The original of this mirror site is HERE. My Blogroll; The archive; My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here. Other mirror sites (viewable in China): Greenie Watch, Political Correctness Watch, Education Watch, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine and Australian Politics. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing)
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31 December, 2005

FRANCE VERSUS THE USA

French democracy unable to cope with its Muslims: "This is the end of the French political system that has prevailed since de Gaulle came to power and established the Fifth Republic in 1958," said Guilhou. "The middle classes are becoming impoverished, and they fear for the future of their children. The system has run its course, and I expect a general implosion of the system leading to something between the Argentine economic crash and political crisis of 2001 when the government was thrown out of power, and the Lebanese situation. We can expect populist reflexes to emerge in the middle class, leading to that traditional French recourse in a crisis, the election of a new Bonapartism," Guilhou added.

French economy in trouble: "France's economy is under fresh scrutiny after industrial production unexpectedly fell in October. Output dropped by 2.5%, after rising by 0.6% in September, the statistical office INSEE reported. While the government has promised to revive the flagging economy, a mixed picture has emerged in recent months. Despite the good intentions recent riots have dented consumer confidence, unemployment is still above 9% and reforms are proving difficult to enact".

U.S. economy booms: "The U.S. economy turned in a remarkably strong performance in the summer despite surging energy prices and the battering the Gulf Coast states took from hurricanes, although business growth was slightly lower than the government previously estimated. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that the gross domestic product, the nation's total output of goods and services, rose at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in the July-September quarter. It was the fastest pace of growth in 1 1/2 years".

There is an article here that says that France quarrels with America not because the pair are so different but because they are so alike

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ELSEWHERE

I have a post on Australian Politics about the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission -- famous for prosecuting two Christian pastors who quoted the Koran. They have just refused to take note of REAL abuse of Islam, thus showing their total hypocrisy.

Leftist racism: "Nothing brings out racist slurs like an ambitious black man who doesn't know his "place." So when Maryland's lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, announced his candidacy for the US Senate recently, the bigots reared up. On one popular website, The News Blog, Steele's picture was grotesquely doctored, making him look like a minstrel-show caricature. "I's Simple Sambo and I's Running for the Big House," read the insulting headline accompanying the picture. This wasn't some white supremacist slime from the right-wing fringe. The News Blog is a liberal site, and the reason for its racist attack on Steele, a former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, is that he is a conservative. Specifically, a black conservative. As far as too many liberals are concerned, blacks who reject liberalism deserve to be smeared as Sambos and worse....

Conservative group speaks out: "The television commercials are attention-grabbing: Newly found Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax and mustard gas, and had "extensive ties" to al-Qaida. The discoveries are being covered up by those "willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions." The hard-hitting spots are part of a recent public-relations barrage aimed at reversing a decline in public support for President Bush's handling of Iraq. But these advertisements aren't paid for by the Republican National Committee or other established White House allies. Instead, they are sponsored by Move America Forward, a media-savvy outside advocacy group that has become one of the loudest - and most controversial - voices in the Iraq debate".

It is very encouraging to see an article by Abdurrahman Wahid in the WSJ which sets out the urgency of defeating Islamic extremism. Better known as Gus Dur, Wahid is of course arguably the most respected religious leader in the world's most populous Islamic nation -- Indonesia. As Indonesia is on Australia's doorstep, many politically aware Australians are rather appreciative of Gus Dur.

New England elitists deny choice to their people: "As a newspaper reporter, Diane Srebnick covered the division that surfaced last year when a Dunkin' Donuts planned to move into rural Cornish, Maine. The tension she witnessed between an anti-franchise coalition and Dunkaccino fans spurred her to preventive action: a ban on 'formula restaurants' in her own community a few weeks ago. A tiny town of 2,500, Shapleigh has no franchises. But Ms. Srebnick, a planning board member, says corporate sprawl is a concern for even the most remote parts of Maine. ... Her measure comes on the heels of two similar bans within two years in Maine. Last month, the seaside village of Ogunquit banned all chain restaurants from its vicinity, following in nearby York's footsteps the year before."

Keep the front door of legal immigration open: "In the long run, the best way to fix our immigration system is not to militarize the border or to drive undocumented immigrants further into the shadows. The flood of illegal immigration exists, in large part, because U.S. laws do not provide legal channels to accommodate the labor demand of employers and the supply of immigrants willing to work. An estimated 70 percent of the current agriculture work force is illegal. Current guest-worker programs are capped at 66,000 annually for non-agriculture service industries, the current temporary agricultural-worker program is so bureaucratic that over 40 percent of applications to the Department of Labor are not acted upon until after the harvest, and current laws allow the admission of only 5,000 unskilled workers annually on a permanent basis."

I recently had an email discussion with Steve Sailer on the topic of Hispanic IQ which I reproduce here

I have also just put up here an email from a reader in response to my recent comment on the Brace craniofacial findings about human evolution.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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30 December, 2005

THE ORIGIN OF MODERN EUROPEANS

Physical anthropology is not my field at all but I have a slight interest in the genetic origins of the British population from which I personally am descended so I do occasionally note studies that attempt to enlighten us about that. I have however given up taking notice of the DNA studies as their conclusions seem to vary between saying that the English population is almost wholly Celtic and almost wholly Anglo-Saxon. My conclusion is that DNA is so complex and our understanding of it is still so slight that we will have to wait for some time before anything definitive emerges.

I was therefore rather interested to see the latest paper by Loring Brace using craniofacial measurements of ancient skulls to trace European ancestry. Such measurements do at least offer the prospect of being a lot simpler than DNA. There is an abstract of the paper here, the full paper is available here and there is a popular summary of it here. I am afraid, however, that I also find difficulties with Brace's conclusions. What Brace appears to have found is that modern Europeans are in appearance more like very ancient Europeans than the Europeans who came in between. The Europeans who came in between were the first farmers (he refers to them as "neolithic") and he says that they had heavier features than either present-day or very ancient Europeans. His explanation for his finding is that the first farmers came into Europe from the Middle East and taught the natives how to farm but then mostly died out (or at least left little genetic legacy).

That seems reasonable at first glance but if the natives soon learnt to farm from the incomers, how come most of the farmer remains are not in fact those of the natives? Surely it is absurd to claim that the natives conveniently refrained from farming until the incomers died out!

What seems a slightly more reasonable explanation to me is that the original European population evolved in two directions -- the more heavyset farmers and the more gracile hunters but, perhaps due to climatic changes, the hunters eventually took up farming too and in the process wiped out most of the original farmers -- aided in that, no doubt, by the superior fighting skills that their original hunting lifestyle had given them.

That of course leaves us with the problem of explaining how farming APPEARS to have originated in the Middle East. Time-lines that far back are however very speculative so I see no real difficulty in supposing that the first farmers in the Middle East in fact fled there from Europe.

But that still leaves the question of where the original Europeans came from. Brace believes that they gradually evolved from Neanderthals -- which conflicts with the usual view that they originated from Cro-Magnons out of Africa. Brace's data do conveniently show little affinity between Cro-Magnons and modern Europeans so that is certainly interesting. The only firm conclusion that seems to emerge from it all is that the present-day population of Europe is very ancient.

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ELSEWHERE

Something had to be done: "China plans to jail anyone who helps prospective parents to learn the sex of their unborn child, in an attempt to reduce the number of female fetuses being aborted. It is already illegal to scan a fetus to discover its sex. But an amendment submitted to the standing committee of the National People's Congress, or parliament, will mean up to three years in jail and heavy fines for anyone helping with gender selection. It is rare for the parliament not to pass a bill. Most couples are limited by law to one child. Many, especially in the countryside, yearn for a son to work their land, provide for the parents in their old age and carry on the family name. Many rural clinics provide unauthorised ultrasound scans to determine the sex of the fetus and parents generally abort daughters. As a result, the ratio of boys to girls stands at 119 to 100, significantly higher than the world average of 106 to 100. In southern provinces such as Hainan and Guangdong the imbalance is as high as 130 boys per 100 girls, despite the many incentives offered to farmers to stop them aborting daughters".

Good if they really were guilty: "A Kuwaiti court handed down death sentences Tuesday, to six Islamists linked to the al-Qaida terror network. The six condemned men were among a group of 37 people accused of plotting to attack Kuwaiti security forces and U.S. troops in the Gulf emirate."

Malingerers under threat in Britain? "Payment of long-term sickness benefit is to become conditional on people taking advantage of government help aimed at getting them back to work, under reforms to be announced next month. The Times has learnt that ministers are to risk the opposition of Labour MPs by introducing a "something-for-something" approach. The Government would provide more generous benefits and support to deal with illness and disabilities in return for a new obligation on people to try to work again. Incentives to stay on benefit will be removed".

French 'active' in Rwanda genocide: "One of the most controversial episodes in France's recent history is to come under legal scrutiny after a judge opened a formal inquiry into allegations that the French Army conspired in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The move, which will renew debate over the actions of Francois Mitterrand, France's late president, is embarrassing for Paris at a time when it is struggling to maintain its influence in Africa. Despite attempts by the French Defence Ministry to block the case, Jacques Baillet, the prosecutor at the army tribunal, has begun an investigation into the role of France's troops during the massacres".

Cowardly Dutch: "Britain's plans to expand significantly its military presence in Afghanistan early next year are being disrupted by political indecision within Nato. Ministers had hoped to give the Commons details of the proposed despatch of a combat battle group to Afghanistan before Christmas. Army units have already been put on standby for Afghanistan and have been training for weeks, but without any firm guarantee that they will be sent. Military planners and ministers have been unable to make final decisions about the reinforcements, which are due to go in March and April. Nato foreign ministers agreed at a meeting in Brussels this month to increase the size of the alliance’s commitment in Afghanistan from 10,000 to 16,000 troops. The major players within Nato earmarked for sending extra troops included Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. But no decision has been made about each nation’s contributions, partly because of Dutch concerns over the risks".

There is a rather heartwarming story here that may even be true. At least Snopes do not appear to have rubbished it yet: "It started last Christmas, when Bennett and Vivian Levin were overwhelmed by sadness while listening to radio reports of injured American troops. "We have to let them know we care," Vivian told Bennett. So they organized a trip to bring soldiers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital to the annual Army-Navy football game in Philly, on Dec. 3. The cool part is, they created their own train line to do it.... "

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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29 December, 2005

BLACKS VERSUS HISPANICS

John Brimelow recently put up on Vdare a reasonably friendly comment in response to my recent post about New Orleans. That he calls me a "market supremacist" causes me no grief at all -- though my libertarianism is in fact much broader than mere market advocacy. What Brimelow implies by calling me that however is a bit amusing. He is claiming that I ignore the importance of race and genetics. I am sure that any regular reader of my posts would be falling off their chair laughing at that!

What Brimelow is bothered by is that I appear to be defending Hispanics. As he is an anti-immigration warrior that curdles his egg-nog. I in fact am also an immigration restrictionist, unlike some libertarians. I think that just as a homeowner has the right to say who lives in his house, so a nation has a right to say whom they admit to their home. And, as an Australian, I am very mainstream about that. Both of our major political parties support a crackdown on illegal immigration and our government has in fact successfully reasserted control over immigration into our country.

But none of that should blind us to the fact that not all minorities are the same. And I think that a comparison of blacks and Hispanics treated as groups definitely favours Hispanics. I am well aware that the measured mean IQ of Hispanics in the USA is at present low but I have presented reasons elsewhere for thinking that Hispanics will in general eventually rise above that and become good mainstream Americans -- which only a Leftist would expect to happen with blacks as a group.

And Brimelow's claim that wages of up to $15 per hour are unattractive in a country where the national minimum is $5.15 seems to me quite absurd.

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ELSEWHERE

There is an interesting article here by Jeffrey Hart that attempts to summarize and integrate the current themes in American conservative thinking. Most of what Hart says has merit but, as might perhaps be expected from a professor of English, his history is weak. Identifying the founder of the Progressive Party (TR) as a conservative is an easy mistake to make (given the often extreme ways in which pre-WW2 and post-WW2 Leftism differ) but it is quite wrong nonetheless. One wonders if he has ever heard of TR's progressively more strident anti-business policies. See here for a more informed commentary on TR.

Conversions to Islam show failure of mainstream churches: "Mary Fallot looks as unlike a terrorist suspect as one could possibly imagine: a petite and demure white Frenchwoman chatting with friends on a cell-phone, indistinguishable from any other young woman in the caf, where she sits sipping coffee... Ms. Fallot is a recent convert to Islam... Fallot laughs when she is asked whether her love life had anything to do with her decision. "When I told my colleagues at work that I had converted, their first reaction was to ask whether I had a Muslim boyfriend," she recalls. "They couldn't believe I had done it of my own free will." In fact, she explains, she liked the way "Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points." Those reasons reflect many female converts' thinking, say experts who have studied the phenomenon. "A lot of women are reacting to the moral uncertainties of Western society," says Dr. Jawad. "They like the sense of belonging and caring and sharing that Islam offers."

Discrimination as property rights policy: "My wife and I were waiting to be seated at an airport restaurant when an angry man exclaimed, 'This is America! There's not supposed to be discrimination!' The man had been told that he could not be served since he was traveling with a pet and was asked to leave. I just rolled my eyes and felt sad for this person. The truth is, everyone discriminates. We do so not only on purpose but also with total impunity in most cases. Every decision that we make implies the rejection of other possibilities. Faced with the challenge of choosing from many options, a discriminatory process solves the problem. If we value A over B, we are discriminating against B."

German news magazine highlights Eastern European economic miracle: "The Spiegel is not known as a market-friendly publication, so it is noteworthy that the German news magazine has a lengthy article reviewing the economic revival in former communist nations. Slovakia and Estonia get much of the attention, and rightly so. These nations have implemented the flat tax and many other free market reforms. Too bad Angela Merkel thinks Germany needs more government. She could learn a thing or two by looking to the East:

Wonders never cease. There is actually a whole book called The Dittohead's Guide to Adult Beverages. Limbaugh-style humour is definitely in evidence. For impoverished Limbaugh fans, there are some extracts from it here.

A truth-teller not to be forgotten (Alain Besancon in "Commentary" of 1998) : "In my country [France], it is still possible to provoke a scandal by raising in public the issue of the crimes committed by Communism -- and an even greater scandal by suggesting that not only in the enormity of its crimes but in its very nature, Soviet Communism can be compared with that other great evil of our century, Nazism. This was illustrated once again by a recent French best-seller, The Black Book of Communism, an 846-page compilation by six historians with an introduction that points out a number of commonalities between the two totalitarian systems. The book has raised a storm of controversy in intellectual and political circles, and has even caused an uproar in parliament." (Hat tip to Keith Burgess Jackson)

I have just put up a new recipe on my recipe blog. (Mirror site here). It is a versatile recipe for fresh bernaise sauce.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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28 December, 2005

YET MORE EVIDENCE FOR THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IQ

"Bigger is better when it comes to brain matter, says a leading neuroscientist. Canadian researchers examined the brains of 100 people who were given extensive IQ tests before they died and found a correlation between cerebral volume and intelligence. "This is essentially the first study that is actually looking at the size of the brain directly and not through imaging," Sandra Witelson, who headed the study at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University, said Thursday from Hamilton. "What is very clear is that there is a correlation between brain size and intelligence, particularly verbal ability," said Dr. Witelson, noting that verbal ability encompasses comprehension of complex sentences, understanding verbal logical information and verbal memory.

The study looked specifically at the size of the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain, and found a correlation with verbal intelligence in women. The same correlation was found for right-handed men. The research paper was published online this month by the journal Brain. Dr. Witelson is the scientist who made headlines in 1999 after painstakingly studying the brain of the scientific genius Albert Einstein. She discovered that one part of his brain - the inferior parietal region, which is related to mathematical reasoning - was 15 per cent wider on both sides than normal. Her latest study involved the brains of 58 women and 42 men who all lived and died in the Hamilton area over the past 25 years. The subjects had secondary stage cancers - their cancers had spread, or metastasized - and while still relatively healthy, they agreed to take the intelligence tests as well as donate their brains to science after death.

Some studies have looked at intelligence using MRI images of the brain, but Dr. Witelson noted there is room for ambiguity in the images that come through computer programs. Likewise, she said people can't just look at head size and determine that a smaller head means a smaller brain, or vice versa. "There's a lot inside a skull other than just the brain," she said. The brains in her study were weighed and the volume calculated through the simple Archimedes' principle - they were placed in water, and measures were taken of how much water was displaced".

More here

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SOME MORE NOTES ON KATRINA AND ITS AFTERMATH

Katrina cleanup: Private firms best: "There are many reasons for the difference between the lack of progress in Pascagoula and the quick cleanup in the Biloxi area. But officials here point fingers at what they consider the No. 1 culprit: the federal government and, in particular, the Army Corps of Engineers. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Harrison County, the home of Biloxi, and Jackson County, where Pascagoula is located, each had about 10 million cubic yards of debris to clean up. Both counties took up the federal government on its offer to foot the bill. But while Harrison County and all but one of its cities hired contractors on their own, Jackson County and its cities, at the urging of the federal government, asked the Army Corps to take on the task. Officials in Jackson County said it was a choice they had regretted ever since. The cleanup in Jackson County and its municipalities has not only cost millions of dollars more than in neighboring counties, but it is also taking longer".

Those who live in glass houses ....: "The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which slammed the Bush administration for its allegedly slow and racially insensitive response to Hurricane Katrina, has yet to spend any of the estimated $400,000 that it raised for the victims of the Aug. 29 storm."

I have just put up here an interesting email from a reader that takes a skeptical look at the New Orleans fiasco.

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ELSEWHERE

There is yet another survey of American professors here which shows how strongly they adhere to Leftist politics. It also shows that the range of views among them is quite narrow. They march in lockstep to their Leftist drumbeat. They conform to an orthodoxy rather than being individual thinkers. No wonder they want to impose the same orthodoxy on everyone else.

Comment from Germany: "A former German hostage who spent 24 days in the hands of unknown captors in Iraq has said that her kidnappers were not criminals and had demanded humanitarian aid for Sunni Arab regions. She described her captors as "poor people" and said that she "cannot blame them for kidnapping her, as they cannot enter [Baghdad's heavily fortified] Green Zone to kidnap Americans." This has got to be another evil trick by Bush&Rumsfeld Inc. - incapacitating Iraqi terrorists ability to kidnap Americans by not allowing them to enter the Green Zone! Shocking!

The religion of peace: "A man allegedly killed his four daughters today by slitting their throats while they slept in their home in eastern Pakistan, after the eldest married a man of her choice, police said. "The man came to a police station ... after killing his four daughters," said senior police officer Mukhtar Iqbal Tikka. Nazeer Ahmed, who worked as a labourer near Burewala, some 110 kilometres east of Multan, had resented his eldest daughter's love marriage and killed the three others, fearing they might follow her, Tikka said. Ahmed allegedly told police his eldest daughter Muqadas Bibi, 25, had married a man of her choice against his wishes and her act had tarnished the family's honour so he plotted to kill her and his other daughters".

Stupid Jewish Leftists: "The movement of which I am a member has just voted against a war that I support. This vote by the Union of Reform Judaism was the first vote by a major national Jewish organization or religious movement opposing the war in Iraq. This war was and is being fought for American reasons, not Jewish reasons. However, to see this war that toppled one of Israel's fiercest enemies-an anti-Semitic dictator who sent $25,000 to the families of every jihadist who had been able to kill and maim Israeli children and other innocents-opposed by Jews is more than an act of ingratitude to this country and this president. This vote was an act of stunning and incomprehensible historical blindness".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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27 December, 2005

A SMALL PERSONAL NOTE

As I think I have mentioned here before, I get a lot of email where the sender's address ends in "mil" -- indicating that the sender is either enlisted in the U.S. armed forces or works as a civilian for the U.S. armed forces. And some of those emails do come from servicemen in Iraq. A frequent feature of those emails is that the sender thanks me for what I write in my postings both here and on other blogs. I always feel most unworthy of such thanks. I feel that it is I who should be thanking the men concerned who voluntarily put their lives at risk to serve the welfare of us all. Perhaps I am biased because of my own small service in the Australian army but I think the profession of arms is the noblest profession of all. In what other profession does one consciously volunteer to put one's own life at risk as an integral part of the job? I am therefore pleased that my latest post on Tongue-Tied may be of some help to the men and women serving in Iraq.

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NO RACIAL DIFFERENCES HERE OF COURSE

Blacks are streaming back to New Orleans to take advantage of the well-paid work available there .... Whoops! ... I got it wrong:

"Much of New Orleans lies abandoned and destroyed after Hurricane Katrina struck nearly four months ago, but for Latin American immigrants the storm-ravaged city has become a land of opportunity. While New Orleans residents are slow to return, the immigrants, most of them illegally in the United States, have swarmed in to do the hard work of cleaning up and rebuilding that others so far have shunned. They are not here because of altruism -- New Orleans is just another place in a strange land to them -- but because there is a huge unfulfilled demand for labor and, as a result, high wages they cannot get in their homeland or in other U.S. cities. In a sight common in the southwestern U.S., but new to New Orleans, they crowd street corners starting at daybreak, offering themselves as day laborers to anyone who needs them.

Most days, Delgado and his colleagues -- sometimes as many as 200 on this corner parking lot near the New Orleans central business district -- get hired quickly by contractors in passing pickup trucks, who whisk them off to whatever project is pending. "Baby, we couldn't do it without them," one of the employers shouted through his truck window.

There is so much work to be done, the immigrants say, that often they finish, return to the corner and get hired the same day for another job. The pay is good -- "$10, $12, $15 an hour," said Jose Del Rio, 38, from Chihuahua, Mexico -- and there are few problems....

The city was mostly abandoned after Katrina flooded 80 percent of it on Aug. 29 and most of it still sits empty and in ruins, waiting to be rebuilt. Mayor Ray Nagin said this week studies showed that as many as 150,000 of the pre-storm 462,000 residents have returned, but many doubt the figure is that high..... When asked where the American workers were, Del Rio shook his head and said, "Who knows? It just seems like the Latin race likes to work more.""

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ANOTHER LEFTIST FRAUD

The following note concerns Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the patrician socialist President F.D. Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt's fake "anti-racist" reputation: "The incident that most famously led to Eleanor Roosevelt's reputation as a foe of segregation and discrimination was her defense of the famous opera singer Marian Anderson. In 1937, Anderson was barred from performing at Constitution Hall because of her race. Roosevelt protested by resigning her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution which owned the hall. She also was instrumental in arranging for Anderson to perform at a special integrated out door concert on the Washington Mall. It was inspiring event that did much to show the follies of segregation. Yet, as black author, Zora Neale Hurston observed, there was more to the story. In 1951, Hurston noted that Anderson's manager...

"had originally applied to two places-Constitution Hall, the property of the D.A.R., and the auditorium of the White High School, the property of the District of Columbia.... The D.A.R. refused their hall to Mrs. Anderson..The school board likewise refused the auditorium of the high school.Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, et al., rushed into the fray and gave with a howl against narrow-minded racial discrimination that could be heard in Addis Ababa..But it was all directed against the D.A.R. No loud screaming against the school authorities. And as far as the high-school auditorium is concerned, to jump the people responsible for racial bias would be to accuse and expose the accusers themselves. The District of Columbia has no home rule; it is controlled by the congressional committees, and Congress at the time was overwhelmingly Democratic. It was controlled by the very people who were screaming so loudly against the D.A.R. To my way of thinking, both places should have been denounced, or neither.

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ELSEWHERE

The Australian Left is different: "Tax cuts for high-income earners and families will form the bedrock of a federal Labor tax plan designed to make Australia more competitive in the global labour market. Labor Treasury spokesman Wayne Swan has called for urgent reform to create a "flatter" tax system by cutting the number of marginal tax rates from four to three. In his most comprehensive blueprint yet for a redesign of the tax system, Mr Swan has also proposed stripping high-income earners of the tax-free allowance in return for lower marginal rates. His plans would also have more low-income earners pay no tax. In an essay, The Cutting Edge of Competitiveness, Mr Swan said his proposals would simplify the system and make Australia more competitive internationally".

Our friends, the Saudis: "The lawyer for an Indian migrant worker sentenced to have his eye gouged out as punishment by a Saudi Arabian court said he has launched a new appeal against the verdict.... Noushad, 32, had been working at a petrol pump in Dammam on the Saudi east coast since 1995. He had a fight with a Saudi customer over payment in April 2003 that put him in jail. The Saudi man later lost his eyesight, but the Indian said it was not because of the injuries he inflicted, and that he had acted in self-defence".

Jeff Jacoby has a very good post pointing out why the Jewish Hanukkah celebrations are significant for Christians.

For Americans there is a very sobering article just up on Strange Justice

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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26 December, 2005

SOME ANCIENT WORDS OF WISDOM

In this festive season many of us devote extra thought to the founder of the festivities and as I read his words I am struck by the evidence in them that the Left have always been with us. The intellectuals of Jesus's day were the Pharisees and when I read what Jesus said of them it seems to me that he could have been talking about our modern-day Leftist intellectuals. To remind you:

13 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

25 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

26 Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

From Matthew 23

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ELSEWHERE

Stupid US border cops: "Those leaky national borders so many people fret about? Not, apparently, a Minnesota problem -- at least in International Falls, where agents of the United States Customs and Border Protection are cracking down on people who might seem like innocents to the untrained among us. Take the case of Canadians Bob and Diana Hawley. On Nov. 2, they approached the border as they have for the past 20 years. The Kenora, Ontario, couple was headed to what they consider their winter home, an $850-a-month condo in Panama City, Fla. ... The Hawleys were -- gasp! -- attempting to transport a small yellow box of tools across the border. Agents spotted the toolbox and told the couple they were not welcome to enter the United States.'They said we must be going to Florida to do work,' Diana Hawley said. 'We tried to tell them that we always carry the toolbox in the car. If there's a breakdown, we might need it...' For the first hour of the interrogation, the Hawleys kept thinking this was just a misunderstanding. They have a hard time seeing how they can be confused with construction workers. He's 71, she's 70. He wears a knee brace and doesn't get around so easily."

Micro economics: "The White House regularly bemoans the fact that the economy is humming along impressively but the public doesn't recognize it. Just last week, President Bush told NBC News anchor Brian Williams that he's 'a little bit' frustrated by the public's negative attitude. 'I also think it's important to understand why people don't see or don't feel the improved economy,' Bush said. But he didn't offer an explanation. In truth, there are two explanations. One is the media, which dwells on bad economic news at the expense of good. As gasoline prices soared past $3.00 a gallon, the press couldn't say enough about this ugly trend. More recently as prices plummeted, the media was far less interested in touting the dramatic reversal. The second explanation involves the Bush administration itself.... the administration hadn't spread the word effectively about the strong economy.... How do we know the media has poisoned the public's view of the economy? It's really very simple. Opinion polls show basically that people believe overwhelming that they're doing well financially but the country isn't."

Even some 'progressives' now think multiculturalism has had it's day: "I was lucky to listen, in September, to a speech given by the British Commissioner for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, in response to the July 7 London bombings. Phillips made an impassioned and eloquent speech about moving beyond multiculturalism. In essence, he seemed to be suggesting that while multiculturalism had served Britain well in welcoming and accommodating millions of immigrants from all over the world over the past five decades, it was time that for the good of all Britons, British society took the next step: progressive integration. Phillips said not to take this step would be to "sleepwalk into segregation" as different communities became further entrenched and increasingly isolated from each other. Phillips seemed to suggest that we should remember that multiculturalism was meant to be a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. And as a means to an end, it's day has come".

Tyrannical (and job destroying) NSW occupational health & safety act: "If you think the proposed [Australian] sedition laws are tough, spare a thought for a piece of legislation that makes them look almost benign. Under this law, there is a presumption of guilt, the trial occurs before a tribunal and there is no appeal to a real court, and 96 per cent of those accused are found guilty. Plus the party bringing the case gets to keep half the fine. It's a package Philip Ruddock can only dream of. The law is the NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act 2000, under which hundreds of managers and companies are prosecuted every year".

"Homophobic" incident": Another lapse in sanity from Britain: "Mrs. Lynette Burrows was investigated by the police for what she said on a radio program. She had stated her belief that homosexuals should not be allowed to adopt. She added that placing boys with two homosexuals for adoption was as obvious a risk as placing a girl with two heterosexual men who offered themselves as parents. "It is a risk," she said. "You would not give a small girl to two men." A member of the public complained to the police and an officer contacted Mrs Burrows the following day to say a "homophobic incident" had been reported against her. "I was astounded," she said. "I told her this was a free country and we are allowed to express opinions on matters of public interest. She told me it was not a crime but that she had to record these incidents." "They were leaning on me, letting me know that the police had an interest in my views. I think it is sinister and completely unacceptable.""

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots of good reading for the festive season.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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



25 December, 2005

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all who come by here


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THE SECULAR AND THE SACRED NEED NOT CONFLICT

"Christmas in America is done in a way that offends many people around the world, and also many Christians in the United States. The mega-bucks shopping, the over-the-top promotion, the non-stop jingles and carols, the light displays, yard decorations, huge inflatables everywhere -- must Christmas really be like this? No, it doesn't need to be. But neither should we be quick to take offense. A big Christmas need not be an insincere Christmas.

This point was made by Benedict XVI before he became Pope. He noted in a 1977 essay that .... "such criticism is largely justified, even though it might too readily forget that, behind the facade of business and sentimentality, the yearning for something purer and greater is not entirely extinguished; indeed, that the sentimental framework often provides the protecting shield behind which hides a noble and genuine sentiment that is simply reluctant to expose itself to the gaze of the other."

He is speaking about the core of good and virtuous intentions behind much of what is assailed as "commercialism." Much of what people buy is for others. But what people do to commemorate Christmas reflects an inner sense that something extraordinary is occurred and continues to occur on the night of Jesus' birth. All this fuss would not take place over a fat man in the red suit... From the earliest centuries, Christmas was not merely a private affair for homes and parishes. Christians obtain grace from reflecting on the miracle of the Incarnation but they have given the event called Christmas as a glorious gift to the world".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

I have always thought it crystal clear that the USA is the kindest nation that the world has ever seen. There is a short article by Herb London that gives a brilliant example of that.

Post from No Left turns: "This is amusing. I'm guessing that the New York Times is in need of copy because this report, filed from Kenya about anthropologists researching their so-called Dream Tribe is pretty empty. It seems that anthropologists--those who study human beings as if they were worms (that is, as if they have no rational faculties) and then call it science; or, those who study culture and cannot discover the human nature to be found therein--discovered the isolated Ariaal tribe, in the 1970's, in Kenya and started poking at them and asking them questions. The article notes--without even the depth of a Margaret Mead--that the tribesmen have been studying the anthropologists as well, and that they are disappointed when they get no feedback from the researchers. A chief, wearing a Boston University T-shirt and sandals made of used tires, said this: "We don't mind helping people get their Ph.D.'s, but once they get their Ph.D.'s, many of them go away. They don't send us their reports. What have we achieved from the plucking of our hair? We want feedback. We want development." The article notes some of the published studies to come from this research. For example, "In a study in The International Journal of Impotence Research, Dr. Campbell also found that Ariaal men with many wives showed less erectile dysfunction than did men of the same age with fewer spouses." Amazing.

Africa's war on poverty begins at home: "It is true that rich countries' protectionism harms some producers in the developing world but trade liberalization in rich countries as a cure for African poverty is often over-emphasized. The main causes of African impoverishment are internal. Africa lacks political stability and economic freedom. Its tariffs are high and private property rights weak. It is hypocritical for African leaders to call for greater access to global markets while avoiding policy reforms, including trade openness, at home."

Good to hear: "The city transit union sent its members back to work without a new contract yesterday after a three-day strike that brought subways and buses to a standstill, earning the union the wrath of commuters and millions in fines and lost pay. Union members were told to return to their jobs starting with the evening shift. Buses were scheduled to roll again by evening.... The walkout, which began early Tuesday, was New York's first citywide transit strike in more than 25 years. The workers left their jobs in violation of a state law prohibiting public employee strikes. The return to work was announced minutes before Mr. Toussaint and two top deputies were due in a Brooklyn courtroom to answer criminal-contempt charges that could have landed them in jail".

Unusual good sense in San Francisco "The ranks of homeless people on welfare in San Francisco shrank 84 percent over the last 18 months through the city's Care Not Cash program, and by next May, there should be no homeless people left on the rolls at all, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday in his second annual State of Homelessness address. The best news about that development, he told a cheering crowd of city workers, homeless people and social service providers, is that about half of the 2,106 homeless people who left welfare -- 1,101 of them to be precise -- are now living in newly created housing, Newsom said. And at a time when crucial federal funding for housing and other social programs is either being cut or put in danger of cuts, that's 'not bad,' he said. 'I remember my critics saying there is no way there will be a decline in (welfare) rolls with Care Not Cash,' Newsom said. 'Well, now that's 84 percent. ... We've done a very good job with that program... The voter-approved Care Not Cash overcame court challenges and premiered in May 2004, when 2,497 homeless people were receiving monthly welfare checks of as much as $410. Those checks are cut to $59 under the program, and the homeless are offered housing or shelter instead'"

Small steps toward immigration reform: "Congress passed an immigration bill last week that takes some small steps toward asserting control over our nation's porous borders. I supported the bill despite its lack of substance, in the hope that it will move America in the right direction on the critical issue of illegal immigration. Some measures in the bill sound good, but are in effect superfluous. Do we need new legislation requiring the Department of Homeland Security to achieve 'operational control of the borders?' Shouldn't the federal government already have 'operational control of the borders?'"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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24 December, 2005

INTERESTING SUMMARY OF THE VATICAN'S ATTITUDE TO THE AMERICAN PRESENCE IN IRAQ

The Vatican opposed the American invasion but now supports the American presence!

So during the months of the war in Iraq, various and sometimes opposing approaches operated at the highest levels of the Church, under the insignia of pope Wojtlya. But these different approaches were essentially reconciled beginning in the autumn of 2003. The turning point was the terrorist bloodbath in Nassiriya on November 12. And the new orientation was marked by cardinal Ruini's homily at the Mass for the nineteen Italians who were killed:

"To love even our enemies: this is the great treasure that we must not permit to be stolen from our consciences and our hearts, not even on the part of the terrorist assassins. We will not run away from them, but will face them with all the courage, energy, and determination of which we are capable. But we will not hate them; on the contrary, we will not grow weary of exerting ourselves to make them understand that all of our effort, including our military effort, is aimed at safeguarding and promoting a humane coexistence in which there is room and dignity for every people, culture, and religion."

From that point onward, beginning with that memorable "we will not run away," the Holy See consistently defined, not as an "occupation," but as a "mission of peace," the presence of Western troops in Iraq in defense of the nascent democracy.

This same realist line, which had forcefully opposed the war at the Vatican, now defended its results and demanded that the soldiers remain in Iraq as long as necessary, to safeguard the formation of a new order, free and peaceful, which, as precarious as it might be, is seen as much more acceptable than leaving this crucial country to its own devices.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Projection again: It's the Leftists who live in a "bubble": "To a remarkable degree, America's liberal elites have constructed for themselves a comfortable, supportive, and self esteem-enhancing environment. The most prestigious and widest-reaching media outlets reinforce their views, rock stars and film makers provide lyrics and stories making their points, college professors tell them they are right, and the biggest foundations like Ford fund studies to prove them correct. It has been a disaster for them..... As a result, liberal discourse has become an in-group code, perfectly understandable and comforting among the elect, but increasingly disconnected from everyone else, and off-putting to those not included in the ranks of the in-group. Rather than focusing on facts, logic, and persuasion, liberals find it easier to employ labeling ("That's racist!") and airy dismissal of contrary views to sway their audience, and because their authority figures in the media and academia accept this behavior, they assume it is persuasive to the rest of us. Even worse (for them), the self-reinforcement they experience in their geographical, academic and media strongholds encourages more and more extreme expression of their worldview. Within the in-group, such strong expression of group norms earns prestige. But to the rest of society it becomes stranger and stranger, until it becomes repellant".

The Democrat love-affair with evil: "So what is the real reason the Democrats seem so eager to help Al Qaeda? There are two reasons: they like America and Republicans even less than they like Al Qaeda. Bleeding heart Democrats were once known to be pro criminal, and now they are know to be pro terrorist. They were and to a large, but quieter, extent still are pro criminal because they believed an evil, capitalist, individualistic, Republican America produced criminals, and so they did everything they could to coddle criminals and blame America for producing them. Fortunately, as crime then rose, the Democrats descended. But now the Democrats are back at the same concept with their pro-terrorist theme".

Canadians bow down to Islam: "On December 2, the Liberal candidate for Mississauga-Erindale, Omar Alghabra, made his victory speech after winning the nomination. In that speech, he reportedly exhorted his audience, "This is a victory for Islam! Islam won! Islam Won! ... Islamic power is extending into Canadian politics". Alghabra's victory speech was delivered to an audience of several hundred in the Coptic Christian Centre of the Church of the Virgin Mary and St. Athanasius in Mississauga. David Ragheb, a member of the congregation, reported that following Alghabra's victory speech, Markham Councillor Khalid Osman took to the stage and declared, "We have the east, we have the west, and now we have Mississauga!" to cheers and applause from the audience. Ragheb also reported that Rogers Cable was present throughout and may have filmed the event. "A member of parliament is supposed to represent my concerns about taxes and roads in Mississauga, not promote an Islamic agenda," said Ragheb. Victor Fouad, a Coptic Christian, was disturbed to hear of such Islamist rhetoric from a Liberal who could easily become a Canadian parliamentarian. Mr. Fouad assumed that Paul Martin would likewise disapprove of such incitement by a Liberal candidate, and so wrote to the Prime Minister detailing what had happened. That message was ignored. The event took place over 2 weeks ago, and Paul Martin's silence since that time can only be interpreted as approval of Mr. Alghabra's rhetoric".

With liberty and cacophony for all: "Last month's riots in France reminded me -- not that I needed reminding -- that I'm glad I emigrated to the United States and not to France. As is known by now, the Paris rioters went on a rampage because they, the children of immigrants, had long felt like second-class citizens in France, the land of their birth. After decades of being discriminated against and shut out from the mainstream, the dam apparently broke recently. Across the Atlantic here in this country, it is a different, more positive story. A group of us Indian-American immigrants sat around recently, talking, reminiscing, all with similar backgrounds: all had had a middle-class Indian upbringing, had been in this country for a decade or more, had come here with essentially the same things -- a good education, two suitcases and the proverbial 10 dollars in our pockets. And all had, through a combination of frugality, resilience, positive attitude and hard work, pursued and achieved the American Dream, more or less. Lest we get self-congratulatory, however, one in the group put it in proper perspective: Yes, we had done well, he said, but the credit goes, in large part, to the country and society in which we live."

In response to my recent posts about the U.S. birthrate a reader has sent me some interesting anecdotes and observations about which groups in the U.S. population are having the babies. I have posted the email here

China Hand has just put up his Christmas wishes together with some festive photos from China.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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23 December, 2005

NEW FORMAT?

I believe that users of some minority browsers (Firefox?) are having trouble with this page seeming wider than the screen. It is because of the Table I posted on 22nd. IE handles it with no problems so the solution is to switch to IE or use the mirror site for a week or so until the table drops off the front page. The problem could also be caused by a low screen resolution so setting your browser or your screen to a higher resolution should help.

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INTERESTING DATA: STUPID INTERPRETATION

New research by economists Professor Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick, and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee at London University's Institute of Education, reveals that the more daughters a family has the more likely the parents are to vote for left of centre parties. Sons, by contrast, make people more right-wing.... On average, each daughter raises the likelihood of left-wing voting by 2% percentage probability points....

The researchers believe there are subconscious reasons behind the observed voting decisions. Women, they argue, are inherently collectivist while men are individualistic. They point out that because there is pay discrimination against women, and females put greater importance on public spending on issues like community safety, females are thus intrinsically more left-wing than males. As men acquire female children, those men gradually shift their political stance and, through subconscious concern for their daughters, become sympathetic to the "female" desire for more public spending and thus a steeper income tax schedule. Similarly, a mother with many sons becomes sympathetic to the "male" case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods....

Source

If women are inherently more Leftist, how come GWB got roughly 50% of the female vote in the 2004 Presidential election? The finding above more probably reflects some hormonal influence

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Brookes News Update

Clinton's boom holds lessons for Bush: By raising interest rates the fed has confessed that they had been forced below their market level
Australian economy: why the jobs figures are dangerously misleading: Tightening labour markets are not always indicative of economic growth. That Terry McCrann thinks otherwise is typical of our economic commentariat, despite the fact that classical economists knew better
How Australia's rightwing managed to discredit labour market reform: A competent economist would have immediately pointed out that there is no economic law that says free labour markets are sufficient or even necessary to promote productivity and economic growth. The 1960s is ample proof of this fact
Media lies about President Bush and "mass spying": Taking their cue from the NYT the media falsely accused Bush of mass spying against Americans. The media are the real scandal here -- not George W. Bush
Lebanese Muslim thugs spark riots and the media blame "racist" Australians: Lebanese Muslim goons have been terrorizing locals for years without a peep from those leftwing bigots who call themselves journalists
Muslim bigots impose blasphemy laws on Victoria: The Bracks Government suspended free speech in Victoria by imposing a blasphemy law dressed up as an anti-vilification law. Moreover, an EOC member who is a Muslim bigot conspired to persecute two Christian pastors
Letter to an American Soldier: We will not allow them to sully your honor or your service. We will not allow them to throw mud into the blood you have spilled
Kanye West 2006?: Good luck to Kanye and his political aspirations. Better yet, Kanye, don't give up your day job
Attempt to assassinate Iran's President fails: Rebels attacked Iran's Presidential convoy

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ELSEWHERE

The Left are always claiming that the GOP are in the pocket of big business. There is an absolutely scandalous story just up on EDUCATION WATCH, which, I regret to say, confirms that accusation.

Chinese Repressed Again in Dongzhou: "Two weeks after a protest that culminated in gunfire and bloodshed, the rebellious farmers and fishermen of Dongzhou have been reduced to submission. Authorities have sealed off the seaside village and flooded its streets and lanes with police patrols, residents said, and an unknown number of men have been summoned by a knock on the door and hauled away for interrogation."

Apologists for evil out in force: "He co-founded the Crips gang to protect his neighborhood, not kill people or run drugs, and Stanley Tookie Williams died an innocent man, wrongly executed for four murders he did not commit. That's how celebrities, religious leaders and former and current gang members remembered the man who was executed last week for the 1979 murders of four people. It was a far different picture than the one painted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he refused to grant clemency to Williams who, Schwarzenegger said, did not demonstrate the remorse necessary to warrant consideration.... But Williams eventually came to renounce the Crips and other gangs, and in a tape he made from prison, he called on mourners to continue his anti-gang efforts. Teach them to promote peace and teach them to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods that you, others and I helped to destroy," he said on the scratchy recording".

Sometimes even lawyers can do good. There is a tribute to one here. Excerpt: "Few people know that every day, American JAG officers work in Iraqi courtrooms with Iraqi judges. They prosecute insurgents. McGovern did not know. But after the Akbar case, he was sent to Iraq to do just that. He would charge insurgents with murder and attempted murder. If he did not have quite enough evidence to get them on those charges, he would bring them up on illegal border crossings. He would argue his case using Iraqi laws signed in 1969 by Saddam Hussein. In five months, he worked with more than 400 cases and had a 90 percent conviction rate. He often sat close to those insurgents everyone hears about on the evening news."

Christian persecution growing : An array of activists yesterday offered a grim assessment of religious freedom around the world, saying that 2005 years after Jesus' birth, many of His followers are severely repressed. The chief villains in a "Christmas Under Siege Around the World" panel at the Capitol were Indonesia, China, Uzbekistan, Iran and North Korea. "Anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world ... the mass media seem to generally ignore or downplay its gravity,"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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



22 December, 2005

Skin colour and brain activity genetically linked?

German (Austrian?) geneticist Volkmar Weiss has just pointed out that the effect of the recently identified skin color gene SLC24A5, which makes the difference between the white race and other races (See here), is more than skin deep. SLC24A5 is also active in the brain (See here).

Given the statistical linkage between IQ and skin colour (See for instance the Table below), that should not really be too surprising but there are none so blind as those who will not see. The Table is from an article by Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa that is in press at the journal Intelligence.



There are more details and some commentary about the article from which the table above is taken here but you need to scroll down to get to it. And see here for some interesting comments on Volkmar Weiss's observation.

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ELSEWHERE

Poor whites keeping the U.S. birthrate up? There is a big table of statistics here on female fertility in the USA. The figures that I found most interesting were from non-Hispanic whites aged 35 to 44. Women of that age will have mostly completed their families and the difference between the over 40 and under 40 sectors were in fact slight. Around 20% had NEVER had children, which, to the best of my knowledge, is what it has always been. There were plenty of maiden aunts in Victorian and Edwardian England, for instance. But most encouraging was the no. of children per woman in that age and racial group. At around 1.8 it is quite high compared with Europe. How many of the whites concerned were poor whites is however another matter. My guess would be that the white American birthrate is so high mainly because America has a lot of poor whites. In welfare states, of course, nobody is really poor.

Islamic Jew-hatred: "Outsiders are rarely aware of how intense the Muslim world's Jew-hatred is. "What has surprised me is the virulence of this new anti-Semitism throughout all the Muslim countries," the distinguished journalist and editor Harold Evans wrote in 2002. "It is frenzied, vociferous, paranoid, vicious, and prolific, and is only incidentally connected to the Palestinian conflict." It is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that accounts for this loathing of Jews. It is the loathing of Jews that accounts for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obsessive anti-Semitism almost always characterizes the most dangerous threats to America and the West. Nazism, Communism, Islamofascism -- one thing they have in common is intense anti-Semitism. Which is why Ahmadinejad's strident rhetoric should be setting off urgent alarms. Dictators who talk about wiping nations from the face of the earth generally mean what they say. We should know by now that it isn't only Jews who are endangered by the mullahs and their threats. All of us are. And time is wasting".

The German sickness: "Stern magazine (Germany's # 1 magazine by circulation) has finally discovered why life is so rotten in Germany these days. The Western world is breaking apart and its all America's fault. This time it's a commentary in Stern magazine with a dramatic title: "America is destroying the West." Like so many Stern pieces, this article has all the tell-tale elements of the perverted view of America that has come to dominate and cloud the minds of many in the German media establishment".

Stupid German Leftist women embrace Islam: " More than 1,000 people converted to Islam in Germany this year, the highest figure on record, and the majority were women who were not married to a Muslim, according to a report this week. "This is a considerable rise," Salim Abdullah, the director of the Central Institute of Islamic Archives in Germany, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. The Institute said its statistics showed that 14,352 of the 3.2mn Muslims in Germany are of German descent. More than 60% of the converts to Muslim are women and most of them are "university-educated and affluent", Abdullah said. Only a small percentage converted to Islam as a result of marrying a Muslim.

Dennis Prager comments: "Jews who support the Christian right are "Uncle Jakes." So says a pro-Israeli Jewish official in his recent column for the Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel organization. "Uncle Jake" is M. J. Rosenberg's term for Jewish equivalent of "Uncle Tom." Just as the left sees conservative blacks as traitors to African-Americans, so it sees conservative Jews as traitors to the Jewish people. I am the "Uncle Jake" most criticized in the Rosenberg column. That a Jew on the left would use this term to describe Jews who support conservative Christians gives one an idea of how irrational, how hysterical are the arguments of the Jewish (and non-Jewish) left. And lacking a rational basis, they frequently rely on name-calling... The use of this smear is the tactic of those who cannot argue".

Freeman calls Black History Month `ridiculous': Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is "ridiculous." "You're going to relegate my history to a month?" the 68-year-old actor says in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" to air Sunday (7 p.m. EST). "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history." Black History Month has roots in historian Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week, which he designated in 1926 as the second week in February to mark the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Woodson said he hoped the week could one day be eliminated - when black history would become fundamental to American history. Freeman notes there is no "white history month," and says the only way to get rid of racism is to "stop talking about it."

Arnie strikes back: "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in his hometown in Austria to remove his name from a sports stadium and stop using his identity to promote the city. The governor's request came after politicians in Graz began a petition drive to rename the stadium, reacting to Schwarzenegger's decision last week to deny clemency to condemned inmate Stanley Tookie Williams. Opposition to the death penalty is strong in Austria".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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21 December, 2005

Liberalism as Socially Motivated Cognition

Excerpt below from a post by Dr Helen. My own comment on the "study" that got her dander up is here

"I have mentioned a research study by the APA entitled, Political Conservatism as Socially Motivated Cognition, that appeared biased against conservatives. The study pointed out that there had been little research done on the traits of liberals--but they must have overlooked this article in Clio Psych's Journal from 2003. Here is an excerpt from the article that mentioned research on liberals from 1982--I guess the writers of the APA's biased article did not see fit to go back that far.

Research on the psychology of radical activists helps us to understand this mismatch between Chomsky's ideas and his personal style. In the 1970s, Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter administered Thematic Apperception Tests to a large sample of "new left" radicals (Roots of Radicalism, 1982). They found that activists were characterized by weakened self-esteem, injured narcissism and paranoid tendencies. They were preoccupied with power and attracted to radical ideologies that offered clear and unambiguous answers to their questions. All of these traits can be found in the work of Chomsky and other anti-imperialist intellectuals.

And if you ever wondered why some liberals seem wishy-washy at times--this paragraph from the same article might explain things:

The unwillingness to offer alternatives reveals a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. If they offered their own policy ideas they would be vulnerable to criticism. They would run the risk that their ideas would fail, or would not seem persuasive to others. This is especially difficult for anti-capitalists after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has also been difficult in the war against terrorism because Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are such unsympathetic figures. Psychologically, it is easier to blame America for not finding a solution than it is to put one's own ideas on the line.

Hmmm.... I don't agree here that it is lack of self-esteem that would cause liberals to seem spineless. I think it is their desire to avoid responsibility at any cost".

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ELSEWHERE

There is a useful summary here of the recent Steven Pinker lecture in which Pinker came out in favour of the argument that Western Jews are genetically more intelligent than other Westerners: "Though the moderator thanked him for a very 'even-handed' presentation on a controversial topic, to my ear what Pinker presented was a spirited endorsement of the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending (CHH) paper. The presentation generally seemed to fill the need to present these controversial ideas to a very interested audience by a trusted authoritative source. It didn't seem to me that Pinker added anything that Cochran or Harpending could not have provided themselves except proximity to NYC and comfortably strong Ashkenazik credentials. Overall Pinker emphasized the reasonableness of the authors' hypotheses, the generally better quality of the genetic evidence over the environmental, the non-rational basis of much of the opposition, and the paper's strong foundation in the current state of knowledge". There is another account of the talk here.

Media New Orleans backtrack "In the traditional winter/spring crush by major newspapers to publish investigative stories that land them on finalist lists for hotly contested journalism awards, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times both put forth front-page stories this weekend that dramatically contradict much of their own coverage of the disaster. The New York Times found that of 260 deaths it analyzed, "Of those who failed to heed evacuation orders, many were offered a ride or could have driven themselves out of danger," while the Los Angeles Times found that "the well-to-do died along with the poor." Despite media coverage that focused on poor blacks, of the 380 bodies formally identified in New Orleans thus far, the Los Angeles paper said, a disproportionate number were white -- as measured against the city's population"

A wonderful article here by a man who gave up journalism to join the Marines. Excerpt: "When people ask why I recently left The Wall Street Journal to join the Marines, I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that's not the whole answer, and how I got to this point wasn't a straight line. It's a clich‚ that you appreciate your own country more when you live abroad, but it happens to be true. Living in China for the last seven years, I've seen that country take a giant leap from a struggling Third World country into a true world power. For many people it still comes as a surprise to learn that China is chasing Japan as the second-largest economy on the globe and could soon own a trillion dollars of American debt. But living in China also shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens. I've seen protesters tackled and beaten by plainclothes police in Tiananmen Square, and I've been videotaped by government agents while I was talking to a source. I've been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them.... When you live abroad long enough, you come to understand that governments that behave this way are not the exception, but the rule. They feel alien to us, but from the viewpoint of the world's population, we are the aliens, not them. That makes you think about protecting your country no matter who you are or what you're doing".

Now for the Senate: "House lawmakers opened the way for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as one of their last acts of an all-night session Monday bringing their legislative year to a close".

I have just posted here a challenge to the "anti-vilification" laws in the Australian State of Victoria that have been used to prosecute two Christian pastors for quoting the Koran(!)

The latest issue of Ovi Magazine is out. I have an article or two in there somewhere. It's a magazine to browse through rather than look for particular content. Could be handy during the Christmas break.

Jim Paine is continuing his monitoring of the disgusting but basically empty-headed Prof. Ward Churchill and his supposed "Indian" ancestry. It should be a wonder that an American university continues to employ such a chronic liar but I am afraid that it is not. Leftists have never rated the truth as very important.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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20 December, 2005

RACE IS REAL -- AGAIN

Even mentioning the word "race" makes one into something of a polecat these days but reality does not go away because it has become unfashionable and reality is my no. 1 interest in life. The only "reality" Leftists have in mind when they claim to be "reality-based" is their devotion to a theory! And the theory concerned -- evolution -- is a highly imperfect one!

Anyway, there are a few scientists -- mostly Asian -- who continue to do research on human genetics that includes mention of race. And they of course uniformly find that the allegedly "social" construct of race in fact has an overwhelmingly genetic basis. The more genetic markers they use, the more accurately they can tell what your racial origins are. I reproduce the abstract of the latest such study -- by Tang et al -- below. Note that they could even pick out Hispanics reliably on the basis of their genes -- presumably because Amerindians are distinct genetically and "Hispanics" are in fact mostly Amerindian.

"We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ ethnicity-as opposed to current residence-is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population. Implications of this genetic structure for case-control association studies are discussed".

Still, I suppose all those Leftist "intellectuals" who cannot believe the evidence of their own eyes as they walk down the street (all those black skins are "socially constructed", don't you know?) are not going to be much moved by research of any kind. The PDF of the whole study is here

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ELSEWHERE

There is a post here which is a very good example of Leftist elitism. The writer dismisses the Iraq election on the grounds that Iraqis are too simple to have minds of their own. So a nice dictatorship is all that they are fit for. And did you know that the only reason American troops are in Iraq is "Bush's vanity"? A lot of these Leftists really are sick puppies.

Adult Stem Cell Research Discovery Could Change Entire Embryonic Debate: "Scientists at the University of Louisville say they have made a discovery of a certain kind of adult stem cell they say could drastically change the debate about embryonic stem cell research. The researchers have reportedly found stem cells from adult mice to change into brain, nerve, heart muscle and pancreatic cells. The ability to take on the characteristics of other cells is the primary selling point for using embryonic stem cells, which can only be obtained by destroying unborn children in their earliest days. The discovery could greatly expand the dozens of therapies and treatments already available from adult stem cells and the researcher say it could end the entire stem cell research debate. "We have found a counterpart for embryonic stem cells in adult bone marrow. This could negate the ethical concerns""

Michigan Brownshirts Rampage for Race Quotas: "Momentum continues to build for a noisy showdown over racial preferences in Michigan. Just how ugly the issue could become was starkly demonstrated last week in Lansing, the state capital. The state’s Board of Canvassers, a four-person body split by law between Democrats and Republicans, was meeting to decide whether to certify for the 2006 ballot a referendum that would ban the use of race in state hiring and admissions policies. But no sooner had the meeting started than a mob of mostly black students from Detroit schools, led by a radical national outfit calling itself By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), stormed the building, overturning tables, jumping on chairs, stomping their feet and yelling “They say Jim Crow – We say hell no.”"

If you have broadband (or a lot of patience) there are some excellent and revealing photos here which were taken outside the gates of San Quentin Prison on the evening of December 12, 2005 during a vigil marking the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams. They show the Left at their looniest and most intolerant and also show the media displaying their usual bias.

Hopeless British Tories: "But the Cameron thing is not a revival of Conservatism. Early indications are that the arrival of this apparently young, dynamic leader may well boost his party's standing in the polls. But in political terms, his accession marks the final demise of anything that might be recognised as a Tory Party. The political emptying-out of Conservatism, a process that has been proceeding in faltering fashion for some time, is now set to accelerate towards a conclusion. Many comparisons have been made between Cameron and prime minister Tony Blair. Here is one that seems to have escaped the notice of most commentators. We now effectively have a non-Tory leading the Conservative Party, to go with our non-Labourite leader of the Labour Party".

Apply zero tolerance to something that matters : "He was once in the Air Force, he says, refueling jet fighters. He once worked for a military contractor, building nose cones for missile defense systems. But he can't work for the city of Scottsdale. The city this week pushed Garrett Ross out of his job as a building inspector. This, because of a 4-year-old speeding ticket. Or more precisely, his failure to disclose said speeding ticket when he applied for his job in 2004. How the city and its bureaucrats managed to survive with such a hardened criminal in their midst is beyond me. Fortunately, they caught on last month. 'This letter is your notice that under the provisions of Sec. 14-74 of the Scottsdale Revised Code request that your presence is required at a Pre-Termination Hearing at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005 ... ,' said a Nov. 29 ungrammatical letter from Frank Gray, general manager of Planning and Development Services."

See here for America's first libertarian student newspaper, the Pennsylvania Independent. They aim to make sure the next generations of Americans value liberty, and hope to be the first in what is to be a rightward shift toward libertarian principles and values. It has some good articles.

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts -- on his usual themes of IQ and race.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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19 December, 2005

THE MASK SLIPS

Thomas Lifson gets it. Just an excerpt:

The past year has seen a spate of shocking statements revealing hatred and contempt for President Bush and his supporters on the part of important media figures who claim objectivity and sneer at conservatives unafraid to characterize themselves as such. Regrettably, we cannot credit a sudden outbreak of honesty for this phenomenon, and thereby anticipate improved news coverage from these folks. A pathology is at work.

A sudden loss of status and influence is a profound shock to most people who have spent their lives aimed at the acquisition and enjoyment of socio-political standing. Relieved of the ability to shape the consciousness and behavior of others, a certain number unburden themselves of the inner restraints which kept them from openly voicing the condescension and scorn they have for those whom they regard as their social, intellectual, and moral inferiors.

The rise of alternate media - talk radio, Fox News, and the internet - has not simply allowed competing voices to be heard in the public square, it has robbed many media grandees of the ultimate reward of their striving after careers as shapers of mass opinion. Some have become unbalanced mentally, and emotionally overwhelmed by the loss. They strike out with blind fury at their "enemies" (the subjects whom they have covered as "unbiased" journalists), and thereby let the mask of objectivity slip from their faces, revealing spiteful, arrogant and bigoted visages. By dismissing those who disagree with them as unworthy of consideration, they expose to light the long-hidden dark vision of the rest of humanity that enables them to regard themselves as worthy.

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ELSEWHERE



Another example of antisemitic stupidity from a black political leader: "A Dallas city councilman is accusing a councilwoman of making an insensitive religious comment during a heated argument Thursday. Councilwoman Maxine Thornton-Reese made a remark about Jews during a backroom debate regarding police response to burglar alarms, Councilman Mitchell Rsansky said. NBC 5 reported that both council members returned to the council chamber visibly shaken and that Rsansky told other members what Reese had allegedly said. Councilman Ron Natinsky described the comment as "you Jews controlling city hall," and said it was "fairly shocking." Anti-Defamation League representative Mark Briskman called on Reese to apologize. "This specific incident is very hurtful, very troubling, and I think it would be appropriate that there be an apology," Briskman said. Reese has promised a written response about her comment, NBC 5 reported".

House lawmakers call for new border fence: "The House called for construction of a fence along parts of the U.S. border from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of Mexico as a bill aimed at shutting down illegal immigration moved forward Thursday. The two-layered fence, about 700 miles long, would be built in parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The provisions, passed 260-159, put priority on construction near Laredo, Texas. The city is across the border from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where warring drug cartels have been blamed for more than 140 murders this year."

Illegals bill drops felony provision : "The House Judiciary Committee chairman yesterday backed off his provision to make illegal aliens felons and instead proposed a misdemeanor charge for unlawful presence, angering some Republicans who wanted the higher penalty. The House is expected to vote today on a border enforcement and employee work verification bill, which calls for more U.S. Border Patrol agents, mandatory database checks of employees' eligibility to work, expanding expedited removal of illegal aliens and allowing sheriffs along the border to help enforce immigration law. Some Republicans already were threatening to try to block the bill if they didn't get a chance to vote on amendments such as ending birthright citizenship and allowing local authorities to aid federal immigration officials. Yesterday's change just fueled their determination."

Potomac Fever: "Congress is being criticized for funding pork projects and for a general lack of fiscal restraint. Many people agree that there is a spending problem in Washington, but not many understand the fundamental causes. Why have Republicans abandoned their pledge in the 1994 Contract with America to cut 'government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money?' Did the GOP simply decide that it was good politics to buy votes with lavish special-interest spending? That is one cause of the budget crisis, but not the core problem. With the extraordinarily high reelection rates in Congress, any political advantage gained from special-interest spending is not crucial. The real problem is the pro-spending mindset ingrained in long-time legislators. It's called 'Potomac Fever,' and it causes members of Congress to see themselves as philanthropists with unlimited means to solve every problem in society."

Federal telephone excise taxes and you: "Some readers undoubtedly know that they pay a three percent federal excise tax on telephone service. Fewer may recall that the tax was enacted in 1898 as a temporary tax to fund the Spanish-American War and remains in place to this day, which is as good a reason as those countless others to be cynical about any government promise. What even fewer may have heard is that there are finally some cracks in the federal tax machine, thanks to federal appeals courts which are marching one-by-one toward voiding at least the part of that tax that applies to 'toll telephone' or long distance service."

Skewed tax cut spin : "Here's what you get from the New York Times when you try to honor Americans' innate, you might think, right to enjoy the fruits of their labors. You get: '(T)he House passed (a) tax bill . . . that would drain the Treasury of $56 billion of additional revenue over the next five years' -- a measure 'both unaffordable and gratuitous,' not to mention 'morally reprehensible.' All I can say is, let's hope that next year, the House and the Senate get really reprehensible. So low-down, so sleazy and gratuitous, that the whole tax-raising, tax-loving editorial page staff of the Times keels over in empurpled anguish. That might mean Congress, for the first time in a while, had done something profoundly constructive about the tax code's ongoing impositions. ... Washington mythology insists on two improbabilities: 1) that tax cuts benefit mainly 'the rich,' and 2) that they cause huge deficits. Republicans are elected to sneer at these improbabilities -- which, sometimes, they actually do."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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18 December, 2005

UCLA RESEARCH CONFIRMS THAT THE U.S. MEDIA TILT LEFT

The study appears to have been carefully done but some of the detailed results are a bit weird

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly. "I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are." "Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co?author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

U.N. arrogance reined in: ""For years, United Nations diplomats were notorious for running up millions of dollars in parking tickets, then just laughing at the city's attempts to collect. Diplomatic immunity meant there was little U.S. courts could do about it. But the city's thousands of foreign officials have largely changed their ways since a threatened crackdown three years ago. According to New York's finance department, diplomats have gotten 90 percent fewer tickets since late 2002, when the U.S. threatened to revoke the plates of scofflaws and subtract however much they owed in fines from the foreign aid their countries received. Those who do get citations have gotten better about paying them. Of the 11,771 parking violations issued to diplomats in the past three years, 87 percent have been paid or successfully appealed, the city said."

Both parties disingenuous about privacy rights : "What is interesting about the concern with this right to privacy is how it has become the mantra of the American left. And it is the American right, led on the court by Justice Antonin Scalia, that has strong objections to it. Does this not strike anyone as paradoxical? American conservatives have been identified as individualists, especially when it comes to their economic views. They used to champion capitalism and the right to private property. This right they identified in the Constitution, especially the Fifth Amendment. When recently the court ran roughshod over this right in its New London (Conn.) v. Kelo ruling, the American right still voiced some protest. Indeed, its greatest hero on the court, Justice Clarence Thomas, was in the outspoken minority wishing to uphold that right. As to the right to privacy, we now have an American left -- which is notoriously anti-individualist and persistently demeans the right to private property -- declaring fidelity to it and insisting that it is part of the fabric of the Constitution"

An old-time ACLU member chides the Fascist ACLU of today: "In my judgment the ACLU of Michigan is deeply wrong to defend race preferences. We are disloyal to our own deepest principles when we do so. I may be in error about this. But if you believe that it is right to defend race preferences, say that forthrightly and give your reasons. That view will almost certainly be rejected by Michigan citizens, but at least you will then retain your good repute, and not besmirch that of the ACLU."

Mood in France turns Rightward: "The public mood in France has darkened and veered sharply to the Right in the two months since the Paris riots. Despite endless political hand-wringing over the failure of the French model of ethnic integration, the country is no closer to a national consensus about how to re-establish the core republican values of fraternity and equality. Indeed, the political centre of gravity has shifted in favour of Jean-Marie Le Pen, as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin scramble to head off the lethal challenge from the far Right. Support for Le Pen's National Front - or at least its anti-immigrant ideology - has risen since the riots, sparking fears there will be a repeat of the 2002 presidential election, when the wily demagogue trounced the Left and almost snatched the presidency..... One in four French are in favour of Le Pen's ideas, especially regarding defence of traditional values and immigration. And 63 per cent say there are "too many immigrants in France", a 4 per cent rise since 2003. As the electorate turns increasingly inwards, heavy-handed solutions to the crisis of the French suburbs proliferate. The political elite is sending a strong message that France effectively blames its immigrants for the troubles, with renewed crackdowns on non-French residents, asylum-seekers or the "sans papiers" - illegal immigrants"

Moronic TSA again: "Sarah Zapolsky was checking in for a flight to Italy when she discovered that her 9-month-old son's name was on the United States' "no fly" list of suspected terrorists. "We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled," Zapolsky said, recalling the July incident at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. "The desk agent started laughing...She couldn't print us out a boarding pass because he's on the no-fly list." Zapolsky, who did not want her son's name made public, said she was initially amused by the mix-up. "But when I found out you can't actually get off the list, I started to get a bit annoyed." She isn't alone. According to the Transportation Security Administration, more than 28,000 people have applied to the TSA redress office to get on the "cleared list," which takes note of individuals whose names are similar to those on the terrorism watch list, but even getting on that list does not guarantee an end to hassles related to the no-fly list".

I am continuing to follow news about the racial tensions in Sydney on my Australian Politics blog (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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



17 December, 2005

SOME MORE ENLIGHTENMENT ON THE GENETICS OF RACE



A little striped fish is helping scientists solve one of the biggest mysteries in biology - which genes are responsible for differences in human skin, eye and hair colour. The large, international team of scientists have found a gene that makes African zebrafish of a lighter-than-normal colour - and say the same gene helps explain the light-coloured hair, skin and eyes of many Europeans. While they stress they have not found a genetic basis for race, [what is it that they have found, then?] they say just a tiny change in a single amino acid plays a major role in causing the distinctive light European colouring. The gene is called SLC24A5, Keith Cheng of Pennsylvania State University and colleagues said. "Our results suggest that SLC24A5 explains between 25 and 38 per cent of the European-African difference in skin melanin index," the scientists wrote in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Cheng's team was originally looking for genes involved in cancer. They were using zebrafish, a favoured tool of genetic researchers because they are small, reproduce quickly and are well understood. They found a gene that appeared to make some zebrafish "golden" - with lighter-than-usual stripes. Under a microscope, the skin of these fish have smaller, fewer structures called melanophores. In people of European descent, pigment granules called melanosomes are fewer, smaller, and lighter than those from people of West African ancestry. The melanosomes of East Asians fall in between. This suggested gene variations may be responsible and may be similar in vertebrates - which include fish, mice and people.

Scientists know that more than 100 genes are involved in pigment production, so the process is complex. But most of the genes identified so far are found in unusual conditions such as albinism, which causes very light skin and eyes. "...the genetic origin of the striking variations in human skin colour is one of the remaining puzzles in biology," the researchers wrote. But researchers have published several maps of the human genome and made them available to anyone. Cheng's team made use of them. They zeroed on on SLC24A5. Penn State pharmacologist Victor Canfield found that all vertebrates have a version of the gene. They found that one version appears to be the "base" version and is found in most people of African and East Asian descent. Europeans have a mutant version that differs by only a few letters of the genetic alphabet

Source. (The scientific abstract is here)

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Iraqi voters decide their own future: "Iraqis streamed to the polls amid minimal violence yesterday in a legislative vote many hoped would heal a nation wracked by sectarian conflict and bring minority Sunnis back into the political process. Electoral officials briefly extended voting owing to the massive turnout, which preliminary estimates put at between 60 and 80 per cent, higher than October's referendum, with Sunni Arabs casting ballots in unprecedented numbers".

The "no idea" Democrats: "To this day, Democrats have yet to offer a coherent strategy for winning the war in Iraq, and it is clear that they have none. Their attacks on Bush's 'failed' strategy have rung hollow all these years because they never had anything better to offer. And now their top leaders have revealed that their real goal all along was not to win, but to cut and run. They only waited this long to announce it because they have concluded that the poll numbers finally are in their favor. While Americans disapprove of the Bush administration's execution of the Iraq war effort, will they really embrace surrender as the alternative? Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi think so. We don't. The American people, rightly disturbed by serious administration mistakes, still want America to win this war. Unfortunately, the Democrats are quickly removing themselves as a serious foreign policy alternative to the Republicans, and that is damaging not only to them, but to the republic."

British legal piranhas get their comeuppance: "Some of the country's most successful law firms, which grew rich by exploiting sick miners, were told by the Government last night to repay more than 50 million pounds that they "outrageously" sliced from their clients' compensation. Ministers lambasted the firms for deducting money from payments to elderly pitmen suffering from chronic chest diseases as a result of their work".

A sincere Leftist agrees with neoconservatism: "What is neoconservative foreign policy? The best thumbnail definition is the one given by Paul Berman in his hugely influential Terror and Liberalism (2003) and quoted by Oliver Kamm: "Freedom for others means safety for ourselves. Let us be for freedom for others." It is that coupling, of national security with the promotion of freedom, that has given neoconservative foreign policy its potency, and why it is likely to last through a change of power in the United States after George W Bush - certainly if the Republican victor is John McCain, probably if the Democratic victor is Hillary Clinton."

There is a good article here about the many different attempts by the Irish government to create "affordable" housing by legislation and regulation -- attempts which simply drove the price of housing up, of course. Making things difficult for builders is not a good way to encourage them to build.

Pinter: Just another postmodernist hypocrite: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false." ...



Harold Pinter, explaining the difference between drama and politics in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the lofty realm of dramatic art, Pinter asserted, there can be nothing so clear-cut as truth. It is, however, a very different matter when it comes to American foreign policy. There, the distinction between true and false is as clear as that between day and night. It's simple. Every- thing the United States says is false, and everything its critics say is true.... But it's not Pinter's solipsism I really object to. It's the way he used his award to pour verbal kerosene on the crackling flames of anti-Americanism.... Truth and falsehood are indeed hard to distinguish in Pinter's drama, and his Nobel soliloquy was no exception. First, the true part. Thousands were indeed killed by US-backed dictatorships, especially in Central and South America. What is demonstrably false is that this violence is comparable in scale with that perpetrated by Communist regimes at the same time...."

I am continuing to follow news about the racial tensions in Sydney on my Australian Politics blog (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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16 December, 2005

Brookes News Update

Central economic planning makes a comeback: It looks as if the Australian Labor Party is about to put industry policy, aka central planning, back on the drawing board
Our rightwing failed on labour market reform and minimum wages: When it comes to debates about the minimum wage Australia's rightwing is in dire need of support. As I am here to help, I shall do what I can to assist them. After all, it is Christmas
Why the Palestinians should be terrified of Iran?: The Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia either become colonial subjects of Iran or they put themselves under the protection of Israel's nuclear umbrella
A socialist economist spews garbage on tariffs: Evan Jones, a socialist 'economist', made the absurd argument that tariffs lower prices
America's Ship of Fools: By failing to privatize we are sticking our kids with the impossible task of paying for our increasingly greater numbers of elderly citizens
Businesses do not pay wages -- consumers do: The nature of wages and purchasing power is something politicians, particularly Liberal politicians, seem incapable of grasping, not that most businessmen or CEOs are much better
Why are only Jews deported?: Critics of Israel love selective mentioning of UN resolutions, but they do not like when people actually read the original text of the resolutions

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Iran is being run by a full-on fruitcake: "Iran's hard-line president lashed out with a new outburst at Israel on Wednesday, calling the Nazi Holocaust a "myth" used as a pretext for carving out a Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments drew quick condemnations from Israel, the United States and Europe, which warned he is hurting Iran's position in talks aimed at resolving suspicions about his regime's nuclear program. The White House said his remarks showed why Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Germany, one of three European Union countries leading the nuclear talks, called his statements "shocking and unacceptable.""

Child abuse by Planned Parenthoiod: "In the "Shared Stories" section of the Planned Parenthood Golden Gate web site, the group published a letter in which a young girl praises Planned Parenthood for not telling her parents that she was raped by her 17-year-old boyfriend when she was just 11 years old. Neither the letter itself nor Planned Parenthood made any mention of Planned Parenthood alerting law enforcement to this sexual abuse of an 11-year-old child."

French intransigence: "French farmers were accused of holding Europe and the world to ransom yesterday after official figures obtained by The Times revealed just how far European Union subsidies are skewed in their favour. Three times as many French farmers receive large subsidies from the EU than those of any other country. In total, France receives almost twice as much direct subsidies for its farmers as any other member state, and they are mostly channelled to large farmers rather than traditional small-scale land holders. Despite the huge discrepancies France steadfastly refuses to countenance any reduction in farm subsidies, bringing the EU budget negotiations in Brussels and the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong, both climaxing this week, to the brink of collapse".

Iraqis defy terrorists: "One anecdote from Mosul," said General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he spoke at the National Defense University earlier this month. "There was a police recruiting station. Forty young men lined up to sign up to become Iraqi policemen. A vehicle-borne IED explodes -- kills or badly injures 12 of them. The next day, the 28 remaining return to the same spot to sign up to be policemen. "And that kind of courage," the general told his audience, "is being shown across Iraq by literally thousands and thousands of Iraqis who want to serve their country.""

Tax bills soaring in socialist Scotland: "MSPs exploded ministers' claims that council tax rises next year could be pegged at 2.5 per cent, saying it was possible they could even reach 6.6 per cent. A devastating report from the Scottish Parliament's cross-party finance committee on the Executive's draft budget for the next financial year also said that, despite ministerial protestations to the contrary, councils were facing a funding shortfall of 85 million pounds, as well as having to find 58.5 million in efficiency savings".



The execution of thug Tookie Williams has brought forth the usual Leftist lies about capital punishment having no deterrent effect. Mike Tremoglie gives you the facts.

The "Dark Ages" myth: "Some of the "Dark Ages" innovations that show the folly of considering Greek and Roman culture the apex of civilization until recent times: The perfection and widespread use of waterwheels, windmills, and pumps, the invention of the compass, stirrups, the crossbow, canons, effective horse harnesses, eyeglasses, clocks, chimneys, violins, double-entry bookkeeping, and insurance? This list doesn't begin to do justice to this era that historians of science now refer to as an age of remarkable innovation and discovery. Perhaps the most revealing instance involves the "story" that in order to gain backing for his great voyage west, Columbus had to struggle against ignorant and superstitious churchmen who were certain that the earth was flat. Truth was that all educated Europeans, including bishops and cardinals, knew the earth was round. What produced church opposition to the Columbus voyage was that Columbus believed the circumference of the earth was only about one-fifth of its actual distance. Thus, the church scholars who opposed him did so because they knew that he and his sailors were bound to perish at sea. And they would have done so had the Western Hemisphere not been there to replenish their food and water". (See also here and here).

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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15 December, 2005

THE LATEST U.S. IMMIGRATION STATISTICS

Between January 2000 and March 2005, 7.9 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) settled in the country, making it the highest five-year period of immigration in American history. Nearly half of post-2000 arrivals (3.7 million) are estimated to be illegal aliens. Immigrants account for 12.1 percent of the total population, the highest percentage in 8 decades. If current trends continue, within a decade it will surpass the high of 14.7 percent reached in 1910.

Of adult immigrants, 31 percent have not completed high school, three-and-a-half times the rate for natives. Since 1990, immigration has increased the number of such low-skilled workers by 25 percent, while increasing the supply of all other workers by only 6 percent. Immigrants were once significantly more likely to have a college degree, but the new data show that natives are now as likely as immigrants to have a bachelor's or graduate degree.

The proportion of immigrant-headed households using at least one major welfare program is 29 percent, compared to 18 percent for native households. The poverty rate of immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) is 18.4 percent, 57 percent higher than the 11.7 percent for natives and their children. Immigrants and their children account for almost one in four persons in poverty. Immigrants make significant economic progress the longer they live in the United States, but even immigrants who have lived here for 15 years still have dramatically higher rates of poverty, lack of health insurance, and welfare use than natives.

The low educational level of many immigrants, and resulting low wages, are the primary reasons so many live in poverty, use welfare programs, or lack insurance - not their legal status or an unwillingness to work.

Immigration accounts for virtually all of the national increase in public school enrollment over the last two decades. In 2005, there were 10.3 million school-age children from immigrant families in the United States.

Recent immigration has had no significant impact on the nation's age structure. Without the 7.9 million post-2000 immigrants, the average age in America would be virtually unchanged at 36 years.

More here

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Major Leftist German newsmagazine Spiegel is condemning America for the execution of the murderous Tookie Williams. The Left have always liked murderers. No mention of Tookie's victims, of course.

The stupid Left again: Spiegel has another an article on "THE EMPIRE OF SHADOW - The worldwide operations of the U.S. Secret Intelligence Service", and the picture on the cover shows ... members of the Canadian military!" Reminds one of the recent case when the American Left mistook British soldiers for Americans, despite the different uniforms

Government Intervention Makes Houses More Expensive: "Escalating prices that have made houses unaffordable for many people in Washington are mostly the result of homeowners using political and regulatory means to block construction of new housing, economic studies show. . . . Economists increasingly are concluding that the shortage of affordable housing in Washington and other major U.S. cities on the East and West coasts is a result more of man-made restrictions on development than high construction costs or other market forces."

Hooray! 20 years for Muslim animal: "A Muslim father was sent to jail for at least 20 years yesterday for ordering his sons to kill a teenager who was going out with his daughter in defiance of his wishes. Chomir Ali, 44, recruited his sons to murder Arash Ghorbani-Zarin, 19, after discovering that his only daughter, Manna Begum, also 19, was pregnant by him. Mr Ghorbani-Zarin, an Iranian Muslim who was studying at Oxford Brookes University, was found in November last year with his body tied to the driver's seat of his car. He had been stabbed 46 times. Mujibar Rahman, 19, and his brother, Mamnoor, 16, were given minimum terms of 16 and 14 years respectively. Ali, a waiter from Bangladesh who settled in Oxford, and his sons were found guilty of murder at Oxford Crown Court last month. Mr Justice Gross, who passed sentence yesterday at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, said: "Far from vindicating your family's honour, you have permanently dishonoured your family with the stain of murder."

Another reason for the Left to hate Wal-Mart: "The U.S. economy entered its fifth year of expansion in November, with non-farm payroll employment, a broad economic indicator, having expanded by 4.5 million jobs (3.4 percent) since bottoming in May 2003. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, the nation's largest private employer, has been creating new jobs at a much higher rate. Data obtained from Wal-Mart show the retail giant expanding employment by 15 percent in the same two-and-a-half-year period. That's only part of the incredible success story being told by the Arkansas-based retailer. The Wal-Mart employment effect, rarely examined by economists, is so strong that it is counter-cyclical. In other words, the retailer has created new jobs in every recession since it went public in 1971... this point is clear: A corporation that adds new jobs in periods of recession, while many others are laying off workers, is good for the U.S. economy.

Australia buys Boeing: "QANTAS says it will acquire 115 Boeing 787 aircraft as part of its fleet renewal program in a deal worth up to $24 billion. Qantas will take delivery of acquire of the first 65 aircraft from 2008 at a list price of $13 billion. "Obviously with the 115 aircraft it gets up to about $23 to $24 billion," chief executive Geoff Dixon said".

Spengler has some scathing comments on irrelevance to mainstream America of the latest films out of Hollywood -- including comments about Spielberg's film on the massacre of Israeli athletes by Arabs at the Munich Olympic games. He points out that the script for the Spielberg film was written by "the world's worst playwright" -- homosexual Marxist Tony Kushner. Kushner was not even fazed by the downfall of the Soviets, whom he supported until their downfall. Reliapundit has an extended reply to Kushner's raving.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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14 December, 2005

MORE ON "PATHOLOGICAL" RACISM

Taranto has a good comment on the latest psychiatric proposal. Excerpt:

The Washington Post reports that some psychiatrists are urging the creation of a new diagnosis that would cover people who display "extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice":

"They are delusional," said Alvin F. Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who has long advocated such a diagnosis. "They imagine people are going to do all kinds of bad things and hurt them, and feel they have to do something to protect themselves.

What about black people who entertain paranoid conspiracy theories about white people? The Post doesn't address this question, so we have to turn to an NBC report, in which our old friend Alvin Poussaint shows up singing a somewhat different tune:

Dyan French, also known as "Mama D," is a New Orleans Citizen and Community Leader. She testified before the House Select Committee on Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday. "I was on my front porch. I have witnesses that they bombed the walls of the levee, boom, boom!" Mama D said, holding her head. "Mister, I'll never forget it."

"Certainly appears to me to be an act of genocide and of ethnic cleansing," Leah Hodges, another New Orleans citizen, told the committee. . . .

Harvard's Alvin Pouissant [sic] says such conspiracy theories are fueled by years of government neglect and discrimination against blacks: slavery, segregation and the Tuskegee experiments, during which poor blacks were used to test the effects of syphilis. "If you're angry and you've been discriminated against," Pouissant says, "then your mind is open to many ideas about persecution, abandonment, feelings of rejection.

Now, maybe there's some subtlety here that doesn't come across in the two quotes, but it certainly sounds as though Poussaint is saying behavior that is normal in blacks is a sign of mental illness in whites..

I should perhaps note here that psychologists have been trying at least since 1950 to pathologize racism but the evidence for its pervasiveness is such that, as even the Washington Post noted, most psychologists and psychiatrists these days regard some form of negative feeling towards minorities as normal and natural.

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I have just put online an article written in 1980 by Herb London, a conservative professor. It gives an account of his experiences in the 1960s and 1970s with student radicals. The brownshirts he describes are of course now the professors. See here or here

The mask of the British Left has now slipped right off: "Before you go to a left-wing meeting, brace yourself for the likelihood that everyone you meet in the hall will be standing on their head. Do not be surprised to see communists supporting fascism, feminists throwing their arms around misogynists and liberals volunteering to be advocates for tyranny. It's been like this since 9/11.... Anyone who now believes CND [Committee for Nuclear Disarmament] is as much against proliferation [of nuclear weapons] as for unilateral disarmament would have been surprised by this autumn's annual conference. Among the guests was the startling figure of Dr Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, the then Iranian ambassador. Iran is building the nuclear power stations CND once protested against - an odd project for a country with one of the largest reserves of oil in the world. Not only the US government but the United Nations and the European Union suspect the Islamic Republic wants the bomb. The obvious course for those sincere about nuclear disarmament is to oppose Tehran as vigorously as they oppose a replacement for Trident [U.S. nuclear missile submarine]. But there's the rub. Standing by its principles would, if only for a moment, have put CND on the same side as George W Bush and Tony Blair, and that would never do.... Members of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran exiled in London gazed with astonishment on CND's dalliance with a "fascistic" state. The invitation to the ambassador was an "outrage", the party said. CND was insulting "the people of Iran who are struggling to get rid of this brutal regime", and the countless thousands who have died in the attempt.

Keith Burgess Jackson on Leftist projection: "Once again, we see the stereotype of the dumb (or at least the intellectually uncurious) conservative. Liberals are smart; conservatives are dumb. Liberals think; conservatives emote. Liberals debate one another in search of truth and justice; conservatives flock together. In fact, the success of conservatism as a political movement lies precisely in its willingness to debate, discuss, and think. It's liberals who emote (their hearts bleed even for murderers); it's liberals who act like herd animals (John Kekes calls their unexamined assumptions "the liberal faith"); and it's liberals who are too dumb to figure out how to win elections. How smart can you be if you keep nominating northeastern elitists-people whose patriotism is suspect, who believe in a Nanny State that punishes the productive and rewards the unproductive, who are hostile or indifferent to religion, and who think the United States is the world's problem rather than the solution to the world's problems?"

Good riddance to Tookie: "With the execution of former gang leader and convicted murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams virtually assured to occur tonight, members of the black leadership network Project 21 are calling on the public to remain calm as justice is administered. They are also critical of those who seek to elevate Williams to hero status despite his conviction and his history steeped in violence. "There can be no clemency for someone directly responsible for the murders of four innocent people and indirectly responsible for the deaths of possibly thousands more"

Wow! Hits on my Australian Politics blog have quadrupled over the last couple of days. My coverage of the fightback against Muslim aggression by young Australians is no doubt responsible. There is such a lot of garbage being spouted in the media about it that my habit of calling a spade a spade must be a welcome change for people who are trying to figure out what is really going on.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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13 December, 2005

WHY LEFTIST JOURNALISTS DESPISE ISRAEL

Some excerpts from a talk by Andrew Bolt

Disdain for wealth: The neo Marxist theory that wealth is never created, it is expropriated. Therefore if there is a wealthy country next to a poor, then the wealthy must have exploited the poor. Poverty is always someone else's "fault". Thus here, if Israel is rich and the Palestinians are poor it must be Israel which is to blame.

Disdain for personal achievement: Anti Capitalism. Israeli kibbutzim no longer reflect socialist ideology. They are actually a hub of capitalism at work. Because in capitalism, individuals are respected with their individual motivations, the "grand plan" intellectuals mentioned above find this problematic.

Disdain for Christianity: Anti Christianity. Maurice Samuel wrote in 1941 that any attack on the Jews is a proxy attack on Christianity. He maintained that Hitler actually hated Christians for the same reasons that he hated Jews. Christianity is against "grand schemes" which subordinate ordinary people in favour of the big cause. In Christianity even the most humble person is supervised by G-d and it is the same with Judaism. Judaism and Christianity stand in the way of the great totalitarian movements. There is no such thing as an individual somehow "falling below G-d's radar". The anti Christian tendencies among journalists in the feral organistions play against Israel.

Revival of paganism and tribalism: This means the rise of the Greens. Israel is fighting the noble savage - people who are tribal and brown. The closer to the land the more noble. The more industrialized a nation, the more sinister. It is an unfortunate obervation that in a dispute between a person of a whiter skin, and a person of darker skin favour will be shown by the journalist to the darker skin. The darker the skin the more sympathy, the more the anti racism racism.

Hidden admiration of violence: The Left has a perverse respect for violence. They preach peaceful negotiation at one level, but simultaneously favour violent overthrow by some vanguard of perceptive people, ie they like their militarism. Journalists don't see fit to condemn this. For example the writers festival invited Tariq Ali who supports violent overthrow.

Contempt for democracy: Totalitarianism has a perverse appeal to the far left. Thus the imposition of democracy on others is too often disparaged, unappreciated or simply ignored.

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Another diagnosis of Leftism. Excerpt: "According to author Phillip K. Dick, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Using this benchmark to judge the sanity of the Left, it becomes apparent that they have, indeed, lost their cats-eyes and pearly whites. The modern Liberal is madder than a haberdasher at a Lewis Carroll tea party. How did this happen? ... To understand why the radical fringe is so at odds with reality, it is necessary to understand the philosophical underpinnings of what they believe. There are numerous intellectual influences at the core of the modern Left, and each of these contribute to the final architecture of the asylum that is Liberalism. We need to look at a few of them to get the general idea. 1. Man Is Inherently Good: Rousseau is the primary originator of the modern version of this belief. This concept is at odds with the Christian worldview, which holds that Man has a fallen nature, and will sink to the level of barbarism if his appetites are not constrained. This particular view of man as originally perfect has a number of consequences; the Anti-Americanism often displayed by the left stems from the belief that our system is corrupting to the individual, and must be destroyed to free Man to realize his potential. Remember the students chanting "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has gotta go!"? The idea here is that our civilization is at the root of suffering and evil, and by ridding ourselves of it we will be free to be righteous. Radical Environmentalism is another consequence of this particular concept. Many Environmentalists believe that a return to a state of nature will be a return to paradise

"Experts" more wrong than right "People who make prediction their business-people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables-are no better than the rest of us. When they're wrong, they're rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either.... the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert's predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones".

The Koran: A New Mein Kampf? "Last week in New York Oriana Fallaci said that "the Koran is the Mein Kampf of this movement. The Koran demands the annihilation or subjugation of the other, and wants to substitute totalitarianism for democracy..You will find that all the evil that the sons of Allah commit against themselves and against others is in it." This statement has caused considerable controversy. Some maintained: "There are moderate Moslems.Tarring the whole religion is counterproductive.If there are no moderate muslims, as Fallaci says, then we are doomed." But of course, Fallaci did not say that there were no moderate Muslims; she said that there was no moderate Islam. As Ibn Warraq has said, "There may be moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate." .... Any cursory glance at the statements of jihadists shows them to be filled with Koran quotes and appeals to other Muslims that they represent "pure Islam." Nor are these jihadists misrepresenting what the Koran says. They take the book's many martial verses at face value. Over 100 Koranic verses exhort believers to wage jihad against unbelievers. "When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly" (Koran 47:4). This is emphasized repeatedly. Jews and Christians are among those to be fought"

Death penalty is Biblical: "No passage in the Bible -- Old *or* New Testament -- disapproves of the death penalty, which is why the bishops do not cite one. The Sixth Commandment (in Catholic reckoning, the Fifth) is clearly no bar to capital punishment. The penalty for those who violate "You shall not murder" (Exodus 20:13) is made explicit just a few lines later: "Whoever strikes a man and kills him shall surely be put to death" (Exodus 21:12). The text goes on to specify that this applies only to deliberate murder, not unintentional killing. Accidents are not capital crimes. But for a willful killer, there can be no sanctuary: "Take him even from My altar and put him death" (Exodus 21:14)."

The Left never stop their old evidence-disregarding chant of "no connection" between Saddam and terrorism. Just some of the evidence for a connection is summarized here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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12 December, 2005

Psychiatrists Debate Pathologizing Racism, Depathologizing Pedophilia

(Post lifted from Majority Rights)

Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness

Mental health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and that some patients are disabled by these beliefs. As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis.

Psychiatric Association Debates Reclassifying Pedophilia

In a step critics charge could result in decriminalizing sexual contact between adults and children, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently sponsored a symposium in which participants discussed the removal of pedophilia from an upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders.

This reminds me of the time the "psychiatrists" decided, within a few year span during the early 1970s, to take homosexuality off of their list of pathologies and then pathologize "homophobia". In that few year span leading "psychiatrists" managed to declare their recently-former-selves to have been suffering from a "psychiatric" disorder.

But never mind -- there is work to be done here right? Having marched forward and transcended minor setbacks to progresss in psychiatric treatment, like lobotomy we're now poised for far more precise treatment of "phobias" using Oxytocin.

Let the cranial injections begin!

And I don't suppose we are allowed to mention the use of psychiatry as a tool of state repression in the old Soviet Union!

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ELSEWHERE

Leftists are so keen to project their own hate-filled attitudes onto conservatives that it is very annoying for them that there are in fact practically no hate crimes committed by identifiable conservatives. But, no problemo! The Left just invent such crimes. Michelle Malkin has a good coverage of the latest such fraud, the Mirecki case.

Right-to-Organize or right to force others to join unions?: "With the nation's labor unions divided and shrinking, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. has organized 100 demonstrations nationwide this week to assert that the right of American workers to form unions is being systematically violated. Eleven Nobel Peace Prize winners, including the Dalai Lama and Lech Walesa, are backing the protest against violations of the right to unionize in the United States and other nations."

Germany and Russia cosy up: "It's all about gas: former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will lead the shareholders committee for a German- Russian gas-pipeline project to pump gas under the Baltic Sea, OAO Gazprom Chief Executive Alexei Miller said today. On September 8, 2005, Schroeder - then still German chancellor - attended the signing of the contract for the pipeline, together with Putin. The pipeline had a clear political background - the contract needed the approval of the German as well as the Russian government. The deal increased Germany's already dangerous reliance on Russian gas deliveries. I guess the two chaps used the opportunity to also discuss Schroeder's future role at Gazprom. This is a conflict of interest if there ever was one".

Why the Islamofascists are so bloodthirsty: "Why do these rebels revel in killing civilians? I think they are exploiting a cultural obsession with death that has its origins very much in the West. Indeed, they seem to define themselves in direct opposition to what they perceive as a cowardly Coalition. The Coalition tries to avoid risky operations; the insurgents take outrageous risks. The Coalition promises to avoid taking casualties; the insurgents kill as many as they can. The Coalition suppresses images of the dead; the insurgents kill their victims for the cameras. This insurgency is best understood, not as a band of freedom fighters or evil incarnate, but as a movement with an intuitive grasp of the West's fearful psychology. Insurgents who pay attention to our debates about the war will notice one thing: We are terrified by death. The authors of the war promised this would be a "clean" invasion in which few would die, while their anti-war opponents obsess over numbers of dead and images of the dead. Both sides have helped to turn death into the defining issue, so it is not surprising that the insurgents should focus on that same issue".

Congress looking at illegal immigration: "The House next week will likely pass a big border security measure that's not nearly stringent enough for some conservative lawmakers. Instead, buoyed by grass-roots sentiment, these lawmakers are pushing plans that would radically alter the government's relations with illegal immigrants. The proposals range from not counting noncitizens in the census to denying U.S. citizenship to illegal immigrants' American-born children. "Now is the time for bold steps, not incrementalism," Arizona Republican J.D. Hayworth said. Legislatively, the odds are against the most dramatic proposals actually becoming law, especially because of opposition in the Senate."

I have just put up here my view of the recent Miss World competition results. Blondes appear to be "out". Even the Russian and Icelandic entries had dark hair!

On Australian Politics I am tracking the revolt against Muslim arrogance and aggression on Sydney's beaches.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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11 December, 2005

EXISTENTIALISM

Excerpt from a novel about Africa

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another - not even for his wife - would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls - young existentialist girls - you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, non-existentialist people around one.

From p.76 of "Morality for beautiful girls" by Zimbabwe-born Scotsman, Prof. Alexander McCall Smith

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ELSEWHERE

Fun! A conservative New Zealand blogger started up a fake-Leftist site called Progressive Essays. The amusing part was that the content on the blog in fact consisted of recycled speeches by Hitler and various other Nazis and Fascists of history. Apparently no one spotted the difference. It was routinely linked as just another Leftist blog!

Bible OK after all: "A federal appeals court reinstated a California man's death sentence, ruling Thursday that jurors did not invalidate their deliberations by considering biblical arguments in favor of vengeance. The Los Angeles jurors in the 1979 case of Stevie Lamar Fields unanimously agreed that death was the appropriate punishment after their foreman circulated biblical and other religious passages - "an eye for an eye," for example - that seemed to require it.... A federal trial judge in Los Angeles reversed Fields' sentence five years ago, citing jury misconduct. The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate it appears to be the first of its kind and could make Fields, now 49, a candidate for execution in the near future".

Holocaust denial at Reuters: "Yesterday we noted that a Reuters dispatch, titled "Iran's President Questions Holocaust," included this sentence: "Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust." A later version of the dispatch, however, deleted the words "Historians say" and presented the Holocaust as fact: "The Nazis killed some 6 million Jews during their 1933-1945 rule." But today, Reuters has a new formulation: "Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Regarding this widely-accepted view, Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency IRNA . . .". Reuters, of course, famously forbade its "reporters" from referring to the Sept. 11 attacks as an act of terrorism. "We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field," said Stephen Jukes, the "global news editor," in September 2001. Apparently Reuters thinks Holocaust deniers are entitled to a "level playing field," even if that means downgrading a historical fact to a "widely accepted view."

European-born Muslims the most dangerous: "There was a real difference between those Muslims who had moved to Europe and those who were born there. Those who had moved here would say to me: "Things are much worse where I came from. Here I can sit and talk to you without worrying about the police." By contrast, the people born in Europe did not take that view -- they were much more likely to say: "Europe has made all these promises to us and hasn't kept them." They were much angrier, and scored much higher in all the alienation tests I used."

An acidic but accurate comment from Michael Graham : ""Americans have never been against sin in and of itself. Rather, we've always believed in sinning the right way. Racism, for example, is utterly evil, unless it involves denying slots at Ivy League schools to people who've made the tragic lifestyle decision of being white, Asian or Jewish-in which case, racism becomes the Lord's work."

Another French absurdity: "The notion of a notoriously bureaucratic French government stage-managing innovations in the high-tech sector -- typically known for fierce competition and a libertarian ethos -- seems paradoxical. But in France, business remains a risk-averse activity in which industry looks to the government for succor. Proponents say this is precisely what makes the initiative necessary: France has proven skilled at research but weak at transforming ideas into money -- a step requiring government orchestration"

California is another country: "Diplomats gathered in Montreal for the largest discussion of climate change since the Kyoto Protocol was signed eight years ago. The U.S. pulled out of Kyoto, but the state of California sent a delegation to Montreal to make its own deals".

A has-been on an ego trip: "Former US president Bill Clinton took to the podium at the UN climate talks Friday here to ram home a grim message about global warming and demand the United States move quickly away from the fossil fuels causing the problem. In a show-stealing appearance rumoured to have ired the US delegation, Clinton defended the UN's Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases that was ditched by his successor, President George W. Bush, and said the switch to cleaner energy would create millions of jobs for the American economy".



A sentimental loss: "Britain's capital bid a fond farewell yesterday to the Routemaster double-decker bus that for half a century has been as synonymous with London as Big Ben. Other more recent double-deckers will continue to run, but the revered red Routemasters are in a league of their own. Loved by tourists and locals alike, the distinctive vehicles have run since 1956. But they are seen as expensive antiques and have been gradually retired since the 1980s. The last Routemaster - the number 159 - travelled from Oxford St to Brixton bus garage in south London last night, ringing in the end of an era.... The buses will not completely disappear. A few will continue on two London heritage routes".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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10 December, 2005

POSTMODERNISM DECONSTRUCTED

I rarely read philosophy these days. I went into the basic philosophical questions in my student days and shortly thereafter had published my conclusions about the nature of mind, the nature of ethics, the nature of cause and the nature of self. I have never seen any reason to alter my views about any of the questions concerned in the many years since but I have at times elaborated a little more fully my views about moral philosophy.

And for me any philosophy that fails to give an account of mind, ethics, cause and self is quite simply failed philosophy. And a philosophy that denies that any of those things are real is therefore fit only to be ignored. As it happens, however, there are lots of failed philosophers about and they have somehow conned the taxpayers into paying them a lot of money. They call themselves "postmoderninsts" and, as far as one can make any sense at all of what they say, their essential credo seems to be "nothing is real". When I come across such garbage I tend to be overcome by the wish that I could hit the so-called philosophers over the head with a baseball bat and then say to them: "Don't worry. Nothing is real so I didn't really hit you over the head with a baseball bat. Just carry on as before while I get ready to hit you again". I think reality would be rapidly rediscovered under those circumstances.

I was triggered off into this little tirade by a book I have just been having a look at. It is called Explaining postmodernism and is by Prof. Stephen R.C. Hicks, who undertakes the heroic task of trying to make some sense of postmodernism and trace its historical roots. As irrationality has always figured largely in human experience, it is no surprise that he finds the sources of postmodernism to be many and varied and to go back a long way. He traces postmodernism back to Kant but he could have gone back much further if he had wished to look at lesser-known writers.

His conclusions are in general also mine, though he is more polite than I would be. In my view postmodernism is simply a juvenile tantrum about how unco-operative reality is with socialist thought. Socialism has of course long had big appeal to intellectuals because it offers the simplifications that intellectuals tend to seek. The only trouble is that the simplifications don't work. From the French revolution on through Stalin and Hitler to Pol Pot we all now know of the horrors that it regularly leads to. So having had their childish simplifications taken away from them by reality, Leftist intellectuals stamp their foot and say that it is reality which is at fault. By denying reality they are in some insane way able to hang on to their faith in socialism.

My only quarrel with Prof. Hicks is that he uses the term "Right" in a peculiar way -- no doubt through political expediency. He seems to think you can be of the political Right and also be a socialist! That enables him to avoid upsetting the applecart with regard to Hitler. He admits that Hitler was a socialist who differed only in detail from the Communists but still calls Hitler a Rightist! Calling Hitler a Leftist would in academe cause Prof. Hicks to be consigned to outer darkness, of course. The only sense I can make of Prof Hick's usage is that he is using "Right" to be synonymous with "Nationalist" but that is pretty sloppy when one considers that, at least from Napoleon on, there have been plenty of Leftist nationalists. Perhaps he just has not read Friedrich Engels, who was as fervid a German nationalist and racial supremacist as Hitler was. (See, for instance, here and here and here and here). And, yes, the Engels I am talking about is the co-worker of Karl Marx. Or were Marx & Engels not Leftists? I think in this matter I have to say that Prof. Hicks gets himself into absurdities as big as those he ennumerates among the postmodernists. Or perhaps he just does not know his political history. He reads this blog, however, so I suspect that he knows it better than he can afford to admit, which is a bit sad. But he has to survive in academe after all and he is only a young man yet.

In most normal usage, Rightism would be identified with conservatism and if anybody wants to know what history shows about the nature of conservatism, I have just updated my account of the matter here.

Academic books and papers very commonly end with the conclusion: "More research is needed" and Prof Hicks is no exception. He feels that postmodernists have been allowed to flourish by the fact that realist and empiricist philosophers have not given final and uncontrovertible answers to the puzzles that they consider. He seems to think that if realists and empiricists had done a better job then postmodernists would not have flourished. I think however that such a conclusion runs counter to his own observation that postmodernism fulfils a psychological need rather than having any real intellectual function. I cannot see that a completed program of realist philosophy would have stopped the absurd tantrums of the postmodernists. And the day that there cease to be questions in philosophy, it will no longer be philosophy.

There is another review of the book here which claims that Hicks does not describe the thought of the philosophers he covers in enough depth. My own view of that is that Hicks is a hero to have waded as deeply as he did into such dog's vomit. My own essay on postmodernism is here

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ELSEWHERE

Marxist pilgrims from China can't wait to get to the capitalist shops: Thousands of Chinese tourists are exploiting their new freedom to make pilgrimages to the German birthplace of Karl Marx - and squeeze in some shopping as well. This year more than 30,000 people from across China will have visited Trier, near the border with Luxembourg - an invasion jokingly attributed to the "Marx Factor".... The Chinese, who have been allowed to travel to Germany freely only in the past two years, are now the second biggest group of visitors after the Dutch. After a visit to the museum, most go shopping, spending an average of 135 pounds a day on items such as non-stick saucepans, steel cutlery, chocolate, designer suits and Swiss army knives".

The psychopathic John Kerry recently claimed that American soldiers go "into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children". Rush Limbaugh has lot of pictures of how the American military do that.

Jeff Jacoby says all that needs to be said about the Left's current infatuation with unrepentant and murderous Los Angeles gang-boss Stanley "Tookie" Williams. I personally would like to see done to Tookie just some of the things he has done to others.

Posts just up on Australian Politics include Australia's recent pro-Israel vote in the U.N. and Muslims trying to take control of Sydney beaches.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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9 December, 2005

BrookesNews Update

US economy and Pollyanna analysts: Against signs of US tightening labour markets some analysts have adopted the Pollyanna approach to economics, arguing that greater competition and improving technology will fuel productivity growth
Labour market reform, the US experience and the productivity myth: It appears that proponents of labour market reform have sold the Liberal Government the myth that a free labour market would raise productivity
Labour market reform and the capital-productivity fallacy: Australia's self-appointed guardians of free market thought are not the only ones to preach fallacious ideas about labour markets and productivity. Kenneth Davidson is just as bad
Australian Marxist-Leninist David Bradbury slimes US Army: Lying comes naturally to leftists like Bradbury as does their support for sadistic leftwing thugs. In 1984 he produced 'Nicaragua: No Pasaran' a film dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas who had taken over Nicaragua
Workplace reform, Hugh Morgan's arrogance and executive pay: Hugh Morgan has neither the knowledge nor the intellectual capacity to argue the free market case. That he believes otherwise comes from a character defect that allows him to confuse the size of his ego with the size of his intellect
The media are "enemy" within: The ongoing American tragedy is the ability of Democrat-controlled media to hide truth from the American people
The sexy Jihad -- or how to get a bang out of your love life: Before the Arabs solve their problems with their governments or before their governments solve their problems with terrorism, they must first solve their problem with the other sex
Supply and demand fallacies: The orthodox supply and demand framework provides the rationale for government and central bank interference with businesses

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ELSEWHERE

Who pays for farm subsidies? "The general public in rich countries bears much of the cost of agricultural protectionism. First, the public subsidizes the farming community through higher taxes. Second, the public pays food prices that are higher than they would be under a liberalized trade regime. In 2004, for example, agricultural support in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) came to about $280 billion. The EU's agricultural support amounted to about $133 billion, Japan's to $49 billion, America's to $47 billion, South Korea's to $20 billion and Canada's and Switzerland's to $6 billion each. Moreover, in 2003, the British think-tank Policy Exchange found that EU consumers 'pay 42 percent more for agricultural products than they would if the system were dismantled. Americans pay 10 percent extra, Japanese more than twice as much. For less well-off families, for whom food takes up a large proportion of household income, freer trade would mean a noticeably higher standard of living.'"

"Windfall" taxes bad for energy supply: "More fundamentally, all targeted tax hikes on energy-company profits are energy taxes no matter how they're labeled. As every policymaker should know from Economics 101, when government taxes something, the economy produces less of it, and when supply falls relative to demand, consumer prices go up. Thus, 'windfall profits' taxes or their accounting-gimmick equivalents are bound to make energy less affordable. Yet the leading proponents claim to be 'consumer advocates.' Are proponents confused, or is consumer protection a rhetorical cover for other agendas?"

Congress subsidises supporters of illegal immigration: "Thanks to a congressional earmark, an open-borders advocacy group that pushes for driver's licenses, free in-state tuition and healthcare for illegal aliens and bilingual requirements for state agencies and ballots is slated to get $4 million in new taxpayer money to add to the more than $30 million it has received from various federal agencies since 1996. The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), Spanish for "the race," will get its latest grant through an appropriations bill passed by Congress on November 18.

There is a very good article here spelling out how much the prewar KKK had in common with the "Progressives" of that era. Many of the things that the Left today brand as "Rightist" (including overt racism) were "progressive" in the first half of the 20th century. Excerpt: "In fact, the 1924 election indicates the extent to which the Klan was entangled with the progressives. For that was the year of the Democrats' infamous "klanbake" convention, when Klansmen participated heavily as delegates and blocked a platform plank that would have condemned their order. They also entered the presidential race ... they endorsed the Californian William McAdoo, son-in-law to the late President Wilson...... What were the man's most notable accomplishments? He had been one of the architects of Wilson's war collectivism, helping create the Council of National Defense and serving as head of the Railroad Administration. And as secretary of the treasury, he had been instrumental in creating one of the Progressive Era's most substantial new interventions in the economy: the Federal Reserve system".

Supreme Court considers recruitment case: "The Supreme Court appeared ready Tuesday to rule that Congress can withhold money from colleges that protest the Pentagon's ban on gay men and lesbians by denying military recruiters access to campuses. Most of the nine justices seemed skeptical of claims by a group of 30 law schools that said their First Amendment rights to speak out against discrimination are violated by a law that could allow the U.S. government to withhold billions of dollars from colleges that inhibit military recruiters."

Gift from Canada?: "Why does President Bush hope Christmas comes a little late this year? Because on Jan. 23, Canada may elect the most pro-American leader in the Western world. Free-market economist Stephen Harper, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, is pro-free trade, pro-Iraq war, anti-Kyoto, and socially conservative. Move over Tony Blair: If elected, Mr. Harper will quickly become Mr. Bush's new best friend internationally and the poster boy for his ideal foreign leader. Both north and south of the U.S.-Canada border, this vote matters."

Basic economics: "Economic ignorance, misconceptions and superstition drive us toward totalitarianism because they make us more willing to hand over greater control of our lives to politicians. That results in a diminution of our liberties. Think back to the gasoline price controls during the 1970s. The price controls caused shortages. To deal with the shortages, restrictions were imposed on purchases. Then national highway speed limits were enacted. Then there were more calls for smaller and less crashworthy cars. With the recent gasoline supply shocks, we didn't experience the shortages, long lines and closed gas stations seen during the 1970s. Why? Prices were allowed to perform their allocative function -- get people to use less gas and get suppliers to supply more."

Congratulations to all the Australian bloggers who got linked by the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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8 December, 2005

THE SPITEFUL LEFT

Taranto yesterday led off with some comments about the dubious motivations of the antiwar Left. Keith Burgess Jackson has taken that thinking one step further as follows (excerpt):

"James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal refers to the Left as "The Angry Left." I'm prone to calling it "The Hateful Left." But perhaps we're both wrong. I'm starting to think the best label is "The Spiteful Left." A spiteful person, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., is one who is "Full of, possessed or animated by, spite; malicious; malevolent." "Spite," in turn, is defined as "A strong feeling of contempt, hatred or ill-will; intense grudge or desire to injure; rancorous or envious malice."

Spite, along with envy, jealousy, and spleen, is one of the green emotions. A spiteful person is so bent on harming another that he or she is willing to pay a personal price to do it; hence the expression, "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Lawyers talk about "spite fences," which are fences built solely to prevent one's neighbor from seeing what's on the other side. Even the lowly expression "in spite of" incorporates this meaning. If I say that I like you in spite of your many defects, I'm saying that my liking for you has a personal cost to me, or that I like you grudgingly.

Having listened to leftists for the past five years, I'm convinced that many of the positions they take have less to do with the merits of those positions than with the fact that taking those positions harms President Bush....."

Keith also has another go at the contemptible Brian Leiter. Keith concludes: "The man is twisted. I am honored to be called "odd" by such a cretin. Now I know what Jules Coleman meant when he told me, in correspondence, that Leiter is "complicated." It's a polite (and plausibly deniable) way of saying he's nuts".

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Report: Last Five Years Highest Immigration in U.S. History

And Illegal Aliens Are Almost Half of New Arrivals

As the nation considers immigration proposals from Congress and the President, a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of new Census Bureau data shows that the immigrant population (legal and illegal) reached a new high in 2005. The data, which the Bureau has not yet analyzed, also show that 2000-2005 is the highest five-year period of new immigration (legal and illegal) in American history. Almost half of new arrivals are estimated to be illegal aliens.

The new report provides a detailed picture of the socio-economic status of immigrants, including estimates for illegal aliens. States with the largest increase in immigrants are California, Texas Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington, Virginia, Arizona, Tennessee, Minnesota, and Nevada. Embargoed copies of the report, ''Immigrants at Mid-Decade: A Snapshot of American's Foreign-Born Population in 2005,'' are available to the media. The study will be posted to the Center's site at http://www.cis.org on December 12.

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ELSEWHERE



What Britain's new Conservative Party leader stands for is listed succinctly here. Like John Kerry he apears to want to be everything to everybody. It may even win him an election but whether it will do Britain much good is doubtful. I think Britain has a long hard road ahead.

Bruce Bartlett points out that cutting the top income-tax rate has always INCREASED the share of total tax paid by the rich. Yet the envy-driven Left still avocate HIGHER taxes on the rich -- just the opposite of what they need to do in order to get the rich to make a bigger contribution. Bartlett concludes: "At some point, those on the left must decide what really matters to them -- the appearance of soaking the rich by imposing high statutory tax rates that may cause actual tax payments by the wealthy to fall, or lower rates that may bring in more revenue that can pay for government programs to aid the poor? Sadly, the left nearly always votes for appearances over reality, favoring high rates that bring in little revenue even when lower rates would bring in more".

The death penalty saves lives: This is old news to economists. Papers of similar import have been coming out since the 70s. Excerpt: "The most dramatic finding comes from Joanna Shepherd and a team at Emory University in Atlanta. They have taken advantage of the fact that some parts of the US don't execute murderers, and only a handful of states execute them consistently. (One of those states, Texas, accounts for more than one-third of the executions in the US since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976.) After taking account of other regional variations thought likely to influence murder rates - among them the mix of races and the resources devoted to policing - they found that executions explained most of what was left. As they starkly report their central finding: each execution results in an average of 18 fewer murders. Or, to present the finding in an even more unsettling way: any state that refuses to impose the death penalty for murder is condemning 18 or so innocent people to death."

Lottery wins show that money doesn't solve the problems of the poor: "Mack and Virginia, if press accounts are to be believed, were textbook cases of how dysfunctional values cause problems of people. It is often believe that people like Mack and Virginia have problems because they are poor. This is the premise of the redistributive state. If money is taken from those who 'have too much' and given to those 'less fortunate' the increased wealth of the poor will eradicate the problems in living that they experience. The Left assumes that such problems are the result of poverty. But what if these problems did not result from poverty? What if poverty and these problems both were the result of the values they had embraced?"

Robert Hayes has just done a fisking of Barbara Streisand. She really is mind-bogglingly dumb.

The Carnival of Vanities is up again with much to read.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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7 December, 2005

BISMARCK AND DISRAELI: A SMALL REFLECTION

I take a great interest in 19th century history. I think you have to know at least the late 19th century to understand all that has happened since. It was after all the era that produced Karl Marx, the most influential misanthrope of all times. But Marx was such an intellectual midget and such a depicable character (even his own father, the kindly Heinrich Marx, thought that Karl was not much of a human being) that it is no wonder his legacy has been so malign and, in the end, irrelevant.



By contrast, the two greatest political figures of the late 19th century, Disraeli and Bismarck, achieved an enormous amount for humanity, peace and civility. Bismarck is normally pictured wearing his Prussian Pikelhaube (spiked helmet) -- though he was only in the reserves of the Prussian military in his glory years -- and that does tend to mislead people into thinking of him as a brutal militarist -- but that is the sort of ignorance you have to expect of people who have been fed the highly selective pap that passes for history lessons these days. In fact, Bismarck gave Europe a long era of peace and rapidly increasing prosperity.

After his great victory over Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870, one might have expected Bismarck to go on to a Bonapartesque quest to dominate all Europe, but he did nothing of the sort. The entire military campaign had not in fact been aimed at conquest at all. Bismarck simply used the war to unite Germany under the Prussian crown. So when the war was over, all but a small (but controversial) slice of formerly French territory was evacuated and Bismarck concentrated on creating the German empire -- not by force but by diplomacy -- albeit by diplomacy of a rather dubious sort at times. And a united Germany of course soon became the economic powerhouse that it has been ever since. But note this: from 1871 on, Europe had no major wars until 1914 -- a 43 year period of peace -- pretty unusual for Europe up until that time. And that long peace was largely Bismarck's doing. The united Germany's formidable military was a much a hindrance as a help because it made the rest of the world fearful and could well have encouraged a grand alliance against Germany. But by a series of ever-shifting and totally Byzantine series of diplomatic manoeuvres, alliances and treaties, Bismarck kept everybody off-balance and both Germany and the rest of Europe were left free to prosper peacefully and to develop the full fruits of the industrial revolution -- which they did mightily.

Bismarck was not as successful at heading off unrest at home, however. As in most of Europe, the newly-created industrial working class was in a fairly ongoing ferment -- a ferment in which Marx played a small part. So there were some serious rebellions, uprisings and disturbances. As in foreign affairs, however, Bismarck's ever-shifting policies and alliances managed to keep the peace overall. Regrettably, however, it was a fragile peace and violent socialism still lurked just beneath the surface. So after Bismarck was gone it broke out again -- as the powerful Communist and Nazi movements of the post-1918 period.



Bismarck's great English contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, was far more successful at containing domestic unrest. Like Bismarck he saw the need for worker-welfare legislation as a means of buying social peace and both men were notable welfare innovators -- THE welfare innovators, it might be said. So what was the secret of Disraeli's success? Fundamentally, it was sentimentality. Although he was always vocal about his own Jewishness, Disraeli had a sort of love-affair with the English people that was only surpassed in more recent times by the love-affair that Ronald Reagan had with the American people. And the results Disraeli got were arguably as transformative as the results Reagan got. Disraeli had a great love and respect for English traditions and preached the virtues of Englishness incessantly. And he included in his embrace the ordinary English working people -- whom he saw as "angels in marble" -- people with great and good potential. He actually trusted the working-class -- an almost unheard-of idea among all the governing classes in Europe at that time. So he sponsored legislation that gave the workers the vote on a greatly increased scale. And they rewarded his trust by being far less susceptible to the political and social agitation that plagued their contemporaries in Europe. They developed a lasting trust in their national institutions that did far more for lasting peace and civility than anything else could have done.

At one of the great international political conferences of the time, Germany was represented by Bismarck and Britain by Disraeli. To Britain's considerable benefit, Disraeli ran rings around all of them -- causing Bismarck to make his famous admiring remark: "Der alte Jude. Das is der Mann" ("The old Jew. THAT is the man"). Coming from Bismarck, that was a compliment indeed. Disraeli himself attributed the greater social peace of 19th century England to Englishness but to a considerable extent it was in fact his own personal achievement.

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Minutewomen: "Across the rickety barbed-wire fence, about a metre high, is Mexico, dotted with walking trails along which tens of thousands of Mexicans, many of them dirt-poor and illiterate peasant farmers, have trekked on their way to America and a better life. This 50-kilometre stretch of the Mexico-US border - about 60 kilometres from Tucson, where President George Bush delivered a speech on illegal immigration last week - is a key unofficial entry point. It is along this forbidding stretch of country that Connie Foust and Carmen Mercer, known locally as the Granny Brigade, have spent many of their nights these past eight months patrolling the border. They are part of the Minutemen movement.... Ms Mercer favours a .45 Colt pistol holstered on a wide brown belt studded with bullets. Ms Foust prefers a more discreet Ladysmith .38, which she wears high up on her waist. Both women insist that Minutemen are sworn not to use their guns "except to shoot snakes or stuff like that" .. There are an estimated 13 million illegals in America and they arrive at the rate of about a million a year."

There is a good post here on the disgraceful pandering of the Chicago Presbyterian church to the terrorist Hezbollah organization.

Chris Brand's latest lot of posts are now up- dealing with immigration, IQ, sex differences etc. See here

Twilight of conservatism: "This year marks the 30th anniversary of [Robert] Nisbet's Twilight of Authority, long considered something of a minor classic, and it is from that book that most of Nisbet's words that follow have been taken. Most interesting are three things: Nisbet's warnings about the ongoing growth in executive power, his prescient critique of American conservatism, and his skepticism and caution about the growth of the warfare state that has long since vanished from establishment conservatism. Nisbet's 1953 classic The Quest for Community argues that for the most part, every major modern political philosopher in the West, from Hobbes to the present, has taken as his starting point the idea of a unitary, all-powerful central state ruling over an undifferentiated aggregate of individuals, and which is legally and temporally prior and superior to all subsidiary associations."

A small apology: I have in the past refrained from putting up many pictures on this blog as graphics greatly slow down loading times for people using dialup connections. Now that broadband has become very widespread, however, I see less need for such restraint

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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

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5 December, 2005

LEFTIST HISTORIANS SKEWERED AGAIN

Excerpt from Christopher Pearson about the invented "terra nullius" legal doctrine that was used to give land rights to Australian blacks

"In June last year, I reported in this column on a seismic shift in Australian history-writing. One of its rising stars, Bain Attwood, had published an article calling into question the veracity and professional ethics of Henry Reynolds, the doyen of Aboriginal history. In particular he drew attention to the disingenuous uses that Reynolds had made of the obscure concept of terra nullius, which the High Court later relied on to justify the Mabo judgment and overturn two centuries' worth of settled land law. For his pains, Attwood was denounced by other historians, most notably Dirk Moses, who described it as a "patricidal attack".

By the time Attwood's new book, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, came out this year, terra nullius had vanished from the text, in one of those flagrant airbrushing exercises we've come to expect. So much for telling the truth. But Attwood was not the first to note the problems with terra nullius or the most trenchant critic of Reynolds's abuse of it. That honour belongs to Michael Connor, a Tasmanian historian.



Connor has written a book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, and I shall have the pleasure of launching it for the Macleay Press, Keith Windschuttle's publishing house, on Tuesday evening. Connor will prove hard to ignore, at least for lawyers and journalists, who need to know the facts, whatever use they make of them. Even in academe, Connor's skewering of so many self-important colleagues will be welcomed by the better teachers and the brighter students of Australian history.

Connor will be hard to ignore because his field work on the origins and applications of the term terra nullius is so thorough and his exposition so lucid. Reynolds pounced on it and gave it a number of sliding definitions. It became broad enough to encompass waste, uncultivated or uninhabited land, land with no owners or land with no sovereign. The conflation of land ownership and sovereignty, Reynolds's invention and unwarranted on any legal authority, was particularly helpful for impressionable High Court judges, who seldom seem to have done their homework and took Reynolds on trust.

Connor says: "For over 20 years Australian history has been written by a conformity of historians for whom terra nullius was the foundation for their telling of Australia's story. They taught us that this phrase had always been there and was the bloody basis on which the nation stands ... Never has a falser antique been palmed off on more unsuspecting buyers." "

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ELSEWHERE

Roger Scruton: "I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy -- or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist". [Not much has changed!]

Animal rights inconsistent with LEFTISM!: "When I hear people argue against wearing leather, animal skins or furs, my response is that those are natural materials, unlike the plastic-based or petroleum-based products they offer as alternatives. Leather, skins and furs will biodegrade, not take up space in a landfill somewhere. Should we really, according to left-wing propaganda, be supporting and encouraging the huge conglomerate corporations that produce nylon and other synthetic substances? Giving the oil companies more sources of profit? Fostering our dependence on Saudi Arabia and other foreign countries that supply us with oil? Increasing our dependence on fossil fuels?.... Are those who are so concerned with the "rights" of rodents and chickens, as concerned with the rights of human unborn children? When anyone rails in favor of animal rights, I ask them, "Are you `pro-choice' on abortion?" Their startled response is usually, "Yes." "Well," I say, "there are people who are `pro-choice' about hunting, eating meat and wearing leather and fur." This inevitably ends the conversation"

Back to more business bashing : "Very sadly the human species has had too many thinkers who were idealists of the worst sort, placing before us impossible goals to strive for while demeaning the possible and desirable ones. Another case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. And it is really quite unjust, when you come to think of it -- with all those diligent people in business, breaking their necks to produce what millions of us want, working ceaselessly to help us all prosper, and they are routinely put down, lumped together with the relatively few crooks among them. No one does this with medicine or education or science, but somehow the members of the intelligentsia haven't managed to grasp that such lumping is unjust as well when it comes to business."

Death penalty opponents have blood on their hands: "Perhaps the most infamous case of a death penalty opponent directly causing the murder of an innocent is that of novelist Norman Mailer. In 1981, Mailer utilized his influence to obtain parole for a bank robber and murderer named Jack Abbott on the grounds that Abbott was a talented writer. Six weeks after being paroled, Abbott murdered Richard Adan, a 22-year-old newlywed, aspiring actor and playwright who was waiting tables at his father's restaurant. Mailer's reaction? "Culture is worth a little risk," he told the press. "I'm willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man's talent." That in a nutshell is the attitude of the abolitionists. They are "willing to gamble with a portion of society" -- such as the lives of additional innocent victims -- in order to save the life of every murderer".

The looming immigration war: "What was once Rep. Tom Tancredo's (R-Colo.) own personal hot-button issue is now a national immigration-reform movement. Fanned by talk-radio, not to mention Republican mania for some kind of wedge issue now that they've abandoned fiscal conservatism, immigration is shaping up as the Us vs. Them issue, certainly for next year's midterm election and perhaps 2008 as well. Tancredo is sniffing around Iowa and has the dreaded and dread-filled potential POTUS candidate's book -- In Mortal Danger -- on the way. His Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus now has 91 members and expects to get actual House floor votes on several of its reform bills when Congress returns. With the GOP leadership in disarray, there is no telling how many votes the proposal might get."

An Irish nun convicted of rape? Sounds fanciful but it happened. Strange Justice has the story.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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3 December, 2004

RECENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

EU and Muslim countries fail the terror test
Letter from Lima
EU: Hamas must recognise Israel
Parliamentary speech on terrorism Bill
Charity for Palestinian poor siphoned to suicide bombers
Australian Muslim MP denies Muslims being targeted
Jews offer safety tips to Muslims
SBS Complaint upheld
How a Town Became a Terror Hub
Apologies to everyone for what we did
French official: time running out for Syrian President
SBS Greek "economic news"
What sort of Frenchmen are they?
Tyranny in Australia
Truth on Trial
ABC appeals FOI decision
Seeking asylum in Australia - draft program
Matter of Public Interest
Islamic Fascism and Satyagraha in Palestine
Fear and loathing in Senate estimates
Terrorism: The Root Causes
Allons Enfants de la Jihad
Show them who is the boss in France
Aunty's media botch
Hope in the shadow of Auschwitz
Who will raise the siege of Paris?
Our World: The Paris fall
The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris

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ELSEWHERE

An outbreak of sanity: "Airport security screeners are reportedly going to let passengers bring sharp objects on board airplanes again. Today's Washington Post says the Transportation Security Administration plans to announce security changes Friday. Sources quoted by the paper say the new rules will allow things like scissors in carry-on bags. The reasoning is that such items are no longer regarded as the greatest threat to airline security. Homeland Security Department officials are said to be more concerned about preventing suicide bomb attacks at airports. Officials want screeners to focus more on finding things that can explode rather than things that are sharp. The Post reports the newly relaxed rules would allow scissors under four inches long tools shorter than seven inches.

FBI stupidity: "FBI agent Richard B. Marx spent a year atop 1.8 million tons of debris from the World Trade Center towers, searching for September 11 evidence at the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, N.Y. For his devotion to the grungy job, he earned the gratitude of victims' families, the respect of his peers, a nomination as the federal employee of the year -- and a 10-day suspension and letter of reprimand from his superiors. The reprimand bars him from a major part of his job -- collecting evidence for use in court. The FBI suspended Mr. Marx after the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General said he 'lacked candor' in answering questions during an investigation into whether agents took evidence from the Fresh Kills site as souvenirs. Evidence that the inspector general thought was missing, which led to the inquiry, turned out to have been sent to museums nationwide and to FBI headquarters in Washington, all on orders of Congress."

Destructive posturing undermining the war: "Listening to the media, the talking heads, and many in Congress, one gets the sense that the most important element in our war against jihadist terrorism is not victory but who can show that he cares more than the other guy about the comfort and "rights" of terrorist detainees. In other words, who can boast that he is more "ethical" than the rest of us. This is no way to win a war. Instead of determining what best can achieve immediate victory, our preoccupation has been more about feeding detainees the Islamic food of their choice; safeguarding the Koran more than our own Bible; trying them not in military courts where they should be tried but in civil courts so they can have the best lawyers and chance at acquittal; providing them with all the Constitutional rights reserved for those born here who wish not to destroy our Constitution; and instituting anti-torture standards whose definition judges can expand so that effective interrogation will be impossible. Better for a million Americans to be incinerated, avant garde thinking goes, than use on known terrorists procedures that might elicit dates, time and place of imminent bombings of U.S. cities and citizens. It is not that the country has gone moral, it has gone crazy".

Taranto often has fun pointing out what a turncoat Andrew Sullivan is but he has now gone one better -- catching Sullivan out in an egregious lie.

French PM backs Bush!: "French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, one of the sharpest critics of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, warned Washington on Tuesday against pulling out troops without regard to regional security. Villepin, interviewed in Paris by CNN, said a badly planned withdrawal could cause chaos in Iraq, "which of course would be disastrous for the whole region."

Senator Lieberman: "I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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2 December, 2005

ANOTHER BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCE ON IQ

"Scientists have discovered why some shorter children do worse at school than taller youngsters. A team from the University of Bristol found that children with lower levels of a height controlling hormone also had lower IQs. The study is the first to make a link between the insulin-like growth hormone and intelligence. Professor David Gunnell and his colleagues measured levels of Insulin Growth Factor IGF-I in the blood of 547 children, who also took an intelligence test at the age of eight. When the researchers compared IGF-I levels in the youngsters in the study, they found a significant link between the growth hormone and intelligence. For every 100 nanograms per millilitre increase in IGF-I levels, the IQ increased by three points.

At the moment scientists do not know what happens in the body to link poor growth and impaired development in the brain. But one explanation could be that growth hormones also affect brain development. They said this effect seemed to be restricted to the verbal component of IQ, as the link was not seen in other tests.... The study, part of the long-running Children of the 90s project, is published in Pediatrics"

More here

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ELSEWHERE

That "cowboy" economy again: "The US economy powered higher in the third quarter at a 4.3 per cent annualised growth pace, the US Government said overnight, revising upward its previous estimate of 3.8 per cent growth. The Commerce Department estimate was stronger than the 4.0 percent pace expected by economists and showed the world's biggest economy was able to shrug off the impact of two powerful hurricanes and a surge in energy costs.

Chirac written off: "It was the kind of birthday present politicians have nightmares about. As he turned 73 yesterday, and after 10 years as President, Jacques Chirac awoke to perhaps the most devastating headline of his career. "Jacques Chirac - the difficult end of his reign" announced Le Monde, France's most influential daily, in an extraordinary media intervention that read more like an obituary than a birthday notice. As the front-page report noted, 72per cent of voters believe the head of state has hardly any influence over public affairs, either in France or the rest of the world. "It is the winter of his reign .."

Sarko gets it right: "The French Government is to tighten immigration controls to make it more difficult for foreign students and foreign-born family members of French residents to enter the country, in response to the worst civil unrest in four decades..... The moves come at a time of heightened anxiety over perceived threats at home and abroad. The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, told parliament on Tuesday that France does not want "those people that nobody else in the world wants. We want selective immigration".

Islamists abduct peaceniks and the USA gets blamed! "A peace group blamed the US and Britain yesterday for the abduction of four Western activists shown in an insurgent video, saying the kidnapping was the direct result of the occupation of Iraq... The abduction tape aired by al-Jazeera television shows four aid workers - two Canadians, a Briton and an American - three days after they were snatched. Their abductors, calling themselves the Swords of Truth Brigade, accused their captives of being "spies working for the occupying forces". The attack is believed to be part of a new wave of kidnappings that police fear is aimed at disrupting this month's national elections. A statement released by the Christian Peacemaker Team said: "We are angry because what has happened to our teammates is the result of the actions of the US and UK governments due to the illegal attack on Iraq and the continuing occupation and oppression of its people.""

Leftist double standards: "Many in my profession - journalism - were understandably outraged to discover that in a get-together with his partner in crime Tony Blair in April 2004, President Bush allegedly made a bad-taste gag about bombing the Qatar headquarters of the Arab TV channel al-Jazeera.... But I have a question. Why, right now, do some journalists seem more outraged by the alleged threats and slurs made by President Bush against a TV station than they were about an earlier president's actual bombing of a TV station? Why are they red-faced with rage and indignation over the Bush and al-Jazeera incident, yet they turned a blind eye - or even tried to justify - President Bill Clinton's outrageous bombing of Serbian TV during the Kosovo War in 1999, which left journalists dead and maimed?"

The poison of Islam: "Mireille, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad. In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalisation, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing. Belgian investigators, who arrested 14 people associated with her, are keeping the 38-year-old woman's true identity secret, but details have started to emerge. She was from the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, married to a Moroccan and converted to an extreme form of Islam".

U.K.: More Leftist hatred of their own country: "A Labour Party official caused outrage last night after suggesting sports fans who wave the England flag are racist. The outburst came from Terry White, of Labour's Communications Unit, in an email to a member of the public. It followed a row last week when ex-minister Gisela Stuart claimed the rise of Englishness is a threat to democracy.... Mr White, who is 65 and near retirement, wrote back: "England, as opposed to Britain, has an unfortunate history around the world and within the British Isles and please do not say that it is all past."

Good if he means it: "President Bush said Monday he wants to crack down on those who enter the country illegally but also give out more visas to foreigners with jobs, a dual plan he hopes will appease the social conservatives and business leaders who are his core supporters. 'The American people should not have to choose between a welcoming society and a lawful society,' Bush said from the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base about an hour from the Mexican border."

Michelle Malkin gives a good blast to Leftist "projection" -- where Leftists accuse conservatives of being hate-filled while being apparently unaware of how they are actually bubbling over with hatred and anger themselves. Michelle has of course also written a whole book which collects the unhinged utterances of the Left.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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

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1 December, 2005

STILL RECOVERING

Many thanks for the many "Get well soon" messages. All were appreciated. I am making steady but slow progress. I have to lie down a lot to help things settle but I seem to get enough time in front of the computer to keep up most of my usual output. Links sent to me by my various voluntary spotters of interesting articles have been a big help. My guess is that I will be back to normal around the beginning of next week.

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Brookes News Update

US economy, manufacturing and monetary policy: There seems to be a degree of schizophrenia when it comes to the US economy and manufacturing
The Australian economy and its current account deficit: Not only does monetary expansion distort the pattern of domestic production and create current account crises, it also distorts the pattern of international trade
Workplace reform -- our rightwing keep stuffing it up : There has been a massive shift in public opinion against the Liberal Government's workplace reform package. Could this be because our rightwing stuffed it up? Also attacks the fallacy of economic rent.
Economic growth and information technology: It is argued that because of the limited amounts of capital and labour, without technological progress the opportunities for growth will eventually run out
Democrats teach the world to hate America: So many in the world hate America because the Democrats hate America and they control so much of the information that the rest of the world sees
A message to Christian friends of Jews: Just recently, the Pope, leader of 1.1 billion Catholics, deliberately omitted Israel from the list of countries suffering from Islamic terror in his speech

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ELSEWHERE

About time: "Canadian politicians will hit the campaign trail this holiday season after opposition parties seized upon a corruption scandal to bring down the minority government of Prime Minister Paul Martin in a vote of no confidence. Monday's loss means an election for all 308 seats in the lower House of Commons, likely on Jan. 23. Martin and his Cabinet will continue to govern until then. The Conservative Party teamed up with the New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois parties to bring down the government, claiming the ruling Liberal Party had lost its moral authority. Recent polls have given the Liberals a slight lead over the Conservatives, with the New Democrats in third place. The same surveys suggest the Bloc Quebecois would sweep the French-speaking province of Quebec, making a majority government unlikely no matter which party wins the most seats". Bleeding Brain has a look at the implications.

Politically correct top cop in the gun at last: "Sir Ian Blair, the head of the Metropolitan Police, is to be personally investigated for his conduct and statements immediately after the killing of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in South London in July. The investigation follows a formal complaint by Mr de Menezes's family to the Independent Police Complaints Commission and under a piece of legislation never been used before, the investigating officer had to be formally approved by Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. Mr de Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician, was shot seven times in the head after being mistaken for a suicide bomber by officers at Stockwell Tube station on July 22".

Oil: The market at work: "The rusting oil derricks that once pumped crude from beneath the streets of Los Angeles are being brought back to life almost 50 years after being abandoned. The derricks - black, hammer-like contraptions that squat over oil wells - were long ago rendered uneconomic by falling petroleum prices and the soaring value of property in Southern California. But now, with the price of crude oil near a record high and the property market rapidly cooling, Tinseltown has rediscovered its less glamorous economic roots. As one oil industry lawyer once said: "They ruined a perfectly good oilfield by building a city on top of it." In the Signal Hill area, an oil drill has started boring into the earth next to a Starbucks. In Long Beach, drills have been disguised as tropical islands, with waterfalls and banana trees. And in Venice, the rigs pose as lighthouses and office blocks. Analysts say that many Los Angeles wells were plugged after giving up only 25 per cent of their oil - even though modern technology allows up to 50 per cent of a reserve to be drained. Now those wells are being hastily reactivated".

Woeful government postal service: "Imagine a business where the more you use them, the more irritated you become with them. Now imagine that despite their poor performance, they probably will never improve or go out of business. Where does such a place exist? In the hinterlands of post-Soviet Russia? In a backwater of proto-capitalist China? In Fidel's Cuba? Try a post office in New York. The U.S. Postal Service is getting hammered by FedEx and UPS. Standing in line gives you lots of time to figure out why."

Antisemitic public broadcaster reined in: "The SBS Office of Audience has finalised its investigation into the commentary by Dr Yannis Varoufakis on the Greek Language Program, broadcast on 29 August 2005. Your complaint has been upheld. SBS considers the commentary breached Code 1 'Introduction and SBS Radio' and Code 2.1 'Prejudice, Racism and Discrimination' of the SBS Codes of Practice".

Jew-hatred is the new environmentalism:: "RESOLUTION Adopted by the Green Party of the United States, November 21, 2005: 1. The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) publicly calls for divestment from and boycott of the State of Israel until such time as the full individual and collective rights of the Palestinian people are realized. To maximize the effect of the Green Party's support for divestment and boycott of Israel: 2. The party calls on all civil society institutions and organizations around the world to implement a comprehensive divestment and boycott program. Further, the party calls on all governments to support this program and to implement state level boycotts. 3. The party urges the Campus Greens network to work in cooperation with other campus organizations to achieve institutional participation in this effort.

The French try affirmative action: "The French automaker has pioneered a drive to diversify its workforce that other companies are beginning to emulate, even at the risk of violating French laws that prohibit classifying workers by race or ethnicity. "Three years ago, it was complicated to get a personnel manager to see me," says Alexandra Palt, who works with IMS, a nonprofit group that helps French firms broaden their recruiting policies to hire more minorities. "Today it's the opposite. We are extremely in demand and everybody wants to get involved." This month's violence in the heavily immigrant suburbs of France's cities, where youth unemployment can run to 40 percent, has sparked a lively debate here about the lack of opportunities that young people of immigrant origin face. It has also prompted admissions from President Jacques Chirac on down that the nation proclaiming "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" has betrayed that promise to its minorities".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

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