neighborhood "activists?"

In a July 30 Wall Street Journal article, titled "Whose Ox Is Gored," John Fund reveals the true face of ACORN. He tells us that, in 2006, ACORN registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. But since it was organized labor and the Democrat Party who paid by-the-head for the new voters, we have to wonder how many of the newly registered voters are actually living persons.

Fund reports that, on July 26, 2007, local prosecutors in Seattle indicted seven ACORN workers on charges of submitting phony registrations in what Secretary of State Sam Reed, himself a Democrat, terms the "worst case of voter registration fraud" in state history. (If Reed is actually capable of recognizing vote fraud, one wonders how he was able to preside over the Democrats' brazen theft of the Washington governors office in 2004.)

In the present case, ACORN workers turned in registration forms containing the names of such well-know "Washingtonians" as Dennis Hastert (former House Speaker from Illinois), Frank Rich and Tom Friedman (New York Times columnists), as well as totally fictitious persons such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses given were all traced to various homeless shelters. According to the indictments, of the 1,805 registrations submitted by ACORN, only nine have been confirmed as valid. Election officials are still trying to validate the remaining 34 registrants.

Election officials first became suspicious when ACORN delivered the registrations too late to meet the October 7, 2006 deadline. And when the registrations were refused, ACORN officials, fearing that they would not be paid the per-capita bounty, as promised, threatened to sue the county. However, when four ACORN workers were indicted by the U.S. Attorney in Kansas City on November 1, on charges of submitting some 14,000 bogus voter registrations, the Seattle ACORN officials dropped their threat.

Source

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Maine Democratic Party Stalks-Harasses Sen. Susan Collins (Video)

Post below recycled from Gateway Pundit

Democrats are already harassing Republicans a year before elections! And their violent tactics continue from assaulting conservative speakers, to spitting on soldier amputees, to ambushing speakers on stage, to screaming at conservative speakers during public events, to strange protests at senate hearings.

Former Nazi Youth member Hilmar Von Campe compares this behavior by democrats to the former storm troopers in Nazi Germany who would shut up the opposition.

Now the Maine Democratic Party is stalking Republican Senator Susan Collins a year and months before the election.
The stalker posted his video at the Maine Democratic YouTube page:

This violence worked well with Senator Allen last election so look for the democrats to continue their stalking this election cycle

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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19 August, 2007

WHY I AM A FREDHEAD

The summary below is excerpted from a hostile source but I still like what I hear:



Thompson, who is expected to enter the presidential race formally in September, but plans to campaign in Iowa on Friday, was not known as a big-ideas guy and was hardly a heavy-hitter when it came to legislation during his Senate career from 1994 to 2002. Still, he was considered a reliably conservative vote on economic, security and social issues alike. He backed Bush's tax cuts, a prohibition on a late-term abortion procedure and voted to give the president the authority to invade Iraq.

More prominently, he established a reputation for working to limit the role of the federal government and protect states rights - an issue that remains very important to him and, perhaps, is an indication of what may lie at the root of his candidacy.

Broadly, he favors a strong federalist approach that emphasizes personal liberties and fiscal conservatism. "Centralized government is not the solution to all of our problems and, with too much power, such centralization has a way of compounding our problems," Thompson wrote in a recent column on his Web site. "This was among the great insights of 1787," when the Constitution was adopted, "and it is just as vital in 2007." He adds: "How we draw the line between federal and state roles in this century, and how we stay true to the principles of federalism for the purpose of protecting economic and individual freedom, are questions we must answer."

Thompson also:

* Splits with Bush on immigration, opposing the president's comprehensive immigration law overhaul bill and, instead, argues for increased border security as well as full enforcement of current federal immigration laws. The issue has divided the GOP, and Thompson is seeking the support of Republicans who object to illegal immigrants getting a path to U.S. citizenship. In one online column, he says: "Federal law must be enforced, or our neighborhoods will continue to be the scene of chilling and lurid crimes committed by those who broke the law in the first place to come to America."

* Appears to take a hard-line approach to foreign policy. He criticizes the United Nations, saying the world body "seems to oppose human freedom rather than promote it." And, in one particularly incendiary commentary for ABC radio in April, he carried on about the perception of the U.S. around the world and its relationships with certain countries. He assails Mexico on immigration, arguing that leaders there "apparently have an economic policy based on exporting their own citizens while complaining about U.S. immigration policies that are far less exclusionary than their own." He adds: "The French jail perfectly nice people for politically incorrect comments, but scold us for holding terrorists at Guantanamo." Thompson saves his most aggressive comments for Russia, contending that ex-KGB agents "apparently" run the country, use their oil wealth to engage in blackmail, and dispose of people who cross them. "Oppose the Russian leadership, and you could trip and fall off a tall building or stumble into the path of a bullet."

* Emphasizes individuals' right to keep and bear arms, as well as the right to own and keep property. He suggests in one online piece that the Virginia Tech massacre could have been deterred had those who were at least age 21 and met certain criteria been allowed to carry concealed weapons on school grounds. In the Senate, Thompson voted against requiring criminal background checks for purchases at gun shows.

* In a recent commentary, he assailed a 2005 Supreme Court decision giving local governments broad power to seize private property to generate tax revenue.

* Calls Bush's tax cuts a "success story" that helped grow the economy and says: "Letting them expire would amount to a tax hike of historic proportions." He also says the president should hold the line on spending.

More here. And another interesting post on Fred here

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ELSEWHERE



Soviet-style patience required for life in bureaucratized Britain: "A customer who was trying to report a problem to BT [British Telecom] was kept hanging on the company's helpline for 20 hours without getting an answer. Hannah King, 51, rang an 0800 number after a telephone line she had paid for was not installed at her new home. From 1pm until 9pm she listened to piped music and a recorded message every few minutes. She gave up until the next morning, when she dialled the same number and waited another eight hours without a reply. The next day Mrs King tried between 8am and noon - but again no one from BT picked up. "I was so frustrated and angry I broke down in tears," she said. "It is a helpline for goodness' sake, surely a company as big as BT can answer their phones." Mrs King, who has a new flat at Milford Haven, called the helpline after an engineer failed to turn up. She said: "The problem is that if something goes wrong you have no other point of contact with BT. You have to ring their helpline number and you end up listening to music and voice prompts without ever speaking to a real person."

Europe rediscovers babies: "Europe is in the midst of a baby boomlet after fretting for two decades that European women weren't having enough children to replenish graying populations and sustain economic growth. At least 16 countries, stretching from Iceland to Italy, saw modest upticks in their birthrates from 2004 to 2006. Roughly half the continent has reversed declining fertility rates or halted their slide, says William Butz, president of the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB), which tracks worldwide population trends. The increases are small, but the trend bucks a 20-year decline"

Why rebuild New Orleans?: "The Drudge headline read: "MUCH OF NEW ORLEANS IS STILL VULNERABLE TO FLOODING." It linked the New York Times report: "One Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Is Still at Risk." Of course most of New Orleans is still "at risk" of flooding; most of the city is in a flood zone because most of the city is below sea level. The nation is throwing away money rebuilding the city because of racial politics and piss-poor reporting. Democrats charged that George Bush "ignored" New Orleans because he hates black people. To prove them wrong, Bush promised to rebuild New Orleans bigger, stronger, better. This is machismo politics at its worse. Whatever happened to mitigation? FEMA rules say you don't rebuild in the flood zone. You move people to higher ground. There are flood zones all over the place - even in the hills of West Virginia. Intelligent people do not build there."

Do we need a t-shirt tax to save jobs?: ""Virtually all of America's 114 million households (most of them 'working families') buy shirts every year. In fact, last year, Americans bought 4.5 billion T-shirts and other apparel tops, 94.3 percent of them imported. That's an average of almost 40 shirts per household. But very few U.S. workers -- fewer than half a million -- make their living producing T-shirts, other apparel and textiles. Yet Obama and the union audience clearly side with the one third of one percent of American workers who still make shirts and other clothing rather than the 99.7 percent who unambiguously gain from being able to buy their clothing at more affordable prices. Democrats and their union allies are not representing 'working families' against big corporations, but a small and declining share of U.S. producers and their employees at the expense of the vast majority of American households."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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18 August, 2007

Matthew Syed says something useful

On 4th., I made a few comments about an article in "The Times" of London by Matthew Syed in which he attacked all mention of race. He has apparently done some reading since then. His latest article is still a rehash of a lot of old stuff but he has got to the point now of attacking Leftists for thinking that interracial differences have to be denied. Bravo Matthew! Keep up your reading.

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Media lies

Post below lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links and full details



Scott Beauchamp was the last straw. I realized that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the fallen journalists, journalistic mistakes and major and minor screw-ups in the media. I couldn't find one already made, although Wikipedia came close, so I started my own. I apologize if there is a good list already out there, but I looked and could not find.

Offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias. Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier. Some are silly, such as reporting on a baseball game watched on TV. Some are more serious. I leave it to you to judge whether the internet damaged "journalism's ability to do its job professionally", as Marvin Kalb accuses, or if the internet has in fact helped expose an already damaged "profession".

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Misleading Wal-Mart gloom

Wal-Mart stock got hammered today after the retailing giant cut its profit outlook for the rest of year, saying its customers were under "economic pressure." Now I can almost guarantee you that some congressman or think-tank economist somewhere is going to point to Wal-Mart's troubles (which many elites will delight in) as a worrisome symbol of growing income inequality, a sign that the company's supposedly lower middle-class customer base is getting left behind by the current economic expansion. A few thoughts on that:

1) Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott made a point of saying customers globally, not just in America, were under financial pressure. Indeed, one of Wal-Mart's biggest trouble spots was in Japan, where its retail unit, Seiyu Ltd., said it now expects to post its sixth straight annual loss on weak sales. Yet Japan is noted for its income equality, ranking second-behind only Denmark-among all nations, according to the United Nations.

2) Income-inequality worriers argue that it's basically only earners at the very tippy-top of the income ladder making any dough, with the rest of us just breaking even. If so, I would expect all manner of big-box retailers to be suffering. But that is certainly not the case. In its most recent earnings report, Target reported net earnings of $651 million, up 20 percent from a year earlier. At Costco, profits were up 14 percent in its most recent quarterly report. But Wal-Mart has them all beat. Its earnings rose 49 percent in the second quarter, but the weaker outlook-along with the sliding stock market-had Wall Street selling.

More here

Another comment: "The headline on the Reuters story syndicated all over the world today is "Wal-Mart Hits the Wall: World's largest retailer issues bleak forecast, pointing to cash-squeezed customers, higher fuel prices, interest rates." The accompanying story describes Wal-Mart as "struggling" -- which would carry dire implications for the U.S. economy, because Wal-Mart, which serves 127 million customers every week, "is considered a barometer of the health of the U.S. retail sector." The clear thrust of the article is that Wal-Mart, and hence the U.S. economy, is in trouble. Really? What the article actually shows is that Wal-Mart's second-quarter sales "were $91.99 billion, up almost 9 percent from a year ago." Moreover, its earnings rose to $3.1 billion, up from $2.08 billion a year ago. So, in reality, sales and profits were higher than last year. These are not the financials of a company that is in trouble"

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ELSEWHERE

Poles stand up for Israel: "A pro-Palestinian conference is scheduled for the last days of August at the European Parliament. The organizer is the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People famous for its ant-Israeli attitude. Members of that group are i.e. Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Tunisia and Turkey. The topic of the conferece is "Human rights violation by Israel military". However there are scheduled working groups on "how to increase the resistance against Israel military". The Israeli Foreign Office has submitted the protest against the conference. President of Knesset, Dalia Itzik, sent a letter to the President of EP, Hans-Gert Poettering. There is no official answer yet. In the meantime the group of Polish MEPs deriving from all main political parties declared to boycott the conference and help to call off the event."

British bureaucracy at work: "The external gate of a jail with more than 1,000 inmates was left open at night to allow staff to park in a secure area within its walls, according to a report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons. Anne Owers expressed concern at the general casualness about aspects of security at Ranby jail in Retford, Nottinghamshire. Security staff admitted that they were fighting a losing battle against drugs being smuggled into the prison, where there were difficulties in patrolling the perimeter fence. Ms Owers also highlighted a "large and unexpected" shortfall in the prison's accounts that could lead to delays in dealing with the problems."

Forget All Those Other Gaffes, This One Will Sink Obama: "Yesterday I said, "goodnight, Senator," and pretty much wrote off Barack Obama's chances of overtaking Hillary Clinton. Well, things just get worse for the Illinois senator. First it was his pledge to meet with every dictator with no conditions. Then it was threatening ground troops in Pakistan. Then it was taking nukes off the table. Then it was calling U.S. policy in Afghanistan "just air-raiding villages and killing civilians." Now, worst of all for his chances, comes this headline from the AP: Obama Says Bush Not Solely to Blame. I thought this man was running for the Democratic nomination. The party's base will never forgive a statement like that."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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17 August, 2007

Some good ways to handle those who want to dictate to us

Take Gov. Mike Huckabee of the Razorback State. When tax-lovers bashed him for refusing to jack up taxes to cover budget shortfalls, he created a public "Tax Me More Fund." That way people who get piggish about raising taxes can prove it with a voluntary donation.

Then there's Virginia Ham State Senator Warren E. Barry who filed a bill to create an opt-out registry for death penalty foes. If the registrant is murdered, the killer will be ineligible for execution and the victim's piggybank must posthumously support the expense of keeping the killer in the pokey.

Both of these moves, of course, are just pigs in a poke. They're designed to publicize the politician's position, not to be taken seriously. So why should libertarians cheer? Not because we agree or disagree with their options, but because of the kinds of options they offer. Options that put the opposition on the defensive by challenging them to put up or shut up.

Libertarians should piggyback on these reverse psychology tactics and offer our detractors exactly what they say they want. Take the whole anti-gun hogwash for example. If gun-banners really believe that hog heaven can be achieved by preventing everyone from hanging hoglegs on their hips they should be given the chance to proudly act on their convictions. Why should gun lovers be licensed and registered but not gun haters? Let's set up a web site and double-dog dare every gun basher to sign the "I'll Never Touch a Gun Pledge." In exchange for posting their names and addresses on the Internet they'll receive a big bright yard sign that says "No Guns In This House." Of course, their identities will be known to everyone, but so what? They'll be as happy as pigs in mud knowing that no intruder will ever be able to turn their own weapons against them.

Hog wild about the drug war? Great! Prove your pigheaded beliefs by joining the new libertarian organization called "Drug War Volunteer." When someone has their car seized and is never charged with a crime, DWV will call upon you to donate your own car to the victim. When the narco pigs ransack the wrong house, DWV will assign you to help clean up the mess. When someone is framed by crooked cops, you bail him out. When a single mother of three is killed in the drug war crossfire you'll become the kids' foster parent. Join the DWV today and prove you're not a hypocrite!

Opposed to education vouchers, charters, and other forms of school choice? Convinced that government schools will get better if we just shovel enough tax money at them? Print out the libertarian-supplied list below and carry it with you at all times.

THE PUBLIC EDUCATION SUPPORTER PROMISE CARD


1. I will not laugh when a high school grad cannot make change for a five when I buy a bag of pork rinds.
2. I will not grimace when he tells me that our first president was George Harrison.
3. I will not squeal like a pig when I'm told that Idaho is an Arab-speaking country somewhere in France.
4. I will not question the logic when she tells me that angels must exist because no one can prove that they don't.
5. I will not complain when the three million dollars in renovation money for the pigsty that is Guido Junior High School ends up as raises for district administrators.

And what about the next election cycle? Libertarian candidates, ever hopeful of turning the sow's ear of big government into a silk purse of freedom, will once again run like stuck pigs in pursuit of public office. Dispensing campaign literature, bumper stickers, and yard signs. But what do you give to people who say they only vote Demo or `Publican? Or those who say, "The only choice we have is to vote for Boss Hogg or be the little piggy that stayed home"? Slap a pin in their palm that says "I Love Big Gov" and challenge them to wear it!

Let's give people what they say they want. Maybe they'll learn to say, "In a pig's eye!"

Source

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LEFTIST MEDIA FOLLIES (1)

Don't they know ANYTHING? Post below excerpted from Autonomist

What follows is a caption from the AFP, and below that, the picture that accompanies it: " An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City."



The only way those bullets hit her house was if someone threw them at her house. You see, they've never been fired. For those of you unfamiliar with firearms, only the little copper-looking tip is the actual bullet. The larger, cylindrical casing below it holds the primer and the gunpowder that propels the bullet out of the firearm. Nice going, AFP! Proof again, that members of the MSM are often dupes for terrorist propagandists, and know very little about things military. Look at it like this: That picture had to have passed through at least several news people, including AFP's editors, before it was posted. An AFP editor chose that picture as representative of the printed story. And none of the people in that chain knew anything about guns

Confederate Yankee notes that the rounds are not American military ammo anyway!

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LEFTIST MEDIA FOLLIES (2)



Stupid Leftist newspaper does not know Iran from Iraq. Though they have changed their online heading now. Hence the screenshot above. A pity for them that they cannot also change the heading in all the newspapers they printed. I gather that some of the Melbourne Jewish community are pretty peeved by the mistake

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ELSEWHERE

There is a book out lately that purports to describe the political teachings of Jesus. There is a critique of it here

U.S. shares info about Taliban bases with Pakistan, bases disappear: "Information regarding the location of 29 Taliban bases, ID'd by U.S. intelligence and shared with Pakistan, has lost its targeting value for Islamabad's promised offensive against the militant group with the apparent evacuation of 28 of the training camps along the country's northern border with Afghanistan"

Democrat need for doom and gloom: "One of the two major political parties of the United States has linked all its electoral hopes on domestic pathologies, economic downturns and foreign failure. It is actually difficult to name any positive development for America that would benefit the Democratic Party's chances in a national election. Name almost any subject, and this unhealthy pattern can be discerned. If African Americans come to believe that America is a land of opportunity in which racism has been largely conquered, it would be catastrophic for the Democrats. The day that most black Americans see America in positive terms will be the day Democrats lose any hope of winning a national election". [Mussolini and Hitler got into power amid economic and social crisis too]

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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16 August, 2007

Leftism is a corrosive hatred of the world around you

My academic background is chiefly in the psychology of politics and in 2002, I wrote: "That permanent and corrosive dissatisfaction with the world they live in is alone what makes people Leftists. That is all they have in common". In other words, I have for a long time been saying that Leftism can only be understood as a psychology, not as a philosophy or a coherent set of ideas. The article below points out that too

"Everything must be different!" or "Alles muss anders sein!" was a slogan of the Nazi Party. It is also the heart's desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it's true. Hitler and his criminal gang hated the rich, the capitalists, the Jews, the Christian Churches, and "the System". They went through their Leftist phase early in life, and then went on to discover Aryan racial purity as their beau ideal. (As a swarthy Italian, Mussolini preferred to appeal to ancient Roman imperial glory).

Nazism was hatched in the same little intellectual cafes as a myriad of Leftwing ideologies, like social-democracy, anarchism, the Socialist Workers' Party, Trotskyism, Proudhonism, the lot. Peter Viereck writing in 1941 saw fascism's origins clearly. In the back streets of European cities you can still find the local anarchist or Leninist storefront, with old guys wearing 1900 laborer's caps and big mustaches, and fierce revolutionary posters of Lenin tacked on the walls. You can also find them in Berkeley, California.

"Everything must be different!" is the core psychology of Leftism, and has little to do with reasoned political beliefs. Most Marxists in the English Departments of America have never read Karl Marx's giant tome, Das Kapital, which parades as a work of economics and history, but is in fact a ponderous update of the Prussian philosopher Friedrich Hegel, who is even more unreadable than Marx. Instead of going to the fount of all Marxist wisdom, our academic "Marxists" have read the 1848 Communist Manisfesto and some hero-worshipping Leftist magazines. They are what Lenin, with magnificent disdain, called "vulgar Marxists" -- that is, proletarian dupes who just don't understand the deep philosophical roots of the real thing.

There are only a few ideas in Das Kapital. One is that human history is driven by class struggle between the rich and the poor, a wild oversimplification of history's rich and colorful tapestry. The other idea, borrowed from Hegel and flipped upside-down, is that the inevitable culmination of History in a state of Paradise is a material and this-worldly society, the condition of universal Communism, instead of an other-worldly condition, as Hegel predicted. Hegel believed that the Prussian State was a model of Paradise to Come. But since Marx was a "scientific" materialist, his version of history was called "dialectical materialism."

The final idea in Das Kapital is that economic profit (called "surplus value") belongs only to the workers, and not to the providers of entrepreneurial capital, nor to entrepreneurs who start and run businesses, nor to the inventors and developers who build intellectual capital all the way from Silicon Valley to Shanghai. Naturally, the radical Left gets to control what the workers produce. That's it. There's nothing else; it's a huge and ponderous rationalization of the impulse to overthrow whatever exists.

At bottom, the key political idea of Marxism is "Alles muss anders sein!" --- Everything must be different. The workers are supposed to be the revolutionary engine of Marxism, but of course they must follow the "guidance" of the Party, which is the intellectual vanguard of the proletariat --- the Party ruling elite, who are inevitably the same gang of parasites who were hatched in the same backstreet cafes in which Lenin and Hitler learned their craft. If the workers and peasants don't follow orders they must die or be sent to Siberia, as a logical matter of policy. It's all for the good of mankind. Naturally the real beneficiaries are the Leftist apparatchiks, who happily end up stealing anything the workers produce.

The craving that "Everyhing must be different!" begins in personal psychology, and then becomes articulated in political beliefs. That's why the same people can turn into anarchists or Nazis, Communists, or today, Post-Modernists, Deconstructionists, Radical Feminists, Socialists, Hillary followers, Islamo-fascists, you name it. It is why the ACLU chooses the worst criminals to defend; they secretly adore criminals, who are the ultimate rebels against society.

In teenagers the spirit of rebellion is perfectly normal, but it has its pathological extreme in what the psychiatric manual calls "oppositional personality disorder." The most psychologically acute philosopher in Western history, Friedrich Nietzche, called this oppositional personality syndrome the "reveral of values," and attributed it to Christianity (and its roots in Judaism two millenia ago). Christianity does tell us that "the poor shall inherit the earth," but like any other two-millenium religious phenomenon, it also includes far, far more than that. The wish that Everything must be different! is not limited to any faith or race, but is part of the human condition, to one degree or another. It's a normal part of growing up for most people.

But in some people it goes to murderous extremes -- such as the young Adolf Schickelgruber in Vienna, or the exiled Vladimir Ilyich Lenin not far away in Zurich. A young Cambodian named Pol Pot learned his version of Everything must be different! in Jean-Paul Sartre's Paris, was recruited as a promising candidate by the Soviet KGB, and then went back to Cambodia to kill three million people -- to create Paradise on Earth back home. Again. It's a predictable career path on the Left. Hugo Chavez today may follow the same logic as his model Fidel Castro.

What most conservatives don't understand is that the Left has reincarnated itself since the Soviet Union died. Conservatives think that obviously false beliefs should change; but that's not the way it works. Oppositional psychology is still at the core of the Left, and the mere crashing of the Soviet Empire and Maoist China hasn't changed a thing. The human condition is not that susceptible to reason or evidence. Oppositional personality just mutates and breaks out in other ways, like some insidious virus.

Marx thought that class struggle was the engine of history, but "deconstructionism," postmodernism, and the like have now generalized the class struggle to include race, class and gender, plus post-colonial revenge against the West, anti-rationalism, anti-scientific and anti-technology hatred, multiculturalism, militant Gays, transsexual gender benders, radical feminism, Afrocentrism, anti-Americanism, "man-boy lovers," the cultural assault against the traditional family, anti-Zionism, militant atheism, and all the other rabble-rousing "isms" of the Left. The key to all these movements is just one basic craving, that Everything must be different! ....

Oppositional personality syndrome explains a lot. When Yasser Arafat was asked who his personal hero was, he answered with a broad smile, "Mao Zedong!" That should have told us everything we needed to know. The Palestinian movement never builds anything, because its overriding impulse is to destroy, not to build. That famous Hamas-TV Mickey Mouse character didn't teach little kids to build a wonderful new Palestine, but only to kill Jews. Islamic Fascism is therefore just another revolutionary creed, with radically different beliefs from atheistic Marxism, but driven by exactly the same craving that Everything must be different!

That is why the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939 was a natural alliance. It is why Islamic Fascists in London get along so well with the Socialist Worker's Party in the Respect coalition, fronted by "Gorgeous George" Galloway in the British Parliament. A radical's beliefs are only on the surface. It is the personal psychology that is always the same, and it always hankers to break down whatever humanity has built to date.

More here

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GOOD AND BAD MUSLIMS

There is a generally insightful post here which tries with only partial success to explain the fact that the Jihadis are only a small minority in the Islamic world. Most Muslims just get on with their day-to-day lives as we all do and ask little more than to be left alone.

So where do the Jihadis come from? The answer is really simple. The Jihadis are people who are frustrated enough to act upon what Western Leftists say. A corrosive dissatisfaction with the world they live in is what characterizes Leftists and they express that dissatisfaction vociferously day in and day out. And the Jihadis are usually educated people who have often heard that constant angry wail.

And Muslims have got more to be angry about than most. By most criteria, Islamic societies are the anus of civilization. They are brutal, backward, stifling, sexually repressive and poor. They contribute nothing to the world and function principally as parasites on the West. But it is a great human failing to blame others for your own problems and the Jihadis grab with great satisfaction what the Leftists say: That all the ills of the world (including the ills of the Muslim world) are the fault of America and the West.

That is of course a thoroughly stupid message and it is notable that you usually seem to need a Western university education to believe it. The 9/11 bombers and the British doctor bombers were all highly educated people who had lived for years in the West. They were not Egyptian peasants.

So the Jihadis are simply people who are dumb enough and frustrated enough by their own societies to put into practice what the Left preaches. Leftism is the real enemy egging them on, not Islam. It is no wonder that the Left does all it can to protect them.

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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15 August, 2007

Will India pull ahead?

But will India always remain the tortoise-elephant to China's dragon-hare? If India could transcend its fractious politics (and there are signs in recent elections that it might), then it certainly has the potential to excel economically. It has a demographic advantage over China - it will have a larger working-age population by 2050. Its diversity is also a source of creativity - something its dour northern neighbour fears it may lack. And while China's rulers have managed economic liberalisation masterfully, it remains to be seen whether they can achieve the same miracle in the political sphere. China has enjoyed the short-term bonus of authoritarianism - the power to impose restructuring regardless of popular opinion - but authoritarianism also brings a lack of transparency. Many commentators believe this has shrouded serious overinvestment, bad debts and potential asset bubbles.

Moreover, China - unlike India - has not been effective at managing its gross regional inequalities. Few doubt that China's economic triumph will eventually bring political turmoil in its wake. India, unlike China, has had 60 years of experience in managing political turmoil. Though there are pockets of extreme radicalism, Maoist factions and Islamist extremism, mass revolutionary violence is highly unlikely; people accept the mediation of political conflict through elections. And so, paradoxically, though India's political life is chaotic, it is also curiously stable. India's elephantine advantages may yet win out.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Rethink in Germany: "After years of calling Iraq a disaster, debacle and quagmire, SPIEGEL ONLINE has decided to declare the following: "The US military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe.". This all stems from last week's Der SPIEGEL magazine cover feature article by Ullrich Fichtner: An enormous, fascinating and remarkably honest report on the complex situation in Iraq. SPIEGEL ONLINE is also publishing Fichtner's report that US troops are in a remarkably good mood and have high morale. That also flies directly in the face of past SPIEGEL reporting that consistently depicted US troops as demoralized, depressed, defeated, prone to suicide and suffering from low morale. As a long-time observer of the publication, my first reaction to reading this on SPIEGEL ONLINE was: Are they on drugs?! - this directly contradicts everything they've reported for the past four years! My second reaction was: Have they finally gotten off the drugs?! Maybe reality is finally starting to sink in!"

Rare realism from a British charity: "One of Britain's leading charities has warned students not to take part in gap-year aid projects overseas which cost thousands of pounds and do nothing to help developing countries. Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) said that gap-year volunteering, highlighted by Princes William and Harry, has spawned a new industry in which students pay thousands of pounds for prepackaged schemes to teach English or help to build wells in developing countries with little evidence that it benefits local communities. It said that "voluntourism" was often badly planned and spurious projects were springing up across Africa, Asia and Latin America to satisfy the demands of the students rather than the needs of locals. Young people would be better off simply travelling the world and enjoying themselves, it added."

BBC presenter was NOT drunk! Oh no!: "Normal service will be resumed, the BBC has promised, after Radio 2 listeners raised concerns over another baffling early-morning performance by Sarah Kennedy. The broadcaster mispronounced words and let sentences tail off in a rambling show that prompted a number of listeners to voice fears for her health on the station's website. Kennedy, 57, referred to Diana, Princess of Wales, wearing a "pink polka blot" dress and described the victim in the Phil Spector murder trial as having a "gunshot to her month". She offered to send some "panties" to soldiers in Afghanistan and also appeared to have difficulty reading the newspaper review."



Cricket taking off in China: "Shouts of "Howzat!" resounded across a Beijing football pitch as China's cricketers battled yesterday for victory in the first final of the National Cricket Tournament. The winners of the inaugural national championship were the team from the Shenyang Sports Institute who defeated Shanghai Fudan University by seven wickets. A total of 59 men's teams and 19 women's teams took part in the tournament - an increase from the 37 men's teams who played regional matches last year. The first finals were played under rare blue skies in the usually polluted capital and on the grounds of Tsinghua University. In the absence of a pavilion, the players waited on the boundary, sipping iced water under red Coca-Cola umbrellas" [The headline on this article in The Times is amusing: "Oh no! Another country to beat us at cricket"]

A low, dishonest decade: "The Roosevelt Myth is more than a simple error of fact; it has a normative component that makes it one of the most pervasive and harmful in contemporary America. Forty years ago, historian Arthur Ekirch, Jr., wrote that 'the years 1929 to 1941 transformed the traditional values and attitudes of the American people, conditioning them to look, as never before, to the national state as the basic arbiter and fundamental factor in their lives.' And indeed, the notion that government planning rescued the economy -- or the almost equally perverse notion that it 'saved capitalism' -- is firmly embedded in the catechism of untruths that rationalizes the ambitions of both Left and Right. It does not appear that any politician since Ronald Reagan has seriously questioned the success of the New Deal, and even he did not challenge its theoretical assumptions or moral pretensions."

Freedom's example on Taiwan: "Democracy can be chaotic. While in Taipei last May I saw demonstrators inside the Chang Kai-shek Memorial. I read press critical of government policies. And I talked to opposition leaders plotting political campaigns to regain power. But from the messiness of freedom comes resilience, strength and order. Free people pursue their dreams, hold their leaders accountable, and accept the rule of law because they choose the lawmakers. The machinery of democracy allows competition while promoting compromise, cooperation and coalitions. It provides a peaceful pathway for change. Taiwan's rambunctious democracy rebuts Beijing's assertion that democracy cannot flourish in a Confucian Society."

Good news for Australian and Californian winemakers: "Britain faces a champagne shortage because vineyard owners in eastern France are refusing to sell tens of millions of bottles stocked in their cellars. Their unwillingness to give up what they see as their retirement nest eggs has left the country's most prestigious champagne houses struggling to keep pace with a rise in demand in the US and developing countries. Champagne experts say that producers will soon be unable to supply emerging markets in Russia, China and India as well traditional customers in countries such as Britain."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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14 August, 2007

Communism and Nazism

Excerpt from a review of: 'Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe' by Robert Gellately. There is a longer review here. That the Hitler regime differed in being more popular is undoubted. Detailed background on the Hitler regime here

In their different ways they were as bad as each other, the three monsters of 20th-century Europe. That is an oddly controversial statement. Hitler is almost universally vilified; Lenin remains entombed on Red Square as Russia's most distinguished corpse; and modern Russia is looking more kindly on Stalin's memory.

Robert Gellately elegantly scrutinises their differences and highlights their similarities. He places all three men in the context of a Europe shattered by the first world war. "Before 1914 they were marginal figures," he writes, without "the slightest hope of entering political life." The whirlwind of destruction that started in 1914 turned their fantasies of racial purity and class dictatorship into reality, killing people on a scale unknown in human history.

Anyone who still believes in the myth-assiduously propagated by the Soviet Union and its admirers-of the "good Lenin" will find the book uncomfortable reading. The author outlines with exemplary clarity Lenin's cruelty, his illegal and brutal seizure of power, his glee in ordering executions, the institution of mass terror as a means of political control and the construction of the first camps in what later became the gulag. "Far from perverting or undermining Lenin's legacy, as is sometimes assumed, Stalin was Lenin's logical heir," he writes icily.

Mr Gellately busts another myth too: that Hitler seized power by fear and force. The combination of anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik rhetoric played well with the German public. People felt humiliated by defeat and impoverished by recession, and Hitler blamed "the Jews" for both. Hitler looked on Soviet methods with contempt. His model was what Mr Gellately calls "consensus dictatorship": cautious, sounding out public opinion and changing course when necessary. Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not make a habit of murdering his closest allies. The Nazi party never experienced the ritual purges that were a habitual feature of Soviet Communist Party life under Stalin. Hitler's adversaries were so demoralised by the seeming success of his regime that few offered systematic resistance. It was only as defeat loomed in the last months of the war that ordinary Germans had a taste of the official paranoia that had been their Soviet counterparts' daily fare for 25 years.

The argument about the origins of Nazism will run and run. But there is little danger of Germany rehabilitating Hitler, even in the driest and most academic corners of historical theory. In Russia, by contrast, Stalin's memory is being burnished. A new guide for history teachers describes Stalin as the Soviet Union's "most successful leader"; it admits that "political repression" took place, but says it "was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite." President Vladimir Putin, welcoming this guide, compared Stalin's Great Terror of 1937 with the allied bombing of Hiroshima. It would be interesting to hear Mr Putin's tame historians debate the Stalin era with Mr Gellately.

Source

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Some good sarcasm from Mark Steyn on the new NASA climate data: "Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast" [The 1930s were of course the time of the Great Depression]

Misleading Reuters picture again: "News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic.... it has now emerged that the footage actually showed two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that were employed on location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic ship in the north Atlantic some 10 years ago. This footage was used in sequences in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster about the 1912 disaster. The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie.... The incident is doubly embarrassing for the agency since it follows a case in August last year in which it published an image by a freelancer of Israeli bombings in Lebanon that had been dramatised using photo manipulation, with the addition of smoke rising from allegedly burning buildings"

Liberals and the Gift that Keeps Taking: "While we're on the subject, yet another reason why I am not a leftist is that it is an ideology that undermines true brotherly love, which is to say, caritas. It is astonishing to me that the Democrats are able to fraudulently depict themselves as the "party of compassion," when their central program involves half the population voting to force the other half to give it stuff. You can be in favor of that, but just don't call it "charitable" or "compassionate." Call it what it is: a form of misguided self-interest. It is misguided because, as Tom Nugent explains today on NRO -- repeat after me -- "tax revenues will fall -- not rise -- when an economy slowed by tax hikes produces lower tax revenues. In all of this, the little guy -- not the rich guy -- is the one who's going to get hurt...."

FDR has got a lot to answer for: "When Europeans express anti-American sentiments, in my opinion, they are actually acting as loyal servants of the America that conquered them six decades ago. Of course, Europe was invaded by tanks, airplanes and infantry - not diplomats, educators and aid workers. But the America that won World War II was a one-party state that had no place for the Right, and it recreated Europe in its own image. The cold war between State and Defense, eggheads and jocks, blue-state and red-state, broke out only after the shooting had stopped." [For more on the "Progressive" dominance of pre-WWII America, see here]

Dress standards still alive in British horseracing: "Don't come to Glorious Goodwood if you're a "chav". That's the supposed message from the Earl of March, heir to the Goodwood Estate, if you fancy attending the Flat season's most varied and joyful meeting this week. At least, that's how I would currently describe it. Comments like that risk sucking out all the fun. These five days celebrate Flat racing in all its guises against the country's most beautiful racecourse backdrop. More relaxed than Royal Ascot, it nonetheless retains an effortless sense of occasion. It's also a microcosm of British society enjoying itself at whatever level of expense they choose. So it's disappointing that the Earl hankers after a more rigorous dress code. Although he insists he did not use the word "chav", he does seem to have pretty fixed ideas on how best to dress. "I won't be asking that visitors wear morning coats but I would like to see the ladies in nice traditional English summer frocks, with linen suits and Panama hats for the gentlemen," he was quoted as saying." [In Britain, a "chav" is a flashily dressed working-class person -- generally considered to be stupid]

Some of our best people are in the military: "I spent a week in Iraq recently, and here's what impressed me most: the Americans. In particular, the quality and character of the American soldiers and Marines who are fighting there and trying to help rebuild the nation. I don't mean to slight, in some ethnocentric way, the steadfastness and courage of the Iraqi people. But it was meeting and watching the American soldiers at work that I found most interesting.... the soldiers who have done well in Iraq will be major figures in American life for the next couple of decades. These men and women are no less suited to national leadership than are entrepreneurs, lawyers or local community leaders. In fact, they've had to show more courage, they've had to operate in a more fluid and volatile environment--and they've risked their lives for their country".

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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13 August, 2007

LEFTISTS FEAR THE FUTURE

Post excerpted from Breath of the Beast. See the original for links

Up to this point I have concentrated on the similarities between The Left and the Islamists. As important as it is to understand those similarities, we cannot solve the dilemma they put us in without looking at the ways in which they differ. Ironically, the only way to highlight those differences is to point out one last, critical similarity. That is, that they are both afraid of and at war with the future.

Now, it is true that to conceal this fear (even from themselves) both groups put up a brave front by claiming to be "the wave of the future". Communists and socialists, of course, have always presented themselves as the avant-garde. From the theses of Marx, to the perpetual revolution rhetoric of the Russians and the Chinese, to the presumptive (and pathetically hopeful) appellation "Progressive" that much of today's European and American left has adopted as its title, the left has always presumed that their ideas and practices would sweep away the "old order" and bring in a new and finer age of political, economic and social equality.

But we have seen that whenever a leftist government has been in control, change has immediately become the enemy, a new, more exclusive ruling class has arisen and extraordinarily harsh measures have been used to repress individual initiative and thought. That same fear of the future is what turns liberal western politicians into "control freaks". It fuels their desire to give the government control over all aspects of life. They want government health care, to make government the monitor of the balance of conservative and liberal conversation on the broadcast media, to call on government to become the enforcer of racial preferences on hiring and educational opportunity, it even (in Massachusetts, any way) wants the government to specify and police the fat content of perfectly edible foods. It is the atavistic fear of the future that desires the government to control the distribution of wealth and resources.

The left's fear of the future results in paralysis. The logical extension of those creeping government controls is a soviet-like, centrally controlled economy, and history has shown that to be a failure. It was that very central management of the economy and the stagnation it created, not any internal political heresy or subversion, that caused the Soviet Union to fall apart. The leftists paralyze themselves politically with their cultural relativism and the illusion that they can create equality in an unequal world. They are unable to make value judgments on cultural cornerstones such as family, education, morality and ethics because they are mired in intellectualized, multicultural "non-judgementalism". They have no way forward because they have prohibited themselves from favoring any one course over another- or even considering what the differences might be. Their ethos is one of an intellectually nomadic existence, wandering from one platitudinous, ineffectual idea to the next.

As long as the leftmost "progressives" are a tiny minority this might seem a harmless, if perverse, pastime. But they are never content with strangling and avoiding their own future. They are convinced that everyone must be forced to participate in their dystopian dream. The left is always attempting to force others to share their unproductive illusions. They take a particular interest in becoming educators and trying to bend, fold and mutilate the children of others into becoming the vanguard of the new social order of stagnancy they aspire to. My post about the "progressive" teachers who banned their classes from playing with Legos because, "the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys - assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society - a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive" shows how they take normal childhood behavior and turn its energy not into a productive learning experience but a pedantic inquisition into thought crimes.

They don't seem to know who they are, really. They deny that they are children of this culture. They do not seem to recognize that they owe their education and freedom of expression to this culture. They keep themselves assiduously ignorant of the fact that no other culture in the history of the world was ever as free as ours, and that their pose as perpetual social gadflies and Cassandras would have landed them in prison or mental asylums in most other cultures. They are in total denial that is that very "ownership and social power" that they detest that has given them the opportunity to work with (and attempt to indoctrinate) the children of gainfully employed, productive citizens. This is a classic example of the dissociation of a borderline personality expressed in the cultural dimension. How else could a human being of at least average intelligence (many of these lefties are very intelligent) propose the least successful, most class-based (the ruling class in a communist system decides everything by fiat) and repressive system known in modern times as a "better alternative" to the most successful and freest one. Remember that the definition of Borderline Personality Disorder is, in part; "(3) self-image, (4) identity, and (5) behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual's sense of self. In extreme cases, this disturbance in the sense of self can lead to periods of dissociation."

The western left seems always to be behaving as if they want to tear down the government and the culture that supports it while not admitting to the knowledge that were there to be a change of regime, even a leftist one, the vast majority of them would be among the very first to be purged, imprisoned or marginalized by whatever autocratic or totalitarian regime arose in its place. They are literally sitting on the limb that they appear to be trying to saw off. Either they have supreme confidence that nothing they do will actually cause the bough to break they are simply so blinded and consumed by their fear of the future, they are blind to the kind of future they would bring down on themselves if they were successful. They clearly do not feel at home in their own culture and have no clear idea of what their new home might look like if they could move to one or build it themselves. They only know what they hate (Bush, capitalism, ownership, power, competitiveness, patriotism and meritocracy, etc...) about this one. They really seem to be happiest knowing that the culture they despise will not hurt them, nor will it expel them thereby forcing them to fend for themselves in other, less hospitable, societies. They are homeless, nomadic foreigners in their own homeland. Which, in a cultural sense, is the first definition of pilgrim (with a lower case "p"): one who journeys in foreign lands: nomadic

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Crime in the chocolate city: ""In the two years since hurricane Katrina soaked the Big Easy, the murder rate has soared, and street justice has prevailed over the notoriously ineffective halls of justice. But there are signs now that this city, famous for its laissez-faire lethargy and laid-back detectives, is gaining some ground against a tide of criminality that residents say threatens to sweep away the promise of recovery. From Coronado Heights to Lakeview, hope is returning that 'the battle for New Orleans,' as residents call it, is winnable -- on the streets and inside the city's corruption-tinged criminal justice system. Reforms in the squad room and the courtroom have lifted the rate of solved murders here from 16 percent to 42 percent since January. Moreover, a new violent-crime unit has won convictions in 19 of 20 cases since April. It's a dramatic turnaround that may indicate an abrupt awakening to the need to check crime at this particular juncture in city history."

The religion of peace in India: "Muslim protesters assaulted the exiled Bangladeshi author and feminist Taslima Nasreen at a book launch in Hyderabad on Thursday, incensed by her repeated criticism of Islam and religion in general. Some radical Muslims hate Nasreen for saying Islam and other religions oppress women. On Thursday, lawmakers and members of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party attacked her at the press club in Hyderabad at the launch of a Telugu translation of one of her novels. An uneasy-looking Nasreen backed into a corner as several middle-aged men threw a leather case, bunches of flowers and other objects at her head and threatened her with a chair, according to a Reuters witness and television pictures. Some of the mob shouted for her death. Other men tried to shield her and catch the projectiles. She ended up with a bruised forehead, and described the attack as barbaric before being taken to safety by police".

Scrap scalping laws: "I'm not a sports fan; never have been. Maybe that's why all the atmospherics surrounding ticket scalping raise more questions in my mind than they answer. For example: Why is someone who sells tickets to a Red Sox fan outside Fenway Park for a heavily inflated price called a 'scalper,' while someone who charges the same fan $4 for a bottle of water inside the stadium is called a 'concessionaire?' ... But what I really don't understand about the scalping brouhaha is why anyone thinks the government should be involved in deciding how much a willing buyer can pay a willing seller for tickets to a lawful entertainment event. We all take it for granted that if you're willing to pay for the privilege, you can stay at the best hotel, live in the best neighborhood, eat at the best restaurant, or hire the best lawyer." [Note: Massachusetts is one of only 8 states where this is still illegal]

The Petri dish of terror is failure: "The terrorists and their supporters don't want to see western values (i.e., democratic principles) and successes brought into the Muslim world because western values and successes are antithetical to the ideologies of terrorist and their supporters. Terror flourishes when societies fail. Introduce values that embrace individual freedoms and the freedoms that allow an individual to succeed, and support for terror vanishes. The petri dish of terror is failure. If the terrorists and their supporters and apologists really wanted to better the lives of hundreds of millions of oppressed people, they would use America western freedoms as models for success. Instead, terrorists and their supporters seek to destroy the freedoms that have authored success. They deliberately want to keep failed leaders and failed ideologies in place" [A Petri dish is laboratory glassware in which "In Vitro fertilization" and the growing of bacteria and fungi takes place]

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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12 August, 2007

The genesis of the modern world

Modern industrial civilization developed in countries with a large Protestant population -- mainly in England -- but is religion alone enough to explain why? There was certainly a long gap between the establishment of Protestantism in England (which stretched from Wycliffe in the 1300s to Elizabeth I in the 1500s) and the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s. I suspect that a combination of Protestantism with other factors -- such as the newly revealed one mentioned below -- made the difference

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution - the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 - occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues....

The Industrial Revolution, the first escape from the Malthusian trap, occurred when the efficiency of production at last accelerated, growing fast enough to outpace population growth and allow average incomes to rise. Many explanations have been offered for this spurt in efficiency, some economic and some political, but none is fully satisfactory, historians say.

Dr. Clark's first thought was that the population might have evolved greater resistance to disease. The idea came from Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel," which argues that Europeans were able to conquer other nations in part because of their greater immunity to disease. In support of the disease-resistance idea, cities like London were so filthy and disease ridden that a third of their populations died off every generation, and the losses were restored by immigrants from the countryside. That suggested to Dr. Clark that the surviving population of England might be the descendants of peasants.

A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected. Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. "The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages," he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Another significant change in behavior, Dr. Clark argues, was an increase in people's preference for saving over instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in interest rates from 1200 to 1800. "Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving," Dr. Clark writes.

Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency first emerges in the English economy. It was this significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England's escape from the Malthusian trap and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. It is puzzling that the Industrial Revolution did not occur first in the much larger populations of China or Japan. Dr. Clark has found data showing that their richer classes, the Samurai in Japan and the Qing dynasty in China, were surprisingly unfertile and so would have failed to generate the downward social mobility that spread production-oriented values in England.

What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence - being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was "a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world." ...

Most historians have assumed that evolutionary change is too gradual to have affected human populations in the historical period. But geneticists, with information from the human genome now at their disposal, have begun to detect ever more recent instances of human evolutionary change like the spread of lactose tolerance in cattle-raising people of northern Europe just 5,000 years ago. A study in the current American Journal of Human Genetics finds evidence of natural selection at work in the population of Puerto Rico since 1513. So historians are likely to be more enthusiastic about the medieval economic data and elaborate time series that Dr. Clark has reconstructed than about his suggestion that people adapted to the Malthusian constraints of an agrarian society....

Dr. Bowles, the Santa Fe economist, said he was "not averse to the idea" that genetic transmission of capitalist values is important, but that the evidence for it was not yet there. "It's just that we don't have any idea what it is, and everything we look at ends up being awfully small," he said. Tests of most social behaviors show they are very weakly heritable. He also took issue with Dr. Clark's suggestion that the unwillingness to postpone consumption, called time preference by economists, had changed in people over the centuries. "If I were as poor as the people who take out payday loans, I might also have a high time preference," he said.

More here

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Don Surber has a very amusing roundup of "The week that was"

Is there any end to U.S. airline stupidity? "An Australian woman was branded a criminal by airline officials after "swearing" on an American flight - with a classic, and utterly inoffensive, Aussie oath. "Fair dinkum," New South Wales woman Sophie Reynolds muttered when told by an air hostess that there were no pretzels for her to snack on. The next thing Ms Reynolds knew, the flight crew had demanded her passport to note down her details, telling her that swearing at attendants was a crime. The 41-year-old, who lives in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, was stunned to find three uniformed officers waiting for her when she left the flight in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "They said: 'You swore at the hostess and there are federal rules against that'," Reynolds told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "And I said: 'I did not swear at the hostess, I just said 'fair dinkum'." Reynolds was travelling on a Delta Connection flight on SkyWest Airlines. Ms Snow said the Utah-based airline, which flies under contract to Delta Air Lines, was still trying to contact Ms Reynolds. She said no charges had been filed as a result of the incident and Ms Reynolds had been allowed to go on her way after talking to police." [In the context, the expression simply meant, "Really?". What sort of logic is it to describe as abuse words that they do not understand?]

Canada to build new military bases. How un-Canadian!: "Canada fired a warning shot in a new Cold War over the vast resources of the far North by announcing last night that it will build two new military bases in the Arctic wilderness. A week after Russia laid claim to the North Pole in what is rapidly becoming a global scramble for the region's vast oil and gas reserves, Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, said that Canada would open a new army training centre for cold-weather fighting at Resolute Bay, and a deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the northern tip of Baffin Island. The country is also beefing up its military presence in the far North with 900 Rangers."

'BET' Gets Thumbs Down Award From Journalists: "The cable TV channel Black Entertainment Television receives a "Thumbs Down" award from the National Association of Black Journalists at its annual convention. Its critics say BET has too much low-brow entertainment, portraying blacks in the worst possible way." [No comment]

Ski resort's 'Impeach Bush' vote backfires: "Some of the ski fans who have patronized Telluride, Colo., now are calling the ritzy resort "the land of radical liberals" and canceling planned vacations there because the town board voted to approve an ordinance calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. One ski club of 175 people already has made plans to go elsewhere, another skier has threatened to sell his home there and another critic predicted the town soon would bow to Mecca. "It's huge, unbelievable," said Telluride Mayor John Pryor. "Ski groups are canceling for the winter. Hundreds of people are bailing. The (town) website is flooded with people saying they're canceling their vacations here."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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11 August, 2007

Bill Clinton Says Hillary Is Winning Over the Military.... Here's How:

A really fun post below lifted from Gateway Pundit

Bill Clinton told supporters at a $2,300.00-a-plate dinner last night that Hillary is winning over the military.
Here's a reminder on how Hillary is winning over the military she loathes:

The COERCION PHOTO shows that this soldier has been thru Survival School and learned his lessons well. He's giving the sign of "coercion" with his left hand. These hand signs are taught in survival school to be used by POW's as a method of posing messages back to our intelligence services who may view the photo or video. This guy was obviously being coerced into shaking hands with Hillary Clinton. It's ironic how little she knew that he would so inform us about the photo -- perhaps because she's never understood our military to begin with.

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ELSEWHERE

Rupert to squash the NYT: "The News Corp chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has endured criticism "normally levelled at some sort of genocidal tyrant" during the three-month stand-off over his controversial $US5.6 billion takeover of Dow Jones. In his first public comments since securing the deal, Mr Murdoch gave investors a broad-brush look at his plans, including possibly scrapping online subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal, but stayed mum on specific plans for Australia. Buying Dow Jones "positions us to become the strongest company in the world in both information and entertainment", the 76-year-old media magnate said on a conference call early yesterday. News Corp would aggressively boost the Journal's coverage of national, international and non-business news to take on The New York Times and other rivals" [With Rupert against the America-hating Pinch Sulzberger it's not even a fight]

News organizations distrusted: "More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed. And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news -- roughly one quarter of all Americans -- were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said. More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don't care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased. More than half -- 53 percent -- of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for "failing to stand up for America".

Academics vote with their money: "Nearly four years after academia donated almost $30 million to unseat George W. Bush and Republicans, college professors and others in the education field have contributed more money to federal politics than the oil industry and drugmakers, with a nearly unanimous goal of putting a Democrat in the White House. So far in the '08 election cycle, people who work for institutions of higher education have given more than $7 million to federal candidates, parties and committees, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Nearly 60 percent of that money has gone to presidential candidates. The industry's favorite, Barack Obama, has raked in nearly $1.5 million in the campaign's first six months, followed by Hillary Clinton with almost $940,000."

Alcohol nanny breathalyzers: "'Pre-emptive war' got us into a real mess in Iraq. So maybe we ought to think twice before adopting similar measures when it comes to traffic law. Specifically, when it comes to an idea floated by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to require that all new cars be fitted with an ignition interlock that can detect alcohol in the driver's system -- and shut the car down if it does. Several large automakers (including GM, Ford, Toyota and Honda) also support the idea -- and are working on ways to get these things into new cars, maybe within the next two or three years, if not sooner. Sounds OK in principle -- sort of like the idea of liberating Iraq. The devil's in the details, though."

Vegan fanatics get the punishment they deserve: "A Scottsdale woman who severely malnourished her three children was sentenced to 30 years in prison, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office announced Thursday. Kimu Parker was convicted on three counts of child abuse and received 10 years for each count, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas said. The sentences will be served consecutively. "Thirty years in prison is entirely appropriate for a person who almost starved to death three defenseless children. We will strongly oppose any attempt to reduce this sentence," Thomas said in a press release. When she was arrested, Parker's 3-year-old weighed 12 pounds, her 9-year-old child weighed 29 pounds and her 11-year-old child weighed 36 pounds. The parents attributed the low weights to a strict vegan diet. The youngest child was taken to the hospital in April 2005 after suffering many seizures over the course of several hours. Police reports show the parents didn't call 911 for several hours".

In Iraqi south, Shiites press for autonomy: "When Najaf unplugged its power station from the national grid last week, it was a sign of provincial dissent over the unequal distribution of electricity. But it also indicates a new assertiveness in the south, as Iraq's regional leaders seek to wrest control from a central government in Baghdad paralyzed by political infighting. Multiple visions for unifying the county's southern provinces are emerging. The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), one of the most powerful Shiite parties, is leading the charge to form an autonomous 'South of Baghdad Region.' But 45 southern tribal notables in Najaf last week signed their own pact that envisions creating 'the self-rule government of the unified Iraqi south.'"

More British IT bungling: "A multimillion-pound government project to give greater protection to the public by managing offenders more closely is threatened with collapse because of financial problems, The Times has learnt. Ministers have halted all further development work on the project while officials conduct an emergency review of the costings and capabilities of the 244 million programme. The crisis is the latest setback to an IT system that underpins the whole of the Government's strategy to manage offenders from conviction and during their prison sentences to supervision in the community by the Probation Service. About 155 million has already been spent on the project but this year it was revealed that there was a 33 million shortfall on capital funding. It is understood that it has now been discovered that the initial costings did not include VAT and that cancelling the project will cost the Ministry of Justice 50 million in fees to EDS, the private contractor in charge of developing the system". [The British Health Service computer system has cost 12 BILLION and is still not working!]

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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10 August, 2007

COLLAPSED BRIDGE IMPLICATIONS

The bridges of Hennepin (and every other) county: "Last week, a bridge on Interstate 35W in Hennepin County, Minnesota collapsed, killing five people, with at least eight more missing at this writing. 'For more than a decade the state of Minnesota has known of problems with the metal holding up the Interstate 35W bridge,' according to Minneapolis CBS news channel WCCO. Around the nation, 75,000 other bridges have similar problems, and 'are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis,' according to The Cleveland Plain Dealer .... The next time you cross one of those 75,000 bridges, give a moment's thought to the way your tax money is being spent. Meditate on the built-in incentives .... that lead government to spend your money in counterproductive, inefficient, and often violent or unhealthy ways, and which eventually deprive 'basic government services' of the funds they need."

The wrong lessons of the bridge collapse: "The collapse of a bridge in rush-hour Minneapolis must be well known by nearly everyone in the United States by now. Whenever anyone dies, it's a tragedy; when many die, and expensive property (dozens of automobiles) is lost, that's obviously a tragedy. When all this loss of life and wealth happens because government bureaucrats did their jobs poorly or correctly, that's a preventable and costly tragedy -- bought at the expense of many taxpayers who likely would have done other things with their money than pay those bureaucrats. Remember, those who might have done other things with their money include the dead victims."

Politics, bridges, and one possible solution: "Ah, say the advocates of nationalization, the state can't afford major projects like this so it behooves the federal government to step in. Of course the federal government is deeply in debt so what the term 'afford' means is difficult to pin down in this case. Either way the federal government appears set to provide around $250 million for a new bridge. As for Minnesota not being able to afford the new bridge? Apparently they could afford to spend a lot more than that for a massive welfare check to a wealthy businessman. The government handed over $387 million in funding to Carl Pohlad, the owner of the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise so that he could build himself a new ballpark. For good measure the legislature also stipulated, in the law, that the measure is exempt from any public referendum."

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Brookes News Update

US economy and the lessons of history: Unfortunately, what passes for economics and economic history today is simply unable to correctly interpret economic events even as they unfold before their eyes. The same thing happened in the 1920s and 1930s
Is the decline in housing to be blamed for US economic slowdown: As the effect from a tighter stance continues to gain strength bubble activities in various sectors of the economy are expected to come under pressure. Again the likely deflation of various bubbles is on account of the Fed policies and has nothing to do with the housing sector slump
China's economic growth is a boon, not a threat: Economic growth has been a process of providing for more and more people at ever-increasing living standards. (I guess this is why our green Herrenvolk detest the process). Therefore the idea that Chinese economic growth poses a dire threat to the planet is vicious green propaganda
Costs and protectionism: another economic fallacy re-emerges: Economics is emphatic about the benefits of free trade, just as doctors are emphatic about the benefits of a healthy diet. This fact should be borne in mind when reading the likes of Ross Gittins and Nick Gruen about the alleged detrimental effects of zero-tariff policies on output, wages and unemployment
Michael Moore's Sicko propaganda for Castro: It now seems that Michael Moore - the self-appointed tribune of the people - not only told outrageous lies (nothing new there) in Sicko, he also willingly collaborated with the DGI (General Directorate of Intelligence). This is Castro's equivalent of the KGB
Obama shoots self in foot, while media praises his flexibility: What a charmer that nice Mr Obama turned out to be. He has now publicly endorsed the murder of healthy newborn babies. I suppose that's another reason why America's Mainstream Media Party love him
Left smears war hero judicial nominee: Americans are becoming more aware of Judge Southwick's impressive credentials and the fact that he selflessly and heroically gave up a lucrative law practice so that he could bravely and honorably defend his country during a time of war
Israel - ratings down?: Our borders are open and criminals and terrorists are pouring in like water through a sieve. Then they wonder why the traffic is so bad

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ELSEWHERE

There are some good comments here about the weird economics spouted by the contenders in the recent Democrat Presidential debate.

A very interesting example here of that the media leave out -- the best part of a speech by Mitt Romney. They reported the bits before and after, though.



It's hard to believe but above is what a planned memorial in Arizona to the 9/11 victims is going to look like. It's in the shape of a Muslim crescent. The memorial glorifies the killers, not the victims. See LGF for more. Even more amazingly, it's not the only Crescent-shaped memorial to the 9/11 events.

BBC gave bonuses of 20 million pounds as it cut jobs: "The BBC spent nearly 20 million on staff bonuses last year, despite cutting thousands of jobs and missing performance targets. Almost half of its employees received bonuses, with an average payout of 1,805. One employee received 100,739. The corporation has also been criticised over the salaries of some of its biggest stars – such as the 18 million paid to Jonathan Ross – as it cuts 3,000 posts. A spokeswoman said: “Bonuses are a regular part of the BBC. They are extra recognition for exceptional performance, for staff who have gone above and beyond the call of duty.”

Former CIA Director: Terrorist Strike Within U.S. Real Threat: "Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey tells NewsMax in an exclusive interview that terrorists could strike the American homeland — possibly with a weapon of mass destruction — this summer or early fall. He also warns that if Iran fails to comply with international efforts to stop its nuclear weapons program, the U.S. will have no other option than to bomb it. "I think the threat of a serious attack in the next few months is very real," Woolsey said. A terrorist strike with a dirty bomb or with biological weapons was "a real possibility."

Europe to shoot its tourism industry in the foot?: "The European Union is threatening to impose tit-for-tat entry restrictions on all US citizens travelling to Europe in response to new American laws designed to strengthen security at airports and prevent would-be terrorists entering the country. US tourists can now travel to Europe without a visa. Franco Frattini, justice and home affairs commissioner, is drawing up plans for an EU-wide system of 'electronic travel authorisation' (ETA) similar to that written into US law by President George Bush late last week as part of new homeland security rules proposed by the 9/11 commission and endorsed by Congress."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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9 August, 2006

Fascism reborn in Russia

Sadly, Fascism was always popular and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has rediscovered that

Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp's mass wedding. "They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia". Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland. With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phony religious cult. But this organisation - known as "Nashi", meaning "Ours" - is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.



Nashi's annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness. Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale. Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear - supposedly a cause of sterility - and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp's first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official. Attempting to raise Russia's dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country's demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hard-smoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

But the real aim of the youth camp - and the 100,000-strong movement behind it - is not to improve Russia's demographic profile, but to attack democracy. Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as 'Young Guard', and 'Young Russia', is in the forefront of the charge.

At the start, it was all too easy to mock. I attended an early event run by its predecessor, 'Walking together', in the heart of Moscow in 2000. A motley collection of youngsters were collecting 'unpatriotic' works of fiction for destruction. It was sinister in theory, recalling the Nazis' book-burning in the 1930s, but it was laughable in practice. There was no sign of ordinary members of the public handing in books (the copies piled on the pavement had been brought by the organisers).

Once the television cameras had left, the event organisers admitted that they were not really volunteers, but being paid by "sponsors". The idea that Russia's anarchic, apathetic youth would ever be attracted into a disciplined mass movement in support of their president - what critics called a "Putinjugend", recalling the "Hitlerjugend" (German for "Hitler Youth") - seemed fanciful.

How wrong we were. Life for young people in Russia without connections is a mixture of inadequate and corrupt education, and a choice of boring dead-end jobs. Like the Hitler Youth and the Soviet Union's Young Pioneers, Nashi and its allied movements offer not just excitement, friendship and a sense of purpose - but a leg up in life, too. Nashi's senior officials - known, in an eerie echo of the Soviet era, as "Commissars" - get free places at top universities. Thereafter, they can expect good jobs in politics or business - which in Russia nowadays, under the Kremlin's crony capitalism, are increasingly the same thing.

Nashi and similar outfits are the Kremlin's first line of defence against its greatest fear: real democracy. Like the sheep chanting "Four legs good, two legs bad" in George Orwell's Animal Farm, they can intimidate through noise and numbers. Nashi supporters drown out protests by Russia's feeble and divided democratic opposition and use violence to drive them off the streets....

Nashi fits perfectly into the Kremlin's newly-minted ideology of "Sovereign democracy". This is not the mind-numbing jargon of Marxism-Leninism, but a lightweight collection of cliches and slogans promoting Russia's supposed unique political and spiritual culture. It is strongly reminiscent of the Tsarist era slogan: "Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality". The similarities to both the Soviet and Tsarist eras are striking. Communist ideologues once spent much of their time explaining why their party deserved its monopoly of power, even though the promised utopia seemed indefinitely delayed. Today, the Kremlin's ideology chief Vladislav Surkov is trying to explain why questioning the crooks and spooks who run Russia is not just mistaken, but treacherous.

Yet, by comparison with other outfits, Nashi looks relatively civilised. Its racism and prejudice is implied, but not trumpeted. Other pro-Kremlin youth groups are hounding gays and foreigners off the streets of Moscow. Mestnye [The Locals] recently distributed leaflets urging Muscovites to boycott non-Russian cab drivers. These showed a young blonde Russian refusing a ride from a swarthy, beetle-browed taxi driver, under the slogan: "We're not going the same way." Such unofficial xenophobia matches the official stance. On April 1, a decree explicitly backed by Mr Putin banned foreigners from trading in Russia's retail markets. By some estimates, 12m people are working illegally in Russia.

Those who hoped that Russia's first post-totalitarian generation would be liberal, have been disappointed. Although explicit support for extremist and racist groups is in the low single figures, support for racist sentiments is mushrooming. Slogans such as "Russia for the Russians" now attract the support of half of the population. Echoing Kremlin propaganda, Nashi denounced Estonians as "fascist", for daring to say that they find Nazi and Soviet memorials equally repugnant. But, in truth, it is in Russia that fascism is all too evident. The Kremlin sees no role for a democratic opposition, denouncing its leaders as stooges and traitors. Sadly, most Russians agree: a recent poll showed that a majority believed that opposition parties should not be allowed to take power.....

A new guide for history teachers - explicitly endorsed by Mr Putin - brushes off Stalin's crimes. It describes him as "the most successful leader of the USSR". But it skates over the colossal human cost - 25m people were shot and starved in the cause of communism. "Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite," it says. In other words, Stalin wanted to make the country strong, so he may have been a bit harsh at times. At any time since the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in the late 1980s, that would have seemed a nauseating whitewash. Now, it is treated as bald historical fact.

Terrifyingly, the revived Soviet view of history is now widely held in Russia. A poll this week of Russian teenagers showed that a majority believe that Stalin did more good things than bad. If tens of thousands of uniformed German youngsters were marching across Germany in support of an authoritarian Fuehrer, baiting foreigners and praising Hitler, alarm bells would be jangling all across Europe. So why aren't they ringing about Nashi?

More here

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ELSEWHERE

There is a report here showing that the MSM does not check easily checkable "facts" and does not correct significant errors when the error in one of their "facts" is pointed out to them. No need to say which side of politics the errors favour.

Hillary slammed for taking $400K from lobbyists: "Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton is being taken to task by her two closest rivals for accepting $400,000 in campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists. Over the weekend, Clinton was booed by an audience of liberal bloggers in Chicago when she defended taking money from Washington lobbyists, something both Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards have vowed not to do. "I don't think, based on my 35 years fighting for what I believe in, anybody seriously believes I'm going to be influenced by a lobbyist or a particular interest group," Clinton said.

Taliban stages foolish attack on U.S. base: "A group of 75 Taliban militants tried to overrun a U.S.-led coalition base in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, a rare frontal attack that left more than 20 militants dead, the coalition said in a statement. The insurgents attacked Firebase Anaconda from three sides, using gunfire, grenades and 107 mm rockets, the coalition said. A joint Afghan-U.S. force repelled the attack with mortars, machine guns and air support. "Almost two dozen insurgents were confirmed killed in the attack," the statement said. Two girls and two Afghan soldiers were wounded during the fight in Uruzgan province, it said. A firebase like Anaconda is usually a remote outpost staffed by as few as several dozen soldiers. "The inability of the insurgent forces to inflict any severe damage on Firebase Anaconda, while being simultaneously decimated in the process, should be a clear indication of the ineffectiveness of their fighters," said Army Capt. Vanessa R. Bowman, a coalition spokeswoman."

Dow Down 281 Points Big News Friday, Dow Up 287 Points Not So Newsworthy Monday: "A pronounced example of how bad news is news and good news is much less newsworthy: On Friday night, ABC and NBC teased full stories on the 281 point plunge that day in the Dow Jones average, but on Monday, after the Dow rebounded by five points greater than Friday's loss in the biggest one-day gain in five years, the networks limited coverage to a few seconds"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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8 August, 2006

Why Daily Kos is full of nastiness

The Left has a problem. Its view of life does not conform to reality. So it is continually receiving hard blows when its worldview collides with facts. One of the important polemical consequences of both talk radio and the Web is that the Left can no longer massage the news to suit its predilections as it could when there was a monopoly, or at least an oligopoly, in mass media.

The limited ability of the Left to actually make an argument leads it to treat all opposition as ipso facto "hate." We saw this with the formulation "Clinton haters" directed at anybody who disagreed with the Clintons on policy or thought that they should not be exempted from the legal process, at least while holding high office.

To a conservative, the Daily Kos is simply not an interesting venue. As Rush says about the NY Times, we don't need to read Daily Kos postings, we can write them. On important issues, they don't make arguments, they offer attitude, and very unpleasant attitude at that.

Source

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RECENT ARTICLES ON ICJS

Counterpoint: A liberal's lament
A byline for Hamas?
Train leaders to think differently
What about Muslim moderates?
Why I am not joining the party
The case for mistrusting Muslims

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ELSEWHERE

There's a rather hilarious story here about a new Iranian invention: A Camera For the Blind. The last sentence of the post is the funniest.

Treacherous Syria: "Terrorism, radical Islamist Jihad, Iraq, Iran's growing power, and the Arab-Israeli conflict all beset the West and in each Syria plays a central, threatening role. Barry Rubin's new book The Truth about Syria explains Syria's regime, interests, policies, and society, as well as how it shows how Arab and Muslim world politics and ideology work. To survive, Syria's minority-dominated, dictatorial, and economically incompetent government needs radicalism, control over Lebanon, regional instability, anti-Americanism, and using Israel as a scapegoat. The Truth About Syria explains how the country has run; how it attacks U.S. interests; and why the regime is incapable of another type of policy."

Absurd exclusion of India: "A permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council has eluded India despite its relentless efforts as it has not adopted a broader role in settling international issues, Vijay Nambiar, Chief of Staff to the U.N. Secretary General has said. "India is not doing enough to become a permanent member of the Security Council. Instead of demanding for it, India should play a more participatory role in world affairs," he told PTI here".

EU and UN sponsor antisemitic campaign: "The United Nations has scheduled an "International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace", to be held in the European Parliament in Brussels, August 30-31. This misleading title not withstanding, this annual conference is held under the auspices of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the International Coordinating Network for Palestine - frameworks that promote the conflict through NGOs involved in implementing the Durban agenda of demonization . This year, for the first time, the exercise is gaining the legitimacy of sponsorship by the European Parliament, further highlighting the role that the Europe Union plays in supporting the NGO campaign."

Methodist hatred of Israel: "Ratcheting up the simmering debate over how Protestant denominations should express their concern about Israel, the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church is advising congregations and individuals to divest their holdings from a wide variety of American corporations that the United Methodists believe support the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The action, although largely symbolic, is being greeted with dismay by leaders of the local Jewish community, but is giving new energy to the divestment movement, which had lost steam in other mainline Protestant denominations. The United Methodist Church, with 8 million members nationally, is expected to discuss the Middle East at its General Conference next year; in addition to New England, other conferences of the denomination have been debating divestment as a means to pressure Israel"

Loony Leftist exlains why Republicans think America has a strong economy: "The obvious reason is, "Because we do have a strong economy," as virtually every metric shows. Matt Stoller (proud member of the Reality-Based Community) rejects this reason. Rather, he has a "pretty simple" explanation for the odd phenomenon of Republicans thinking a strong economy is strong. The reason? Republicans live in areas where the "Republican Economy," which relies almost entirely on military spending, weapons manufacture, clear-cutting forests, and strip-mining, is actually doing quite well, unlike the Non-Republican Economy (chief exports: enlightement, sharing, caring, and love) is doing horribly. Near the end of this idiocy he notes, rather redundantly it seems to me, that he's not an economist."

Hillary's Experience is at Surviving: "Polls suggest that the leading attribute attracting voters to Hillary's presidential candidacy is her "experience," a virtue which contrasts, presumably, with the lack of it in Senator Barack Obama, her chief rival. But a close examination of her record as first lady and as New York Senator suggests that her experience is largely in the avoidance of death by scandal.... Consider what her experience has been. She burst forth on the national stage with two tasks in her husband's administration: The selection of the nation's first female Attorney General and the design and adoption of a comprehensive program of health care reform. Her efforts to designate an Attorney General hamstrung the new Administration for months as two nominees, in succession, had to withdraw their names from consideration. Finally, at the eleventh hour, she urged her husband to appoint Florida's Janet Reno, a selection Bill Clinton would come to describe as "my worst mistake" ....."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual themes.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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7 August, 2006

WHY THE 60s?

Rich Lowry has up an interesting essay in which he contrasts American "liberalism" of the present day with American liberalism in the era up to JFK. The two were of course very different and Lowry sees the death of Kennedy in 1963 as the watershed. At that time the American Left suddenly became anti-American and sympathetic to the Communist bloc and the Kennedy assassination was to blame.

Lowry is however resting far too much on a single event. It is good to see ANYBODY showing an awareness of how radically American Leftism has changed over time but Lowry fails to root his critique deeply enough. He shows no awareness that the pre-WWII American Left was characterized by much that it accuses conservatives of today. It was super-patriotic, interventionist in foreign policy, believed in eugenics and thought blacks and Jews to be obviously inferior. The pre-WWII American Left were less extreme than Hitler but not by much. You can find documentation of all that here.

Hitler's excesses, however, discredited all those ideas I have just mentioned and the Left needed new foci. But most Leftists could not abandon overnight ideas that they had so long and so vigorously advocated. They could not suddenly go from being super-patriots to being internationalists, for instance. And JFK, for one, did not even try. Anyone today who said: "Ask not what your coutry can do for you but ask what you can do for your country" would be regarded as quaint at best by today's Left -- if not "Fascist".

So it actually took the rise of a new generation without any memory of prewar committments and ideology for the Left we know today to arise. And the coming of age of that generation we now know as "The 60s". And that generation rebelled in such a vigorous and attention-getting way that the older quasi-Fascist Left rapidly and gladly changed its tune -- though a few migrated to conservatism.

Meanwhile, conservatives kept on with the moderate attitudes that had always characterized them. They remained patriotic but had no desire for war and conquest. They remained broadly tolerant but not mindlessly so and they remained allergic to tyranny.

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ELSEWHERE

Traitorous British politician: "Britain's seat at the UN Security Council will eventually be handed to the European Union, Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office Minister, has suggested. The former diplomat was brought in by Gordon Brown to help to overhaul foreign policy was already under fire for suggesting that Britain and America would no longer be "joined at the hip". He faces fresh controversy after it emerged that last October, when he was Deputy General Secretary of the UN, he spoke approvingly of growing EU representation on a visit to Brussels last October. According to a report by the EU Observer, he told Brussels diplomats that the EU was heading toward one single seat within the UN institutions. He said: "I think it will go in stages. We are going to see a growing spread of it institution by institution. It is not going to happen with a flash and a bang." He added that he hoped that it would happen "as quickly as possible. I'm a huge fan of it."

The Goose Creek bomb scare: "Michelle Malkin has several links to info on the investigation of two "Middle Eastern" men whose car was pulled over in South Carolina and found to contain suspicious material. Some have suggested that the stop may have been prompted by a report from other law enforcement sources and was not a routine stop. Goose Creek is the site of a naval facility that among other things services nuclear submarines. It is near Charleston. It also houses the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig, a military prison where enemy combatants have been held, according to AP. If this was an attempted jail break for jihadis, it gives yet another reason to keep most of them at Gitmo."

Maintenance material may have caused Minnesota bridge collapse : "Trucks carrying tens of thousands of pounds of crushed stone were parked on the Interstate 35W bridge, and more stone was sitting on the deck when the bridge collapsed, investigators said Sunday, raising suspicions that the added weight of materials intended for repairs may have played a role in the bridge failure."

Perceptions of Iraq War Are Starting to Shift: "It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when The New York Times printed an opinion article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq. Yes, progress. O'Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- Pollack even wrote a book urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein -- but they have sharply criticized military operations there in the ensuing years. "As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq," they wrote, "we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory,' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."

The Kos Konvention and the Leftward lurch of the Dems: "So, why is the influence and power that the Daily Kos wields in the Democratic Party so significant? Because many of the writers at the Daily Kos are extremists who promote a virulent hatred of the military, conspiracy theories, and in some cases, even violence and Fascist tactics against the people who disagree with them. That means when someone like Harry Reid writes a diary on the Daily Kos or when Hillary Clinton goes to the Yearly Kos convention, it indicates that they're comfortable associating with people who hold those sort of radical views."

Pelosi repudiated: "I have no idea if the upgrade of the FISA law is good or bad. I suspect good, since Congress gave the new law only 6 months to prove itself or die. But the bill does one thing: Its passage rebukes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Plurality Leader Harry Reid. In the House, 41 Democrats abandoned their speaker to pass the FISA upgrade. Only 2 Republicans crossed over in a 227-183 humiliation of the speaker."

Landmines discovered in Canadian creek: "The big question about two live landmines found in a countryside culvert running under Inadale Drive between Strathroy and Mt. Brydges, Ontario yesterday is who put them there? Appearing to be attached to timers, the landmines were likely of the type used to blow up tanks, according to Strathroy-Caradoc police. Police yesterday swarmed a country creek where children cool off in heat waves like the one this week as Canadian Forces explosives experts detonated the landmines. The creek would be a huge draw for children in the weatherman's extreme heat alert on Ontario's Simcoe Day long weekend.... Since the creek is a popular family gathering place, police suspect the mines were put there to deliberately maim and kill. "The senseless loss of life or grievous bodily harm that could have taken place at this creek-it's reprehensible," Strathroy-Caradoc police Sgt. Mike Overdulve said. There was no need for speculation on the potential for devastation from the two landmines after a military team detonated both from a safe distance. The force of the blast ripped bark and limbs from a tree and sprayed water so high it could be seen by observers a kilometer away."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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6 August, 2007

THAT RIGHTWARD SHIFT

A Leftist tries to cope

There is a book review in the NYT of "Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys". For the reviewing task, the NYT picked Stephen Metcalf -- well-known for vitriol -- and so the review is predictably hostile and, as such, very lightweight. There is no attempt to engage what the writers say at all. He summarizes two of the essays in the book as: "Pig popsicle, bad; babies, good"!

The purpose of the review is not of course scholarship of any kind. It is meant simply to prop up threatened Leftist egos. And the threat that enrages the Left most of all is the way conservatives connect so easily with ordinary mainstream white Americans -- something most vividly seen in the popularity of conservative talkshow hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. So how come? asks our reviewer. Is there some way Leftists can piss on that?

Our reviewer has the answer: Conservatives connect with the workers because conservatives were social failures at college who were marginalized and never got the girl: By experiencing failure conservatives learnt to understand others who are failures in life. The elitism and stereotyping of that explanation is breathtaking, of course. The claim that the ordinary mainstream white American feels a failure shows how little our Leftist reviewer knows about the people concerned. He has obviously lived most of his life in a little like-minded Manhattan social bubble. He seems quite unaware that most ordinary mainstream white Americans are hard-working people who find great joy in their families, their friends, their church, their hobbies and even often in their work. They do NOT consider themselves failures! They look at the "success" they see in places like Hollywood and are thankful for their own more wholesome lives.

I suspect that it is a dim awareness of that happiness which really makes Leftist elitists like Metcalf hate ordinary mainstream white Americans. He has to project feelings of failure onto them to boost his own feelings of superiority. Accepting that they may well be happier than him would be just too intolerable -- though even that he would no doubt be able to dismiss temporarily with some contemptuous adjective such as "bovine".

But all good lies have an element of truth in them and that conservatives often feel alienated and marginalized in their college days is no doubt true. I certainly did. I arrived at university having already read most of the Greek canon, from the miracle of Homer to the bright clarity of Plato, and already knowing such arcane things as what a Pindaric ode was. I met very few others as culturally grounded as that. Babblers like Sartre were what passed for sophistication and culture among most people I met and there were not even many of those -- even though I attended a major university.

But the major reason why conservatives feel alienated at university is the lack of intellectual diversity there. American universities seem to think that a thing as superficial as skin color is the only important sort of diversity. The lockstep Leftism that characterizes most professors (at least in the Humanities) would alienate and marginalize any conservative, no matter how well-adjusted he might be.

Fortunately, however, academe is just one rather deviant bubble within the wider world and conservatives often do well outside it. I myself particularly enjoyed my time in the Army -- where I reached the rank of Sergeant. Bitter elitists like Metcalf no doubt have in their heads a comforting stereotype of the army as a bunch of rockheads but reality is much more complex than that. The army in fact particularly values and rewards the all-round man (e.g. General Petraeus) and in my army unit I was far from alone in my liking for Bach and Palestrina.

That the real reason for the conservative communicative advantage might lie in the fact they do not inhabit the Left's mental cloud-cuckoo land Metcalf cannot of course concede.

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Another corrupt Democrat: "What West Virginia lacks in jobs, population, and reasons to live there, it more than makes up for in receipt of loads of government money. So who can blame Rep. Alan Mollohan> for unethically steering millions of dollars to his “poverty-ridden district” (and, uh, to his own personal poverty-ridden bank account)? Turns out lots of people can blame him for this, including the FBI, and now the House Rules Committee. Mollohan rather hurriedly asked last night that all his earmarks be stripped from the Agriculture appropriations bill, because the Republicans were about to point out that he was still funneling money to the shady nonprofits he set up with former aides and business partners. Lawmakers requesting that their own earmarks be removed from bills is pretty much unprecedented and definitely hilarious.

100 Taliban believed killed in air strike: "The Afghan government has said it believed more than 100 Taliban may have been killed in an air strike in the south of the country and did not rule out civilian casualties. But General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a defence ministry spokesman, rejected some media reports that scores of civilians were killed or wounded in the US-led coalition strike Thursday in Helmand province. Gen Azimi said it was unclear how many people had been killed in the attack on a large gathering of Taliban. "But the enemy casualty is very high,'' he told a press conference in the capital, Kabul. "There might be more than 100 killed.'' Hospitals in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, and in the nearby city of Kandahar, said Friday that nearly 40 civilians had been brought in for treatment. But Gen Azimi questioned this figure, saying: "Even if there were civilians, there were very few of them. Their number would not reach 10.'' He added: "How can you distinguish when someone is a civilian or not? When he has his gun laid on the ground, he's a civilian but when he has it on his shoulder, he is not?'' The area had been under aerial surveillance for more than 24 hours before the strike, Azimi said, and images showed there were no women or children in the group".

Broadcast Networks Ignore Murder of Oakland Post Editor: "When a member of the journalism community is murdered, wouldn't you expect most news agencies to report it? Well, on Thursday morning, Chauncey Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post, was gunned down by an at that time unknown assailant. On Friday morning, Oakland police arrested seven people at Your Black Muslim Bakery in connection with Bailey's murder. Yet, despite all this, ABC, CBS, and NBC haven't said a word about this shooting, or the connection to Your Black Muslim Bakery. Why?"



Duggar family not stopping at 17: "An Arkansas couple had a baby daughter on Thursday - their 17th child and seventh girl - and the pair say they're still not ready to give it a rest. Jennifer Danielle was born at 10.01am at a hospital in Rogers, Arkansas, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar said in an interview. "We'd love to have more," Michelle said, referring to baby girls. "We love the ruffles and lace." Jennifer joins the fast-growing Duggar brood, who live in a 650sq m home in Tontitown. All the children - whose names start with the letter J - are taught at home. The oldest is 19 and the youngest, after Jennifer, is almost two. "We are just so grateful to God for another gift from him," said Mr Duggar, a former state representative. Mr Duggar, 44, is a real estate-agent who served in the Arkansas House of Representatives from 1999 to 2002. He was a candidate for the US Senate in 2002 but lost the ballot. Mrs Duggar, 41, and her husband are politically conservative fundamentalist Christians. They reportedly live debt-free. [This latest birth will no doubt make the hideous Mark Morford hate the Duggars even more]

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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5 August, 2007

Some crime statistics

In the 19-month period - over a year and a half - from Jan. 1, 2006 until the morning you read this, misbehavior by our troops resulted in a total of 59 scheduled court-martials in Iraq - 21 of them general court-martials, which are reserved for the most-serious crimes (murder, rape, robbery, assault, arson and so forth). The other 38 were special court-martials, invoked for lesser offenses, such as disciplinary infractions or petty theft.

OK: 59 trials in 19 months, among an average troop population of almost 140,000. Compare that to civilian crime statistics back home, and it's clear that any of us would welcome the chance to live among such model citizens - even though our troops are overwhelmingly within the age window where criminal behavior is most frequent.

Start with a city that Money magazine rated as "one of the 10 best places to live" in the United States: Ann Arbor, Mich. Home to a great university, the town has a population of about 113,300 - about 20,000 lower than our pre-surge troop numbers in Iraq.

In 2005 (the last year for which statistics are available), that ideal place to live recorded 1,476 crimes that, if committed by a soldier, would have required a general court-martial - plus a further 2,282 thefts and similar infractions that, depending on the details, would have been handled by either a general or a special court-martial.

Twelve months in Ann Arbor, 3,758 court-martial-equivalent trials. If all the crimes had been taken to court, which one doubts. Nineteen months in Iraq, under the complex stresses of combat? 59 court-martials. Guess that bastion of ethical liberalism in Michigan needs to go through basic training.

But let's give peace a chance: The most dogmatically left-wing city in the United States is undoubtedly (the People's Republic of) Santa Cruz, Calif. With a population of some 55,000 - about a third of our current troop numbers in Iraq - Santa Cruz, where the Age of Aquarius reigns, had 503 violent crimes in 2004 (the latest statistics available) and a total of 3,665 crimes that would qualify for court-martials.

Extrapolate those numbers to match our current troop strength, and you'd have a requirement for more than 10,000 court-martial equivalents. If Santa Cruz were as serious about punishing its criminals as our military is.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Your government will protect you: "The interstate highway bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River had been rated "structurally deficient" for 17 years and was regularly inspected by state engineers, who spotted corroded bearings and stress fractures but remained confident that the bridge was safe, authorities said Thursday."



Such a pretty hypocrite: "John Edwards, who yesterday demanded Democratic candidates return any campaign donations from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., himself earned at least $800,000 for a book published by one of the media mogul's companies.... The campaign didn't respond to a question from The Post about whether it was hypocritical for Edwards to take money from News Corp. while calling for other candidates not to"

U.S. Should Threaten Islamic Holy Sites: "Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites. The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town hall meeting in Osceola, Iowa, that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it. "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do." Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia, are Islam's holiest cities. All able-bodied Muslims are required to make a pilgrimage there at least once in their lives".

Nice! Precision-guided munitions kill top al Qaeda leader: "The top target for al Qaeda in Iraq south of Baghdad was killed July 14 in Arab Jabour by precision-guided munitions, the Excalibur. Shortly after 12 p.m., 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, received a call that Abu Jurah and 14 anti-Iraqi forces were meeting at a house in Arab Jabour. Abu Jurah was an AQI cell leader and was responsible for improvised explosive devices, vehicle-borne IED and indirect fire attacks on Coalition Forces in Arab Jabour. At approximately 1:12 p.m., the house was positively identified allowing 1st Battalion, 9th Field Artillery Regiment to fire two Excalibur rounds destroying the meeting house. An unmanned aerial vehicle observed persons leaving the house, loading injured individuals into a sedan and fleeing the scene. An AH-64 Apache helicopter engaged the sedan destroying it. Three people were observed running from the meeting house to a nearby house. A U.S. Air Force F16 Fighting Falcon dropped two 500-pound GPS-guided bombs on the second house."

No outrage from the Left? "Egyptian soldiers shot and beat to death four Sudanese refugees who were trying to illegally cross the border into Israel, Israel's Channel 10 television reported Thursday. A soldier from an Israeli military unit near the border said the Egyptian border police fired many rounds of bullets at the refugees, killing two and injuring one. The fourth refugee tried to climb the border fence. The Israeli soldiers, in what they described as a "tug-of-war," said they tried to pull him over to their side, but the Egyptians overpowered them and captured him. The shocked and audibly shaken soldier said he and others from his unit heard screams of agony as they helplessly watched the Egyptian soldiers then beat the two refugees to death" [Now if Israelis had done it ....]

Doin' the Raghead Rag: "By now just about everyone has heard about "Jihad: The Musical", the hilarious stage send-up of Islamic terrorists being performed this month in Scotland. If you haven't, go watch this video at LGF; it made me laugh until the tears ran down my cheeks. And now - surprise, surprise! - members of a certain religious group have taken offense. A satirical musical about Islamist terrorism and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has sparked protests in Britain, with critics blasting it as tasteless. "Jihad: The Musical", which features songs including "I wanna be like Osama" and is described as "a madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism," is on at the Edinburgh Fringe festival this month.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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4 August, 2007

More slippery Leftist talk about race

The conclusion of a recent article by Matthew Syed in "The Times" is as follows: "The conclusion is unavoidable: those who invoke race as an explanation of real and perceived differences between humans have an agenda that is other than scientific"

How does he arrive at that conclusion? By pointing out, quite correctly, that there are well-known differences WITHIN races. West Africans are better at sprinting and East Africans are better at long-distance running, for instance. So therefore, he thinks, in a breathtaking overgeneralization, all talk of race is misleading.

That is an old quibble, however. While it is true that statements such as "Blacks make the best sprinters" are much less precise than they could be, they are nonetheless true statements -- as are other generalizations about race -- such as: "African-Americans commit violent crimes about 9 times as often as white Americans". Such statements are simple statements of fact and saying that anyone who utters such statements "has an agenda that is other than scientific" is just indulging in the usual fact-ignoring Leftist abuse.

Insofar as I can find any logic at all in Syed's pontification, I think he may be pointing out that what is true of any group is not necessarily true of all members in that group. I know of no-one who would dispute that, however, so Syed's attack is an attack on a straw man.

Syed also seems unaware that the usual racial classifications are well-reflected in the DNA of the people concerned. See e.g. here and here.

From his surname, I suspect that Syed is a Muslim. So let me give him another generalization to chew on: "The statements of prominent Muslims are not notable for their reliance on logic". That statement is of course a generalization and, as such, does not preclude some prominent Muslims from being very logical -- but Syed is clearly not one of those.

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ELSEWHERE



Leftist rag TNR (Truth Not Required) has now admitted that their Scott Thomas Beauchamp was not even In Iraq when his alleged tales of horror occurred. See here and here and here. Gateway Pundit thinks he has just qualified as the next Senator from Massachusetts.

Britain's dangerous Keystone Cops: "Two years have elapsed since the de Menezes shooting. Since then the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has conducted two inquiries -- at a combined cost of 600,000 pounds -- and concluded that only one man can be held to account. None of the firearms officers who pulled the trigger has been charged with any offence. The surveillance officers who changed the police log to try to cover up their mistakes have not been reprimanded. The operational commanders who gave the order to shoot have, so far, not faced any disciplinary action. But the IPCC says that Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, head of Special Operations at Scotland Yard, should be disciplined. Mr Hayman must be held to account for failing to tell Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner, that there was mounting evidence that police had shot an innocent man. He is also accused of deliberately misleading the public by providing contradictory accounts of what he knew in press briefings."

Do Dems finally understand the collateral effects of taxing the "rich"? : "Back in the hot summer of 1990, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell proudly engineered the infamous "luxury tax," a nasty little tithe on everything from furs to jewelry to yachts. Democrats were proud: Not only were they throwing new dollars at the Treasury, they'd done it by socking it to the rich. The wealthy, in the words of then-House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, would finally pay "their fair share." Within a year, Mr. Mitchell was back in the Senate passionately demanding an end to the same dreaded luxury tax. The levy had devastated his home state of Maine's boat-building business, throwing yard workers, managers and salesmen out of jobs. The luxury tax was repealed by 1993, though by the look of today's tax debate, its lessons haven't been forgotten. Top Democrats are working to implement a new class-warfare tax strategy, only this time they're getting pushback from those in their party who fear the economic consequences"

Sarkozy to vacation in the USA: "France's President Nicolas Sarkozy would not have to stray far from the Champs-Elys‚es to find a summer holiday spot most Americans can only dream of. A castle in the Loire valley. A country estate in Provence. A villa on the French Riviera. But non. Sarkozy, his country's celebrated new leader, is planning to get some rest and relaxation on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. Wolfeboro -- a popular vacation destination for countless Bostonians -- is buzzing with excitement about his visit.... Wolfeboro, which bills itself as the oldest summer resort in America, takes great pride in its natural beauty and low-key sensibility, and over the years the town has drawn rich and famous people from all over the world -- including Mitt Romney, who owns a summer home a few minutes by boat or car from Appe's mansion. Adam Gopnik, who has written extensively about French politics and culture for The New Yorker and in his own books, said yesterday it would be "a huge mistake" to think Sarkozy idealizes America, but he said the new French president appears to want to "drain the drama" from relations between the two countries. Asked about the prospect of Sarkozy's visit, Gopnik said he did not know whether Sarkozy had any political purpose in his trip, but if he did, it might be to make it seem "completely normal and unfreighted that a French president could vacation in America."

The empty vessel runs at the mouth and then realizes it: "Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday he would not use nuclear weapons in any circumstance. "I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance," Obama said, with a pause, "involving civilians." Then he quickly added, "Let me scratch that. There's been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That's not on the table."

Fighting drones now in Iraq : "Danger Room reports that modified Swords bomb-disposal robots with M249 machine guns mounted on them are now in Iraq. In development the units were somewhat sluggish in responding to commands which made them dangerous for use. The problems have apparently been solved."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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3 August, 2007

Leftists worldwide are moving Right -- except in America

The excerpt below comments on European developments but it perhaps even more so in Australia -- where the Leftist leader (Rudd) sounds very conservative indeed on most issues. He even seems to be a genuine Christian

In Europe, reforms are in vogue. Though many special interests are fiercely resisting change, it is striking to see just how many European Social Democrats have come to recognize the need for structural reforms to welfare states.

Witness Gerhard Schroeder, the center-left former chancellor of Germany: in 2003, he called for a "change of mentality" in his own party, the SPD, as well as in German society as a whole. "Much will have to be changed to keep our welfare and social security at least at its current level," he added, as he argued in favor of reforms that would trim entitlements, and cut taxes. The chairman of the SPD, Franz Muentefering, supported Mr. Schroeder by saying that "we believe that things must be rearranged and restarted in Germany in this decade." Not long thereafter, Mr., Schroeder took the lead in making German labor laws more flexible.

In France, Socialist former prime minister Lionel Jospin shocked the left several years ago: When asked on TV what he was going to do to help laid-off factory workers beyond the public assistance already on the books, he said that "the state cannot do everything." It was not so much the truth of the statement that came as a shock; it was that a leader of the French left would say it so candidly. Throughout his tenure, Mr. Jospin privatized numerous state-owned companies, including Air France, even as he criticized capitalism.

Labour former British prime minister Tony Blair became famous for his "Third Way" philosophy, which he said moved "beyond an old left preoccupied by state control, high taxation and producer interests."

And in Italy, on July 20, center-left prime minister Romano Prodi announced a deal raising the retirement age to 61 from 57. Though the deal was a somewhat watered-down version of the pension reform plan originally passed by his center-right predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, it shows that the Italian left is aware that structural reforms are urgently needed.

Source

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Rushbo liked the above rendition of American "liberal" thinking.

There's a post here showing the complete empty-headedness of Andrew Sullivan.

Leftist Boris Reznick wakes up to Cesar Chavez: "Like so many other Americans, I cheered Hugo Chavez' early work to restore dignity to the people of Venezuela. I chuckled when I listened to Chavez express many of the same opinions of president Bush as many Americans have. I was deeply engaged when Mr. Chavez talked about education and health improvements and put the resources into programs to do so.... Today, to see the end of criticism, the end of the legislative progress, in fact the entire process of democratic give and take makes me feel like a fool for believing Hugo Chavez would be any different than any other leader. Hugo Chavez may have been a socialist democrat at one time ... but he has become a nothing more than the egocentric dictator Aleksander Boyd warned me about. God help the people of Venezuela."

The world's least favourite airline: "British Airways has been named as the worst performing of all Europe's major airlines, with its passengers more likely to face delays than those on any other airline. Between April and June, 35.7 per cent of short or medium haul flights did not arrive on time and 32.7 per cent were delayed on departure, according to a report by the Association of European Airlines (AEA). The airline's performance on long haul flights was even worse with 44 per cent of these arriving late and 36.6 per cent departing later than scheduled. The figures come after BA was fined almost 270 million pounds ($646m) for price fixing after colluding over fuel surcharges with Virgin Atlantic. AEA said that for every 1000 passengers travelling in the three months between April and June, an average of 28 bags were delayed on BA flights compared with around three bags for every 1000 Air Malta travellers"

Defeatism defeated?: "If victory in Iraq was oversold at the outset, there are now signs that defeat is likewise being oversold today. One of the earliest signs of this was that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he could not wait for General David Petraeus' September report on conditions in Iraq but tried to get an immediate Congressional mandate to pull the troops out. Having waited for years, why could he not wait until September for the report by the general who is actually on the ground in Iraq every day? Why was it necessary for politicians in Washington to declare the troop surge a failure from 8,000 miles away? The most obvious answer is that Senator Reid feared that the surge would turn out not to be a failure -- and the Democrats had bet everything, including their chances in the 2008 elections, on an American defeat in Iraq. Senator Reid had to pre-empt defeat before General Petraeus could report progress. The Majority Leader's failure to get the Senate to do that suggests that not enough others were convinced that declaring failure now was the right political strategy."

The empty vessel now wants to invade Pakistan!: "Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama issued a pointed warning Wednesday to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf by saying, as president, he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists. In his most comprehensive statement on terrorism, the Illinois senator said the Iraq war has left the U.S. less safe than it was before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and said he would seek to withdraw U.S. troops as president and shift the country's military focus to threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan".

Don't let them grind you down: "An Italian politician whose party represents Christian values has been embroiled in a scandal involving two prostitutes, a hotel room, and a large amount of cocaine. Cosimo Mele, 50, a Christian Democrat UDC MP, was caught out when he had to call an ambulance to the hotel in Rome after one of the girls suffered breathing problems.... Mr. Mele said, "I did nothing other than go to dinner with a friend who introduced me to this girl. Since it was late, she came to bed with me. How many politicians go to bed with young girls?" He said he had nothing to do with the other girl who had "taken drugs or something else." She had felt ill, and he had called reception. He added: "So politicians in the UDC do not make love? Of course, I recognize Christian values. But what has that got to do with going with a prostitute? It is a personal matter. This affair has nothing to do with family values. I cannot be branded a bad father and a bad husband simply because after five or six days away from home, an occasion presented itself."" [Having a mistress as well as a wife has a long history of acceptance in Italy]

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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2 August, 2007

Interesting war review

In a wider sense, the war is as most wars: an evolution from blunders to wisdom, the side that makes the fewest and learns from them the most eventually winning. Al Qaeda and the insurgents in 2004-6 developed the means, both tactical and strategic, to thwart the reconstruction, but we, not they, have since learned the more and evolved.

As in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, the present American military - which has committed far less mistakes than past American forces - has shifted tactics, redefined strategy, and found the right field commanders. We forget that the U.S. Army and Marines, far from being broken, now have the most experienced and wizened officers in the world. Like Summer 1864, Summer 1918, and in the Pacific 1944-5, the key is the support of a weary public for an ever improving military that must nevertheless endure a final storm before breaking the enemy.

The irony is that should President Bush endure the hysteria and furor and prove able to give the gifted Gen. Petraeus the necessary time - and I think he will - his presidency could still turn out to be Trumanesque, once we digest the changes in Europe, the progress on North Korea, the end of both the Taliban and Saddam, and the prevention of another 9/11 attack. How odd that all the insider advice to triangulate - big spending, new programs, uninspired appointments, liberal immigration reform - have nearly wrecked the administration, and what were once considered its liabilities - foreign policy, the war on terror and Iraq - may still save it.

Source. Note also below:

Honest reporting at last: "On Monday this week Rush Limbaugh talked about all the members of the mainstream media who are now coming to the conclusion that the surge is working. I think Burns and his fellow Times correspondent Michael Gordon have done more than anyone to change those attitudes and they did not do any of it as partisans. It is especially ironic that these two men of integrity work for the paper that has done its worse to insure defeat." [See also here]

The Left are afraid of success in Iraq: "As I predicted earlier in the day, the left wing blogosphere has turned on the Brookings scholars who went to Iraq and noted the results of the surge. Glenn Greenwald, a.k.a. “The Lion of Jalalabad”, penned a characteristically windy attempt at character assassination. Thankfully, Matthew Yglesias showed more brevity. Characteristically, both pieces didn’t take issue with what Brookings-men Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon reported seeing in Iraq but instead attacked them personally. If you’ve studied the moonbats in their native habitats as I have the past several years, this comes as no surprise. After all, what is the chickenhawk meme but an attempt to win an argument by attacking your opponent rather than engaging his ideas? Has anyone come back from Iraq recently and not seen progress? Wouldn’t an effective rebuttal of O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s article sought out such friendly sources?

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Graphic above courtesy of Englishman's View

Gateway Pundit has some excellent photos of scenes in Jerusalem.

The publisher of the WSJ offers assurances that standards will not decline now that it is owned and run by Rupert Murdoch. The top-quality "Times" of London has thrived under many years of Murdoch ownership so one would have to be a bit paranoid to expect otherwise. I read "The Times" every day but I read no American publication regularly. As with Murdoch's Fox News, "The Times" gives conservative viewpoints a fair run -- a great contrast with its New York namesake.

The New York Times and Partisan Book Reviewers: "If one were to turn to The New York Times Sunday Book Review section today, the front page features a long indictment of the Bush Administration and the way it is conducting the War on Terror by Samantha Power. It is a curious article because there is no single book "reviewed" in the piece but rather it offers a tour d'horizon of books on the conflict that Power thinks we should all be reading. Power is identified as "the Anna Lindh professor of the practice of global leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard." That's fine as far as it goes. But what the Times doesn't mention is a travesty. Samantha Power served last year as an adviser for the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama .Apparently, she still serves in some capacity as an adviser on his foreign policy team The fact that the New York Times chose her to deliver a harsh attack on the Bush Administration was a journalistic failing and reveals an agenda at work at the paper that has nothing to do with the journalism. The fact that the Times failed to disclose this campaign tie is a sin of omission"

Incredible British bungling: "Known sex offenders are living unchecked in the community because there are too many of them to be monitored regularly, according to research commissioned by the Home Office. The rapidly growing number of people registered as violent criminals or sex attackers is threatening to overwhelm the police, probation officers and social workers who have to keep them under supervision"

Eliot Spizer in the gun at last: "The fisherman is Andrew Cuomo, Spitzer's successor as New York's attorney general. In a state long known for remorseless Machiavellians willing to do whatever is necessary to get to the top, Cuomo may be the only man with more intense ambitions than Spitzer. The son of a previous New York governor, Cuomo recently made public his evidence that Spitzer used state employees to generate a false charge against state senate majority leader Joe Bruno, a Republican, with whom Spitzer was clashing. Cuomo clearly hopes to incite a feeding frenzy against Spitzer by those other well-known man-eaters, the Empire State's news media."

Respect must be earned: "Why, then, should we be commanded to "respect" those who insist that they alone know something that is both unknowable and unfalsifiable? Something, furthermore, that can turn in an instant into a license for murder and rape? As one who has occasionally challenged Islamic propaganda in public and been told that I have thereby "insulted 1.5 billion Muslims," I can say what I suspect-which is that there is an unmistakable note of menace behind that claim. No, I do not think for a moment that Mohammed took a "night journey" to Jerusalem on a winged horse. And I do not care if 10 billion people intone the contrary. Nor should I have to. But the plain fact is that the believable threat of violence undergirds the Muslim demand for "respect.""

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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1 August, 2007

A failed study of academic ideology

A study published late last year by sociologists John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick under the heading "Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors" has got a fair bit of attention. It is a rather desperate attempt to deny the obvious -- that American university and college teachers are overwhelmingly Leftist.

They concede that party identification runs 7 to 1 in favour of Democrats among professors but argue that this does not adequately reflect ideology. Conservatives would certainly agree with that -- seeing professors as much more extreme Leftists than most Democrat voters are. That is the WRONG conclusion, however, according to the zippy one. He and his friend in fact argue that a lot of those academic Democrats are really centrists!

The study has been thoroughly shot down on a number of grounds by others (e.g. here and here) but I thought I should have a look at it nonetheless. I spent 20 years or so trying to measure people's political attitudes as precisely as possible and have over 100 academic journal articles in print reporting on the results of that. So the research concerned really is in my line of country. I thought I might be able to see defects that others have missed.

And I sure did! The attitude surveys from which they derived their data had only a 50% response rate! For many purposes that may not matter. That is actually a fairly good response rate compared to attitude surveys and opinion polls in general. But there is ONE occasion where a low response rate does matter a great deal. And that is the sort of occasion we have in the present case: Where one's sample includes a large number of political extremists. I tried for many years to get Communists and Nazis to complete my attitude surveys. I used every trick in the book to persuade them to do the task -- including getting recommendations of the task from their own authorities. But the comrades just would NOT do the task. They obviously felt -- probably rightly --that the results could be used to "get at" them in some way. And, as we all know, academe is now the only place where Marxism still has a strong following. I taught in a Sociology Department at a major university myself for many years so I can vouch for the popularity of Marx in such places. And what is true of Marxists as far as paranoia is concerned is probably also true of the fruitier versions of Leftism that also infest academe.

So Zipp and friend based their research on data from which the real Leftists were self-excluded! No wonder they found that the Leftists they did have were rather moderate! Rather hilarious, really.

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An American liberal's view of American liberalism

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it's the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God's green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn't mind being in the position it's in - politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class. And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here's the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein's monster of incongruous parts - a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans' rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them - like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the "All Things Considered" interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven't yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

More here

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For those who don't know much history, Israel is above being compared with Czechoslovakia before WWII. Thanks in part to the appeasement policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia was eventually overrun by Hitler

Some polls are not fit to print: "Janet Elder of the "All The News" paper has a laugh-out-loud story about what happens when the Times doesn't like a poll result - they bury it: "The war in Iraq is the single most important continuing news issue right now. Public opinion about the war is a critical part of that story. That's why when a finding about the war in a New York Times poll could not be easily explained, the paper went back and did another poll on the very same subject. It turns out the poll had gotten it right. Support for the initial invasion of Iraq, as measured by a question The New York Times/CBS News Poll has asked since December 2003, increased modestly compared with two months ago."

This is incomprehensible to the Left: "In a time of war, when Americans have soured on the grinding conflict in Iraq, and the rosters of the dead lengthen daily, young men and women continue to join the military. Although the Army missed its recruiting goals in May and June, all four services exceeded their goals last year. More than 80,000 recruits joined the Army, 36,000 the Navy and 30,000 the Air Force. An additional 32,000 joined the Marine Corps. In June, 4,113 Marine recruits signed up, exceeding the monthly goal of 3,742."

British airport screening adds inconvenience but no security: "Britain's airport screening policies inconvenience passengers without boosting security according to the head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). "Harmonised security measures across borders are more important than ever," IATA General Director Giovanni Bisignani said in a ciritical statement on first half civil aviation statistics. He said "governments must focus much more on further harmonisation to ensure that effective security is also convenient for passengers." "A particular focus will be the UK, where unique screening policies inconvenience passengers with no improvement in security. "The only beneficiary is the airport operator - BAA - that continues to deliver embarrassingly low service levels by failing to invest in appropriate equipment and staff to meet demand. This must stop."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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