Dissecting Leftism is HERE. The Blogroll. The archive. My Monograph on Leftism. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. My mirror site with absolutely NO advertising attached to it is HERE but it is hosted by my ISP so may not be as permanent as my other sites. There is now also a mirror site for "PC Watch" that is viewable in China. See HERE. Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing.
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31 March, 2004

THE EDUCATION MESS

Australia's Left falls foul of teachers' unions: "Latham's policy that good teachers in bad schools be paid more is a good idea. It is recognition from the Labor Party that market forces apply in education as they do in all walks of life.... The great myth of education policy in this country is that non-government schools outperform government schools because government schools must teach any student that wishes to attend, while non-government schools have the privilege of choosing who they enrol. In fact, non-government schools achieve higher outcomes because they employ better teachers, and they are largely free from the dictates of state education departments and teachers unions.... the union of teachers in government schools, the Australian Education Union, is implacably opposed to merit pay and differential salaries because such measures require an assessment of the performance of individual teachers and their school... Latham can't have it both ways. He can't reform government schools and satisfy the teachers union."

Educational control freaks: "Although many teachers and principals officially tout the benefits of parental involvement, they become nervous when parents actually do get involved. They fear parents and seek to stop them from making choices about which schools their children will attend, about the curriculum used in their children's instruction, and about the punishments used in the schools."

Home schooling "A newer breed of home schooler is emerging, motivated not by religious belief or countercultural philosophy. Uppermost for such parents are concerns about violence, peer pressure, and poor academic quality in their schools."

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THE ISLAMIC MESS

Those delightful Muslims again: "A young boy, pleased that his dad shot his mum. Brothers who urge their father to shoot their sister. Girls as young as thirteen imprisoned by the state "for their own protection" from family members who want to rape or kill them. This is Jordan today, generally regarded one of the most westernised countries in the Middle East."

Europe likes to pretend that its Muslim problem is a by-product of their nominal alliance with the USA. But that ignores both history and demography: "Today, 15 million Muslims make their home in the European Union." Ultimately, Islam is a bigger problem for Europe than the USA.

Mark Steyn on appeasement: "a defensive war against terrorism will ensure terrorism."

A book review of Onward Muslim Soldiers, by Robert Spencer, points out that what Muslim "extremists" are doing is an integral part of Islam.

Christopher Hitchens says that many of the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism come from Western Fascists and other Leftists: "In many areas of German, Russian and French culture, one finds the same hatred of "decadence," the same cultish worship of the pitiless hero, the same fascination with the infallible "leader," the same fear of a mechanical civilization as opposed to the "organic" society based on tradition and allegiance".

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ELSEWHERE

California kookiness like Wow! "The law allows students and school staff to define their own gender, regardless of their biological sex, to prevent discrimination against transsexuals and others who do not conform to traditional gender roles". I guess Californian schoolgirls are going to love having weird guys turning up in their restrooms! If any of the girls are attacked, the legal fallout could be interesting!

"Sen. John F. Kerry has started talking about health care for the first time since securing his party's nomination for president. Americans should beware: Kerry's platform represents perhaps the greatest threat to health care and patient sovereignty since the Clinton health plan. Though Kerry claims he would reduce costs and expand access to medical care, his two-pronged health plan would have the opposite effects, for it would bring America several steps closer to a system of socialized medicine, with all the increased costs and rationing of care that follow."

An Icelandic blogger has a great collection of quotes (in English) showing how Leftist Nazism was.

A great article on the Indian love of cricket here. "seeing cricket as a way of pursuing diplomacy by other means" refers, of course, to a famous statement by Clausewitz. Cricket as an alternative to war sounds pretty good.

I have mentioned this academic article on IQ before (see here) but I think the abstract (summary) of it is worth reproducing in full: "Virtually all indicators of physical health and mental competence favor persons of higher socioeconomic status (SES). Conventional theories in the social sciences assume that the material disadvantages of lower SES are primarily responsible for these inequalities, either directly or by inducing psychosocial harm. These theories cannot explain, however, why the relation between SES and health outcomes (knowledge, behavior, morbidity, and mortality) is not only remarkably general across time, place, disease, and kind of health system but also so finely graded up the entire SES continuum. Epidemiologists have therefore posited, but not yet identified, a more general "fundamental cause" of health inequalities. This article concatenates various bodies of evidence to demonstrate that differences in general intelligence (g) may be that fundamental cause." (From the very mainstream journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004, Vol. 86, No. 1, 174-199)

The British government is gradually removing all mention of the Crown from its functions. Given Britain's lack of a written constitution, Peter Hitchens sees the move as a loss of important safeguards.

Today's recipe is for that classic Indian dish, Roghan Josh. It feeds 6 so is good for a discerning family or a dinner party. See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

GREENIE WATCH

What the Greenies will never tell you: "What the suburbanite doesn't see is that, in the vast stretches of American and Canadian wilderness lands, a quite different process is unfolding: Far more trees are being planted than harvested, a trend that has been going on for decades. America has roughly the same forested area in 2002 as it did 80 years ago. Just two examples of the resurgence: Vermont's woods have expanded from 37 percent of the land in 1850 to cover 77 percent today. The forests in New Hampshire covered 50 percent of the state in 1850 and cover 87 percent today. One reason America has the same area of forestland today as in 1920--despite a 143 percent rise in population--is that, in 1910, about 25 percent of the cropland was devoted to producing feed for horses. As the automobile and farm machinery replaced equines, all that land was freed up for human-food crops. Another reason for the lack of pressure on wooded lands is the huge strides in technology, chemistry, and genetics that have vastly increased farm productivity, allowing far more food to be grown per acre than was ever dreamed possible".

The weird Green/Left attack on GWB's "mercury" record is rebutted here

The world leaders in water conservation are the USA and Israel. So why no cheers from the Greens? They are always telling us how wonderful the Germans and Danes are at arguably less relevant forms of conservation

Global warming: The movie: "Coming to a multiplex near you on May 28 is the global warming disaster movie, 'The Day After Tomorrow.' I've only seen the trailer, but my money is on the movie, not global warming, being the disaster. Featuring sensational but implausible weather phenomena ... the movie's unmistakable purpose is to scare us into submitting to the Greens' agenda: domination of society through control of energy resources. This column has addressed Green extremism and global warming many times in the past. ... So suffice it to say that there's no credible evidence humans are altering global climate in any measurable way and, to the extent that global climate is changing -- as it always has and always will -- there's nothing that humans can do about that change except to adapt."

Greenie false prophecy: "Paul Ehrlich had written in The Population Bomb (1968) that it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. By 1974 India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals. Pakistan progressed from harvesting 3.4 million tons of wheat annually when Borlaug arrived to around 18 million today, India from 11 million tons to 60 million"

More California kookiness: "It would be nice to think that major public policy decisions are based on sound science and rational thinking rather than emotionalism and scare tactics. Of course, the reality is far different, as any aficionado of the political process has noticed. This reality is especially stark when dealing with environmental issues, where emoting replaces thinking, and where the neuroses of activists drives policy more than anything else. It's one thing to spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars to, say, actually clean up some land or a waterway, quite another thing to spend the same amount to accomplish little more than boosting the self-esteem of activists. Yet here in Orange County, residents are doing just that: paying additional fees to fund a costly new program that cleans something that doesn't need to be cleaned as a sop to vocal environmental activists who are impervious to scientific data proving them wrong. It's policy as psychology, yet it's costing taxpayers plenty. The program I refer to goes by the name of "full secondary treatment," and it relates to sewage treatment."

Much recycling is ideological rubbish, a monumental waste of effort. And this is not just the view of free-market economists... Both Valfrid Paulsson, the green guru and former director-general of Sweden's environmental protection agency, and Soren Norrby, the former campaign manager for Keep Sweden Tidy, argue that the whole concept of recycling household rubbish is a mistake.

Ted Lapkin's Quadrant article about the genocidal Greenie ban on DDT is available here

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ELSEWHERE

This is another story about how America's drug enforcement bureaucrats show the brains of fleas in the way they enforce the law -- making criminals out of ethical doctors and making effectve pain relief just a memory for many Americans. Surely it is about time that GWB made the effort to put someone with at least half a brain in charge of the agency concerned. I have never heard of the equivalent Australian authorities being remotely as moronic.

Some rare good sense from a psychologist: "Three problems of working in the disease model have plagued Psychology since it became a mere handmaiden of medicine. First, victimology, a moral problem: We took on a pathological view of human nature such that people were seen as victims of circumstances, and we forgot about venerable concepts like choice, will, character, and responsibility. Second, we misplaced our mission of making normal people happier and worse, genius became a dirty word". Interesting that those remarks (by Martin Seligman) were originally circulated as an email only, however.

Our blacked-robed rulers: "American courts do not use sharia as grounds for their autocratic pronouncements, but they have their own uniquely Western equivalents: fuzzy moral sensibilities, 'international law,' the inviolable principle of tolerance, and even public polling. With these inane justifications and others, they are stealing Americans' birthright of self-rule."

Keith Burgess-Jackson suspects that my focus on the meaning of moral discourse makes me a "descriptivist" in R.M. Hare's terms and that I am therefore a relativist. That really requires a full essay in reply but, fun though that would be, it would also be a rather big sidetrack for a political blog such as this so I will simply say that I doubt that I am a descriptivist but I don't think that Hare's critique of it holds up anyway. For some of the reasons why see here. And I do cheerfully admit to being a relativist. But, unlike Leftists, I do not at all see that the relativism of morality makes it either arbitrary or unimportant. Quite to the contrary, I think that the rightness of an action can be a very important empirical enquiry: Does it lead to long term results that would be generally desired?

My recipe for today is another way of doing pork fillet. Show what a good Muslim you are not! See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

THE STRANGE MENTAL WORLD OF THE LEFT

There is a very clear-sighted article on the Gefen blog about how Leftists abuse talk of human rights. One quote: "One could say that the entire world Left is suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance on this issue. They can extoll peace and yet defend Saddam Hussein. They can love human rights and acclaim Arafat. They can decry racism and revel in the basest anti-semitism, sometimes in the same breath. Their desire for an absolutism of justice has resulted in an embrace of righteous murder". The author is wrong to call it "cognitive dissonance" however. "Cognitive dissonance" means you feel uncomfortable about the inconsistencies -- but inconsistencies have never bothered Leftists. They are psychopathic -- they have no moral anchors. Under the guise of "Postmodernism" they often tell us that in fact.

For any of my readers who have any interest in the social sciences, there is a fabulous article here about the "Militant Tendency" Trotskyist group that was very influential in the British Labour Party in the 1980s. The author specializes in the study of cults and shows that "Militant" is a good example of one. The reader who drew my attention to the article commented: "One sees a lot of this same behavior by the Greenies also -- the Messianic sense of mission, the closed frame of reference, and the looming apocalypse that only they can avert." The article is at the moment up on a Marxist site but also appeared in an academic journal. The author advises me that a revised version of the paper is also to be found in his book with Tim Wohlforth - On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, ME Sharpe, 2000.

Prof J.E. Haynes explains why Leftists routinely ignore the inconvenient reality of how destructive and inhumane Leftist policies always have turned out to be: "Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated, the economic and social inequalities that have driven people to crime have been removed, poverty does not exist and social justice reigns, world brotherhood has replaced war and international strife, and an economy planned by people like them has produced economic abundance without pollution or waste. Coupled with this vision of the future is loathing of the real present which falls woefully short of these goals and hatred for anyone or anything that stands in the way of their illusion of the radiant future". I would be less charitable than that. Some Leftists may be like that but many if not most are not idealists at all -- just people who are pretending to be -- in order to boost their own ego by appearing "different", "caring", "wise" etc. Their ego matters to them far more than mere facts.

"Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington has not even published his new book on the cultural threat of mass Third World immigration, but already the Open Borders onslaught on book and author has begun.... What's interesting about the attacks is not only that they precede the appearance of the actual book but seek more to discredit Mr. Huntington himself- as a nut, a "nativist," a fount of "hate and suspicion"-by name-calling.... The tactics of smear almost always tell us that the smear's target has offered facts and arguments that can't be answered on their merits-and the only way to answer them at all is to attack the person who brings them up in the first place."

The Bell Curve by Murray & Herrnstein was also attacked in a similarly unscholarly way. Murray comments: "I do not know how to explain the extraordinary discrepancy between what The Bell Curve actually says about race and what most commentators have said that the book says, except as the result of some sort of psychological projection onto our text. Other factors are at work as well. Michael Novak (who has written favorably about The Bell Curve) and Thomas Sowell (who has his criticisms of the book) have pointed out in similar terms that the Left has invested everything in a few core beliefs about society as the cause of problems, government as the solution, and the manipulability of the environment for reaching the goal of equality. For the Left, as Novak puts it, The Bell Curve's "message cannot be true, because much more is at stake than a particular set of arguments from psychological science. A this-worldly eschatological hope is at stake. The sin attributed to Herrnstein and Murray is theological: they destroy hope".

Australian academic Leftists don't care about the truth either: "Claims of plagiarism against Keith Windschuttle reveal the desperation of his critics. Windschuttle's book, launched last Monday at the Tattersalls Club, has already had an extraordinary impact in the academic world. It refutes the "black armband" view of Australian history and seeks to overturn the concept of white guilt and black victimhood which have become embedded in the national psyche. It told how Australia's academic historians have "failed their public responsibility to tell the truth", said Claudio Veliz... The book has already forced admissions from three high-profile purveyors of "black armband" history."

In case you have not seen it already Ron Rosenbaum's 2002 article on the moral imbecility of the Left ("Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee") is also worth reading.

Slate reports that we know next to nothing about the effects of gay parenting on children. So let's experiment on a generation to find out! No "precautionary principle" there. Under the precautionary principle Green/Left politicians say that the alleged unknowns of genetically modified crops make them too risky to even experiment with, so modifying tried and tested social systems is surely at least as risky. Where's the hysteria? Once again we see that a so-called "principle" is just a tool to cause disruption, not something sincerely believed. It will never be used against disruption of society.

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ELSEWHERE

"Behind closed doors many U.S. technology executives will say something that could get them flayed if repeated in public: Sending computer programming jobs to India and China is good for America".

Internet pioneer Marc Andreesen supports the outsourcing of computer programming jobs as win-win.

The wicked one says the Pledge of Allegiance is Leftist!

My recipe for today is for pumpkin muffins. Very vegetarian! But they taste good too. See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

THE NATURE OF MORALITY

One of the most common topics of conversation among people is whether or not various things are right or wrong so it is more than a little strange that Leftist intellectuals very often claim that there is no such thing as right or wrong. Clearly, then, the nature of right and wrong is an important topic if only for political reasons. So Keith Burgess-Jackson and I have each in our own way been trying in our recent postings to give a careful account of what morality is and what it can and cannot do.

I think Keith's most recent posting on the matter is a very clear one that very few people could have much argument with but I think it needs to be extended a bit to answer what Leftists say. So I will try to do that. Keith says that only values exist rather than any abstract properties of rightness or wrongness and I agree with that, as would most Leftists. Where do we go from there, however? Leftists draw the to-be-expected inconsistent conclusion that describing anything as "wrong" or "evil" is therefore silly unless it it applies to the actions of George W. Bush or other conservatives.

The conclusion I draw is that people use moral language in a variety of ways but they mostly mean something real and important by it that transcends the personal. They are not merely expressing their own preferences or values. They are conveying propositions that do have truth value. This can most clearly be seen in those cases where we feel that we could substitute the word "advantageous" for "good" or "right" with no loss of meaning or little loss of meaning. I take "advantageous" to mean "leading in the long term to a situation that you would prefer". So the saying "killing babies is wrong" translates not to "there is an immutable property of wrongness about killing babies" but to "Killing babies leads in the long term to a situation that you would not prefer over the alternative."

Now, obviously, many people DO want to say that killing babies has nothing to do with preferences and that it would still be wrong even if everyone in the universe said it was right. That is however a mere assertion or expression of personal opinion that is not testable and so has no truth value. I do not argue with such people. They are entitled to their opinion and to their way of using words. I simply want to point out that for many if not most people "advantageous" is either a large part or 100% of what they mean by "right" and that in such cases the statement is capable of being argued for as being either true or false. I could, for instance, argue against the proposition that "Killing babies leads in the long term to a situation that you would not prefer over the alternative" by saying that the ancient Greeks routinely killed babies and that theirs was the most brilliant society and civilization of its times so killing babies does not have consequences that are automatically or on the whole unpleasant. Many people would fault my argument in that respect (by presenting, for instance, reasons why Greece would have been even more brilliant if they had not killed babies) but the argument would be about what leads to what -- a scientific argument, if you like. It would not be a mere assertion of values.

So it is perfectly reasonable, rational, realistic and coherent to see "is right" statements as having truth value -- and Leftists who deny truth value to such statements are distorting or ignoring what many if not most people mean by such statements.

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BUREAUCRACY AT WORK

"The well-known inefficiencies of government operation are not empirical accidents, resulting perhaps from the lack of a civil-service tradition. They are inherent in all government enterprise, and the excessive demand fomented by free and other underpriced services is just one of the many reasons for this condition."

Bureaucratic lies: "Last fall, every state was required by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act to identify schools with a 'persistently dangerous' atmosphere so parents would have a better idea of whether their children were being educated in a safe learning environment. When 44 states denied having any such schools and the remaining states admitted to having a combined total of fewer than 50, one safety expert greeted the publication of the lists with a Bronx cheer."

Bureaucrats take aim at doctors "Some doctors have been literally 'under the gun.' Government agents broke down the doors of Dr. Jonathan Wright's office in Washington state, seeking to investigate the heinous crime of using a form of Vitamin B12 that didn't meet the government?s idea of what a 'good vitamin' should be."

Drug hysteria: "I have long referred to the war on drugs as the war on some people who use some drugs, sometimes. Now there's a byproduct of that war -- a side effect, if you will -- a war against doctors who prescribe painkillers, putting a chill on legitimate pain treatment by physicians who fear prosecution."

Patient billed $1100 for 5min visit: ""Whether the doctor is there for 10 minutes or 10 hours, that is the standard charge for the management of labour," she said. "Her own doctor would have charged exactly the same fee. It is an item number set by Medicare and there is one set charge for that item regardless of how long it takes.""

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ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald shows that John Kerry's latest tax proposals are a good way of DESTROYING millions of American jobs.

The Horny-headed one has an interesting graph showing that poverty was declining until the LBJ-era expansion of welfare. Poverty CLIMBED as more welfare became available. Then when welfare programs were cut back in the Clinton era, poverty went DOWN again! How strange? Not at all. The Happy Carpenter explains why.

The wicked one has several links about the idiocies of gun control.

My recipe today is for Vindaloo -- a well-known "hot" (spicy) curry. By making it yourself at home you can put as many chillies in it as you like (or none at all) and thus have it hot, medium or mild. It tastes great even without the chillies. See here.

I have put quite a few postings up on PC Watch lately. Political correctness is showing no signs of waning but there is the occasional victory over it.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

At a time when resources have never been so cheap or abundant the nutty Greens have somehow got it into their heads that we are running out of things. Why? Because they work on simple-minded theories and are totally oblivious of facts. Once upon a time it made sense to darn socks and lots of women took a basket with them to go shopping. I can remember my mother doing both things back in the '50s. But who does either of those things now? Socks are so cheap that it would be lunacy to spend time darning them and plastic is so cheap it is almost free. Shops wouldn't give plastic bags away willy-nilly otherwise. The price system gives us all the resource scarcity signals we need. If wool and plastic were becoming scarcer the price would be going up and we would all soon be back to darning socks and taking baskets when shopping. But the opposite is happening. Things are getting cheaper, not dearer. It takes a Greenie not to notice that.

The Associated Press ran a global warming story this past weekend that makes the following statement: "Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year..." See here for a systematic puncturing of the claim.

Bidinotto asks: "Do you ever wonder why terrorism has become so widespread? Then consider the crucial role played by terrorism's enablers: those intellectual and cultural leaders who act as apologists and excuse-makers for violence... Hollywood is now producing a new movie glorifying the violent exploits of eco-terrorist Paul Watson, transforming him into a cultural hero and icon. The film will star Academy Award-winner Sean Penn as the thug who rams and sinks fishing vessels..."

Physicist A.E. Brain says that global warming is part of a normal cycle unconnected with human activity: "It seems likely that the melting of the ice-sheet around the North Pole will continue whatever is done and that the climate differences we have seen within the last two decades will not alter their present course. To a physicist the supposition that such a considerable change in the temperature of the Pacific Ocean has been produced by a minor variation in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere "caused by the burning of fossil fuels" is simply nonsense. Unfortunately, among the world's politicians this supposed "fact" has now become dogma; the waste of resources that has resulted from fighting this mythical dragon can only be regarded as futile and tragic.... Unfortunately many of the environmentalists who denounce global warming supposedly created by the burning of fossil fuels, may be driven by a political agenda and may be illiterate in matters relating to physics. Our concern here is simply with trying to get the physics right - events will inevitably take care of the rest. Global warming will definitely affect the future of every person on the Earth directly and to a non-trivial extent. We are all seekers after the truth. There are those who claim to have all of the answers by mystical revelation and do not need evidence - they "just know""

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Economic indicators do not point to a market drop this year Share prices could continue to rise right into 2005 as excess capacity falls, investment rises and output and productivity continue to increase.
Union leader claims minimum wages don't raise unemployment The likes of Combet and their media hand-puppets blather on about the low-paid and the need to price them out of work, because that's exactly what their economic nostrums amount to.
Journalist misleads readers over Bush's war on terror There is just no pleasing Bush-hating journalists, including Australian ones. Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, aka "The Saddam Times". No wonder some people now think that Fairfax Press, to which this paper belongs, is an intellectual cesspit.
The Age lies for Palestinian terrorism Fairfax Press cheerfully welcomed a Palestinian apologist for terrorism.
Saudi Columnist: Terrorists in Iraq are more barbarous than Saddam A Saudi columnist criticises Arabs for blaming the US for the terror attacks in Karbala and Baghdad.
Solution of China's ills demands a free society China's problems are turning the country into a ticking time bomb.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Aaargh! Has Mr Flip-flop flipped? "John Kerry wants to cut corporate taxes by 5 percent and eliminate tax loopholes that push U.S. jobs overseas." Has he now lost the Leftist vote? There will certainly be much weeping and wailing and garnishing of teeth among Leftists today. ("gnashing", I know).

Bidinotto has some satirical details of John Kerry's private life.

There are less than 1,000 homeless people in the whole of Chicago! How tragic for the do-gooders. Never mind: 1,000 out of 8 million is still too many! Tax the rich! More welfare! More rent control! Down with patriarchy! Or something.

Good man! "Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has launched a trenchant attack on Islamic culture, saying it was authoritarian, inflexible and under-achieving. In a speech that will upset sensitive relations between the faiths, he denounced moderate Muslims for failing unequivocally to condemn the "evil" of suicide bombers. He attacked the "glaring absence" of democracy in Muslim countries, suggested that they had contributed little of major significance to world culture for centuries and criticised the Islamic faith." It may be noteworthy that Carey is one of the few Anglican bishops who still seem to believe in God.

A black blogress exposes the "reparations" industry for what it is -- a racket.

The Taliban's fall has helped lift the veil of superstition in Afghanistan. Women and children are the winners

The wicked one has some comforting thoughts for those who worry whether their diet is "healthy".

My recipe for today is for an upmarket version of Steak Diane -- The classic Australian way of cooking a fancy steak. See here. If any reader has "family-favourite" recipe that he/she thinks should be more widely known, do send it in to me and I will give it a trial run to see if it works for me -- and if it does I will post it up.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2003

APPEASEMENT WATCH

People sometimes forget that the United States has been to war against Muslim terrorism once before -- not long after the USA became a nation. The terrorists concerned were the Barbary pirates of North Africa and on that occasion too, the USA had to act with only sporadic help from Europe. And also then appeasement just led to more demands and more attacks so that it was only force of arms that won peace and freedom from attacks. See here and here

Beat this! Appeasement doesn't work -- deterrence does: "A group of 70 Palestinian intellectuals and officials urged restraint on Thursday over Israel's killing of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, calling for peaceful protests instead of bloody revenge."

There is a good short article here about the double standards applied to Israel in its fight against Islamic terrorism. OK to kill Osama & Co. but not OK to kill their Palestinian equivalents?

A very sober warning here of the likely dreadful consequences of the Spanish appeasement: More bombs for Europe.

Gefen says: "Watching the parade of hypocrisy, racism, lies, and abject cowardice spewing forth from Europe over the execution of Hamas murderer Yassin has led me to only one conclusion: Europe is our enemy. The enemy of Israel, the enemy of the United States, the enemy of civilization itself. Its weakness and moral/spiritual bankruptcy threatens the lives and freedom of every one of us. It has become a continent of collaborators with terror and political evil".

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ELSEWHERE

A MOST interesting United Nations report (about the "Micronutrient Initiative") has just come out which acknowledges that the people of poor countries are less intelligent! "But the most disturbing gap between countries with good and poor nutrition is in intelligence, said Cutberto Garza, a Cornell University professor who also leads the nutrition program at United Nations University. "A difference of five to seven IQ points doesn't sound like a lot, but you have to look at the tail ends of the (statistical) curve". The report, however, glides past the magnitude of the problem. It states, correctly, that about 5 IQ points can be added by optimal nutrition but neglects to mention that the gap between (say) some European and (say) some African populations is more than 20 points on average! And the means they recommend for utilizing the potential of good nutrition is also perfectly reasonable -- adding vitamin and mineral supplements to manufactured food. But the inhabiants of poor countries eat very little manufactured food! So how are we going to get them rich enough to buy manufactured food? More capitalism and less socialism is the only way. I don't think that got a mention, though. See Lynn & Vanhanen for the full facts about international differences in IQ.

Law versus science?? Frank Sulloway, one of the authors of the infamous "Berkeley Study" of the psychology of conservatism, has just shown how much of a scientist he is. When another scientist could not replicate the findings reported in Sulloway's book, Sulloway used the legal system in an almost successful attempt to suppress the contrary evidence. How Leftist! Replicating (repeating) a finding is the acid test of any scientific theory so Sulloway has totally discredited himself as a scientist. His book was devoted to the theory that it is birth order that makes you Leftist or Rightist. If you are not a firstborn, you should be a Leftist according to Sulloway! So it was another attempt to discredit the role of reason and logic -- and his legal attack on his critics was an attack on science itself.

Amusing: "With a small band of performers, writers, technicians and investors, Mr Walsh is taking a set of unmistakably leftwing voices to America's airwaves, where the right reigns supreme. Air America radio goes on the air next Wednesday". Are they trying to do NPR out of a job?

The National Urban League has just released the very old news that blacks are poorer than whites. This bit slipped past the censors, however: "About 68 percent of Americans own their homes, but the Census Bureau has reported that ownership among blacks and Hispanics is about 48 percent. Nearly 54 percent of Asian-Americans own their homes, compared with 75 percent of whites." Those poor Asians! Someone give them a dime! That the choices people make influence how well-off they appear to be is obviously the unmentioned elephant in the bedroom there.

"Hispanics and the Bottom Rung: Often uneducated, many are more willing than blacks or whites to take less desirable jobs, which keeps their jobless rate fairly low.... Latinos' thirst for labor and employers' eagerness to hire them "is so powerful that it offsets the education advantage blacks have," adds William M. Rodgers III, chief economist at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University." No comment.

With Saddam gone, the Ba'athist dictatorship next door is now coming under popular pressure

New Iraq has had enough of Old France: "France's policy is still sharply criticized by Iraqis. Contrary to what Europeans often think, having opposed the American occupation certainly does not help the popularity of Europe, or of any country, in Iraq."

Don Hagen has a humorous political beliefs quiz here

Amusing: Instead of importing people from the Third World to do menial jobs, The Japanese use robots.

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

Pork fillet mostly seems to be eaten in the form of chops as far as I can work out but you can buy just the fillet if you want a treat. My recipe for today gives a good way to cook it. See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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25 March, 2004

JOBS AND GLOBALIZATION

Economist Alan Reynolds points out that loss of factory jobs is occurring worldwide as processes become more efficient and that losses in the USA are actually SMALLER than the loss of factory jobs in China, South Korea, Germany and Japan.

The brainless Leftist idea of how to protect American jobs: "The trouble with protectionism, aside from its costs to the consumer, is that other nations retaliate: If America forbids the import of their goods and services into America, they will not permit export of American products to their countries. That would be costly because one factory job in five in America depends on international trade."

"186 million children, between the ages of 5 and 14, perform illegal child labor. 111 million of these jobs involve hazardous work. Kaushik Basu offers his analysis and observations in the latest issue of Scientific American. Obviously wealth is the best cure for hazardous and oppressive child labor. By the latter part of the 19th century, child labor was declining in the richer nations. Basu notes that many anti-child labor campaigns backfire. A 1990s boycott of Nepalese carpets, made with child labor, led many of those children to become reemployed as prostitutes".

Some economists ask: "Does increased international trade promote child labor? ... We find that countries that trade more have less child labor."

"Massachusetts ... has lost a higher percentage of jobs the past three years (6 percent) than any other state, according to data released this month by the Labor Department." Funny that! Nothing to do with firms moving elsewhere to escape tax and regulation burdens, of course.

The war against slavery isn't over, and globalisation is helping to eliminate it in India.

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THE EDUCATION MESS

"Oxford University is moving to reintroduce entrance tests for history and English in the latest assault on the credibility of the A-level system as a means of identifying bright pupils. The move comes just nine years after the university scrapped its entrance examinations amid concern that they favoured independent school pupils.

Teachers hate free speech: "The Michigan Court of Appeals today threw out a lawsuit filed by the Michigan Education Association that attempted to punish the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank that accurately quoted the union's president in a fundraising letter. The Court stated that discussion on matters of public interest, such as school choice, should enjoy broad protection under the First Amendment ..."

Janet Albrechtsen argues against special scholarsips to entice males into teaching: "In promoting special privileges for male teachers, the Government has made exactly the same mistake as the unionists and the feminists - extrapolating the wrong conclusion from raw numbers without looking behind the numbers" Albrechtsen is not entirely fair, however. All Australia's conservative Federal government proposed was to REMOVE certain legal restrictions on what private bodies can do.

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ELSEWHERE

Cronkite attacks Kerry: "Dear Senator Kerry: In the interests of your campaign and your party's desire to unseat George W. Bush, you have some explaining to do. During the primary campaign, your Democratic opponents accused you of flip-flopping on several important issues, such as your vote in favor of the Iraq War resolution. ... Shades of gray don't do well in political campaigns, where primary colors are the rule. And your long and distinguished service in the Senate has no doubt led to genuine changes in some positions. But the denial that you are a liberal is almost impossible to reconcile. ... A candidate who lacks the courage of his convictions cannot win a nation, Mr. Kerry."

Guess who supports John Kerry? Malaysia's famously antisemitic Muslim ex-Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohammad!

From Conservative Truth: "You don't believe Kerry is al Qaeda's choice? America certainly does. In a national survey, Americans were asked, "Who do you believe the terrorists want to win in November?" 65% answered "Kerry". Only 17% thought Bush would be their choice."

Some interesting statistics: Assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders saves both Palestinian and Israeli lives.

A couple of readers have asked why I was not more critical of the article in the Christian Science Monitor that quoted my work. I take the view that ANY mention of Hitler's Leftism in the mainstream media is a breakthrough. See here for the full story.

I like Keith Burgess-Jackson's idea of hurling epitaphs at people. Should be more of it!

Writing on his "other" site, China Hand reviews the changes of the last 20 years or so in both China and Australia and notes the progress towards economic rationality in both -- with an accompanying rise in living and other standards.

The wicked one has a story about the Australian approach to salesmanship.

My recipe for today is a quick way to make good spaghetti bolognaise. See here. I am pleased to say that a lady in Melbourne emailed me yesterday after trying my recipe for Korean meatballs. She said they were "a big hit with all the family".

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

HOMOSEXUALITY

I personally don't think that what homosexuals do among themselves matters a hill of beans one way or the other but nobody (Left or Right) seems to agree with me so here are some of the more interesting recent comments:

"Newsweekly" (Catholic conservative publication) on same sex marriage... "Until recently, laws in every country throughout the world recognised marriage as a legally enforceable agreement between a man and a woman to become husband and wife. Marriage changes the status of those who enter into it: it is an exclusive and enduring contract which requires the husband and wife to pledge fidelity to each other, and to care for each other and their children. On this foundation, marriage is regarded as the basis of the family unit, necessary to protect the position of children, and ultimately, important to the stability of society. With the best will in the world, none of these conditions apply to homosexual couples."

Osama & Co. can't stop Saudi Arabia's homosexuals: "Jeddah's malls have become meeting places for another group: homosexuals. Gay Saudi men now cruise certain malls and supermarkets, openly making passes at each other"

"Nationalizing marriage laws will only grant more power over our lives to the federal government, even if for supposedly conservative ends. A far better approach is for Congress to exercise its existing constitutional power to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts."

"Marriage is a fundamental human right. For many of us, and our churches, it is a holy act; in some religions even a sacrament. These two facts point to the only decent American solution to the gay marriage controversy. Marriage belongs in church, not in the courthouse or the legislature.

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ELSEWHERE

I noted over 30 years ago how violent "peace" demonstrators were then. They are still the same -- as hypocritical and dishonest as ever.

Thanks to one of my readers, I found this article in the "Christian Science Monitor" which quotes some of my points about Hitler. The realization of how Leftist Hitler was is slowly getting into the mainstream instead of being known only to historians.

"Wearing the American military uniform doesn't guarantee the person wearing it loves America, understands America, or is even interested in defending America. That should be quite clear by now. That people like John Kerry should think to conjure up images of genuine American patriotism by publicizing a very dubious military record and subsequent political activism is a sign of leftist delusion. The Left always presumes the public is ignorant and treats the public as such"

"The story of Anthony Bars -- the 4-year-old boy who was starved and beaten to death in Indiana by foster parents with a criminal record of child abuse -- continues. Due to media and public outrage, the caseworker who recommended removing Anthony from an earlier, loving foster parent is facing charges. Denise Moore is accused of official misconduct and of falsifying reports in an adoption proceeding: misdemeanor offenses. Sadly, Anthony is just one in a long list of children neglected or abused by Child Protective Services... The increased power of child welfare agencies to do so comes from legislation dating back to the Mondale Act of 1974. That act established huge financial incentives for state agencies to uncover abuse, without providing checks or balances to protect those wrongfully accused. It also virtually immunized child welfare workers and false accusers from liability."

Capitalism is good for your health. Poland is much more capitalist than Russia and it shows in their health statistics: "In the early 1980s life expectancies in Soviet Russia and Communist Poland were roughly similar, and both were starting to get worse. Cancer and cardiovascular disease were beginning a rapid rise, in lock step with their prime causes: smoking and alcoholism. Two decades later, Poland's life expectancy for men, at 70, has risen by four years since the collapse of communism and now is more than 10 years longer than that of Russian men. In Poland, cardiovascular disease has fallen by 20 percent in a decade, while in Russia, it has risen by 25 percent"

A paragraph from a very impassioned book (Beyond Terror) by Ralph Peters: "A room filled with university professors makes me nostalgic for the Khmer Rouge. Since I value intellect, I dislike intellectuals-those men and women, freed from the necessity of labor, who prefer theory to reality and who footnote while others fight our nation's battles. The enormous increase in the number of minds shielded from mundane concerns-thanks to our expanding wealth-is far more dangerous than the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction: Absurd theories killed vastly more human beings in the twentieth century than did the most terrible weapons. Those powers of thought that so enrich the years of the man or woman unafraid of life are employed by the intellectual to reduce life to a colorless, explicable sketch. The intellectual, whether a dean on a Cambridge campus or a scholar in a Cairo madrassah, perverts the power of the mind in order to force reality to conform to a simplified, strict, and inhuman vision of the way the world should be. With intellectuals in charge, of course."

Blogger A.E. Brain has been looking at what the National Library of Australia carries on its website: "I did a search on "Iraq & Saddam". The results, frankly, astonished me. A result worthy of the Misistry of Truth. Of the 4638 hits, I reviewed the first 1000. Of these, approximately 300+ were political anyalysis and commentary. Of that 300+, I found 2 that were neutral, neither pro- nor anti- war, but dispassionate analysis of alternatives. The rest were all anti-Bush, anti-War, anti-American." As Slattery comments: "And that clearly displays the difference between us rationalists and the dumb, unconfident in their convictions, moral relativists: we can handle all sides of the debate, because we know truth will win; they can't because they don't want truth, only ideology." Leftists really are pathetic in their fear of the full truth on any matter becoming known.

Colorado Conservative says fitness is bad for you. I agree. The last time I did any exercise was when I was 16 and at 60 I feel fine.

China Hand says very few people in China are interested in politics. They are too busy improving their personal lives.

I have just put up a recipe for Liptauer cheese spread and Hungarian open sandwiches: Something different. See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

SOME MORE PHILOSOPHICAL OBSERVATIONS

Amusing: My critique yesterday of an article by big-time Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman produced a very rapid backdown. Prof. Harman emailed me a brief reply, the key sentence of which was "My article was intended only to point to certain developments in social psychology" -- a much more modest claim than he in fact originally made. For instance, he originally said "Character based virtue ethics may offer a reasonable account of ordinary moral views. But to that extent, these ordinary views rest on error". A climbdown from "error" to "certain developments" is quite a plummet. Given the way he had ignored half the evidence on his topic, a backdown was of course all that was available to him.

Being an old guy, I have long ago decided (and got into print) what my views are on most of the major questions of analytical philosophy. Keith Burgess-Jackson's various posts on philosophical questions have however reminded me what fun philosopical questions can be so my interest in thinking about them has revived somewhat. Keith and I do not however agree on many of our conclusions. I suspect, in fact that there are NO two philosophers who agree with one-another on all philosophical questions. So I am sure that Keith will not take it amiss if I make a few comments (in my usual "take no prisoners" way) about his theories. He will probably just give my theories a hard time in reply.

In particular, Keith has a theory of "rightness" that is deontological. A deontologist believes that at least some actions have little bits of rightness or wrongness attached to them in some mysterious, mystical and unobservable way. Keith's own version of deontology seems to be peculiar to him: He thinks that uncontracted actions (contracted actions being actions done or refrained from pursuant to some sort of contract) can only have wrongness attached to them, not rightness. That oddity aside, however, he seems (in his major paper on the subject) to give NO reason why he believes that some actions have moral attachments nor does he say how we find out what those attachments are or resolve disputes about what they are.

That really puzzles me. I could understand such a view in a religious believer -- as religious believers believe in lots of mysterious, mystical and unobservable stuff -- but Keith is an atheist! I am forced back onto the view espoused by John Maze that Keith and those like him are simply making a mistake about how uncontracted actions come to have rightness or wrongness. Maze (See: Maze, J. (1973) "The concept of attitude". Inquiry, 16, 168-205) says that because moral properties are sometimes spoken about in the same way as physical properties (the statement "X is right" is of the same form as "X is pink"), some people mistakenly conclude that moral properties must have a separate and distinct existence of their own similar to physical properties. They don't, however. As most people readily see, "X is right" is an entirely different sort of statement from "X is pink". They see that "X is is right" is a value judgment whereas "X is pink" is a statement of fact. It is easy to detect, measure and agree on pinkness. None of that is true of rightness.

That "rightness" is a value judgment does not however mean that it is unimportant. As I think almost all psychologists would agree, values are very important indeed. I spent most of my research career studying them.

I also made a very brief comment yesterday about how I believe rights (as distinct from rightness) come about. Keith asked in reply whether or not I think that babies have rights. The ancient Greeks certainly thought that newborn babies had no rights at all. A father had the right (up to a certain age) to say whether a baby lived or died. So it seems to me that we GIVE babies rights. They are not BORN with rights. If babies are born with rights that are independent of any human law or custom, where do we find those rights? -- under the baby's fingernails? If not there, where? Or do we merely assert them without proof or evidence? And how come the Greeks could not find them?

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ELSEWHERE

There is a very interesting article in "Spiked" which blames terrorism on the risk-aversion that the politically-correct brigade have engendered in Western society. We look so chicken-livered to the rest of the world that they think they can easily intimidate us into doing what they want. And the lack of cojones among the Spanish has reinforced that impression. Thank goodness for the resolve of GWB in Afghanistan and Iraq!

The NYT has used the occasion of declaring the famously polluted "Love Canal" clean to revive all the Greenie myths about it. Wayne Lusvardi writes: "Times reporter Brian De Palma is incorrect that in 1978 "hundreds of families were evacuated from the working-class Love Canal section of Niagara Falls, N.Y., after deadly chemicals started oozing through the ground into basements and a school, burning children and pets and causing birth defects and miscarriages." The truth is that after decades of research, there is no scientifically substantiated incident of harm, not even so much as catching a cold, that ever occurred to humans at Love Canal due to exposure to so-called toxic chemicals, as documented in the book by Aaron Wildavsky: But Is It True? A Citizen's Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues -Harvard University Press, 1995.

Western Australia has decriminalized cannabis. Prohibition of alcohol did not work either. As Queen Elizabeth I of England asked King Philip II of Spain centuries ago: "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?"

"An opinion poll suggests most Iraqis feel their lives have improved since the war in Iraq began about a year ago. The survey, carried out for the BBC and other broadcasters, also suggests many are optimistic about the next 12 months and opposed to violence."

Michael Darby has just put up a new lot of postings. Some of his headings:
THE PRIME MINISTER IS RIGHT (about Australia's risk from terrorism)
Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen (Influential former conservative Premier of the State of Queensland)
Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage
Education Debate: Good work by Hon Brendan Nelson MP
Adoption of children by homosexual couples
Food Scares

David Yeagley compares the so-called "Christians" of the Left to the Pharisees.

Peg Kaplan has the Jug Man ("Krug" means jug" in German) summed up.

The wicked one has put up an alaming scenario of how difficult it soon might be to order a pizza.

My recipe for today is for that old Greek favourite -- Moussaka. It's not a quick recipe to make but the result is worth it. See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

SOME DUBIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY

I have just been reading a much-linked article on moral philosophy by Prof. Gilbert Harman of the Philosophy Dept. at Princeton -- titled "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology". Judging by his publication list, Harman is one of the eminences of American moral philosophy so I am sorry to say that in my view his article is straight out of cloud-cuckoo land (with apologies to Aristophanes). I have no idea of Harman's general political orientation but his argument on this subject is classic Leftist stuff. To oversimplify a little, he claims that there is no such thing as a stable personality trait in anybody and that "It's all situational". It is only people's environment that dictates how they behave. So there is no barrier to creating a "new Soviet man", for instance. He claims, in other words, that there is no such thing as a "kind" man, a "dominant" man a "selfish" man etc. etc. His reasoning seems to be the completely fallacious: "Because nobody is kind all the time, therefore nobody is kind most of the time".

His article is deceptive from the outset. He claims that his view is "widespread" among social psychologists. If one psychologist in half a dozen countries around the world held such a view, I suppose the view could indeed be described as "widespread" but that would not at all mean that it is a majority view. And to my knowledge it is in fact the view of only a small minority of psychologists. Such a view had some vogue in response to a paper by Mischel (Mischel, W. (1977) "On the future of personality measurement" American Psychologist 32, 246-254) but the vast majority of psychologists continued to talk of traits nonetheless.

Where Harman appears to have gone wrong is in his narrow view of social psychology. There are two strands of social psychology -- the experimental and the correlational. The typical method of the first is to tell lies to your students and see what happens next while the typical method of the second is simply to ask people what they think about a variety of topics. Almost all my papers are in the latter tradition. And the reason why I and many others do the sort of psychology we do is that we find the totally unknowable generalizability of the experimental work to be deeply unsatisfactory. Neither people nor situations are normally sampled in any way in such work so any attempt to draw general conclusions from its results is faith, not science. And it is the "faith-based" work that Harman relies on.

The more soundly-based correlational work, on the other hand, almost automatically has the means of examining the sort of assertion made by Harman. It has the data to tell (via factor analysis etc.) whether there is any trait-like consistency in what people report about themselves. And there is. People do report considerable consistency in how they behave from situation to situation. And not only that, but the consistency can usually be readily summarized by normal trait adjectives, and OTHER PEOPLE agree that the self-described consistencies of behaviour do exist in the individual concerned (e.g. here). Harman has simply not attempted to look at the evidence most relevant to his assertion. But unconcern about the evidence is of course hardly new among Leftists. I would even describe it as one of their "traits"!

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ANIMAL RIGHTS

Why animal rights don't exist: "My point was, in essence, that rights are just not the sort of things animals other than people could have. Could animals have guilt, be blamed, feel regret and remorse, or apologize or anything on that order? No, and why so, that was the gist of my thesis: They are not moral agents like us, not even the great apes." I must say that I cannot see any way that rights can arise except through some sort of contract (implicit or explicit) or law so the idea of inborn animal rights seems mere emotionalism to me. Though I imagine that Keith Burgess Jackson might have something to say about that.

PETA's latest: Constitutional rights for fish! "Sorry, crustaceans and reptiles. You didn't make People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' list of animals that deserve protection under their proposed constitutional amendment, which declares 'all mammals, birds, and fish will, henceforth, be defined as 'persons' in the eyes of the law.' Of course, PETA's idea of protecting animals would strip us of everything from our leather shoes to the milk in our breakfast cereal (not to mention bacon and eggs). PETA president Ingrid Newkirk has called human beings the 'biggest blight on the face of the earth.'"

Get ready to see the real PETA, warts and all . ... Showtime will air the program at 10pm (all time zones) on April 1. ... This might be the only kind of publicity PETA's self-styled 'total press sluts' would prefer to avoid. The group's radical zealots may wish this were just an April Fool's joke, but it's not."

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ELSEWHERE

Andrew Bolt gives details of how Australia's universities and public broadcasters acclaim the views of Far-Leftists who believe that Israeli children and other innocents deserve to die.

Leftist antisemitism: "Anti-semitism is a virus and it mutates. To claim Jews cause their own suffering by failing to denounce Israeli policy is a revival of an old hatred"

Those delightful Arabs again: "More than 100 women have been raped in a single attack carried out by Arab militias in Darfur in western Sudan. ... "It is more than just a conflict. It is an organised attempt to do away with a group of people," he said...Arab militias, backed by the government, have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes"

It comes as no surprise to learn that John Kerry, who hates to take one position on an issue when he can take two or three, has come down strongly in favor -- and strongly against -- US policy in Cuba.

The Lolita story was first created by a Nazi. Makes sense: Nazis were Leftists and Leftists have no moral restraints.

Seeing Easter is coming up, I have put up on my recipe site a recipe that could be useful for family reunions -- a recipe for Greek Easter Lamb. The Greeks really know how to do lamb. See here.

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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.

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



21 March, 2994

GREENIE WATCH

The Democratic Leadership Council released on March 18 a commentary, Carbon Flip, Mercury Flop. The screed begins: "When it comes to environmental issues, the Bush administration seems determined to destroy its own limited credibility." For a point by point refutation, see here

Some current posts on ecoNOT:
* Much a-doo: Greens advise moms not to use diapers!
* Misanthropic quotation of the week: from "animal rights" philosopher Tom Regan
* "Alternative energy" -- but not in environmentalists' back yards
* A new primer on the Mother of All Eco-Crises

If the scientists don't understand climate change, how can anyone be so sure of what to do about it? "As scientists have studied the climate record trapped in glacial ice from Antarctica and Greenland, and in mud samples extracted from beneath the ocean floor, their respect for the speed of change has grown. In the mid-1950s, a change of roughly 3 degrees C over more than 1,000 years was deemed abrupt. In 1999, a team led by Jeffrey Severinghaus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., determined that the last ice age ended with a temperature burst that raised the thermostat at Greenland by some 9 degrees C over a mere decade.... "We still don't understand the causes" behind the increase, he says. .... But here, too, the picture grows murky. At a meeting last fall at the WHOI, researchers from the US and Canada looked at the problem and raised more questions than answers."

More elitist trash from the Green/Left: "In Growth Fetish, Hamilton admits that, in the past times of scarcity, growth was beneficial - but he argues that in today's era of superabundance development no longer leads to subjective wellbeing. To support his argument, he quotes opinion polls showing that people in prosperous societies are often unhappy with their lives... There is a nauseating undertone of elitism in Hamilton's work. In his view, the marketing industry, including advertising, plays a key role in shaping individual desires. He refers to 'gullible consumers' and goes on to argue that 'today's average consumer may be an everyday victim of foolishness and feeble-mindedness in their consumption behaviour' .... Whatever people's subjective sense of wellbeing, there remains a huge amount to be done to raise living standards, even in the more developed countries. For instance, we are constantly being told that there is a demographic problem that means that the elderly cannot expect a reasonable standard of living. But with greater economic growth it will become possible for the elderly and others not able to work to have higher living standards." I wonder how many working people today share the judgment that we are living in a world of "superabundance"? Only a "limousine liberal" would think so.

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OUTSOURCING AND INTERFERENCE WITH FREE TRADE

Who's outsourcing whom? "Airwaves and newspapers are abuzz of late with talk about the loss of manufacturing jobs, the offshoring of tech jobs, immigration, and general alarmism about the 'outsourcing' of the American worker. We hear lots of talk about exactly why (and if) this is happening, but rarely do pundits and commentators look at the relationship between companies moving plants overseas, and the kinds of tax and regulatory policies employed by the states they're moving away from. As it turns out, states with business-friendly public policies attract and retain jobs. States with policies hostile to business tend to lose them."

Outsourcing creates AMERICAN jobs: "When Americans hear the word 'outsourcing,' they typically imagine the movement of U.S. jobs overseas. But globalization has created many forms of outsourcing. Consider the world's appetite for American popular culture. America annually exports $90 billion worth of movies, TV shows, sound recordings and other products created by U.S. 'copyright industries.'"

South Africa's Leftist leaders have been successful in their vow to stop SA becoming the West's African "sweat shop". Pity about their 40% unemployed.

For years we have been hearing about a water shortage in the western states... What specifically is a shortage? It is a situation where you are willing to pay the price but simply cannot find as much as you want.... a shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely. That is precisely why there is a water shortage in the western states.... Even in California's dry Central Valley, less than 10 percent of the water available from federal water projects is used by cities and industries. The vast majority of it is used by farmers, who pay a fraction of what urban users pay, thanks to federal price fixing.The long-term contracts under which this ridiculous arrangement goes on expire this year, so theoretically these contracts could be renegotiated so that everyone who uses water supplied by federal water projects has to pay his own way and cover the costs of the operation. Alas, this is an election year, so you can bet the rent money that no such thing is going to happen.

Western protectionists to India. Don't do as I say. "I read about one Indian who said something like the following: "Hey, you lectured us for decades during the Cold War and Indian socialism. Aren't we now doing exactly what you told us to?"

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby says: "Once upon time it was racists who insisted that "nonwhite" was a synonym for "intellectually deficient." Today that attitude is promoted most emphatically by the defenders of affirmative action, a system rooted in the belief that blacks and certain other minorities can't hope to win if they have to compete on a level playing field."

Even the tolerant Dutch cannot stand Muslims: "Dutch parents are abandoning the state-run school system in droves, and sending their children to private schools with high education standards, which just coincidently happen to be almost exclusively native Dutch. The private schools are referred to as 'white' schools, and the remaining high-ethnic state schools are referred to as 'black' schools, and the phenomena is being called 'white flight'."

Spanish "socialism": "Here are some of the economic promises on which Zapatero's Socialist Workers Party campaigned: lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 30 percent, cutting income taxes, and reducing the value-added tax. Oh, and they're going to balance the budget and control inflation."

I have just put up a recipe for Korean fried meatballs. I am betting that they are the best meatballs you have ever tasted. See here. Food names change a lot from country to country. I can translate some Australian food names into more widely understood ones but I will no doubt miss some. For instance, in yesterday's recipe I mentioned "zucchini". They are "courgettes" in England and "Italian squash" in the USA.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

IMMIGRATION

Samuel Huntington has made a strong case against policies that would increase the rate of Hispanic immigration into the US -- largely on the grounds that the "melting pot" is no longer "melting". There is however some evidence that Hispanic immigrants have in fact been assimilating steadily into American society.

Pro-immigration: America's melting pot is still bubbling... "Some 1.3 million immigrants, legal and illegal, are arriving each year. One in nine U.S. residents began life in another country; the total foreign-born population now exceeds 33 million - more immigrants than people in all of Canada." The author argues that concerns about assimilation go back a long way but all have been shown as misplaced. But the political and social environment of today is very different from that of the past so past precedents may be a poor guide today.

Anti-immigration: Peter Hitchens tells why New Labour wants to turn Britain into a multicultural nowhereland

More on the British government's underhand attempts to INCREASE the intake of unqualified immigrants here and here

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THE ACADEMIC CESSPIT

I was not originally going to blog on the loony Leftist professor who vandalized her own car to draw attention to "hate", but I realized what a good proof of one of the two mottos at the head of this blog it is. Powerline has a good summary of the story. Note how there is NO outrage from the Left about the "lie" concerned. All their outrage about the "lies" allegedly told by GWB is thus shown for the sham it is. No wonder they keep saying there is no such thing as objective truth. Truth just does not matter to them. They don't have double standards. They have no standards. Only power matters to them. And Stalin showed where that ultimately leads.

Academics ignore the elephant in the bedroom: Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, the Imam of the most important mosque in Mecca, sermonized that the Jews are "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs." The Imam further advised Arabs to abandon all peace initiatives with Jews and asked Allah to annihilate them. But an examination of PsycINFO, a leading online index of psychological studies, shows 458 entries on anti-Semitism since 1940, 99 of which have appeared during the past 10 years. But not a single one deals directly with hatred of Jews by Muslims or Arabs in the contemporary world.

Random Observations enjoyed my mention on 17th of the Sokal hoax and does a good job of explaining how postmodernism came about and why academics in English Departments of universities love it. Perhaps because he is an engineer however, he misses the main philosophical objection to postmodernism -- its solipsism. Because the postmodernist asserts that there is no such thing as objective reality, the only thing he can be sure of is that he himself exists. This "collapse into solipsism" has long been regarded by analytic philosophers as a decisive disproof any theory -- because it implies that the person believing such a theory can make no assertions at all.

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ELSEWHERE

They want us all to get AIDS: "Quebec's largest school board has voted to cancel Hema Quebec's annual blood drive at its Montreal offices and will remain in effect until the blood agency changes its policy of excluding gay male donors."

Following my post on IQ yesterday, a reader alerted me to a recent study at Duke university which found that the learning ability of rats was much enhanced if their mothers were fed extra choline while they were in the womb. The inference is that human IQ could be increased by early nutritional supplementation too. Eysenck did a study about 15 years ago which showed that feeding babies and young children extra amounts of key nutrients could increase IQ by about 5 points -- not dramatic but worthwhile. So I would expect the same from this procedure. Choline is a very common component in foods that most people eat regularly, however, so the benefit might be confined to people with particularly abnormal diets.

In the Vietnam war many so-called "peace" activists really wanted their country to be defeated. Their anything-but-peaceful behaviour showed that. Mike Tremoglie points out that at least some "peace" activists today are similarly motivated. Hate is their motive, not peace.

VD Hanson and some myths of Iraq war, a year on: "It has now been almost a year since the liberation of Iraq, the fury of the antiwar rallies, and the publicized hectoring of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Sean Penn, and other assorted conspiracy freaks - and we have enough evidence to lay some of their myths to rest. I just filled up and paid $2.19 a gallon. How can that be, when the war was undertaken to help us get our hands on "cheap" oil? Where is the mythical Afghan pipeline when we need it?"

Mark Steyn on terrorism in Madrid: "In his penultimate public appearance, the late Osama bin Laden, broadcasting from his cave in the early hours of the Afghan campaign, listed among his principal grievances "the tragedy of Andalusia" - that is, the end of Muslim rule in Spain in 1492. That's 512 years ago"

The wicked one has a lot of good stuff up at the moment -- including some wisdom from Charles Schultz -- creator of the "Peanuts" comic strip and Charlie Brown.

My latest recipe is for Frittata -- the ultimate Spanish omelette. See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

BUREAUCRACY

There are some pictures here (or here) showing graphically the sort of bureaucracy that the Left are forever wishing upon us.

There is a classic example of bureaucracy at work near where I live in Brisbane. The local authority (Brisbane City Council) builds boardwalks and the like in seaside areas like Wynnum using ordinary steel bolts to hold the structures together -- completely ignoring the fact that any outdoor structure, let alone one exposed to salty air, is very prone to attack by rust. So the bolts will have rusted out in a few years and all the work will have to be re-done -- doubling the cost. The morons do not even protect the exposed steel with paint -- and something as simple and old-fashioned as using galvanized bolts in the first place is clearly way beyond their ken. Anybody in private enterprise who behaved so stupidly would not last five minutes but in the Left-controlled Brisbane City Council you can be sure that nobody will be held accountable when the structures begin to wobble.

See "When 'Mother' is a Bureaucracy," by Wendy McElroy for more on bureaucratic irresponsibility and negligence -- in this case using little babies in New York as guinea pigs.

What government is good at: "We often complain about how slow government can be. But there's a teenager in Arizona who can tell you that swift government has its downside. On February 23, the Arizona Republic printed a fascinating story about how Christian Alf set up his own after-school business rat-proofing his neighbors' houses. Two days later that same newspaper printed a follow-up: the state of Arizona had put young Mr. Alf out of business, citing him with two separate violations of state law."

There is no guarantee that capitalists will be intelligent but it is broadly true that the smarter ones will get the gravy. An amusing instance I know of in that connection is the practice in many Australian Real Estate offices of having a meeting for all staff on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Buyers who ring at that time are told that there are no salespeople available to assist them. I imagine that 90% of buyers do as I do on such occasions -- ring another agent. I can think of at least two occasions where the next agent I rang in fact sold me something. So the wankers who thought that their meeting was more important than selling anything in effect had several thousand dollars offered to them on a plate and knocked it back! Not smart. They'd do well as government employees, though.

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ELSEWHERE

What fun! A huge and very careful study of mental abilities has just come out from Johns Hopkins University under the title: "Disparities in Cognitive Functioning by Race/Ethnicity in the Baltimore Memory Study". I'll spare you the suspense and tell you for starters that blacks had much lower scores than whites across the board. As the study was primarily of memory, the tests used were not all high loaders on 'g' (general intelligence or 'IQ') so the racial difference varied a fair bit from test to test but it was always there. The amusing thing was that the racial difference persisted depite heroic attempts by the researchers to remove it. They even did some things that an Australian would call "shonky" (con-men and frauds are "shonks"). For example, they removed the effect of social class variables such as wealth on their results. In other words, the scores of poorer people were "adjusted" upward. But wealth is a product of IQ! Smarter people get richer! And this particular study was of 50-70 year old people so any effect of intelligence on wealth would have had plenty of time to show up. If the researchers had used parental status indicators only it might have been more defensible. So the fact that the racial difference emerged despite such blatant attempts to mask it is testimony to how strong the difference is.

Good news: Caltech graduate student Bill Cottrell, accused of firebombing and vandalizing sport utility vehicles, was denied bail Wednesday... Cottrell was indicted Tuesday on nine counts, including a count of using a destructive device during a violent crime, which alone carries a minimum sentence of 30 years in federal prison. See also here

Were the Bush tax cuts just for the rich? This article shows that the benefit was spread across the board.

Mel Gibson has broken the 10 commandments, the Hollywood ones that is: "Because "Passion" will be timely to re-issue theatrically at Easter for years to come, it has the potential to wind up as the biggest grossing film in movie history"

Dumb teachers? No problem! "The nation's schools, under deadline to get a top teacher in every core class, have won some wiggle room in areas where the task hasn't survived a collision with local reality. Rural teachers, science teachers and those who teach multiple subjects will get leeway in showing they are highly qualified under federal law, the Education Department said yesterday."

"Anyone who wants to understand why the media are held in such low regard by the public ... should consider the following headline from an Associated Press story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week: 'Accused spy is cousin of Bush staffer.' The accused person is Susan Lindauer, charged with working for Saddam's intelligence agency. ... Before she allegedly became an Iraqi agent, Miss Lindauer spent a decade in Washington working for four members of Congress, Peter DeFazio, Ron Wyden, Carol Moseley Braun and Zoe Lofgren. What do these four legislators have in common? Answer: They all have a 'D' after their names. But to The Post-Intelligencer's headline writer the salient fact about Miss Lindauer is not her 10 years of work for the Democratic Party but the amazing revelation she is a second cousin of Bush chief of staff Andrew Card."

Firm breasts are bad for women!. The do-gooders will puzzle over that one. Compulsory breast massages, perhaps?

China Hand's latest posting about one of China's new container ports says that it is world-best -- which obviously warms his Sinophilic heart. Being pretty Sinophilic myself, I am pleased to hear of it too.

Today's recipe gives a very easy way to make fettucine. There's no such thing as an "authentic" fettucine recipe but this one tastes good. You may note a certain politically incorrect instruction in it too. See here.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

FREE TRADE UNDER ATTACK FROM IGNORANCE -- AS ALWAYS

Protectionism is pretty disgusting at any time but this example really smells. Efficient producers of shrimp in a poor country (Vietnam) are being subjected to huge legal costs and the threat of tariffs by inefficient American producers who produce only a small fraction of the shrimp sold anyhow. I'll bet you'll not hear a single Leftist sticking up for the poor country on this one. Leftist "caring" and concern for "the poor" is just a lie.

Unemployment: "It is a constant refrain from Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry and his lackeys these days: 'George W. Bush has the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover.' They also claim that an economy that has seen significant growth in productivity, the stock market, consumer confidence, housing starts, and overall economic strength, is a 'jobless recovery' because the Bush administration is 'shipping our jobs overseas.' Statements like these make for great campaign rhetoric, but they are far from true. In fact, the unemployment rate today is virtually the same as it was when President Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996 touting his strong record on the economy."

"Every political campaign seems to have some buzzword, and this year's buzzword is 'outsourcing.' Since the economic recovery has not yet reached the stage when new jobs are being created to the extent expected and hoped, the idea that American jobs are being sent overseas has political mileage, whether or not it has much economic substance."

The "exporting jobs" scam: "Politicians are notoriously economically illiterate. And even when they know what would be the right thing, we don't really expect them to do it. But we do expect financial and economic reporters and 'experts' who appear on television to have some grasp of whatever they're discussing. Thus, when these 'experts' join in the chorus of outrage over greedy corporations exporting jobs, it's easy to believe there must be something to the complaint."

"The lack of employment growth continues to be the major political/economic problem facing the country and it likely will remain that way through Election Day. Contributing to the reluctance to hire permanent employees is the rising cost of employment, especially the cost of benefits ..."

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

The Madrid bombing and the election result is a warning to the US Bush's response to America being attacked was to overthrow the Taliban, bring down the murderous Saddam and take out a good slice of al Qaeda. Spain's response was to hold a mass demonstration against terrorists and then promptly surrender.
US productivity and the jobless mystery The contrast between America's unemployment level and the growth in GDP is causing consternation.
A journalist tries to skewer Bush on incomes and inequality A reporter would have us believe that the widening income gap was caused by President Bush. In fact, the gap grew significantly under Clinton. So what we have is another left-wing attempt to rewrite history.
What determines wages? A businessman cannot pay a worker more than the amount added by the work of the employee to the value of the product i.e. what the customers are prepared to pay for the product.
Why the Clinton boom burst Rather than look to economic history and well-tried theory for guidance, commentators, and some economists too, interpreted the boom as a "new era", one that had "abolished the business cycle".

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

David's Medienkritik says that, while the initial reaction of Germany's left-wing media to the results of the Spanish election was one of joy and relief, a new mood seems to be building up fast: the feeling of fear. Zapatero's intention to withdraw the Spanish military from Iraq does not meet with unanimous approval of even the most ardent Bush-haters.

Bidinotto has some updates on the money-laundering scandal in the John Kerry campaign -- and on what Rudyard Kipling had to say about appeasing terrorists.

In case you have not seen it yet, here is another story about the personal arrogance of "John the Jerk" Kerry -- this time from an airforce pilot who worked for him. Kerry really "cares" (about Kerry).

A Leftist puts the workers first! How unusual: "Opposition Leader Mark Latham has backed continued clear-felling of Tasmania's old-growth forests until 2010, angering environmentalists who had hoped he would pledge to halt logging earlier."

More scare-based "science": "Antibiotic use increases breast cancer risk, according to a new study. But after scrutinizing the study, I'm leaning toward linking grant-hungry researchers and a publicity hungry medical journal with reprehensible sensationalism. ... Without a plausible biological link between antibiotic use and breast cancer, the researchers relied exclusively on statistical analysis, a potentially useful tool if the data analyzed are of reasonable quality. These study data, however, fall way short."

China Hand's recent postings reveal some interesting contrasts: Most of his students have TWO cellphones; things get CHEAPER almost daily in China but they cannot make good bread in at least his part of China.

Arlene Peck says that the Arab areas within Israel have descended into gang-ruled anarchy.

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

Over the years I have collected a lot of recipes for food that I particularly like. Many of them are for fairly unusual dishes but some are just shortcuts. I thought I might as well share them with anyone who is interested so I have started a separarate site on which I hope gradually to post my whole collection. The site is here. The first recipe I have put up is for what should be a fairly traditional Australian meat pie but which nonetheless seems to be little heard of today: Lamb and bacon pie. Great with a tossed salad and a glass or three of good Australian red wine.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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17 March, 2004

LAKOFF AND HIS DEFENDER

"Strange Semantics" is an anonymous "cognitive psychologist" -- apparently a cross between a psychologist and a linguist. His views, though Leftist, are somewhat more reasoned than the usual Leftist torrent of abuse featuring words like "scary" so I thought I might make a brief reply to his post about Leftist linguist George Lakoff. He refers to my article on Lakoff and says that I have misinterpreted what Lakoff says in his book about the Left/Right divide. I may well have done that. I cannot take Lakoff seriously enough to study him in any depth. (His work seems to be a branch of that solipsistic body of Leftist thought known as "postmodernism" and, after the Sokal hoax, I think one must suspect all postmodernism of being essentially contentless -- and hence worthy of yawns only). But I was guided in my interpretation of Lakoff by Lakoff himself in his interview here. I think my article is a fair comment on Lakoff's version of Lakoff. A comment on Lakoff's theories by Bernhardt Varenius at the foot of the "Strange Semantics" post is good too: "The liberal worldview, the indulgent parent model, assumes that the world is nothing but puppy dogs and rainbows and children are born good and only become bad if their parents are conservative...." etc.

A reflection on projection: Over 30 years ago I put into the academic literature the view that the Leftists who were throwing rocks and bombs in the cause of "peace" (a common phenomenon at that time) were a prime example of what psychologists call "projection" -- seeing and hating their own faults in others. The slogan at the top of this blog asking why Leftists are always going on about "hate" ("Hate crimes" etc) also embodies that view of Leftist motivations. I suspect that our academic friend at "Strange Semantics" is another case in point. I asked him why he was clinging to anonymity and asked was he ashamed of his views. He replied: "No, I'm not ashamed of my views. I'm just wary of people on the internet". The idea that people on the internet are particularly dangerous sounds pretty paranoid to me but I will credit him with sanity and look for another reason why he holds that view. Lots of conservative bloggers with views that many would violently disagree with -- such as myself -- put their names and personal particulars on their blogs so why is this Leftist blogger so cowardly? What has he got to fear? I think the aggression against conservatives that is so often unleashed by Leftists in power (such as Stalin or modern-day campus Leftists) gives us the answer. He knows how hate- and rage-filled he and his fellow Leftists are and assumes that conservatives are at least as bad in that respect. So he fears from conservatives the sort of treatment that Leftists themselves dish out. That conservatives are generally happy and law-abiding people just does not enter into his calculations.

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing comment here on a far-Left Israeli historian: "In both books Pappe in effect tells his readers: "This is what happened." This is strange, because it directly conflicts with a second major element in his historiographical outlook. Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next. Moreover, every narrative is inherently political and, consciously or not, serves political ends. Each historian is justified in shaping his narrative to promote particular political purposes. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, years ago confronted Pappe with the ultimate problem regarding historical relativism: if all narratives are equally legitimate and there is no historical truth, then the narrative of Holocaust deniers is as valid as that of Holocaust affirmers. Pappe did not offer a persuasive answer, beyond asserting lamely that there exists a large body of indisputable oral testimony affirming that the Holocaust took place."

Jeff Jacoby describes the cancerous way antisemitism is spreading in Europe. European tolerance for irrationality is certainly cause for grave concern. Using the Jews as a scapegoat yet again is a disgrace to civilization. But don't look to Leftists for any "compassion" in the matter of course.

There is a reasonable coverage here (link via Keith Burgess Jackson) of the view that high IQ is both diagnostic of good health and a cause of greater wealth -- which leads to richer people being healthier. It would be surprising if it were otherwise. The brain is just another organ of the body and in general a very well-functioning brain should go with a well-functioning body. Similarly, if intelligence does not help you to get rich, what would? But in any case, these ideas have long ago been put to the test. Starting in the 1920s, Terman followed a group of high IQ kids through their growing up and into adulthood. He found that high IQ kids in fact became healthier, happier, wealthier adults. They were even taller if I remember rightly. But to read of people trying to extract policy prescriptions from the matter makes me laugh. Many natural phenomena are just not "curable", nor should they be.

I commented yesterday that Texas sounded like a place that I would like. With good Texan hospitality, Wallace of Big Gold Dog has responded: "Indeed, I think that you would. And I can say that the feeling runs in the reverse. Having had two short stays in Australia some years ago, I can verify that Texans feel very much at home there. When I tell people who have never visited Australia what it's like I simply have to say......"Well it's a lot like Texas" and they know it's a place they should visit. I've had several friends who, over time, have owned cattle ranches [OK cattle stations] at various spots in your fair land. Come on over...... we'll give you office space in our building to conduct your research on why leftists are so obtuse!"

Spanish jellyfish? Comment from a reader: "We are being unfair to the people of Spain. It is a natural reaction common amongst victims of catastrophe to seek out someone or some group to blame and carry out a response that is within their power to make. Being so close to an election made it almost certain that the government would be the object of the people's anger. We should not be too judgemental and cast shame on their nation for what they have done. We will need them as allies again. We should be careful not to alienate them forever."

Writing on his other blog, China Hand has pointed to a farcical effort by an Australian Leftist government to pander to the teacher's union by commissioning research into smaller class sizes. No attempt was made to show that smaller class sizes improved outcomes by any objective measure. The opinion of the teachers and parents involved was treated as "proof".

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

AND THEY CALL THEMSELVES "LIBERALS"!

Liberal with other people's money is about all

America's academic Left still love communism: "In Denial pulls no punches. "Far too much academic writing about communism, anticommunism and espionage is marked by dishonesty, evasion, special pleading and moral squalor. Like Holocaust deniers, some historians of American communism have evaded and avoided facing a preeminent evil"-namely, the Stalinist dictatorship that for decades ruled the Soviet Union, murdered millions of its own citizens, and treated foreign Communist parties as mere minions of Moscow. There's no denying Haynes and Klehr's contention that "a significant number of American academics still have soft spots in their hearts for the CPUSA," the American Communist Party".

The 60s generation: "One of the most striking features in the anti-Vietnam-War movement and standpoint .. was the astonishing tolerance shown towards the Communist countries, and their deeds, that is, what they did or had done to their own people, and to others, and to their attitudes towards basic notions like freedom, human autonomy, and even the possibility of democracy... Elitism without Guilt.. the Sixties' young grabbed it, and have lived off the fantasy ever since. These Believers think that everything worth saying has been said - and is known - by them. Past knowledge and history are bunk. The forever young make the new history, and make sure that no-one with different values is listened to. The similarity of these political fairytales told to our impressionable, upwardly mobile radical young, and those told to young Germans, and Italians and Russians - rather earlier - is striking".

At least this book pulls no punches about the Leftist attitude to free speech: There's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too by Stanley Fish. Given my generally cynical view of Leftist motivations, I am inclined to agree with the reviewer who said: "But it seems to me more likely that Fish is simply being meritricious for personal gain: he is using his considerable rhetorical and pedagogical talents to defend nonsense, not because he believes it or wants others to object to him, but in order to make a name for himself as academia's "bad boy"." Fish's arguments are nonetheless conventional Leftist postmodernism and, as such, are taken very seriously by his colleagues on the academic Left -- as we see here

Che Guevara is still worshipped by the young Leftists of Western universities but as a Cuban writes of him: "He did not have any business in Cuba but he went there to kill Cubans. He did not have any business in Africa but he went there to kill Africans. He did not have any business in Bolivia, but he went there to kill Bolivians, where he eventually died on his own sword.... As far as I am concerned, Ernesto Guevara was the Bin Laden of his time.... It will be very insulting for millions of people if, 30 years from now, they were to see in the streets people wearing Bin Laden T-shirts, as it is now for us to see people using Che Guevara's T-shirts."

Actually both Castro and Guevara have more in common with Mussolini (the founder of Fascism) than anyone else -- though that is probably unkind to Mussolini. As it says here: "From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary...."

Hayek had it right long ago: "Hayek's challenge was to argue that German Nazism was not an aberrant "right-wing" perversion growing out of the "contradictions" of capitalism. Instead, the Nazi movement had developed out of the "enlightened" and "progressive" socialist and collectivist ideas of the pre-World War I era, which many intellectuals in England and the United States had praised and propagandized for in their own countries."

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ELSEWHERE

Keith Burgess Jackson has put up a rather touching tribute to his adopted State of Texas. It sounds like a place I would like. I feel I should say why I still live in my home State of Queensland -- even though I have travelled all over the world. All four of my grandparents were born here so if I cannot praise the place, who could? But in fact I feel that I could be perfectly happy in many places of the world so I am not a good spruiker for any one. The subtropical climate and the laid-back, friendly and conservative attitudes of the people here have a lot to be said for them, however. And our media cover not only our own country but also give extensive coverage to two other related countries: The USA and the UK. I am sorry to say that John Kerry pops up on our TV occasionally too. So it is easy to feel a world-citizen here while in reality being in a peaceful and prosperous place far away from most of it.

Speaking of what we see on TV here, I will never forget sitting in my big and comfortable old classic Queensland house and seeing on TV Ronald Reagan's speech in the immediate aftermath of the first space shuttle loss. It fixed in my mind forever the view of America as the last hero nation that will dare to push forward all of humanity's frontiers despite the risks and costs involved (And see here and here for the latest space achievement). Europeans cosseted away safely in their welfare States look contemptible by comparison. And I think Europeans know what girls they look by comparison. That's why they hate America so much.

It's probably not much consolation but the GOP is not the only conservative party spending public money like a drunken sailor. Australia's conservative government has just spent $2 billion on building a railroad to nowhere -- or almost nowhere. As an Australian businessman who knows the transport industry well summed it up: "They've spent $2 billion building a railway for five trains a week and a few cartons of beer, and I've described the financial returns on that as being smaller than a tick's testicles". And for once I cannot blame some of the Left for having a bit of a field day with it. But guess whom they blame for the whole boondoggle? You wouldn't believe it: Halliburton! I kid you not. Back in the 60s the Left used to see the CIA under every bed. Now that we all know what a comic opera the CIA is, Halliburton is the all-purpose villain. See here.

There is a good article here on what a lot of bunkum psychological "counselling" often is.

Dick McDonald is mounting another attack on the dangerous distortions of the American Leftist media.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

RELIGION

It's not uncommon for religious and spiritual leaders to deride entrepreneurial capitalism. Robert Sirico reminds them of the parable of the talents: "As a group, entrepreneurs are frequently depicted as greedy, immoral, and cutthroat. This prejudice can be found equally among business and religious leaders, not to mention among cultural elites and individual people. But such criticisms, though justified far too often, fail to acknowledge the implicit spiritual dimension of enterprise..While it is true that entrepreneurs-like any other group of people-have been stained by sin, they must not be judged more severely for their moral failings merely because their profession involves the creation of wealth.......The Parable of the Talents implies a moral obligation to confront uncertainty in an enterprising way. There is no more apt example of such an individual than the entrepreneur"

The recent story about a Catholic charity being ordered by a Californian court to pay for contraception was so manifestly bizarre and unjust that it went all over the world, even popping up on Australian radio news bulletins. As a follow-up to the story, a reader has mentioned an employer he knows of who of his own accord added contraceptive coverage to the health plan for his employees. To fund the change, the firm had to put up the the co-payment premiums and deductibles -- so that the average woman now pays more for the insurance than the cost savings on contraception! So it would be poetic justice if the Catholic charity simply did as the court ordered and saddled the grasping employees behind the original complaint with the resultant costs.

Handicapping religion: "The State of Washington awards handsome college and graduate scholarships to gifted students of modest means through the Promise Scholarship Program. But reminiscent of discrimination against blacks, Jews, or the Irish, a disturbing exception is celebrated. Students pursuing devotional degrees need not apply. ... The purpose is to discourage faith-based professions or vocations, an illicit government objective under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. Yet a decisive 7-2 majority in the U.S. Supreme Court constitutionally blessed the scholarship exclusion last week in Locke vs. Davey. Religious neutrality -- the customary commandment of the First Amendment -- was cast out of the constitutional heavens."

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ELSEWHERE

The terrorist attack in Spain seems to have convinced at least some Europeans that America's tough line against terrorism was not so "stupid" or "cowboy-like" after all.

But the conversion will probably be far from complete so perhaps we should still look at what a German writer says about the disagreements between the USA and "Europe" (meaning in fact only Germany and France -- U.S. allies such as Spain, Italy, Denmark and Poland are apparently not in Europe!). The article makes a big thing about the importance attached to "international law" by Europe. But the chief proofs of what a joke "international law" is come from Europe! Who do they think Hitler and Mussolini were? Americans? Or have Europeans forgotten how Hitler and Mussolini simply walked out of the League of Nations when its resolutions did not suit them? What use is "law" that is unenforceable? Saddam defied United Nations resolutions for 11 years and the United Nations did absolutely nothing of any moment about it. And in the United Nations itself the most disgusting and lawless tyrannies are highly influential -- with regimes like Iran and Libya heading important committees! I think the USA pays TOO MUCH attention to the ridiculous fiction of international law!

And the United Nations is also hopelessly corrupt. Take the UN oil for food program. As it says here: "In the growing scandal over the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, which from 1996-2003 supervised relief to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his staff have excused themselves from any responsibility for the massive corruption involving billions in bribes and kickbacks that went on via more than $100 billion in U.N.-approved contracts for Saddam to sell oil and buy humanitarian supplies. U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop

Iraq freer than ever: "The press coverage from Baghdad is so gloomy that it's hard to remember that a dictator is gone, oil is pumping again and the proposed interim constitution contains strong human rights guarantees. We seem not even to recognize freedom when we see it: Shiites by the hundreds of thousands walking barefoot to celebrate in the holy city of Karbala, Iraqis turning up at town meetings and trying out democracy for the first time, newspapers and free media sprouting everywhere, daily demonstrations in the streets. If freedom is the only goal that redeems all the dying, there is more real freedom in Iraq than at any time in its history..."

Ho Hum! The American Leftist media is now resorting to barefaced lies to discredit the Iraq intervention. As Peg Kaplan reports, they are saying that Clinton handed over to Bush a plan to grab Osama and Co. but Bush ignored it. The truth is that it was Clinton who knocked back offers by Sudan to hand over Osama.

Nice to see The Guardian taking note of the Muslim slave trade that tyrannized Europeans for centuries.

THAT film: "Rabbi Daniel Lapin, an Orthodox rabbi and popular radio talk-show host, has also repeatedly defended Gibson and "The Passion". Rabbi Lapin points out that it is not Gibson's movie, but the irresponsible and vehement accusations coming from Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and other self-appointed Jewish leaders that are most likely to cause anti-Semitism.... "Rabbi Lapin says. "Christians heard Jewish leaders denouncing Gibson for making a movie that follows Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion long before any of them had even seen the movie. Furthermore, Christians are hurt that Jewish groups are presuming to teach them what Christian Scripture `really means.'" Rabbi Lapin says that "instead of helping the Jewish community," leaders like Foxman "have inflicted lasting harm." "By selectively unleashing their fury only on wholesome entertainment that depicts Christianity, in a positive light," he says, "they have triggered anger, hurt, and resentment.... I consider it crucially important for Christians to know that not all Jews are in agreement with their self-appointed spokesmen." I must say that I myself was amazed by the folly of Foxman and Co. They are living in the past rather than the present. They should have held their fire for their real enemy of the present day -- Islam -- rather than attacking their best friends of today -- Christians.

More BBC dishonesty: "A headline on BBC News today - 'Figures show rise in vCJD deaths' - sounds worrying until you read the article, which reveals that the 'rise' corresponds to an increase from 17 deaths in 2002, to, er, 18 deaths in 2003." {vCJD is better known as "mad cow disease"}.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

A politically-motivated lie: "The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a Ralph Nader organization, is charging that a March 11 Senate vote defeating a "polluters pay" Superfund amendment offered by Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Jon Corzine (D-NJ) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) means that polluters are getting a "holiday" from their legal responsibilities." See here for the facts.

The statues of Easter Island have fascinated many for a long time now. It is now however quite clear how they got there, who put them there and why the civilization of Easter Island collapsed. Jared Diamond sums it up well. But when Diamond comes to the now well-known conclusion that the Polynesian civilization which produced the statues underwent a collapse due to their own destruction of the island's natural resources, Diamond of course moralizes that: "The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious". He says that we too could undergo a similar fate if we are not more careful of the environment. That Western man IS wiser than the Polynesians were and that we have been actively conserving our environment and setting aside natural areas for over a century and that agricultural SURPLUSES have long been the major problem for international trade go unmentioned. But Diamond WAS writing in the New York Review of Books, of course. He probably needed a Leftist slant to get his article published there.

I love it: "An ecologically-acclaimed wetland in the grounds of a school in Taiwan turned out to be the product of a leaking water pipe".

Now popcorn is bad for you: "The Environmental Protection Agency is studying the chemicals released into the air when a bag of microwave popcorn is popped or opened. Exposure to vapors from butter flavoring in microwave popcorn has been linked to a rare lung disease contracted by factory workers in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska."

Good to see that the most Leftist of Australia's major newspapers has just given a good summary of the case AGAINST global warming. They still do their best to defend the theory, of course, but in the end arrive at the key conclusion: "But if even scientists like Hennessy and Carter cannot agree on scientific data, how can politicians and policy-makers?" If we spent billions of dollars on every "maybe" around we would soon be back in the Stone Age. But that is what the Greenies really want, of course.

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ELSEWHERE

There is a very sad example of "famous last words" in "The Spectator" of 13th. The leading article by Simon Jenkins refers to a recent speech by Tony Blair about the imminent dangers of terrorism. Jenkins says that the speech "was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not". Beautifully timed to appear in print at roughly the same time as the Spanish atrocity. One of my readers comments: "Simon Jenkins commits journalistic suicide". Even without the Spanish disaster proving Blair to be right, it is pretty amazing that Jenkins sees pop singer George Michael as a good authority for the claim that Blair is stupid. Just that would tend to show that it is Jenkins rather than Blair who is stupid. I have saved a copy of the article to disk in case "The Spectator" takes it down.

A Leftist member of the British parliament gets it right: "As the full horror of the Madrid atrocity unfolds, surely the time has come to unite against terrorism - the new fascism of the 21st century, wherever it takes place".

"Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, yesterday mourned the death of the "martyr" who masterminded the hijacking of a cruise ship in which a wheelchair-bound American tourist was shot dead and his body dumped overboard." Two peas in a pod.

Michael Totten tells it like it is: "If terrorists detonate a portable nuke in a Western city, what's left of the Terror War will be nasty, brutish, and short. The West's so-far limited response will instantly become total and, in effect, genocidal. Any and all WMD-producing states will be considered targets for a unilateral nuclear counterattack, starting with capital cities. The UN will not be consulted. Millions could die in a day."

J.P. Rushton again summarizes the evidence for the very low IQ of blacks in Sub-Saharan Africa. By African standards, U.S. blacks are an intellectual elite. Despite the bad start, America has been very kind to blacks.

Black author Debra Dickerson says "it's time to get over racism": "I am not saying there isn't racism-absolutely not- I'm saying ..some strategies are more effective than others. A vast amount of energy is expended trying to pinpoint who is or isn't a racist, or trying to shut down people like me, who are on the same team but maybe have a different viewpoint. Why isn't the urgency directed toward fixing actual problems? I've seen people praying outside the Supreme Court, for example, who could be in an inner-city community teaching someone how to read."

It's always difficult to unravel cause and effect in these things but there is a lagged correlation between a falling crime rate and increased use of abortion so the view that legalized abortion has caused the drop in crime is gaining ground. For different reasons, this finding is uncomfortable for both Leftists and and conservatives. The fact that welfare recipients are both big users of abortion and more likely to be enmeshed in a criminal milieu makes sense of the finding, however. A lot of potential criminals are being aborted, in short.

Mike Tremoglie quotes evidence to show that the "offence" of "driving while black" is a myth.

"The Occidental Herald is a digest of news for supporters of the culture of the West and its peoples. Twice weekly TOH presents and comments on stories from international news sources on world events and trends that are often neglected in the national and local media. TOH aims to instill a sense of informed purpose in the defense of the West to counter the prevailing, media-inspired atmosphere of anomie and gloom."

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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.

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

13 March, 2004

FREE TRADE AGAIN

"The No. 1 U.S. enemy is ... Bermuda. At least that's what John Kerry seems to want American voters to believe. At almost every campaign stop, he attacks 'Benedict Arnold corporations' that move to Bermuda. One could almost conclude that Bermuda is a predatory regime that shelters scoundrels. .. It's difficult to decide which is most objectionable, Mr. Kerry's smear of a friendly regime or his disregard for accuracy. The denigration of Bermuda is certainly reprehensible, particularly since the territory's market-based tax policy and race relations are both much better than can be found in the United States. (It's worth noting, too, that Bermuda has much tougher anti-money laundering laws than the United States.)"

A reader draws on his studies of accountancy and business management for some insights about outsourcing: "There is much talk of outsourcing being either good or bad. Both views are quite ridiculous. Each firm must make its own "make or buy-in" decision. There is no absolute view as to whether it is appropriate. The simple question of whether it is cheaper to make or buy-in is relatively minor. Most of the weighting is for qualitative factors such as whether the quality and timeliness of supply could be assured, the effects on other parts of the firm, and so on. Like pre-emption, outsourcing is merely an option; circumstances determine its efficacy. I think the outsourcing trend may also be one reason why a decreasing number of men are entering universities. While the dysfunctional educational system in this country may play its part, isn't it also possible that many men have realised that the work of plumbers, electricians, mechanics and others cannot be performed overseas whereas much of the work performed by university graduates will soon enough be at hazard? Given this, and the likely shortage of such people in the future, it seems that the many men's decisions to forgo university could be quite rational." The Happy Carpenter would agree.

Thomas Friedman of the NYT is again arguing for the mutual benefits of outsourcing simple jobs to India. He says that conformist and inefficient India is no threat to innovative and efficient America.

"Last week, European nations slapped a 5% tariff on the prices of hundreds of American exports because Congress is stubbornly clinging to a tax break for U.S. companies. It violates world trade rules by letting firms sell products at artificially low prices. The penalty is expected to hurt European sales of U.S. goods ranging from fruit grown in California to sheet-metal cabinets made in Ohio to textiles woven in the Carolinas.... The tax-cut bidding war pits a few special interests against the larger good of the country. By making the right choice, Congress can ensure a robust U.S. export sector doesn't shrink - and help prevent the U.S. deficit from expanding."

There is now a blog devoted to the "Blame India" nonsense -- the claim that the loss of technical and other support jobs is India's fault for "undercutting" Western workers.

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EDUCATION

Walter Williams: "The low academic quality of many of our teachers is neither flattering nor comfortable to confront, but confront it we must if we're to do anything about our sorry state of education."

Bureaucratized public schools: "Although many students there are now receiving a much better education thanks to vouchers enabling them to choose better schools, the failing public schools themselves have not improved as well as some expected. Hiatt rightly argues that the reason is clear. 'The system was designed to insulate the public schools from the consequence of failure.'"

A Sydney talk-radio host has put on the net an article originally printed over 30 years ago in the Sydney Morning Herald which detailed plans by the then Communist Party of Australia to use the schools to promote Leftist ideas. The article does make an interesting read. Most of what the CPA planned seems to have come about. The CPA folded up a few years ago under the influence of the Soviet implosion -- probably because funding from Russia dried up at that time. I knew the last boss of the CPA -- Mark Aarons -- slightly. His girlfriend was the younger sister of my girlfriend at one stage. The Johnson sisters were/are two very fine women.

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ELSEWHERE

I drink very little alcohol these days so it was for the first time in years that I had a couple of glasses of German white wine with my dinner last night. It took me ages to find someone in Brisbane who sold German wine. Even so, it cost me only $10 for the bottle (about $6.50 in U.S. dollars). I think it is one of the everyday miracles of capitalism that I can buy a Rheinhessen Qualitaetswein half a world away from where it was made for such a small sum. It rather perplexes me, though, that German wine has such a patchy following around the world. Maybe its uniformly high quality makes it boring. French wine is mostly rubbish by Australian or German standards but I suppose the challenge of finding a good one makes it interesting. Australian winemakers wouldn't dream of making such a nasty product as French vin ordinaire. Even a $5 ($3.50 U.S.) bottle of Australian red is pretty good.

The French elites hate Hollywood but the French people love it -- so the elites want to "protect" the French people from it. That hardly shows much faith in their own culture. Protecting the French from Hollywood's politics might make some sense, though.

Wow! We have here a complete summary of French philosophy from a French philosopher: ""Despite his clarity, Seneca still must be taken seriously as a philosopher." Note: "Despite his clarity". I said a few days ago (on 8th) that French philosophy aims to obfuscate, not clarify. No wonder Leftists like French philosophy: Clarity of thought would be fatal to them.

Even The Guardian admits that not everyone hates Guantanamo Bay. Some ex-prisoners liked it. They say that the food in the camp was delicious, the teaching was excellent, and the warders were kind: "Americans are good people, they were always friendly, I don't have anything against them," he said. "If my father didn't need me, I would want to live in America." "

Middle-aged Madness is a good blog. He has a great list of the things that Kerry and the Democrats believe -- and I like his "we found Nemo" graphic too.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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



12 March, 2004

MORE FROM BROOKES NEWS

The US economy: jobs and recovery The real question should be: "Is the recovery sustainable?" If by sustainable one means that there will not be another recession then the answer is no. Only a strict metallic monetary system can cure the boom-bust cycle.
Kerry's rise and media censorship The free pass that the media is giving Kerry once again highlights the extent to which they have combined into an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that rewrites history to advance the interests of the Party. However, the net is coming to the rescue.
Ann Coulter is kidnapped by terrorists, and President Bush calls on Bunny Champers to save her and the world Bunny does it again - in more ways than one. First he dates Ann Coulter, and then he has to save her, and the world, from terrorists.
What has gay marriage to do with Beijing and national security? Beijing rooted for a Gore victory. Come November it, like Pyongyang and Tehran, will be rooting for a Kerry victory, a man for whom the Beijing has only contempt. So what has gay marriage to do with it?
An Atheist Defends Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ The Passion of the Christ is a powerful telling of the story of the Temptation and the Crucifixion of Jesus, and is in no way anti-Semitic. It is intense in its violence toward the hero, but that only makes his own triumph against hatred and evil all the more compelling.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

I have always thought that the fanatical Leftism of the universities will be self-defeating in the end. This is a comment from a conservative student at the very Leftist Smith College: "Most interestingly though, I have met people who came to Smith being a liberal or Democrat and now say that they are more conservative or nearly Republican because of the way-left politics that some people have. I was pretty amazed by that." I think youthful rebelliousness will defeat the Leftist ideologues. (Link via PrestoPundit).

"Reparations". A very incorrect reader writes: "People should be careful what they ask for. I think that blacks could all eventually get their big check only to find that it will be seen as an end to any need for affirmative action etc. Or, since we grabbed the blacks out of Africa, maybe the payments will be available only to those who wish to return to Africa and renounce their U.S. citizenship: A cheap but fair way of deporting all the drones while keeping those who realize what they've got here."

There is an article in the NYT about Christian homeschoolers and the Patrick Henry College to which many homeschooled kids go for tertiary education. Leftists of course hate it when any kids escape the Leftist brainwashing that is normal in mainstream schools so the article does its best to make the homeschoolers look sinister. But the sentence that struck me was: "I would definitely like to be active in the government of our country and stuff," Mr. Olmstead, 19, said as he sat in a Christian coffeehouse near the campus, looking up from a copy of Plato's "Republic." So a student at a Christian college was reading one of the great works of PRE-Christian Greek literature. No prejudice against "dead white males" there. No wonder the graduates of the college do so well. They get a REAL education -- one that draws on all the strengths of the great culture that made us what we are. Even the very words from the past can be powerful. One of JFK's most famous sayings was: "Ask not what your country can do for you; Ask what you can do for your country". Dreadful Right-wing garbage by modern Leftist standards I guess. But JFK stole the words from Pericles, the great Athenian statesman of around 450 BC.

A Jewish Francophile has her eyes opened: "Will the pacifist and pacified French stand up and defend their nation? Or will we have to leave? That is what it boils down to. Things have gone from shouting "death to the Jews" to firebombing schools and synagogues, to persecution, attacks, even murder. We have Muslim rage in schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. Police headquarters are attacked, hospital personnel beaten, judges threatened. The Republic is under siege, and what are the French doing about it? They are trashing America. This, it seems, is their new Maginot line: the sneer of hatred. Hand in hand with the government and the intellectual classes, the French media are channeling the national dismay over lost grandeur into contempt for America."

"Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today.... any accusation that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia. Anti-Americanism is factually absurd, contradictory, racist, crude, childish, self-defeating and, at bottom, nonsensical. It is based on the powerful but irrational impulse of envy-- an envy of American wealth, power, success and determination. It is an envy made all the more poisonous because of a fearful European conviction that America's strength is rising while Europe's is falling."

Dave Huber fisks some Leftist criticisms of THAT movie from Jon Voigt and others.

THAT movie is not alone in being attacked because it replays the central story of Christianity. The great German classical music composer J.S. Bach (1685 - 1750 A.D.) is now being attacked as antisemitic too! I have been a devotee of Bach since I was 13 but it was news to me! (Link via Armavirumque).

This review from a "spiritual" site says of THAT movie "The entire film seemed like the dying gasp of an old ultra-religious paradigm". Dying gasp? Not likely. I have even heard of very skeptical people being drawn to Chistianity by the film. And you should see the size of the congregations in fundamentalist churches!

I have just posted here the latest observations from Chris Brand -- including the news that propensity to marry is genetically inherited!

Interesting that the leader of New Zealand's major conservative party has attacked affirmative action. And he's getting a lot of support for it too. Maybe New Zealanders are more down-to-earth than Americans. The problems posed by New Zealand's Maoris are pretty similar to America's problems with blacks.

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake. Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor! Comments? Email me here or here. 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. ********************************



11 March, 2004

HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE

The conservative case against homosexual marriage is concisely and soberly put here (Link via Keith Burgess-Jackson). For the life of me, though, I cannot see that modern marriage is much influenced by the legal codes that surround it. As far as I can see, modern-day Western marriage is a totally individual thing: There as many types of marriage as there are couples and marriages will be good or bad because of the values, character, beliefs and attitudes of the couple concerned only. Marriage has ALREADY changed enormously from what it was -- not because of any legal changes but because of the advent of the contraceptive pill. Any committment and staying together between a man and a woman these days is entirely the doing of the couple concerned, not the effect of any regulatory framework. I just think that what a few homosexuals do or are allowed to do is irrelevant to heterosexual marriage. Perhaps I am missing something, however, so I reproduce below some more interesting conservative comments on the matter.

Jeff Jacoby says that the push for homosexual marriage is nothing like the civil rights movement of the 60s.

Sowell: "Gay marriage" is not a local issue but a national issue because maintaining the rule of law - or what is left of it - is a national issue of historic importance if we are not to see the United States degenerate into the world's largest banana republic, or worse. The time is long overdue to start impeaching judges who think their job is to veto laws they don't like or condone lawlessness that they agree with. The time is also long overdue to re-examine lifetime appointments of judges, which allows them to act like little tin gods, at the expense of our freedom and the country's elected government. An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold". There is more from Sowell here.

How homosexual marriage in Scandanavia has undermined marriage: "Today's gay activists in Scandinavia, having gotten everything they wanted, now admit that their case for homosexual marriage --particularly that allowing gays to marry will encourage a monogamous lifestyle --was only a tactical argument. The goal, says Mr. Kurtz, citing two prominent gay thinkers, "was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality." "

An Australian reader writes: "I probably would have more respect for the homosexual marriage push if it were part of a serious movement to promote monogamy amongst homosexuals, however it seems primarily aimed at increasing the social approval of homosexuality as suggested by the Scandanavian article. I think here in NSW that any live in relationship beyond about 6 months qualifies as a de facto relationship for legal reasons. I doubt whether the majority of homosexuals have considered the potential legal and financial risks for exploitation this opens up for them."

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ELSEWHERE

There is an excellent article in the NYT about a long-overdue movement to make psychology more scientific. Exposing quackery in clinical psychology has in fact a much longer history than the article notes. One of the first people to apply scientific methods to evaluate conventional forms of psychotherapy was Hans Eysenck -- with whom I was associated for many years in various ways -- and Eysenck's work goes back to the 1940s. Still, it is good to see the torch being taken up now that Eysenck is no longer with us. The problem of unscientific psychology is particularly bad in political psychology -- which is overwhelmingly comprised of Freudians. You just have to read almost any issue of the journal Political Psychology to see that. Still, Political Psychology has published quite a few articles of mine over the years so they are not totally sectarian. They wouldn't take a really outspoken article from me, though, even though I was the relevant expert.

I have recently had an article accepted for publication in "SOCIETY" -- a well-established journal of social science and social commentary that has always been unusual in having some political balance in what it presents. I gather that it will "hit the streets" April 15-20 so you might like to keep an eye out for it. The title of my article is: "Explaining the Left/Right divide".

The "Invest in the U.S.A. Act," seems a good idea. Cutting tax on company profits will undoubtedly turn Leftists purple with rage but it should create lots of American jobs. Leftists would rather have people welfare-dependant, I guess. Having a black group approve the measure might help give it some legs, though.

An egotist caught at last? "The FBI arrested a California Institute of Technology student Tuesday for investigation of arson and vandalism that destroyed or damaged 125 sport utility vehicles at San Gabriel Valley car dealerships and homes last year in apparent support of radical environmentalism. William Cottrell, 23, of Pasadena was held without bail during a court appearance... If convicted, he faces a maximum of 40 years in prison"

The British Conservatives have at long last discovered the school vouchers idea. Will wonders never cease? They might finally be overcoming the trauma of having Tony Blair steal their thunder on most issues. (Link via The Applicant).

Martin Sieff says Russia is moving towards the Chinese model -- authoritarian central government combined with free-market economic policies. Similar systems in Singapore, Taiwan and Korea have worked out pretty well in the end.

The leader of Australia's major Leftist party talks a lot of conservative talk in saying that boys need more male role models but his deeds tell a different story -- oddly enough!

Steve Sailer on social statistics. It's Southern whites, not blacks, who are most likely to end up on death row. (More detail here). From the same article: "the Department of Education and other sensitive sorts have reduced the percentage of children eligible for special education from 2.2% in 1977 to 1.3% in 1997. Why? Because retardation (as defined by the Supreme Court as an IQ below 70) is found about five times more often in blacks than whites. Liberal bureaucrats prefer to cover up this embarrassing fact by tossing a lot of retarded black kids into mainstream classes to sink or swim."

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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



10 March, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

Econot has some good postings up at the momnent. The mass transit one is particularly interesting. Some headings:
* Cash & Kerry: Which major funder of green and leftist causes launders money from John Kerry's wife into his campaign efforts -- including those protests by "9/11 families" against Bush's campaign commercials?
* The deadly threat to koala bears -- from animal rights activists!
* Mass transit = death by environmentalism?
* Oceana's hypocrisy -- It seems some "corporate interests" are more equal than others.
* Which green group's campaign director watched Jaws -- and sympathized with the shark?

"The Green Revolution in agriculture (mainly the introduction of hardier and higher-yielding rice varieties bred by Western scientists) has to be seen as one of the great achievements of our time. It has been the driving force behind the spectacular increases in global food supply over the last half century. " No wonder the 'Greenies' have made it a "villain of choice"

Thomas Sowell, a former Nader fan, says Ralph is unsafe at any speed: Starting his public career Nader "...denounced the Corvair in particular and blamed "engineering and management operations within General Motors" which led to such an unsafe vehicle...Years later, extensive government tests showed that the Corvair's safety was comparable to that of similar cars of its era. But, by then, the Corvair was extinct - killed off by the crusade that earned Nader a place as a kind of secular saint in the media."

Very encouraging to see the headline No future in Kyoto protocol on an article in Australia's national newspaper. The writer points out the inaccuracy of the methods used to estimate global warming effects by the IPCC (the United Nations body that is the chief support for global warming theory).

Globalization and life expectancy: "Some critics claim that globalization impoverishes...(yet) people in the more global countries tend to live the longest. The same holds true when only developing countries are examined"

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EDUCATIONAL DEPRIVATION

I recently discovered to my horror that my 16 year old son had never even HEARD of such great English poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. He is in his last year of high school but the only poets he has ever encountered are various indigenous poets and others who were selected on their political rather than their artistic merits. So yesterday evening I got out my old GRADE 6 school reading book (from the 1950s) and read him from it three old favourites of American, British and Australian poetry -- "Hiawatha's Hunting", "Sea Fever" and the "Song of Cape Leeuwin". He enjoyed all three -- particularly the non-Greenie ending of "Hiawatha". When I remarked to him that it looked like he had been deprived of his entire cultural heritage, he commented, quite rightly: "It's racism -- racism against the English". It looks like it's up to parents these days to introduce their kids to the great cultural heritage that schools now deliberately conceal. Perhaps that's not such a bad thing, in a way. It should help engender disrespect for the corruption that passes for compulsory education these days.

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ELSEWHERE

In case you have not seen it, the "Robin Williams" peace plan is here. Item 1 of it is: "The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs, past & present........ You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Noriega, Milosovich and the rest of those 'good ole boys.' We will never "interfere" again."

David Friedman has a great description on how debates about the deterrent effect of capital punishment or the relation of guns to crime are handled in the media. He says these debates go through three phases: Amateur statisticians comment, Professional statisticians comment and Amateurs abuse the professionals for their inconvenient conclusions.

Power corrupts: "The part of the truth Lord Acton did not realize when stating 'power corrupts' is that the corrupted seek power. Only people not able to grow tall from their own efforts and achievements seek to subdue their fellow man; only people not being able to find comfort in their own mind seek to silence others; those who are unable to produce their own wealth aim to confiscate the wealth of others." Actually, Acton did realize that. The next part of what he said is: "Great men are almost always bad men".

Yassir Arafat, Soviet disinformation agent (For a brief history of Soviet disinformation see here): "Arafat had begun his political career as leader of the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah, whose fedayeen were being secretly trained in the Soviet Union. In 1969, the KGB managed to catapult him up as chairman of the PLO executive committee."

The intellectual decline of Araby...? "No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year."

What the Martha Stewart case means to you: "The Martha Stewart guilty verdict is more than troubling. It is an outrage. The very case itself typifies today's government -- an entity that is free to intrude in any area of your life, free to make up the rules as it goes along, free to allow prosecutors to make names for themselves in high-profile cases without facing any personal consequences, no matter what harm they do."

Arlene Peck says: "What does it take to realize that the Arabs have a plan and we don't -- their plan being: once they destroy the Saturday people, then the Sunday crowd is next." The holy day for Muslims is of course Friday.

The wicked one explains why men die first.

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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.

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



9 March, 2004

THAT FILM AND MIDDLE-EASTERN MINORITIES

"It's only a movie": "Jews have far more to fear than Mel Gibson. Jews have far more to fear from the International Judicial Court in the Hague as it condemns Israel for putting up a security fence to protects its citizens from homicide bombers. Jews have far more to fear from university campuses that refuse to protect them from violence from Palestinians"

Defending Mel Gibson's movie: "If the movie and the Gospels on which it's based are anti-Semitic, then why are those Christians most faithful to the New Testament among the strongest supporters of Israel?"

Mel Gibson is crying all the way to the bank. And he may make some money in the courts too.

It has also the first movie to allow Aramaic speakers to hear their language on the big screen. "Use of the Aramaic language had become common by the period of the Chaldean Empire (626-539 B.C.). It became the official language of the Imperial government in Mesopotamia and enjoyed general use until the spread of Greek (331 B.C.). Although Greek had spread throughout these Eastern lands, Aramaic remained dominant and the linqua franca of the Semitic peoples. This continued to be so until Aramaic was superseded by a sister Semitic tongue, Arabic, about the 13th century A.D. to the 14th century A.D., when Arabic supplanted Aramaic after the Arab conquest in the 7th Century. However, the Christians of Mesopotamia (Iraq), Iran, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon kept the Aramaic language alive domestically, scholastically and liturgically. In spite of the pressure of the ruling Arabs to speak Arabic, Aramaic is still spoken today in its many dialects, especially among the Chaldeans and Assyrians."

With all the attention being given to Mel's movie you wonder why so few commentators, so quick to sniff out any anti-semitism in the movie, haven't wondered aloud what form of imperialism suppressed Aramaic?

As this article points out, Aramaic was the parent language of Assyrian. "Today, the Assyrian presence in the Middle East is under immense pressure. In the past 30 years, Assyrians have fled from their native lands in record numbers with more than 1.5 million having emigrated to over 30 different countries, mostly in theWest. The predominant reason for this flight is because of Assyrian religious and ethnic distinctiveness vis-a-vis their Arab, Persian, Turkish or Kurdish neighbors. Because of these differences, Assyrians are severely discriminated against and are denied basic civil, human, and political rights. In most Middle Eastern countries,Assyrians are not even recognized as a people In Turkey, Iraq, and SyriaAssyrians are officially recognized only as a religious minority, either as "Turkish" or"Arab Christians." Even in the so-called UN protected "Safe Haven" of northern Iraq, Assyrians are referred to as "Christian Kurds."In Iran, Assyrians haverecently been semi-officially recognized as a people but only after more than 90%have emigrated over the past 30 years."

As the ethnic and religious cleansing of non-Muslim minorities (mostly Christians) from the Middle East continues, the Left's selective passion for the Palestinians is all rather sickening.

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ELSEWHERE

"Greece's opposition conservatives scored a convincing win in general elections, ending more than 10 years of Socialist Party rule as Greeks voted for change amid widespread discontent over low incomes, poor public services and corruption scandals". Who would have thought it? Leftists responsible for low incomes, poor public services and corruption?

An optimistic cartoon version of how to convert Muslims to Christianity here. Only for Christians.

French nutritionists give Big Mac the thumbs up: "The relative fat-to-protein content of a Big Mac is considerably healthier than classic French snacks such as quiche lorraine and better than many other sandwiches or fast foods on the market, the authors say."

Keith Windschuttle points out that assimilationist policies have economically helped Australia's native blacks, whereas 'multiculturalist' policies have perpetuated poverty. No surprises which policy the left favours.

Pathetic envy: "A painting that featured the words Israel and the United States and replaced each 's' with a Nazi swastika was removed from an Oslo art exhibition." How is it possible to confuse the tiny Jewish state with the vast Nazi empire that attempted to exterminate the Jews? And how is it possible to confuse the United States, which liberated Europe from Nazi shackles, with the Nazis themselves? This would appear to be a phenomenon that French author Jean-Francois Revel has called "reversal of culpability." It is particularly disturbing when it is propagated not at secret meetings of Osama-worshiping jihadis but at an "art exhibition," in Oslo, the cosmopolitan capital of Norway, an exceedingly civilized country."

If you have not seen the exchange between Rumsfeld and Senator Kennedy in Scrappleface you must read it. You will only get the joke if you know what Chappaquiddick stands for, of course. I gather that the exchange is satire but it could well have been fact.

Pat Buchanan on "Who started the culture war?": "Who is on the offensive? Who is pushing the envelope? The answer is obvious. A radical Left aided by a cultural elite that detests Christianity and finds Christian moral tenets reactionary and repressive is hell-bent on pushing its amoral values and imposing its ideology on our nation."

Why Haiti won't get any better: "Haitian government appears to have no "core," to use the economist's term for instability. Most of the population is illiterate but extremely smart and distrusting of their governments. The distrust is so strong as to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. No leader can command lasting popular support or form a stable political coalition."

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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.

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



8 March, 2004

CHRISTIAN ETHICS

A very small meditation

Although any idea of "God" ceased to be meaningful to me over 40 years ago, I have never abandoned Christian ethics. I don't claim to be any Abou Ben Adhem but I have always found that if I do the "Christian" (kind, helpful, forgiving, generous etc.) thing, I get a reward for it -- usually quickly and it is often a substantial reward. For me, Christian ethics work. They work so well that I do well understand how Christians would see in such things the hand of their God. I myself see such rewards as evidence that Christ was a very wise teacher who had an understanding of human psychology that is still better than what most modern professional psychologists have.

An instance of how Christian ways have worked for me is one most readers of this blog will know by now. When Keith Burgess-Jackson had just started his blog, I read it and noted with pleasure the philosophical clarity of his writing (Anglo-Saxon philosophy aims to clarify; Continental philosophy aims to obfuscate). When I therefore also noted that he was having trouble with his template, I immediately offered to help and was able to do so. As a result Keith was very appreciative and has always since been quick to link to my postings -- and I of course also link back to his. So we have been able to steer our respective readers to one another -- which some readers at least appreciate. So my initial Christian deed (which took me only a couple of hours) has benefited Keith, me and our respective readers! Beat that for an ethical system that works!

As an aside, it is perfectly consistent with Keith's energetic and extraverted style (a style I enjoy greatly) that he posts up some of the congratulatory emails that he receives. But I would never be able to do that. Perhaps it is my traditional British reserve. I only post on this blog emails that address some topic that I think has general interest. I do in fact receive congratulatory emails all the time and every one of them is greatly appreciated so I hope my readers understand my reserve about posting any of them.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Homosexual marriage and incest: the time has come If homosexual marriage is recognised then Ferdinandsen must be freed and his incestuous relationship with his daughter recognised as a legitimate marriage, and their defiance of the law treated as an act of civil disobedience that advanced the cause of civil rights.
US economy and recession: theory and counter theory Although the causes of the recession are still being hotly debated, with some focusing their attention on monetary factors, the overwhelming number of commentators still haven't got it right.
Homosexual marriage and judicial tyranny join hands When we look at what is really happening regarding homosexual marriage we see that Bush had little choice. Bullying Democratic judges forced the issue when they wilfully exceeded their authority and turned the issue into a battle for the rule of law.
Bunny chats with Saddam and then joins Hillary on the Jerry Springer Show Bunny relates how President Bush called on him to help with Saddam. As if that was not enough for our hero, he found himself sharing the sheets, as well as Jerry Springer's stage, with her Royal Highness Princess Hillary.
Forgetting the economic lessons of history It's necessary to resort to economic history if mistaken economic policies are to be avoided. But in order to do this successfully policy makers, or at least their advisers, should have an understanding of the economic forces at work.
Hong Kong's freedom virus causes pain in Beijing If the men in Beijing are wise, they will accommodate themselves to what is unfolding before them and embrace it. To do otherwise could bring an enormous amount of misery to hundreds of millions. And China has already suffered enough this century.
Mao's aura can't help CCP bosses Nearly three decades after his death, Mao Tse-tung's tarnished halo is being polished by Chinese Communist Party leaders and their critics alike, albeit for different reasons.

Details here

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MORE ON IMMIGRATION

A reader writes: "Check out these posts by the Republican Party base voters and tell me that Bush is not in trouble over immigration. These are the little people that pay the taxes and send in $25.00 year to the Party."

Gary Bezowsky replies: "I read the comment from one of your readers claiming the Republican base is in turmoil over the immigration reform proposals and Bush would lose if the election were held today. This may be so. But it boggles the mind to believe any intelligent rightward leaning voter would prefer a Bush lose and a Kerry victory. Kerry is further to the left on immigration and would go far beyond anything Bush would propose. This is insanity. Immigrant bashing doesn't win at the polls. Look at the state of the Republican party in California. After the party became tied to anti-immigrant proposals, it lost election after election, unable to influence policy. Only the disaster that is Gray Davis allowed Arnold the opportunity to claim the governor's chair. These Republicans and their anger would inflict the same damage on the national level. Electoral success is about coalition building, the largest coalition wins. The winners make public policy. If they are upset about the policy, the only way to change it to their liking is from inside the governing party."

Australia has thousands of miles of uninhabited and largely unguarded coastline so it should be even easier for illegal immigrants to come here than it is for them to go to the USA. In fact, illegal immigrants have virtually given up coming to Australia. Why? Because Australia's conservative government does its best to catch them and locks up any it catches. Illegal immigration can be controlled if there is the will to do it.

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ELSEWHERE

I mentioned yesterday the knee-jerk reaction of the L.A. Times to the term "pro-life". A reader writes: "That's nothing compared to an edit I remember from some years ago by a Boston paper. In an article about the State's budget deficit, after their automagic rewrite, the Governor was quoted as saying, "I promise to put the State's budget back in the African American!"

Michael Darby has a new lot of posts up: On Zimbabwe, Pinochet, France and many Australian issues.

I have just put up here a short article by Dick McDonald about pro-Democrat media bias in the run-up to the Presidential election.

And I have just put up on PC Watch an email from a Sydney reader about the annual "Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras" that was held in Sydney over the weekend. The reader notes that, as usual, the number of homosexuals taking part was vastly exaggerated.

The wicked one has just put up a very incorrect picture.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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.

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



7 March, 2004

IN DEFENCE OF FREE TRADE

"The United States must not hide its economy behind a protectionist wall, President George W. Bush said today, during a joint press conference with visiting Mexican President Vicente Fox. "We must reject economic unilateralism," Bush said after talks with Fox at his private ranch in Crawford, Texas. He said the United States would "gain nothing in building walls".

Politics and trade: "Years divisible by four are not good for free trade. When Americans go about the quadrennial chore of choosing a president, the candidates seeking their votes know one thing: everyone disadvantaged by the free international movement of goods and services and jobs knows who they are. But the winners -- consumers who get cheaper goods, shareholders in businesses that profit from free trade, workers whose jobs are created by free trade -- are a diffuse group, often unaware that their good fortune is a result of free trade."

An email from a reader: "Outsourcing, the practice of moving jobs from domestic to foreign locations, has been and will continue to be a major political issue in the upcoming presidential election. But once you get past the rhetoric of "two million jobs lost since GWB took office", what are the facts about job loss, particularly factory jobs since they have been the subject of so much recent debate? Robert Reich, who served for 4 years as secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, and hardly a "right-wing extremist", wrote an interesting article in December , 2003, for the "The American Prospect Online", a far-Left magazine. Surprisingly, while the USA lost 11% of our factory jobs between 1995 and 2002, we weren't the biggest losers. Japan and China lost 16% and 15%, respectively. Brazil lost 20%. Unlike the liberal establishment looking to make this an issue in the election, Secretary Reich blames the loss of these jobs around the world to productivity gains, not "corporate greed", as has so often been espoused by our good friends on the Left." A good quote from Reich's article: "We should stop pining after the days when millions of Americans stood along assembly lines and continuously bolted, fit, soldered or clamped what went by".

"Jobs protection has become the rallying cry of the Democratic presidential campaign. Yet Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards never present a clear-headed plan on how they would create new jobs. Instead, they vow to tear down growth-producing free trade treaties, an effort that would impoverish, not expand, the U.S. work force. Among the many flaws of this year's Democratic argument on jobs is the total absence of facts to back up the claims. Take the Democrats' position on jobs outsourcing, their idea that the country is bleeding away a finite number of jobs to far-off places like India. Outsourcing is not a new issue, but its one that Democrats are using to circumvent the reality that the U.S. economy is surging toward a new boom cycle and that it's President Bush who has us headed that way."

"So now I wonder: when they write the history of the world 20 years from now, and they come to this chapter "Sept. 11, 2001, to March 2004" what will they say was most important? The attack on the World Trade Center and the Iraq war? Or, as Mr. Rao suggests, the convergence of PC's, telecom and work-flow software into a tipping point that allowed India to become part of the global supply chain for services the way China had become for manufacturing -- creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, India and China, and giving both nations a huge new stake in the success of globalization"

Dishonest Dobbs does it for dollars. Some excerpts: "Not too long ago, the people who watch Lou Dobbs's evening business program on CNN tuned into see someone who looked just like Lou Dobbs ranting about free trade and corporations that outsource jobs--"Exporting America," he calls it. It's as if whatever made Linda Blair's head spin around in "The Exorcist" had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich. No public figure has moved so far left so fast since the transfiguration of Arianna Huffington. What's weird is what a lonely fight it turns out to be. This Tuesday, after Lou described "the shipment of hundreds of thousands of high-tech jobs to cheap foreign labor markets," a CNN reporter's piece on the outsourcing of computer jobs bowed in Lou's direction, then quoted an industry source who says they still can't meet the demand here for programmers. Later, after Lou teed up Ohio's manufacturing job losses, a CNN reporter found evidence to blame Ohio itself--its crummy educational performance and an uncompetitive tax structure with nine income-tax brackets"

U.S. manufacturers say that constant lawsuits and burdensome environmental regulations are the main destroyer of U.S. factory jobs.

The Happy Carpenter has more on what the Government COULD do to keep jobs at home -- WITHOUT going the failed socialist route of restrictive legislation.

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ELSEWHERE

One of my readers replies as follows to the email by Gary Bezowski that I put up yesterday: "Mr. Bezowsky should read Steve Sailer's statistics about Hispanic voting habits over the past 30 years before he throws out the old, old bromide about Hispanic conservative values. 80% of Americans want this damn invasion stopped yesterday! I can assure you as someone who works in my State Republican Party that this immigration insanity by the Bush administration has depressed his base. I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that most of the astute Party workers that I have run into on a National or State level concede now that if things remain as they are today Bush will lose. You might want to check out www.freerepublic.com and read the immigration threads; the Party base is going insane"

Peg Kaplan has now joined the ranks of the Krugman demolishers. Perhaps I am being a Pollyanna but my impression is that the new editor of the New York Times is trying to swing the paper back closer to middle ground. Quite a bit that is congenial to conservatives appears there these days. If they really want to get away from their reputation as a Leftist propaganda outlet, however, they will have to do something about columnist Krugman. Giving Donald Luskin a column too would be one idea.

The last item on "Best of the Web" of 5th. shows that the Los Angeles Times also has a long way to go in easing its Leftist bias. Apparently, their sub-editors automatically change "pro-life" to "anti-abortion" -- with sometimes hilarious results.

There is a carefully-reasoned article by a Bible Christian here arguing that Islam is a Satanic religion. If I were a Christian I think I would agree with him.

I am pleased to say that one of my German readers has responded to my request yesterday for a copy of one of my academic articles that I had lost. See here or here. The findings in it throw into a cocked hat almost all of the research into attitudes that psychologists have ever done. No wonder it has been thoroughly ignored!

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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.

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



6 March, 2004

IN DEFENCE OF THE REPUBLICAN "LEFTWARD DRIFT"

Gary Bezowsky writes:

"I don't think it's entirely correct to assign a leftward drift to the Republican efforts during the Bush term. Sure, we have carping from the right wing against the Bush policies on immigration reform, the deficit and prescription drugs. However, I would defend immigration reform and prescription drugs on conservative grounds and the deficit on economic grounds. Bush ran on a platform that included support for prescription drugs. It should be no surprise that he championed this bill in his first term.

It should be noted this bill includes features with a decided market oriented twist. It allows certain Medicare eligible beneficiaries the right to use private insurers. Additionally, it allows for the first time everyone to establish tax friendly private insurance accounts to cover major medical expenses and pay for minor medical expenses out of pocket.

Immigration reform is the first real effort to offer any policy changes in this area. It brings these people out of the shadows, provides background checks and forces the illegals to pay fines but does not offer automatic citizenship. The illegal are not going away. Americans are not going to chase after the illegals employers. Bush has recognized the Mexican voting block will only grow in the future and is determined to bring this naturally conservative constituency into the Republican's fold.

The anger over the deficit is misplaced. It's appropriate to run deficits during periods of slow growth and it will go away as spending slows and the economy grows from the proper fiscal policy prescriptions of lowering marginal tax rates. Deficits are now running at 4% plus of GDP. At this level, they are not a problem.

I think Bush is taking a page out of the left's playbook. Get a little bit of what you really want each year. A single bill is never the cumulation of the effort. It's just the first step of a long journey. I'm ok with the strategy.

Look for making the tax cuts permanent, privatizing social security and more Medicare reform with more market oriented elements in the second term. Just watch the economy boom with this brew. I think the efforts on the war on terror will increase in the second term. Although I don't have a prediction about the direction.

I'm more upset with the steel tariffs (since rescinded) and a lackluster effort to get a better free trade agreement with Australia. These suffer from domestic politics"

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ELSEWHERE

As a libertarian who sees no need for government in regulating marriage anyhow, I have no dog in the current fight over homosexual marriage. I think that marriage should simply be a personal and private contract that can be enforced like any other contract. As Tibor Machan says here: "Sure, the Massachusetts Supreme Court affirmed the right of gays to get married. Did that shove anything down anyone's throat? Not by a long shot, no more so than a court's affirming the right to be free of enslavement or some other government imposed restriction shoves anything down anyone's throat." But, unlike Machan, I DO find objectionable that unelected judges can legalize homosexual marriage just because they feel like it. They have now "liberated" themselves from all constraints. Judges have always made law. The Common Law consists of nothing else. But the Common Law evolved over hundreds of years as the judicial expression of what the community as a whole saw as just. But note how things have changed: "The Defense of Marriage Act, which became law eight years ago, was enacted overwhelmingly by Congress, with margins of 342-67 in the House and 85-14 in the Senate. Public opinion polls show similarly high support among Americans for defending marriage." Judges who try to usurp democracy by making the law up as they go along clearly are one of America's biggest problems. The homosexual marriage issue is only a sideshow to that more basic problem. I think the constitutional amendment that GWB should be concentrating on is one that would allow the people to vote any judge out of office. People might eventually take to shooting them otherwise. They are pure power without responsibility at the moment. That cannot go on forever.

NYT gets real about poverty: "Now many scholars from across the political spectrum agree that money alone will not significantly improve the lives of poor families. "Not only does behavior matter," Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution wrote in The Public Interest last year, "it matters more than it used to. Growing gaps between the rich and poor in recent decades have been exacerbated by a divergence in the behavior of the two groups." If you graduate from high school, wait until marriage to have kids and work full time (at whatever job), it is almost certain that you will not remain poor. Sawhill's research indicates that we could double the amount we spend on welfare programs, and we would not make an important dent in poverty."

Hugh Hewitt says that current Leftist beliefs are simply silly: "John Kerry... stated bluntly that George W. Bush heads the "most inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in the history of this country." No matter how one evaluates recent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya--and they look pretty good to me--they cannot seriously be compared negatively with losing a war in Vietnam, watching Iran slide into virulent Islamism, or allowing Osama bin Laden to nest and metastasize in Kabul and its precincts. Still, millions of Americans will believe Kerry's outlandish excess not because of evidence that he has presented, but because they want to." For those who do not know their history, the last three disasters Hewitt lists happened under Democrat Presidents (LBJ, Carter and Clinton).

Communist Vietnam has a new friend: Germany, of course. Communists are MUCH easier to get on with than that "Hitler" George Bush.

Carnival of the Vanities is a little late this week but as good as ever.

I have just posted here the latest observations from Chris Brand. He is enjoying the divisions among feminists over the publicity-hungry Naomi Wolf.

The wicked one has just put up some light-hearted comments about Israel, improbable though that may seem.

I have just posted up what seems to be just about the last of my published academic journal articles. See here or here. It shows that criminals have very anti-authority attitudes -- which should be no surprise -- but psychologists generally seem to believe the opposite! I do have one other article in print but no lonnger have a copy of it so cannot post it up. It is: "Acquiescent response bias as a recurrent psychometric disease: Conservatism in Japan, the U.S.A. and New Zealand" It is in a German journal that no library in Brisbane seems to hold: Psychologische Beitraege of 1985 (pages 113-119) so if anyone can dig a copy out of THEIR university library and either scan it in or mail me a xerox of it, that would be appreciated.

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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



5 March, 2004

THAT MOVIE AGAIN

Ann Coulter has a very acid comparison between the Leftist reaction to the Gibson movie and their reaction to Islam.

I myself am pleased that (Australian) Mel Gibson's film about the crucifixion is helping the Christian faith of many and may even bring some people into the Christian fold. Even some conservatives, however, are concerned about the film on the grounds that it will inflame antisemitism. Monica Charen, for instance says: "It grieves me to object to Mel Gibson's movie because I know that millions of Christians in this country and around the world will be moved and possibly even transformed by it -- and that is a welcome thing. As a Jew, I can unhesitatingly declare that the world would be a better place if it contained more believing Christians. And yet Gibson has seeded his film with images of Jewish guilt and perfidy that will fall on fertile anti-Semitic soil around the world." Dick McDonald has sent me an email that begs to differ:

"Monica Charen criticizes Mel Gibson's "Passion" as an antisemitic hate piece because it will ignite those feelings in many people around the world who hate the Jews for killing Jesus. Oh, were the case that simple! Having been reared in a Christian minority among a Jewish majority in the Fairfax district of West Hollywood, I have some insight into why they are hated, the least of which is that they killed Jesus.

The first indictment about Jews I've known is they are smarter than any other oppressed minority on the face of the Earth. In general, they are smarter than any majority. Whether we like it or not, envy is the blight on intelligence.

Secondly, they compete for money and power, with the ferocity and guile reserved to those who have been chased from almost every land on Earth. As a whole they are immensely successful, knowing their time might soon come to leave. Their business success everywhere has bred the brutal side of envy.

Thirdly, they stick together. Whenever possible they do business with each other to the exclusion of others. I was chided that we gentiles had only produced Jack Kemp during my time in school, whereas they (the Jews) had hundreds of millionaires. They honor the old tradition of exclusion of other sects thus creating animosity and envy.

Now, there are many other areas we could talk about but just these three traits and the scorn they precipitate have got them in more trouble than their scriptured complicity in Christ's death. I went through my minority as a minority among Jews and can't recall or remember ever discussing their alleged complicity with Christ's death. The "Passion" is a convenient excuse to deflect from the real problem Jews have: SUCCESS. Unfortunately, everyone takes potshots at the guys on the top."

I am sure someone will accuse Dick of antisemitism for mentioning Jewish differences -- particularly that Jews "stick together" -- but they should note that various studies sponsored by the Anti-defamation League of B'nai B'rith (e.g. Quinley & Glock, 1979) came to conclusions similar to Dick's. Here is a quote from Quinley & Glock: ""Another common stereotype of Jews is that they are clannish... The perception of Jews as clannish has some basis in fact and can thus be accepted without necessarily being a symptom of prejudice." There is a long (and unsympathetic) catalogue here of Jews acknowledging Jewish differences and Jewish tribalism. My own sympathetic account of Jewish differences and tribalism is here.

Reference:
Quinley, H.E. & Glock, C.Y. (1979) Anti-semitism in America. N.Y.: Free Press.

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ELSEWHERE

No double standards for Israel: "Look who's preaching to Israel: Last Wednesday, the U.S. State Department released its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. ... A country that is holding 660 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo without trial and depriving them of basic rights is in no position to criticize administrative detentions carried out by other countries. A country that is holding members of the Iraqi political leadership in detention without trial, far from view, is in no position to complain about the conditions of detention in the prisons of other countries. And a country that is maintaining a tough military occupation regime in Iraq doesn't have the right to fulminate against a different occupation regime, however cruel it may be, in the Palestinian territories."

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" no more? "Israeli police said on Thursday they had arrested an ultra-nationalist Jew who had confessed to a three-year bombing campaign against Arabs and to plotting the assassination of Israeli Arab lawmakers". The troubles there would probably be over now if there were more like him.

Once again, they're praising Hitler with impunity in Germany

A general Leftward drift: "For some decades now, it has been axiomatic to say that the two American political parties have become increasingly polarized along ideological lines - the Republicans becoming more conservative and the Democrats more liberal.... What seems to be happening in 2004 is the Democrats are whirling around more liberal than ever, while the Republicans are abandoning their conservative principles on a daily basis...The Democrats, having flirted for months with nominating the extreme liberal Howard Dean, have abandoned him in favor of John Kerry, who is in fact more liberal than Dean. Kerry is.. more liberal than anyone the Democrats have ever nominated for President. He is also more liberal than any of the other candidates in this year's field, if you will allow me to dispense with the burden of classifying Al Sharpton... And what of the Republicans? Have they, in mirror image, moved rightward in 2004? Heck, no. The biggest complaint about George W. Bush is that he has abandoned the conservatives in his party, on immigration reform, the prescription drug program, deficit spending and other issues".

Jeff Jacoby has an appalling story about those wonderful humanitarian Canadians. How they hate anti-Communists!

A former member of the U.S. army in Vietnam ridicules the observations about U.S. Army misbehaviour that John Kerry claims to have made from his Navy boat.

Texas Conservative delivers a fisking of John Kerry's recent UCLA speech on terrorism.

The wicked one has just put up some facetious diet advice that could make us all vegetarians.

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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



4 March, 2004

BLOG BACKGROUND

I thought I might say a few things about this blog in case anybody is curious about it. I think any blogger will tell you how time-consuming blogging is and in my case I would spend an average of about 8 hours a day or more preparing posts for this blog. As a retired man I can easily afford to do that. I usually put up my posts only once a day at around 9am Queensland time (equivalent to 3pm the previous day in California time). Most of the time I spend is spent reading links sent to me by readers. I do very little reading of my own accord. Even blogs that I like to keep up with -- such as England's Sword and the Bunyip -- I log onto only occasionally. The only blog I read nearly every day is the analytical philosopher -- perhaps because he is a professional analytical philosopher while I am only an amateur one!

One reader in particular sends me so many links that he is in effect a silent partner in this blog. Because he wishes to remain anonymous (though he does have an irregular blog of his own) I get the credit for his broad reading. Around half the links I put up are in fact from him. I wish I could thank him by name here but I thank him anyway.

While I am mentioning personal things, I might also mention that my 16-year-old son Joe has just started an advanced placement course in mathematics at the University of Queensland. He is in his final year at a large private Catholic high school but is allowed to do one subject at university level. The University of Queensland is one of Australia's oldest and largest universities and is where I got my first degree. Joe actually has classes in exactly the same big old sandstone building where I first had classes exactly 40 years ago. I am pretty pleased about it all -- particularly as he is the only one in his school doing advanced placement. And he arranged it all for himself, too. I had no hand in it.

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ELSEWHERE

Christian libertarian Vox Day has some cogent arguments for getting the government out of marriage altogether: "There is a significant difference between marriage - the religious commitment between a man and one or more women - as it has been known in every historical society for at least 6,000 years, and the modern concept of state-granted civil marriage. Self-styled conservative "defenders of marriage" justify their support for state involvement, mostly in the form of tax breaks and social security benefits, in much the same way that left-liberal justify everything - it's all for the children. As usual, however, this mistaken notion has worked out about as well as every other government intrusion into the economy and culture. The number of children being produced in the United States has dropped to its lowest level since 1909...."

Christopher Hitchens: "One good thing about gay nuptials: It'd drive the mullahs mad."

It seems that George Soros too has that vast ego that motivates so many Leftists and leads them to hate those who already are in the positions of power and influence that they covet. Soros is almost a caricature of an egomaniac in fact. No wonder he hates George Bush.

Europe would vote for Kerry if it could. And they're rooting for him. Another bunch all twisted up by envy. They know America would be weak under Kerry.

Jeff Jacoby: "John Kerry is going to be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. And that means that President Bush is one step closer to reelection."

Two good quotes via The Federalist: "I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance." and: "It is completely legitimate for President Bush's campaign to cite Mr. Kerry's voting record and public words in an attempt to prove that the senator's military and foreign policy judgments of the last 30 years have been unwise and unrealistic". The quote about tolerance is from Coleridge (1772-1834) -- a famous poet and one of the many who moved from radicalism to conservatism as he went through life. He could have been writing today.

Rubbery French principles: "France said on Wednesday it was ready to review advertising restrictions on wine producers to encourage the French to drink the industry out of a sales slump."

What fun! "COCA-Cola's new 'designer water" is not the real thing at all and its ingredients are not so special that they are a well-kept secret. For the drink is nothing more than tap water".

Government does something useful: "Citing an array of financial abuses at charitable foundations, federal officials and the Massachusetts attorney general's office plan to push new legislation and tougher regulations designed to curtail excessive salaries, lavish spending, and conflicts of interest by some foundation directors. US Senator Charles E. Grassley [R-IA], chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called the improprieties at foundations detailed in a recent Globe series 'wrong and outrageous,' and said new laws and more stringent rules are needed to ensure that the billions of dollars in foundation assets are used for charitable purposes and not to enrich insiders."

Lula's Leftist authoritarianism is showing: "Thirty thousand people took part in a march in Sao Paulo to protest a decision by Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to close down bingo halls and ban slot machines nationwide. The march was led by the Fuerza Sindical union, whose leader Paulo Pereira da Silva says the ban will bump 100,000 people out of work just in Sao Paulo and possibly more than three times that number in all of Brazil. Lula ordered the closing down of bingo halls after corruption allegations surfaced in February concerning a former adviser to the government."

I have just posted here some more observations from Chris Brand -- noting some increases in realism about race.

The wicked one has just put up another big collection of funnies. I liked the one about diarrhoea.

In the last two days I have put up critiques of work in psychology by Adorno disciples. Criticism is no substitute for doing better, however, so I have today put up one of my published academic articles that provides better data for testing the Adorno theories. See here or here.

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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



3 March, 2004

ON WELFARE AND ECONOMICS

An American tragedy: "One out of 17 white homeowners owns a luxury home, but only one out of 33 minority homeowners has such a costly house". And one out of 33 million Bangladeshis has such a house.

Welfare destroys community: "Cohesion develops from the bottom-up. It emerges when families, workmates and neighbours come together to share common interests and to solve common problems. But people come together only when they have a reason to do so. The more the welfare state takes care of our needs, the less remains for us to do for ourselves. The result is that the bonds between us begin to fray... crime rates plummeted during the 1990s at precisely the same time as the government cut back on welfare spending and income inequality increased significantly". All of which is the opposite of Leftist orthodoxy.

Sowell on the "Big Lie of the Year": "It may be too early in this election year to determine which will be the biggest of the Big Lies in this political campaign. However, my feeling is that it may be 'the working poor.' While there are working people who are poor, most poor people are not working full time, not working very long, or not working at all... By focussing on those who work hard all their lives and still remain poor - no more than 3 percent of the population - and telling their personal stories endlessly, liberals can present the Big Lie with a human face. There is an even bigger lie behind all this. That lie is the implication that the purpose of all this hand-wringing is to help the poor. But the poor are just the bait in a political bait-and-switch game. ....The fraud becomes apparent the moment anyone suggests that there be means tests, so that the taxpayers' money will be spent only on the poor. Those who pose as the biggest champions of the poor are almost invariably the biggest opponents of means tests. They want bigger government and the poor are just a means to that end. "

The Left-leaning "Atlantic" to its credit highlighted the same economic mythology that Sowell refers to last year: "lack of money was more an effect of poor people's other, more-fundamental problems than a cause in its own right; and so handing out more cash would be of little help. Other research similarly pointed away from money and toward the importance of two-parent families, education, and work". And Peter Hitchens compares the welfare state to heroin addiction.

On business 'down sizing': The facts show it's mainly restructuring and "..about half of all downsizing firms end up with at least as many laborers within a few years' time... Manufacturing is fifteen percent of the U.S. labor force and thus only a small part of the downsizing story. Retailing and services have been upsizing considerably for many years."

There is an amusing article here about Lou Dobbs, the financial expert who knows nothing about economics -- or pretends not to in his hunger for popularity. The article suggests that he is actually quite a good investment guide -- if you do the opposite of what he recommends.

Should the whole US Senate be investigated for insider trading? "US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998, according to a new study. "The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors," says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University."

Good news for Israel: "Mr. Netanyahu has tackled economic reform with the zeal and single-mindedness that has marked his career, drawing comparisons to New Zealand's Roger Douglas, the finance minister who liberated his own nation's economy in the 1980s. Mr. Netanyahu's emergency economic plan spared no holy cows: It included cuts in government expenditures, welfare entitlements and public-sector jobs. It also sought to lower taxes and jump-start a stalled privatization program"

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ELSEWHERE

John Kerry's Senate votes put him farther Left than Ted Kennedy

Here is another generally conservative writer who doesn't give a hoot whether homosexuals "marry" or not. What they do only matters if you think they are important.

OK. I'll call a spade a spade: Israel's "disengagement" plan is apartheid. Except that Israel has no other peaceful choice left. Keeping the Jews and the Arabs apart is the the best way to protect the security of the Jews. But it will leave the Arabs free to do what they like in their part of Israel so it is nothing like the South African apartheid of yore.

Hostility is bad for your heart and can kill you. I showed something similar 20 years ago. Being an angry type of person is clearly not good for your cardiac health. I wonder if Leftists have more heart attacks? I must try to look that up one day.

I'd flog them too! "Thousands of Indian Muslims flogged themselves as they marched peacefully through the communally sensitive western Gujarat state to mark the Shi'ite Muslim mourning day of Ashura"

Most of the usual Leftist slurs against GWB ("Hitler", "moron" etc) are demolished here.

Adam Smith, neuroscience pioneer? Smith said "The ability to appreciate other people's agony is achieved by the same parts of the brain that we use to experience pain for ourselves" and it appears that he was right.

I have just posted here some more observations from Chris Brand -- including a comment about genetics and eugenics. My own view of eugenics is here.

I mentioned the Marxist theoretician Adorno yesterday and noted that I had just posted to the net one of my published articles demolishing the work of one of his disciples in psychology. I have just put up another article demolishing the work of yet another of his disciples. See here or here.

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

The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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

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



2 March, 2004

FROM THE MIDDLE-EAST

Iraq mass graves: "Since the Saddam Hussein regime was overthrown in May, 270 mass graves have been reported. In November 2003 the remains of 400,000 people had been discovered. "If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.":

Watch points out that the UN report about Israel's security fence "does not describe a single terrorist act against Israelis". How can you report on something without looking at the cause of it? The U.N. can!

What's new in the Palestinian press? "Despite continuing United States and Western European support for Palestinian political aspirations, the tightly-controlled official Palestinian Authority (PA) media relentlessly incites hatred and violence against the US and the West... President Bush, in this global war context, is depicted not merely as a leader of the "enemy United States", but is the enemy of all civilization, the "Fuhrer of the globalization era," a greater danger than Hitler, leading the world to destruction" Sounds rather like U.S. Leftists.

A former go-between for Iraq's Saddam Hussein says: "I don't think there was any Arab in the seventies who did not want Saddam Hussein to have an atomic weapon. They wanted him to have military parity. Israel had atomic weapons. The Arabs wanted an Arab country to have atomic weapons. Iraq was the head of the pack and therefore all Arabs supported Saddam Hussein."

Arlene Peck thinks that Israel should treat the world like women treat men. Arlene has obviously been a handful in her time.

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ELSEWHERE

That old Marxist fraud, Theodor Adorno, still gets lots of respect in Leftist cultural circles so Denis Dutton's review of Adorno's book about astrology is a welcome corrective: "Karl Popper's famous critique of pseudoscience lumps Freud, astrology, and Marxism together. The difficulty with these theories, Popper said, is not that they don't explain enough, but rather that they explain too much. There is no imaginable human event which they cannot seize upon and place neatly in their theoretical scheme; they are unfalsifiable by experience. Despite my deep sympathy with Adorno's contempt for the occult, there is something similar going on here. If Adorno doesn't like something, no matter how inane or innocuous, it isn't long before he begins to detect in it the seeds of fascism." An amusing story: Theodor's original surname was "Wiesengrund" -- after his father -- but he obviously disliked such an obviously Ashkenazi name and adopted his dancer mother's Spanish stagename as his surname. So, translated into English, he went from being Theodor Meadowland to being Theodor Ornament: About as nutty as his theories. Adorno still has his disciples in psychology too. I have just put up (here or here) one of my published articles demolishing one such disciple.

This article says that public language has become full of waffle and obscurity these days. It's true. But you will find all straight talk on this blog. Even in my academic journal articles I always tried my best to put things simply and plainly and other academics often used to say to me things along the lines of: "We mightn't agree with you but at least we understand what you are saying".

French antisemitism: "During demonstrations in May 2002 organized by France's mainstream antiracist organizations, protesters shouted anti-Semitic slogans and tried to attack a couple of passers-by whom they believed to be Jewish... Since then, the Chirac government has made the crackdown on anti-Semitism a top priority. It has taken a series of emergency steps, from tighter policing of Jewish sites to quicker investigation and prosecution of hate crimes to proposing a heightened focus on the Holocaust in the public school curriculum." It should be noted thyat the Chirac government is a conservative one in French terms and that it was the preceding socialist government that did nothing about antisemitism.

France being such a hotbed of antisemitism, I can see their point on this one: "French cinema chains are refusing to distribute or screen Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ because of fears that it may spark a new outbreak of anti-Semitism."

No freedom of religion on the Left coast: "A Roman Catholic charitable organization must include birth control coverage in its health care plan for workers even though it is morally opposed to contraception, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday."

A statistical fluke if ever there was one: "Research from the University of Chicago's Centre on Ageing shows that daughters born to fathers in their late 40s or older live, on average, three years less than other women, yet their brothers are not affected."

Sending call-centre jobs to India: "It is inevitable in a networked world that our economy is going to shed certain low-wage, low-prestige jobs. To the extent that they go to places like India or Pakistan -- where they are viewed as high-wage, high-prestige jobs -- we make not only a more prosperous world, but a safer world for our own 20-year-olds."

Homosexual "marriage": "How about government simply getting out of the marriage-license-granting business? (Ditto for government licenses necessary to cut hair, drive a taxi, open a business or enter a profession.) Leave marriage to non-governmental institutions, like churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship or private institutions. Adultery, although legal, remains a sin subject to societal condemnation. It's tough to legislate away condemnation or legislate in approval. Those who view same-sex marriage as sinful will continue to do so, no matter what the government, the courts or their neighbors say."

VD Hanson: "Preemption is a concept as old as the Greeks. It perhaps was first articulated in the fourth book of Thucydides's history... What is new is the absolutist, blanket condemnation of the strategy altogether. In short, preemption is now a politicized, debased word. It is part of the anti-Bush lexicon and has lost any real meaning for the foreseeable future of its usage. The same may be true of "multilateralism" and "unilateralism... The Left's problem is not our embrace of the concept of "unilateralism" per se - or it would have attacked Clinton's U.N.-be-damned use of force in Iraq, Kosovo, and Haiti. No, the rub is something altogether different. A Christian, southern-accented, conservative Republican president, coming off a disputed election, has chosen to preempt. "

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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 March, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

The Greenies will love this one: "Prolonged exposure to low-level magnetic fields, similar to those emitted by such common household devices as blow dryers, electric blankets and razors , can damage brain cell DNA, according to researchers in the University of Washington's Department of Bioengineering. The scientists further found that the damage from brief exposures appears to build up over time." Is there anything that is NOT bad for us? Odd that people are living longer all the time, though.

Climate science or science fiction? "Proponents of policies to control human-induced global warming cite science as the basis for their claims and proposals. There is only one problem -- as much as they claim otherwise, there is no scientific consensus for their theories. Here's a quick refresher. Science pursues knowledge through testing, observation and the systematization of facts, principles and methods. Progress is made when a hypothesis is proposed to explain or understand certain phenomena, and which is then tested against reality. A particular hypothesis is considered superior to others when, through testing, it is shown to have more explanatory power than competing theories and when other scientists can reproduce the results. The theory humans are causing global warming does not work this way, however."

Science in the service of power: "I am not convinced, actually, that ecology is much of a science apart from offering some explanations of how the globe's living systems behave. But just as most of the natural sciences cannot give us any direction as to how we should conduct ourselves, what we should aim for in our lives, but only tell us about certain limits and possibilities, so with ecology. This is especially so when it comes to the constant finger-wagging environmentalists engage in with the supposed backing of ecologists."

It's just another Greenie hoax: "When a 'scandalous' story breaks in the United States, makes no waves, resurfaces a few weeks later in the left-wing British press, and only then do liberal activists start haranguing people about it, it is safe to say that the story should be treated with a little suspicion. That is certainly the case with the environmental cri du jour, that the Pentagon is alarmed by the national-security aspects of global warming and recommends immediate action."

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ELSEWHERE

Christopher Nelson says that he too is an academic and he therefore knows why Keith Burgess-Jackson criticizes Andrew Sullivan a lot: Keith is envious of Sullivan's big readership. I think that shows that Nelson is a very young academic indeed. Academics traditionally care little about getting a wide public audience. It is their fellow academics they want to address. They want a high-level audience, not a mass audience. We academics are probably incapable of addressing a mass audience effectively anway. You have to be a politician or a film-maker for that. And among academics I would warrant that Keith already has a much bigger audience than Sullivan -- simply because Keith writes at a consistently academic standard. I myself have never found Sullivan very original and so never now read his blog unless someone points me to something on it but Keith is obviously optimistic enough to think he can talk sense into Sullivan where he needs it. The readership of this blog is small too when compared with Sullivan's readership but I know from the many emails I get that it is a thinking and intelligent audience and that certainly suits me.

Keith has a good comment on Leftist objections to THAT film: "And isn't it odd to see liberals, who usually defend the most obnoxious speech and art, come down so hard on a film?"

One of the great triumphs of the Australian Left has been to convict white Australians of the "stolen generation" crime -- the alleged forcible removal of 100,000 black children from their families so they could be brought up by white foster-parents instead. There has even been a film made about the subject -- Rabbit-proof fence -- which claims to be a documentary. The whole story is however just another Leftist lie -- as Andrew Bolt sets out at length here. The slender basis of fact that the story relies on is that some 1930s official do-gooders -- predecessors of the modern LEFT -- did place a few mixed-race children in white foster homes to give them a better chance in life -- but the placement was always made with written parental consent. There was NO forced removal. Nobody and nothing was "stolen". And that's not just Andrew Bolt's opinion. It is the finding of a year-long $10 million Australian court case about the claim. Officialdom acted only when the parents either did not want the children or felt that they could not care for them adequately.

Keith Windschuttle is again upsetting the Leftists and their view of Australian blacks: "Remote Aboriginal communities are a "failure" and their inhabitants should be moved to mainstream towns for their own good, historian Keith Windschuttle has claimed. Windschuttle told a conference in Perth yesterday the indigenous communities were the legacy of a 100-year-old policy of segregation that was continuing to fail Aboriginal people. He said Aborigines would be better off in urban centres where they could have access to jobs and social services. "On every measure of human wellbeing - employment, health and education - remote communities are a failure," he said". As Windschuttle also points out at length here, the do-gooders have always wanted to keep Australia's indigenous blacks in a sort of permanent anthropological zoo rather than treating them as real people.

RALPH NADER INC: "U.S. traffic fatalities per 100 million miles traveled had fallen rapidly throughout the century, from 24 in 1921 to 5.3 in 1965". All without Ralph Nader's help -- despite what his supporters claim. See also here: Ralph's ties with anti-import textile magnates and plaintiff lawyers, ...the best-paid lawyers in America..., undermine his claim to champion the 'little guy'

What "liberalism" has wrought: "In the wake of a fatal shooting, the security for a D.C. high school was officially turned over to the city's police department last week. Armed officers will patrol the halls. This is one more indication of the severe problems haunting the public school system: violence, illegal drugs, the mandating of medication such as Ritalin, low academic achievement, controversial curricula, perceived prejudice against boys."

"Cato the Elder" links to an article by Ion Mihai Pacepa (former Soviet bloc spymaster) saying that the absurd accusations made by John Kerry about the U.S. army in Vietnam look like being lifted directly from KGB propaganda of the time.

David's Medienkritik has excellent excerpts from two speeches by former V.P. Spiro Agnew showing that Leftist bias in the media was already pervasive in the 1960s.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

Comments? Email me here or here. 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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