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

Black Racist Refuses to Pay up

Eddie Jordan is is the sitting Democratic district attorney for Orleans Parish, Louisiana. He is black. When he gained office, he replaced a whole group of white employees by blacks. The white employees sued and were awarded compensation. That was in 2005 but Jordan has just ignored the court award.

So the employees have just been authorized by a judge to seize all the assets of the DA's office. That seems to have forced Jordan into "discussions" with the lawyers for the employees. Maybe the lawyers really will have to take over his office before this scofflaw DA coughs up.

The Dems sure can find some great candidates for high office, can't they? Who else would even tolerate a scofflaw DA?

If he had been a white Republican, the national media would have been all over this years ago. But they seem to accept from African-Americans exactly the sort of behavior that has made Africa such a lawless place. I can't see that they do anybody any favors by that. It's just another form of racism. They judge a man by his race and have different standards for different races.

More details here

Update:

Black racist Jordan has resigned and black racist Mayor Nagin of "chocolate city" fame has said that the city will not pay the court award -- so it looks like the seizure of the DA's assets will go ahead. That's black USA, apparently.

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Brookes News Update

Is it meltdown time for the US economy?: The recent dive in the Dow Jones Index and the rising demand for US exports have their roots in a reckless monetary policy. Until once again the connection between the structure of prices, the exchange rate and the money supply are fully understood, devaluations and exchange rate instability will continue be the order of the day
Economy swamped by confusion as money supply goes wild: What is unnerving here is that none of our economists can link the "explosive growth of debt" to an exploding money supply. Where in heavens name do they think all this credit came from? The Reserve spends years flooding the economy with credit and no one notices? It's like someone flooding their house by leaving the taps running and then wondering where all the water came from?
Stupid journalists promote the great solar scam: Greens and their media allies want to deny the masses access to cheap and abundant energy. It's these people that our so-called journalists quote in support of their anti-growth ideology. Once again it is brought home to us that the are the enemy
Che Guevara: the media mourn a sadistic killer: The corrupt media are at it again. This time they are praising the fictitious exploits of Che Guevara, a cowardly and sadistic killer who once showed how tough he was by blowing out the brains of a 14-year-old boy. Just the kind of thing to give our lefty journalists a thrill. Why else do you think these lying bigots support murderous leftists? It is not possible for a decent person who follows the media not to be utterly disgusted by them
Holy War and Anti-War: An Axis against Nature: Ain't that just dandy. red fascists join with Islamofascists to form a fifth column to bring down the democracies. What should be noted is the support that this scum get from a good part of the media. As usual 'progressive' (as in cancer) journalists refuse to tell the truth about the left's shenanigans. They much prefer to slime President Bush and Prime Minister Howard while at the same time praising the sadistic Che Guevara
A Roman holiday for ethanol: Paul Crutzen blows the whistle on the ethanol scam. Crutzen is the world's premier atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995 and is a research professor in the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany
Global warming skeptics not the same as 'deniers': With the recent discovery of serious errors in calculating the temperature of the Earth - the 1990s were not the hottest years because there were hotter ones in the 1940s - the work of the skeptics is essential and to dismiss them is an intellectual scandal
All crimes are hate crimes in a free society: Whenever there is a proposal in Congress that would breach the vital concept of 'the rule of law' you can bet you last dollar that a Democrat is usually behind it. And so it is with Barney Frank's 'hate crime' legislation

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ELSEWHERE

As a great fan of Ayckbourn, I am delighted by this news: "An early play by Sir Alan Ayckbourn has been found more than 40 years after it was presumed destroyed, completing the 70-volume canon of his manuscripts. The satires about middle-class manners by Ayckbourn have established him as one of the most highly regarded playwrights in the world, but he was an actor in Scarborough when he wrote Love after All, his second play, in 1959. It was another nine years before he made his name with Relatively Speaking, which became a hit in the West End. The manuscript was discovered by staff from the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where Ayckbourn’s archive is based and his plays are still premiered. Working with curators from the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library, they found it in the archives of the Lord Chamberlain who, until 1968, vetted every play before it could be performed".

Britain now closing libraries: "Proposals to close library buildings across England are being explored by a government advisory body even though more than 100 buildings are estimated to have been lost in the past two years, The Times has learnt. Two years ago a damning report by the Commons Select Committee for Culture condemned the shabby and neglected public library services, with their backlog of building repairs and refurbishments. MPs had urged the Government to give libraries access to lottery money, calculating that up to two thirds of a billion pounds would be needed to wipe out the backlog of repairs. Campaigners, who are already outraged that libraries are being turned into centres for fitness classes and Pilates, were shocked to discover yesterday that the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), the government agency in charge of the sector, is addressing the problem by examining whether there are too many library buildings."

A bureaucracy does some good: "The Federal Communications Commission, hoping to reduce the rising costs of cable television, is preparing to strike down thousands of contracts this week that gave individual cable companies exclusive rights to provide service to an apartment building, the agency’s chairman says. The new rule could open markets across the country to far-ranging competition."

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

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

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

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

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30 October, 2007

Leftists live in a Hollywood fantasy world

Reality is too complicated and threatening for them

It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation's Vietnam "quagmire," older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam - the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot - but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store melange of "The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse."

Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go - except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class.

It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it - sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself - but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.

There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons....

Robert D. Kaplan, a shrewd observer of global affairs, has referred to the jihadist redoubts and other lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a cute joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: No one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue, just as Burt Reynolds never had to worry about the mountain man breaking into his rec room. But Iran has put bounties on London novelists, assassinated dissidents in Paris, blown up community centers in Buenos Aires, seeded proxy terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine, radicalized Muslim populations throughout Central Asia - and it's now going nuclear. The leaders of North Korea, Sudan and Syria are not stump-toothed Appalachian losers: Their emissaries wear suits and dine in Manhattan restaurants every night. Life is not a movie, especially when your enemies don't watch the same movies, and don't buy into the same tired narratives.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Rather amazingly, a columnist at The L.A. Times has a very windy defence of the Scott Beauchamp hoax at The New Republic. Confederate Yankee however fisks the article point by point. Hugh Hewitt also weighs in.

Government plans don't work: "After more than 30 years of reviewing government plans, including forest plans, park plans, watershed plans, wildlife plans, energy plans, urban plans, and transportation plans, I've concluded that government planning almost always does more harm than good. Most government plans are so full of fabrications and unsupportable assumptions that they aren't worth the paper they are printed on, much less the millions of dollars taxpayers spend to have them written. Federal, state, and local governments should repeal planning laws and shut down planning offices. Everybody plans. But private plans are flexible, and we happily change them when new information arises. In contrast, special interest groups ensure that the government plans benefiting them do not change -- no matter how costly."

The Manky Numpties of Congress: "Manky numpties" is wonderfully expressive Scottish slang used here to mean useless morons, substituting for profanity ever so vile. At least half of the words with which the singular numpty is interchangeable are vile. In actual usage, it is most often preceded by yet another vile word of almost unlimited versatility. If we could offend the Congress without offending our readers, we would do so, for we are currently in such unmitigated and unapologetic contempt of Congress that we would plead guilty without a hearing so as not to interrupt the imbeciles as they continue to immolate themselves on poisonous stakes of their own incompetent design.

Grown-ups can't be left unsupervised: "Think about the underlying assumption: If the federal government disappeared tomorrow, all federal parks, recreations areas, monuments and impoundments would be ... what? Why, they'd be open, since the default setting in this country is that we're free to go anywhere we want, unless some specific regulation to the contrary -- to which we ourselves have given our consent -- is in force. But that's not what our federal masters want us to believe. They want us to presume that we have no inherent right to go to any of these places, that they're closed unless or until some federal official decides to open the gates, check our ID, run us through a metal detector, and 'allow' us to enter, after 'explaining the rules.'"

Where right, left and center agree: "About two thirds of economics professors vote Democratic. In other social sciences and humanities, the vast majority of professors vote Democratic. So we should expect professors to favor Democratic policy positions. But there is one issue that professors, right and left, seem to agree on: It is good to let Americans and people of other countries trade freely."

Intolerance in the name of tolerance: "The Boy Scouts' Philadelphia branch, called the Cradle of Liberty Council, had been renting the Beaux Arts building, which stands on city-owned land, for $1 a year. The city has now ordered the Scouts to pay a `fair market' rent of $200,000 on the grounds that the group refuses to admit openly gay Scouts and Scout leaders...[T]he Boy Scouts, who require a belief in God and therefore also `discriminate' against atheists, are not comfortable with the idea of openly homosexual men leading young boys into the woods. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (with justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas in the majority), upheld the group's right to bar scoutmasters who are openly gay based on the principle of freedom of association... But the state, or in this case the city of Philadelphia, apparently doesn't have to give the Scouts a break on their rent. Isn't it hypocritical, though, to be intolerant in the name of tolerance, to say that it's wrong to disapprove of the lifestyles of others but OK to condemn the religious and moral beliefs of others?..."

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

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

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

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

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29 October, 2007

Another Leftist psychopath outs himself

Psychopaths invent stupid lies -- as Bill Clinton did when he said that Hillary was named after Sir Edmund. Sir Edmund Hillary was an unknown NZ farmer when Hillary Rodham was born. Post below lifted from Powerline. See the original for links

Earlier this week Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison took to the floor of the House of Representatives to speak in anticipation of the anniversary of the death of the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone. Ellison recalled:

It was a long night, Mr. Speaker, when we heard back the reports as the news reports said that a plane has gone down in Ely, Minnesota, and it was thought to be containing Paul Wellstone and his partner, Sheila Wellstone, and their daughter and several other campaigners. We hoped all night that what we thought might have happened didn't happen, but at the end of the evening, we learned that that tragedy, in fact, did occur. Our worst fears were confirmed when we learned that we lost him, but it was a long several hours before we realized that that tragedy had actually occurred, and we had hoped against hope. I will never forget that night.

However, as Bob Collins comments:

Wellstone's plane took off at around 8 in the morning, it crashed about an hour later, and Jeff Blodgett announced his death a few hours after that. Here's a link to the page I put together at the time, which includes audio from dozens of politicians on the same day....when -- I must point out -- the sun was up. Night? A long night? And the plane went down in Ely, Minnesota, which will come as a big surprise to the folks in Eveleth-Virginia. I figure maybe he was in Australia at the time, but he says in the speech he was to visit Wellstone in the office the same day, so he must've been in the same time zone.

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ELSEWHERE

Breast cancer cannot safely be treated in Arab lands: "One Saudi woman ignored the cancer growing in her breast because she didn't want to risk a referral to a male doctor. Another was divorced by her husband on the mere suspicion she had the disease, while a third was dragged away from a mammogram machine because the technicians were men. Breast cancer is still considered a taboo in oil-rich Arab Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia even as the disease claims more and more victims"

He Shook Some (Moon) Dust Out Of His Tin-Foil Hat: "If he wins his bid for the White House, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson may be just the man to get to the bottom of the 60-year-old Roswell UFO mystery. Answering questions at a townhall meeting Friday, a Dell employee asked Richardson about the 1947 incident in which many people still believe a flying saucer landed near the eastern New Mexico town. "I've been in government a long time, I've been in the cabinet, I've been in the Congress and I've always felt that the government doesn't tell the truth as much as it should on a lot of issues," said Richardson, who is governor of New Mexico."

Holocaust survivor zaps Dutch surrender monkeys: "He'll probably apologize for the remark later but Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos of California, the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, told it like it is to some Dutch politicians: "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay." The liberal Lantos is far from a friend of Gitmo. The Dutch sent these politicians here to bitch about Gitmo. No reporter attended a meeting between the Dutch and the congressman, but AP wrote a story based on Green Party legislator Mariko Peters. The Dutch are threatening to remove their 1,600 troops from Afghanistan to protest Gitmo. Dutch politicians face growing problems with Islamic youths and likely fear a L'Intifada like France suffered in 2005."

Pretty boy does his elitist stuff again: "Does the John Edwards campaign have a death wish? To the litany which includes the 28,000 square foot home, his job with a hedge fund (to learn about poverty!) and the $400 haircuts we can now add a story about the decision by the Edwards campaign to locate their campaign headquarters in the poshest part of posh Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And the death wish? Well, the location of his campaign headquarters was a non-story until the Edwards people got a bit heavy-handed with a UNC professor. A journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is accusing aides of John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, of demanding that he remove from YouTube a student report critical of Mr. Edwards's Democratic presidential campaign - and of threatening to block the university's access to Mr. Edwards and the campaign headquarters near campus."

Pelosi unloved by her own: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's own party is turning on her, apparently because of a perception among California Democrats that she has not done enough to shake up the status quo in Washington, D.C., according to a Field Poll released Friday.... For Pelosi, it was the first time the poll showed more people disapproving than approving of her performance - 40 percent to 35 percent, with 25 percent having no opinion. Other polls since 2003 have shown larger numbers of voters with no opinion, but Pelosi always won more approval than disapproval. As recently as March, California Democrats approved of Pelosi by a 5-to-1 ratio, DiCamillo said. Now it's less than 2-to-1. Nonpartisan voters also have soured on her. Only 22 percent of voters approve of the job Congress is doing, the poll found, while 64 percent disapprove."

Democrats deliver a conservative ideal -- a do-nothing government: "One of the most silvery linings to Congress being overtaken by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid has turned out to be the remarkable inefficacy of the new majority. With half of the toxic "Six in 06" platform remaining unenacted a couple hundred days after the end of the first 100 hours, the country's faring a lot better than she might be, had the "Most Honest, Most Open, Most Ethical Congress" turned out to be a little more productive. And there's more good news for fans of Congressional inaction. 10 months into his stint in the captain's chair, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer propounds the happy news that 2008 will feature 50% more Congress-free days".

Liberals Should Be Called "Suppressives" Rather Than "Progressives": "Instead of calling liberals "progressives", I urge all conservatives to call them "suppressives". The fascination with suppression of speech on talk radio; political correctness in universities; and Nancy Pelosi's interest in treating bloggers as political lobbies subject to federal regulation is more than enough to earn liberals the "suppressive" appellation. I have recently blogged about Peter Levine's book New Progressive Era and note that although Levine claims that public deliberation ought to replace free markets, public deliberation is impossible because progressives dislike speech that disagrees with their own and because progressives' choices, which are mostly erroneous, become institutionalized. Upon institutionalization, discussion about them is foreclosed."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly incorrect themes of race and IQ -- and featuring this time a big coverage of reactions to James "Black IQ" Watson.

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

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

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

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

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28 October, 2007

RACISM LEADS TO WAR

That is the implicit message of the academic journal article below. It could even be a correct message. That it is politically correct there can be no doubt.

The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War

By Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles

Altruism-benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself-and parochialism-hostility toward individuals not of one's own ethnic, racial, or other group-are common human behaviors. The intersection of the two-which we term "parochial altruism"-is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or parochial behavior reduces one's payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these behaviors. But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted intergroup hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

Science 26 October 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5850, pp. 636 - 640

Theory and simulations are a very weak source from which to draw any conclusions about real life but let us say for a while that we should take these results seriously. What conclusions can we draw from them?

Does it mean that all war is racist and that we should therefore refrain from war? Obviously not -- or the overthrow of Hitler would be wrong and that was to a small degree actually an anti-racist war. Wars in antiquity also had very little to do with race. Ancient Rome was led by men of all races, not just the men of Latium. The Roman empire was in our terms quite non-racist. Yet it did an awful lot of wars of conquest and the result is generally regarded as a great spread of civilization.

And does all racism lead to war? It may -- depending on how you define racism. It is certainly true that the primitive tribes of (say) New Guinea had just the combination of parochialism and altruism that the researchers above describe -- and the "noble savages" concerned were almost continuously at war with one-another. But we today do not live in primitive tribes.

The British Empire was undoubtedly racist in the modern sense right into the early 20th century. As rulers of the largest empire the world has ever seen (or ever is likely to see) most Brits believed that British superiority was self-evident. But were they "parochial"? They were certainly often and justly described as "insular" but they were not parochial. They were famous as a nation of refuge for the persecuted of other lands (even for Karl Marx) and they did not have completely different rules for insiders and outsiders. Thanks in part to their Jewish cultural heritage (see, for instance, Exodus chapter 23), they believed in impartial justice for all and British justice was in fact at that time famous for exactly that.

Yes: I know that Mosaic justice DID discriminate in some ways between Hebrews and non-Hebrews but it did also stress impartiality and it was certainly the message of impartiality that British Christians got from the Old Testament (Exodus is where those pesky "Ten Commandments" come from). It even led British Christians to see slavery as unjust -- a quite unheard-of notion up until that time.

Indians even sat in the British parliament in the imperial period and when a British army general went over the line in his efforts to maintain imperial order, as General Dyer did in the Amritsar massacre, sanctions came into play and General Dyer was dismissed. At the very height of the empire, the British Conservative Party even made a Jew their Prime Minister -- and a Jew who flaunted his Jewish difference at that. How "hostile" to outsiders can you get?

Nobody would claim perfection for British society of the imperial period (though I personally think it was remarkably good) but it was recognizably at least as fair and impartial as the most fanatically anti-racist society the world has ever seen: The USA of today. So even racist societies may not be parochial and the societies of the Anglosphere today are certainly not parochial. So the "research" reported above is essentially irrelevant to anything but an understanding of primitive tribes.

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ELSEWHERE

A good email from a reader: "I enjoy your site, as I continue to try to understand liberals. The other night I was watching a section on bird flu, how viruses work by invading cells to take them over to subvert them to their own purposes. The liberals have been equally successful in taking over powerful institutions for their purposes. It is amazing how easy it is for a few aggressive people of like mind to worm their way into an easy-going controlling group and change its makeup and direction completely. I first saw this decades ago at my university, where I noticed how one new incoming group of pledges with a few activists could completely change a fraternity by taking over the running of the group and then making the institution a reflection of their own desires. This initial takeover was then set for years to come by taking in only new members that felt and acted in the same manner. It usually happened because the majority of those in the group did not care enough or know how to fight the "invaders", and just let it happen."

US preparing to beat Iran's bomb: "Nestled deep in George W.Bush's latest $190 billion request to Congress for emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a tantalising little item that has received scant attention. The US Department of Defence has asked for an additional $US88million to modify B2 stealth bombers so they can carry a 13,600kg bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator (or MOP, in the disarming acronymic vernacular of the military). The MOP is an advanced form of a "bunker-buster", an air-delivered weapon with an explosive capacity to destroy targets deep underground. Explaining the request, the administration says it is in response to an "urgent operational need from theatre commanders". What kind of emergency could that be? Pat yourself on the back if you correctly identified the subterranean nuclear enrichment facilities operated by the Iranian Government in its pursuit of an epoch-altering bomb. The debate in Washington about what to do with the increasingly recalcitrant and self-confident Iranian regime has taken a significant turn in the past few weeks. And the decision to upgrade the bombing capacity of the US military is perhaps the most powerful indication yet that the debate is reaching a climax."

Terrorists fall out: "Al-Qaida sympathizers have unleashed a torrent of anger against Al-Jazeera television, accusing it of misrepresenting Osama bin Laden's latest audiotape by airing excerpts in which he criticizes mistakes by insurgents in Iraq. Users of a leading Islamic militant Web forum posted thousands of insults against the pan-Arab station for focusing on excerpts in which bin Laden criticizes insurgents, including his followers. Analysts said the reaction highlighted militants' surprise at bin Laden's words, and their dismay at the deep divisions among al-Qaida and other Iraqi militants that he appeared to be trying to heal.

Farm Subsidies Survive Opposition: "This was the year the antiquated and expensive farm subsidy program was to be reformed. A growing chorus has turned against the $16 billion annual subsidy, which gives most of the money to corporate farms rather than the small farmers for whom the program was designed during the Depression.... Yet ... the 2007 farm bill is pretty much the same as previous versions."

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

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

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

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

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

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27 October, 2007

Good War News....from Atlanta

Post below excerpted from Charlie Foxtrot . See the original for links. I am so pleased that at least some of the military are getting the recognition that they deserve

Today Bob posts some good news from the war that he experienced himself firsthand....at the airport in Atlanta .

"...I wasn't prepared for what happened today. As my flight from Cincinnati to Atlanta was beginning its descent, the flight attendant began her normal spiel about landing and gates, and assistance finding your connecting flights and so on. Then she announced that I was on board and on my way back to Afghanistan after spending two weeks with my family. The plane erupted into applause. I was stunned."

But it doesn't stop there....

"They formed us into a line upstairs at the USO, probably 200 or more of us, and took us downstairs in two long lines. Soldiers and Marines paired two by two in a long line snaked through the airport towards the Army Personnel Command desk to do our formalities. As we wove through the airport, the throngs of travelers began to applaud. I wasn't prepared for that, either. Again, I struggled not to lose it. It was like cracking the seal on a warm, freshly shaken coke. All the bubbles rush towards the cap, bringing the contents of the bottle along. That's what it felt like. I managed to keep all my fluids contained; but it was another close call. "

While these stories are not unique, I believe that is a great demonstration that the public opinion battle over the war is not lost as some might want to claim. I am sure that not all of those applauding support the war in Iraq, and maybe not even the War on Terror, but were merely showing their respect. But if the public opinion had truly been lost, I don't think we would see such public displays of support, even if the military is highly respected.

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Black IQ controversy still bubbling

World Science recently had a fairly conventional article on the deeply unpopular observations of James Watson that did however include this report:

But Linda S. Gottfredson, a sociologist at the University of Delaware in Newark, Del., defended Watson Thursday and called the museum's cancellation of his appearance "an outrage." "Prof. Watson's views are actually in the mainstream of knowledgeable scientific opinion," she wrote in an email. "The Museum is wrong on two counts: first, that certain scientific questions may not be debated, and, second, that Prof. Watson is surely mistaken and alone in his scientific judgment on group differences in average intelligence.

World Science got a lot of comments and email over it, including this profundity from a "philosopher": Watson and his supporters like Gottfredson are clearly racists.

World Science now has a poll on the question. Finding truth by majority votes rather than by a careful examination of the known facts seems to be all the rage these days.

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ELSEWHERE

A small apology: There seems to be a real proliferation of social networking sites. Mainly in response to invites from others, I am on lots of them: Myspace.com, spaces.live.com, facebook.com, wayn.com etc. I have quite lost track of them all. I am calling a halt now, though. I have received invites from various people for many other sites but enough is enough. I won't be registering for any more of such sites. I don't make any use of them anyway. The only one I update occasionally is the Microsoft one. By clicking "More" there, you can get to a more readable version of the blog part of it. You will see that I have no "friends" there. Isn't that sad? I think that might be one Microsoft facility that has very few users.

Lots of us like a good shot at the utterly biased NYT and Taranto gets a good one in today (first item). It may help if you know that it took a lot of plastic surgery to make Tori Spelling look presentable (sort of).

The "population bomb" of the 1960s gets a re-run: "The speed at which mankind has used the Earth's resources over the past 20 years has put "humanity's very survival" at risk, a study involving 1,400 scientists has concluded. The environmental audit, for the United Nations, found that each person in the world now requires a third more land to supply his or her needs than the Earth can supply." [According to similar prophecies in the 1960s we should just about all be dead by now]

Time to get tough with Turkey?: "The United States should radically rethink its relationship with Turkey. For the sad fact is that Ankara no longer seems to be an ally worthy of the name - indeed its threatened invasion of Iraq would be the act of an outright enemy. Nor has Turkey behaved like a genuine ally for more than four years. It's not merely that Turkey refused at the last minute to let Coalition forces invade from the north in March 2003 - though that did affect the war and its aftermath in unfortunate ways. There have been other equally serious derelictions, ranging from the refusal to allow a damaged U.S. warplane to make an emergency landing in March 2003, to active subversion of the Coalition and the post-Saddam Iraqi authorities."

Islamofascism week brought out the Fascists: "The fascists came out in force tonight at Emory University and broke up what would have been an interesting conversation. I hardly got through fiteen minutes of my scheduled talk before members of the audience who come to protest rather than to listen became so unruly that it was impossible to go on. (Video and reports on Islamo-Fascism Week available at www.incorrectu.com) . This is too bad, particularly for the students at Emory, which is a good school and whose student audiences have always been civil when I spoke there in the past. [In football, I think this would be called an "own goal"]



Insane bureaucracy: "The Russian Ilyushin-76 "waterbomber" jet [above] that can douse a fire the size of 10 football fields in a single pass is not being used to fight the California fires because it hasn't passed U.S. inspections, federal officials have confirmed for WND."

Microsoft surrenders to EU: "Microsoft Corp. dropped a nearly decade-long legal battle with European regulators Monday, agreeing to key parts of an antitrust ruling that has already led to hundreds of millions in fines. The world's largest software company will slash the royalties it charges rivals for interoperability information needed to make programs that work smoothly with Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system. It will make access to the data easier for open source developers who the EU said are now "virtually the only alternative for users." Microsoft said it would not appeal a EU Court of First Instance decision on Sept. 17 that turned down its challenge to a 2004 European Commission order that found it guilty of monopoly abuse".

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

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

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

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

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26 October, 2007

Mainstream sense on IQ

The article below from "The Times" of London gets it pretty right. One point they glide over, however, is that "culture fair" tests (one not dependant on a particular educational or social background) show very similar racial and class gaps to other tests -- and have been doing so for decades. In Australia there was even a test specifically designed for blacks in a black environment (the Queensland Test) and whites still scored way higher on that. Pesky!

Rows about race and IQ pop up about once a decade, and invariably cause a fuss. But do they really signify anything? The evidence is that IQ, as conventionally measured, does differ between racial groups. Many studies have shown differences of about 15 points between the mean scores of white and black groups, and some have shown that Chinese and Japanese groups score higher still.

The counter-argument is that the conventional measurement of IQ is heavily culture-dependent. A test developed originally to measure the intelligence of Caucasians may not be fair to those whose cultural heritage is different. Some tests do contain biases that may disadvantage people, either on the basis of culture or, indeed, socio-economic status. When the scores are corrected for wealth and social position, the gaps narrow.

A second argument - that IQ doesn't matter anyway -is easier to dismiss. A large body of evidence shows that IQ is linked to success in life, both educational and economic. This is why the gap narrows when corrections are made for socio-economic status, because in a mobile society success is largely determined by intelligence.

To some, it is enough to say that IQ tests are unfair, and that their conclusions must be disregarded, but that flies in the face of the evidence that such tests are in fact good predictors of success. So if we accept that group differences are real, do they matter? The first thing to say is that such group differences tell us nothing about individuals. The distribution curves for all groups overlap, and the range of scores within each group is far wider than the differences between them. So even if the group differences were to be real, they tell us nothing about individuals within those groups. To judge individuals by the nation, race, or sex to which they belong is prejudice. Everyone has the right to be judged on his or her own merits.

The difficulty is that campaigners for racial equality have insisted on the rights of whole groups, not of individuals. They have sought to be argue that entitlements should be conferred on individuals not on their own merits but simply because they belong to that group.... Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve, a book published in the 1990s that reviewed the evidence dispassionately, said that the only answer was "an energetic and uncompromising recommitment to individualism".

All people deserve equal treatment. But that is not quite the same as saying they are all equal. The error comes in taking a group difference, which may or may not be real, and using it to judge the worth of individuals. That is racism.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

The short memory of the Leftist media: "After the Clintons and their siblings were caught in the 42nd president's last-minute pardon scandal, Jimmy Carter called them "disgraceful." Robert Reich opined that "Clinton is utterly disgraced." Al Hunt called Clinton the "albatross" of his party who should "drop dead." Al Gore's campaign manager, Donna Brazile wrote in the New York Times that "It's time to let Bill Clinton go -- go on and live the rest of his life and allow a new generation of Democratic leaders to renew their fight on behalf of working families in America." New York Times columnist Bob Herbert affirmed that "Bill Clinton has been a disaster for the Democratic Party. Send him packing. It's time for the Democratic Party to wise up. Ostracism would be a good first step. Bill Clinton should be cut completely loose....some of Mr. Clinton's closest associates and supporters are acknowledging what his enemies have argued for years -- the man is so thoroughly corrupt it is frightening."

Private funding for retirement: "Instead of politically correct solutions to Social Security the Republican Presidential hopefuls might consider what President Bush campaigned on (but has yet to deliver) in 2000: A Private Retirement Account System. And if they don't want to look to Chile for a successful example of a privatized SS system, they can turn to Romanian President Traian Basescu who is steering his country in that very direction. Under the new Romanian system millions of workers will be transferred into a private pension system where they are able to choose between 14 competing pension funds. Romania is the latest country to join 31 other countries that have recognized the need to change over to private systems or go bankrupt. In the US, we don't seem to be moving in the direction of a Private Retirement System...nor are we even discussing the possibilities. That is probably because of the terrible results other countries have had with these types of systems. Take Chile for example where the private retirement system has been embraced by well over 90% of the population; where the annual return on investments has been 10% above inflation since the programs inception in 1981; and where a new sector of the economy has grown to compete for personal retirement accounts. That sounds awful to me". [/sarcasm]

More Leftist wisdom: "Dennis Ross is perhaps the least successful diplomat in American history. And his lack of success isn't down to bad luck. Ross concluded that Yasser Arafat was a legitimate peace partner for Israel, and embarked on the fool's errand of trying to bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians on that basis. Has any American diplomat ever misjudged an important matter so thoroughly? Ross now brings his analytical powers and judgment to bear on Iraq. He accuses President Bush, who has brought about both regime change and the rise of a constitutional government that's just about holding together, of engaging in "stagecraft" to the exclusion of "statecraft." In the process, Ross has produced a column in which almost everything he says makes no sense."

Belgian police let Muslims run riot: "Last Sunday, demonstrating Turkish youths ransacked an Armenian restaurant in the Sint-Joost-ten-Node borough. According to the owner the police was present at the scene but did not interfere while his establishment was being demolished. The Armenian had to flee for his life. Another man who had to run for his life was the Belgian journalist Mehmet Koksal, an ethnic Turk. He was attacked around 11 pm on Sunday evening by a group of some twenty Turkish youths in front of the American embassy in Brussels, a few yards from the Belgian parliament building. The Parliament and the US Embassy are less than one kilometer from Sint-Joost-ten-Node. Koksal fled to a nearby police car, but a female police officer refused to let him into the car, whereupon the youths savagely beat him up. Fearing that they were about to lynch him, the police officers changed their attitude and allowed the journalist to seek refuge in their car...."

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

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

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

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

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25 October, 2007

Has a statistician demolished the idea of a single general intelligence factor?

Cosma Shalizi is a rather egotistical-sounding young man of apparently Afghan ancestry. He is also an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. On his blog, Three Toed Sloth, he has a long post demonstrating that a popular form of mathematical analysis generically called factor analysis cannot be used to demonstrate the existence of IQ (or 'g' as we psychometricans call it).

His criticisms are perfectly correct. Factor analysis cannot prove ANYTHING in fact. It is just a convenient but rather arbitrary way of summarizing a set of correlations. Factor analysis is such a weak technique that I myself in my more than 200 published academic papers have used it only rarely -- even though I normally present my research results in correlational form. It is my rather severe view that most (though not all) theories in psychology can be substantiated or dismissed with just one Pearsonian correlation coefficient. Anything else tends to suggest poor research design to me. (Yes. I do know about non-linear relationships. I tested for one such in my very first dissertation, in fact).

The sloth is also correct in saying that much of the research into IQ has used factor analysis as a way of summarizing findings. That the findings are not DEPENDANT on that descriptive technique is the point he appears to overlook.

The underlying finding for 100 years or more is that ability to solve one sort of puzzle generalizes strongly to the ability to solve other quite different sorts of puzzle. Problem solving ability is general, no matter how you choose to summarize that. And problem-solving ability is what IQ or 'g' measures.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that verbal ability (as indexed -- say -- by the number of rare words understood) correlates well with mathematical ability (as indexed -- say -- by ability to detect complex numerical sequences). This is despite the fact that many people report being good in only one of those areas. I am in fact one of those who are good with words but shaky with mathematics. Yet I did for some years teach statistics at a major university. I obviously had some mathematical ability despite my discomfort with the subject. And it is the genes too. My son now teaches mathematics at another major university. And at school he was always a couple of years ahead of his class in reading ability too. Pesky stuff, that IQ.

The sloth should rise above his fascination with mathematical processes and focus on the underlying reality.

There is another over-enthusiastic blog here that claims that the sloth "offers an exhaustive demolition of the idea of a single general intelligence factor". The blogger apparently believes that the sloth has magically made lots of large correlation coefficients disappear. One of the commenters on that blog made an excellent point in addressing the common allegation that IQ tests measure only the ability to pass IQ tests. He said:

"If IQ tests are worthless, then so are college degrees. What do they really measure other than the ability to pass college classes? Nothing. Maybe we should assign MDs by lottery as well. I'll let you go first on the triple bypass surgery under your new world order."

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ELSEWHERE

U.S. Forces Could Attack Iran if Needed: "While military action against Iran is a last resort, the U.S. has the resources to attack if needed despite the strains of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the top U.S. military officer said Thursday. Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the focus now is on diplomacy to stem Iran's nuclear ambitions and its support for insurgents in Iraq. But, he told reporters, "there is more than enough reserve to respond (militarily) if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do."

Fact-free Leftist illusions: "The alternative Western view of Middle East strategy--so influential in academic, media, and to some extent diplomatic circles-has a six-point program that boils down as: Make deals with Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizballah; ally with Muslim Brotherhoods; and split Iran and Syria. Those more extreme who advocate this approach are sympathetic to these forces, seeing them as more misunderstood victim than aggressive oppressor; the more moderate among them merely think the radicals can be moderated through concessions and confidence-building measures. In other words, they are not really adversaries but either already good guys or can be converted into playing that role. By this analysis, those who claim these radical regimes and movements are dangerous due to their radical ideology, violent methods, and totalitarian goals are standing in the way of solving issues quickly, painlessly, and peacefully. They are warmongers perpetrating needless conflicts. This analysis generates tremendous anger against the United States and Israel or anyone else who tries to explain that this approach will not work. Through this transformation, those who generate grievances that create terrorists or don't want to give in to the terrorists' demands are the real villains"

Cardinal signals firm Vatican stance with Muslims: "The top Vatican official for Islam has praised a novel Muslim call for dialogue but said real theological debate with them was difficult as they saw the Koran as the literal word of God and would not discuss it in depth..... The fact that Muslims can build mosques in Europe while many Islamic states limit or ban church building cannot be ignored, he said. "In a dialogue among believers, it is fundamental to say what is good for one is good for the other," he said."

Media can distort anything into anti-capitalism: "Financial Times columnist Clive Crook has had it. Reading MSM's take on the recent World Economic Outlook published by the IMF he feels like the characters of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. No, he is NOT a right wing conservative. He writes for the Atlantic Magazine and National Journal. It is just that he knows enough about economics to finally get what she got 50 years ago - Capitalism is moral and technological innovators are vilified heroes who actually make the world better. The opposite is true of anti-Capitalists, be they from the right or from the left"

Foolish optimism: "The Bush administration's plans to convene a new round of Israeli-Arab diplomacy on Nov. 26 will, I predict, do substantial damage to American and Israeli interests. As a rule, successful negotiations require a common aim; in management-labor talks, for example, both sides want to get back to work. When a shared premise is lacking, not only do negotiations usually fail, but they usually do more harm than good. Such is the case in the forthcoming Annapolis, Maryland, talks. One side (Israel) seeks peaceful coexistence while the other (the Arabs) seeks to eliminate its negotiating partner, as evidenced by its violent actions, its voting patterns, replies to polls, political rhetoric, media messages, school textbooks, mosque sermons, wall graffiti, and much else. Damage will be done should the Israeli government make "painful concessions" and get a cold peace or empty promises in return, as has consistently been the case since 1979. This lop-sided outcome would, once again, boost Arab exhilaration and determination to eliminate the Jewish state."

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

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

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

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

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24 October, 2007

Levitt on IQ

The attempts by do-gooders to dismiss the evidence against racial differences in IQ are often amusing for their desperation. They almost invariably come up with claims and ideas that have been very thoroughly raked over long ago and are too arrogant to suspect that they might learn something by checking the research on the subject (Rushton's demolition of Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" is a handy introduction to some of the more common issues). In his Freakonomics blog on the New York Times, however, economist Steven D. Levitt has come up with something that is at least original -- though at the price of absurdity. He reports a study in which he studied the IQs of one-year-olds. And guess what? At that age there were no differences between blacks and whites.

The idea that one-year-olds can have their IQs reliably measured is of course a joke and Steve Sailer satirizes it well. Steve does not go the full monte, however, so I will -- thus making me perhaps the most incorrect blogger on the net. I regret if it loses me readers but I have never shrunk from telling the full truth.

The fact is that if Levitt had included one-year-old chimpanzees in his group of infants, he WOULD have found some differences -- in favour of chimpanzees. Chimps grow up faster than humans so are capable at an earlier age -- but at the price of a lower final intelligence and a shorter lifespan. Generally speaking, the higher the final IQ, the longer it takes to reach its peak. If the test used by Levitt had really measured IQ, he would almost certainly have found the white children at that age to be LESS intelligent than black children. Blacks do reach puberty earlier than whites. Levitt was the simpleton for being unable even to form a reasonable hypothesis for his study.

The outrage brigade will have stopped reading by now but I must make clear that I am NOT equating blacks with chimpanzees. Blacks are clearly vastly more intelligent than chimpanzees. But comparisons between primates can sometimes help illuminate general principles. Leftists have long claimed to find great significance for human beings in the behaviour of the "peaceful" Bonobos, for instance. But more on that some other time.

Finally, let me add a routine caveat: People have a tendency to see statements about groups as applying to all members of that group. That is rarely so and is certainly not true in this instance. There is no inconsistency in saying that blacks as a whole are less intelligent while also acknowledging that some individual blacks are very intelligent. What is true of most need not be true of all.

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ELSEWHERE

Jacksonian has a long post which argues that Hillary is a sociopath (or psychopath in blunter language). He makes his case fairly well. There is no doubt whatever that Hil is married to a psychopath -- someone plausible but devoid of any conscience, morality, principle or guiding philosophy -- someone to whom a lie comes as easily as the truth.

Hillary puzzle? "For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush's aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It's odd, then, that they're prepared to nominate Hillary Clinton to carry the party into the 2008 elections. The problem with Hillary Clinton is two-fold: First, she's likely to be as bad or worse than Bush on all of those issues, and second, she's the one Democrat the Republicans still have a chance to beat."

Mad Muslim airline pilot. Don't fly Garuda: "The Indonesian captain in this year's Garuda passenger jet disaster ignored 15 automated warning signals and his own co-pilot shouting at him not to land the aircraft in the seconds before the crash, investigators have found. Senior pilot Marwoto Komar was so fixated on landing the Boeing 737-400 that he ignored pleas from his co-pilot to perform a "go around', or second approach, the report by Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee says. The report notes that Captain Komar was singing and engaging in non-essential conversation during the crucial descent from 10,000 feet to 4000 feet, and that during flight simulator and pilot line testing last year and in 2005, the 45-year-old was found by his check pilots to have made landing approaches that were too fast."

BBC joins the British crime coverup: "BBC News is to cut coverage of crime stories as part of its cost-saving plans. Up to 490 jobs are to go in the department as the television, radio and on-line operations are integrated, with 155 million pounds due to be saved during the next five years. Morale within the BBC is said to be at an all-time low after Mark Thompson, the Director-General, announced last week that 2,500 jobs would be lost across the corporation. Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News, admitted that staff were "unhappy and anxious about some of the efficiencies we are having to make". Explaining where the cuts would fall, she said: "We are talking about deploying fewer stories. For instance, I think there's some middle-ranking crime stories we could do without or think harder about the way we do them."

Dutch worse than the French: "Things have gotten so bad in the Netherlands that even French intellectuals are now accusing us of "unacceptable cowardice" because of the way Ayaan Hirsi Ali was treated recently. Several intellectuals wrote an open letter, which was published in the French newspaper Lib‚ration. In it, Pascal Bruckner, Luc Ferry, Alain Finkielkraut, Andr‚ Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy don't just accuse the Dutch of cowardly behavior, they also call on their own government to offer Ayaan Hirsi Ali French nationality. They write that "the Netherlands closes its eyes for a world in which terrorism, intolerance and totalitarianism don't care about borders."

Advanced missiles from Iran have already been fired at U.S. helicopters in Iraq: "The U.S. military has reported that Iran has smuggled advanced surface-to-air missiles into Iraq for the purpose of downing U.S. combat aircraft. Officials said Iran has transported man-portable SAM systems to Shi'ite allies in Iraq. They said some of the missiles have already been fired at U.S. Army helicopters. "It's a real concern, and it's something that we're dealing with," U.S. Army Col. Daniel Shanahan said. "Right now we've got the best systems in the world, and we've got technology behind us." Shanahan did not identify the Iranian missiles. Over the last 18 months, Iran was said to have received the SA-18 Igla-S man-portable missile from Russia."

Violence in Iraq drops sharply, says Iraqi Ministry: "Violence in Iraq has dropped by 70 percent since the end of June, when U.S. forces completed their build-up of 30,000 extra troops to stabilize the war-torn country, the Interior Ministry said on Monday. Washington began dispatching reinforcements to Iraq in February to try to buy Iraq's feuding political leaders time to reach a political accommodation to end violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs that has killed tens of thousands and forced millions from their homes. While the leaders have failed to agree on key laws aimed at reconciling the country's warring sects, the troop buildup has succeeded in quelling violence. Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul-Karim Khalaf told reporters that there had been a 70 percent decrease in violence countrywide in the three months from July to September over the previous quarter".

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

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

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

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

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

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23 October, 2007

For the children?

On Thursday Nancy Pelosi, as is the fashion, used the phrase "the children" like some twitchy verbal tic, a kind of Democrat Tourette's syndrome: "This is a discussion about America's children. We could establish ourselves as the children's Congress. Come forward on behalf of the children... I tried to do that when I was sworn in as Speaker surrounded by children. It was a spontaneous moment, but it was one that was clear in its message: we are gaveling this House to order on behalf of the children."

Etc. So what is the best thing America could do "for the children"? Well, it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a system of unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. Most of us understand, for example, that Social Security needs to be "fixed" - or we'll have to raise taxes, or the retirement age, or cut benefits, etc. But, just to get the entitlements debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 per cent of GDP in the US; in Greece, the equivalent figure is 25 per cent - that's not a matter of raising taxes or tweaking retirement age; that's total societal collapse.

So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits. In France, President Sarkozy is proposing a very modest step - that those who retire before the age of 65 should not receive free health care - and the French are up in arms about it. He's being angrily denounced by 53-year old retirees, a demographic hitherto unknown to functioning societies. You spend your first 25 years being educated, you work for two or three decades, and then you spend a third of a century living off a lavish pension with the state picking up every healthcare expense. No society can make that math add up. And so in a democratic system today's electors vote to keep the government gravy coming and leave it to tomorrow for "the children" to worry about. That's the real "war on children" - and every time you add a new entitlement to the budget you make it less and less likely they'll win it..... That's the real "war on children": In Europe, it's killing their future. Don't make the same mistake here.

More here

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Leftists and Islamics: United only by hate

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father's death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union".

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God. "The Soviet Union is gone," he affirmed. "The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words."

More here

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Hope for Britain? "In my U.S. News column this week, I took a look at the sharp change in the political balance in Britain and its implications for the United States. As the week has progressed, it looks like the balance in Britain is changing even more. The latest ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph has a big (43 to 36 percent) lead for the Conservatives-a striking change from the balance over the summer in which Labor led by an average of 9 points. If the popular vote split along these lines, Conservatives would lead Labor 319 to 301 in the House of Commons, with only two for Lib Dems-down from 62 at the present time (hence the forced resignation of Sir Menzies Campbell as lead of the Lib Dems). That would leave Conservatives just seven seats short of an absolute majority, which would mean they could, at least theoretically, govern with the support of the Northern Ireland Unionist parties."

Surprising sense from Britain: "More people from ethnic minorities must be stopped and searched if Britain is to win the fight against violent inner-city gun and knife crime, one of the country's top black police officers has said. Keith Jarrett, president of the National Black Police Association, is expected to make a speech this week calling for an increase in stop-and-searches in black communities. He told The Observer: "A lot of black people want to stop these killings, these knife crimes, and if it means their sons and daughters are going to be inconvenienced by being stopped by the police, so be it." The association, which represents thousands of officers from ethnic minorities, has previously questioned the high proportion of black people stopped and searched. The tactic was blamed for precipitating the race riots of the 1980s"

Palis prefer Israeli (i.e. adult) rule: "After 40 years of living under Israeli occupation, two stints in Israeli prisons and a military checkpoint on the same road as his odds-and-ends shop, one would think Nabil Gheit would be happy to hear an Israeli prime minister contemplate handing over parts of East Jerusalem to Palestinian control. But the mayor of Ras Hamis, a Palestinian neighbourhood on the eastern fringe of this divided city, says that he can't think of a worse fate for him and his constituents than being handed over to the weak and ineffective Palestinian Authority right now. "If there was a referendum here, no one would vote to join the Palestinian Authority," Mr. Gheit said, smoking a water pipe as he whiled away the afternoon watching Lebanese music videos. "We will not accept it. There would be another intifada [uprising] to defend ourselves from the PA."

Cheney: "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon": "The United States and other nations will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday. "Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions," Cheney said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. He said Iran's efforts to pursue technology that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon are obvious and that "the regime continues to practice delay and deceit in an obvious effort to buy time." If Iran continues on its current course, Cheney said the U.S. and other nations are "prepared to impose serious consequences." The vice president made no specific reference to military action. "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," he said."

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

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

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

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

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22 October, 2007

Go Rupert! Fox News proprietor riding high

Murdoch is in his 70s but his mother is still alive so the genes suggest that he can still afford his customary long-term vision. I have always been a great fan of Murdoch. I admire success in others as much as Leftists hate it. But that is probably because I have always been happy with my own life. Murdoch is pictured below with his Chinese third wife, Wendi Deng. I think he is a happy man too. He has even played himself in some episodes of "The Simpsons" -- though he does own that show. It was he that first put it to air, in fact



News Corporation's market value has passed that of all its traditional media peers for the first time and the company's Fox News Channel alone will soon be worth $10 billion, News chairman Rupert Murdoch says. Addressing the company's annual meeting in New York yesterday, Mr Murdoch told shareholders that financial markets were now noticing the group's average 14 per cent increase in operating income in the past four years. "Since January 1, we have outperformed all other media stocks, and indeed over the past five years we have seen our stock grow faster than both the general market and our peers," he said. "And it is with some pride that I tell you that last week our market value exceeded all of our traditional peers for the first time ever."

Mr Murdoch said News, owner of The Australian, had invested $US900 million in the US pay-TV channel Fox News since its launch. "Within the next few years I expect the channel to earn at least that amount annually and its value to exceed $US10 billion," he said. Last week News launched another pay-TV channel, Fox Business Network (FBN), to more than 30 million subscribers and will soon conclude its acquisition of The Wall Street Journal's owner, Dow Jones.

"Make no mistake -- FBN faces many challenges against an entrenched competitor with a 17-year head start," Mr Murdoch said. "I view FBN's growth in terms of years, not months, and I am confident our new approach to business news will be successful as we again offer viewers more choice in their media consumption."

Mr Murdoch said the Dow Jones deal would provide News with "remarkable reach and flexibility in the growing business news sector". "There is a real hunger -- not just in the US but across the globe -- for financial news," he said. "The opportunities are immense and senior management has formulated a long-term plan to integrate the unique properties of Dow Jones within our complementary assets and overall corporate and digital strategy."

Mr Murdoch also said News's internet businesses were continuing to grow, and he expected the company's internet revenues to reach "around $US1 billion" in the coming year. "While other competitors have entered the arena, none of our peers compare in terms of sheer numbers of users or -- more importantly for stockholders -- revenues," he said. Mr Murdoch said Fox Interactive Media's internet portfolio now reached more than 160 million people around the world. "MySpace, our most popular site, turned profitable for the first time last year and now ranks first in the US in total page views and is among the top five sites worldwide in unique visitors," he said.

But Mr Murdoch said other businesses were also doing well, with News Corp's Italian pay-TV channel, Sky Italia, significantly increasing its operating profit. "Sky Italia is now a major growth driver for our company. It's easy to forget that only three years ago it lost $267 million," he said. "In fiscal 2007, Sky Italia made almost that much in profit and is now on track for continued strong growth."

Mr Murdoch said the Fox International Channels business now operated 270 channels, broadcasting in 31 languages across more than 75 countries. That business did not exist a few years ago but grew profit by 80 per cent last year as it expanded to a larger global audience, he said.

Source

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Carbuncle Soul has a heartfelt post about what converted him from Leftism. He starts out referring to this recent horror story from Australia: One that I frankly cannot think about. To me there is nothing more wonderful than a little child. Jesus had it right: "Suffer [allow] the little children to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14). The mother of the toddler has now been charged with his murder.

EU turning a blind eye to Turkish attack on the Kurds: "The EU seem to be missing in action when it comes to the possible all out war that an aspirant EU-state Turkey, who is desperate to join, is about to cause in Kurdish areas of Asia Minor. Where are the screams of protest and the desperate calls for negotiation coming from the EU ministers? Where is their new foreign minister in this whole thing? After all the EU is at great pains to claim that Turkey is a European state. There is much anger in Brussels over Germany and Frances continued opposition to Turkey joining the EU; from as far away as the UK. Many of us suspect that this will be another case where the EU proves to be a toothless and weak tiger as it did with the Balkans. They talk a lot but are not able to handle something that is on their own doorstep and will have a great impact on the EU. After all, where do you think Kurdish refugees will head? They are hated almost as much as Jews are in the Muslim world for a variety of reasons. Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq have been trying to wipe them off the face of the earth for as long as they have been trying to drive Jews out of the region. The EU needs to make it clear to Turkey that if they invade Kurdish areas of Iraq that they will never be let into the EU. Their membership application will be torn up and they will be permanently banned from the club they are so desperate to join."

"Immigrant youths" rioting in Amsterdam: "Because a Muslim youth entered a police station and began stabbing two police officers. One of them, after having been stabbed multiple times, shot him to death. Rioting has followed. If the police officers had simply consented to being stabbed, there would have been no problem, you see."

James Watson stirs the pot once again: "One in three people looking for a job in temporary employment bureaux in Los Angeles is a psychopath or a sociopath. Is this a consequence of their environment or their genetic components? DNA sequencing should give us the answer. The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me. But science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the service of knowledge and greater understanding."

Some realism about Guevara: "A monument erected to immortalize the life and death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who fought with Fidel Castro in Cuba and in the Bolivian jungle, was demolished by gunfire in Venezuela, the country presided over by Hugo Chavez, Castro's heir apparent in Latin America. The attack was denounced by Chavez's government as "an abominable action" and "criminal," in that it was erected to honor "one of the men who crossed the continent promoting the liberation of towns and the freedom of modern man."

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

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

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

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

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21 October, 2007

Exclusion of Alan Keyes

We read:

In what he called "a major abuse of the electoral process," former Reagan administration diplomat and long-time national conservative activist Alan Keyes has been blocked by the Florida GOP from participating in Sunday's Fox News presidential debate in Orlando.

The Florida party used a 1% or better showing in polls from three of six polling firms as their criterion for inclusion in the event, even though none of the selected polling firms included Keyes, the latest entry in the presidential race, in any of their statewide surveys to date.

However, had Keyes been included in these polls, objective observers - including staff of some of the polling firms in question - agreed, based on past electoral performance in Florida, and on current polling that is taking place in other states, that he would have received a percentage meeting or exceeding the threshold.

Source

This is pretty ham-fisted. Had Keyes been a hysterical Leftist, he would be playing the "race card" by now. That he has not done so shows what a gentleman he is.

Clearly, the stage is going to be cluttered for the debate and Keyes is nowhere in the polls so the thinking behind his exclusion is clear enough but what an opportunity the GOP is missing by failing to present a black face to the many African-American voters. Dumb and dumber!

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ELSEWHERE

Alan Coren RIP. I shed a little tear when I heard of the passing of a wonderful man whom I have often read in the pages of the now also deceased "Punch" magazine. "The Times" says it all. There are a few samples of Coren's gentle humour here

She's at it again. Hillary has got herself another Norman Hsu for a fundraiser. Who he is we don't know yet. The L.A. Times plays it straight but skeptical comment is bursting out all over. See here, here, here and here. There is no doubt that crooks and the Clintons go together.

Haditha -- The massacre that wasn't, and its political exploitation: "The incident at Haditha--or the massacre, as it is often called--is due for a wholesale rethinking. The allegations are that in 2005 U.S. Marines went on a killing spree and deliberately executed 24 Iraqi civilians. The casualties have drawn an extraordinary amount of political attention, becoming an emblem for everything critics say is wrong with the Iraq war--in the common telling, another My Lai. Thus Congressman Jack Murtha, a decorated combat veteran, made accusations of war crimes and said the Marines had killed "in cold blood." These are serious charges; and military justice continues to deal with them seriously, though thankfully at a slower pace than politics. Now the prosecutions have mostly unraveled. It seems Haditha, though tragic, was exploited politically, and the allegations were exaggerated, if not unfounded."

Blair gets it: "Islamist extremism is similar to "rising fascism in the 1920s and 1930s", Tony Blair said last night in his first major speech since leaving office. At a prestigious charity dinner in New York, the former Prime Minister said that public figures who blamed the rise of fundamentalism on the policies of the West were "mistaken". He told the audience, which included New York governor Eliot Spitzer and mayor Michael Bloomberg, that Iran was the biggest exporter of the ideology, and that the Islamic republic was prepared to "back and finance terror" to support it. "Out there in the Middle East, we've seen... the ideology driving this extremism and terror is not exhausted. On the contrary it believes it can and will exhaust us first," he said. "Analogies with the past are never properly accurate, and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading but, in pure chronology, I sometimes wonder if we're not in the 1920s or 1930s again. "This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace."

Limbaugh Letter Fetches $2.1 Million on eBay: "The conservative radio talk-show host turned an inflammatory letter written by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and signed by 41 of his fellow Democrats into a more than $4.2 million gold mine for the kids of Marines and law enforcement personnel killed in the line of duty, all courtesy of eBay. The Eugene B. Casey foundation Betty Casey coughed up more than $2.1 million to be the sole owner of the letter sent to the radio host's boss demanding that Limbaugh be reprimanded for a "phony soldier" comment he made on air. Limbaugh has pledged to match whatever was paid for the letter. Limbaugh described Betty Casey, a trustee of the foundation, as a loyal listener to his show. "She gives significant sums to hospitals, hospices, colleges and private schools," Limbaugh said during his radio show Friday afternoon, just after the eBay auction ended. "Betty has been a listener to my program since its inception, and we can't thank her enough for her support. This was kind of the last straw for her, what Harry Reid did here." The letter, sent by Reid and signed by his Democratic colleagues, was delivered Oct. 2 to Mark P. Mays, president of Clear Channel, the parent company of the conservative talk show host's radio broadcast."

Amazing! Feds stand up for America: "A private Islamic school supported by the Saudi government should be shut down until the U.S. government can ensure the school is not fostering radical Islam, a federal panel recommends. In a report released Thursday, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom broadly criticized what it calls a lack of religious freedom in Saudi society and promotion of religious extremism at Saudi schools. Particular criticism is leveled at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school serving nearly 1,000 students in grades K-12 at two campuses in northern Virginia's Fairfax County. The commission's report says the academy hews closely to the curriculum used at Saudi schools, which they criticize for promoting hatred of and intolerance against Jews, Christians and Shiite Muslims. "Significant concerns remain about whether what is being taught at the ISA promotes religious intolerance and may adversely affect the interests of the United States," the report states".

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

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

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

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

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20 October, 2007

'Bergler' steals Clinton's credibility

[Sandy] Berger, you may recall, was President Clinton's national security adviser. Now Hillary Clinton is trying to sock it to you by employing him as her campaign foreign-policy adviser, treating Berger like a respectable foreign-policy expert - exactly what he ceased to be when he was a common criminal heisting classified documents from the National Archives in 2003. While preparing the former President Clinton for his 9/11 Commission testimony (as well as preparing his own), Berger stole top-secret national-defense documents from the National Archives, stuffing them in a briefcase and in his clothing. He destroyed documents, hid others - some at a nearby construction site. He later lied, claiming it was all a mistake, blaming the removal and destruction on "sloppiness" - "an honest mistake," he said, with former presidential backing.

Berger, for the record, wasn't stealing old lunch menus for his scrapbook. While we don't know everything he took (and in some cases destroyed), we know he did take drafts of what people familiar with it have described as a scathing "after-action report," done after the intelligence community failed to foil the millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, which was instead left for an alert customs agent to discover. The report was a brutal internal review of our state of unreadiness - our vulnerability to domestic terrorism. A House government reform committee investigation revealed that Berger had unsupervised access to noninventoried original documents on terrorism for which there were no duplicates.

So perhaps Hillary Clinton is holding Berger close as a "thank you": Thanks for making sure that some hard-hitting internal analysis of the Clinton administration's poor counterterrorism performance won't become breaking news on the way back to the White House. Or maybe Berger simply knows too much of the kind of information that could hurt an aspiring Clinton running on executive experience. That's surely another reason to keep him on board. Perhaps candidate Clinton feels the need to prove that she is up for a challenge. How, after all, can she continue using the Democrats' top talking point - the claim that they are the antidote to a "culture of corruption" in Washington? If Berger's top-secret rampage isn't corrupt, I don't know what corrupt is.

Source

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Brookes News Update

Rightwing columnists stuff up labour market reform debate: A leftwing academic screws up on labour markets - and what do Janet Albrechtsen, Imre Salusinszky and Andrew Bolt do? They attack the man and in doing so reveal that they are every bit as ignorant as he is. With allies like these it's no wonder that the free market gets such a bad press down here
Hillary, Soros, Alinsky, and Rush Limbaugh: The Hillary-Soros smear machine is in top gear. Completely devoid of anything resembling morality Soros' media Brown Shirts are waging war against American democracy. These are the same thugs that that ruthlessly attacked General Petraeus' character and military standing. They are the same thugs who are trying to destroy Rush Limbaugh. And will try to destroy anyone who gets in the way Hillary and Soros' ambitions for a castrated socialist America
Islamic Economics: What Does It Mean?: Islamic economics increasingly has become force to contend with due to burgeoning portfolios of oil exporters and multiplying Islamic financial instruments (such as interest-free mortgages and bonds. But the dirty little secret is that there is no such thing as 'Islamic economics' - it's a fiction, a complete crock
Why and how the Democrats are pushing America toward socialism: Who would ever have imagined that a Democratic presidential candidate could be someone who was a willing and admiring assistant to a self-proclaimed Stalinist and Communist Party member, lawyer. We are speaking of Hillary Clinton
Congress should reject the Armenian Genocide resolution: In this case, the moral high ground should give way to considerations of realpolitik. Congress should reject the resolution at this time. It is not in America's interest to offend our Turkish allies. What's more, why is it that the Dems never seem to take the moral high ground unless it damages the US in some way?

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Stupid Europeans attack China for selling them stuff cheaply: "The European Union launched a concerted attack on China's expanding trade empire yesterday, accusing it of building up surpluses through unfair practices. In a briefing that will significantly ratchet up protectionist tensions, the EU ambassador to China said requests for the issue to be addressed had met with no response. "Apparently China's trade surplus has no limit and we do not see efficient measures," the ambassador, Serge Abou, said. "These facts are considered with a certain bitterness in our leadership" .... nerves have been frayed by an atmosphere of economic uncertainty set against Beijing's currency policies, its $1.4 trillion reserves, much of which is held in US treasuries, and the risks created by such huge imbalances. The EU's trade deficit with China grew to $184bn last year, and would rise by another 20-25pc this year, Mr Abou said.

The market works its usual magic: "The world is rediscovering "Made in USA." American exports are now coursing their way around the world at a record level. In a major shift from the past five years, the US trade deficit, after stabilizing last year, is now shrinking. US companies, faced with slower economic growth in their home market, are now targeting foreign buyers. It doesn't hurt to have the dollar sinking in value - down almost 9 percent so far this year - and a relatively strong global economy. In fact, the US economy would be flirting with recession if it weren't for the 1 percentage point of growth fueled by the export surge. "Exports have suddenly become a key source of growth at a time when the economy is looking for any growth it can get," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. [Past deficits caused a fall in the dollar -- which led to American goods being easier to sell aboad. A surprise only to non-economists]

TSA still a joke: "Security screeners at two of the nation's busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY. Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows."

Democrats tell business to pay up or else: "The late Milton Friedman used to rail against what he called corporate America's "suicidal impulse." By that he meant that the business community continually financed the very politicians who were intent on robbing their profits and slitting their throats. It's happening again. The latest quarterly Federal Election Commission Report on political giving, released this week, shows the majority of corporate money flowing to the Democrats. Firms like Comcast, General Electric, Federal Express and UPS have shifted campaign giving away from the GOP. Employees of five major defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrup-Grumman spent $104,000 on Democratic presidential candidates, versus $88,800 for the Republican field.... Sen. Charles Schumer runs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and is playing the role of "good cop" when he dials Wall Street donors. As one hedge-fund manager tells me: "Senator Schumer says on the phone, 'I can make your problems go away.' " Of course, the Democrats created the problems. Mr. Schumer has raised at least $2 million this year from managers at leading PE firms like Carlyle and Blackstone Group"

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

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

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

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

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

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19 October, 2007

Immense Israeli restraint in the face of vast Arab incompetence

Two years ago, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led his country in a fateful decision to "disengage" from Gaza, uprooting 8,500 Jewish residents, many born in Gaza and some domiciled there for nearly four decades. Sharon did this because, as he put it to 1.3 million Palestinian Gazans,

"...it is not in our interest to govern you... we would like you to govern yourselves in your own country, a democratic Palestinian state."

Sharon held out hope that if things worked out in Gaza, he would move to withdraw from the West Bank as well. That this hope has turned to literal ashes is now well known.

Not only has a viable Palestinian government willing to live in peace and security with Israel failed to materialize, Hamas, a terrorist group whose charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel, won legislative elections and forcibly drove Fatah rivals out of Gaza. Gaza has become the locus for blatant acts of war against Israel, including repeated Qassam rocket barrages against Israeli residential areas and recurring efforts to infiltrate suicide bombers. Twelve Israeli civilians have died and countless thousands have been dislocated by these missiles. In the early hours of September 11, one rocket launched from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza hit an Israeli basic training camp in Zikim, wounding fifty military recruits. Israeli Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped inside Israel and is being held prisoner inside Gaza. Hamas has smuggled in large quantities of weapons through the porous Egyptian border. Twenty tons of materiel entered Gaza in July 2007 alone, and the IDF now believes that Hamas possesses anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank rockets, most likely Sagger guided missiles.

On September 18, the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to juridically recognize these facts: it declared that a terrorist organization has turned Gaza into "hostile territory." This declaration opens the way for Israeli authorities, at a time and in a measure of their choosing, to reduce the amount of electricity, water, and fuel they have continued to supply to Gaza since Israel's departure two years ago. [Egypt, during its entire occupation of the territory from 1948-67, never developed Gaza's energy infrastructure, leaving the strip destitute and primitive. Israel's integration of Gaza into its supply grid has allowed Gazans to develop their industry and agriculture.]

Despite the deliberative tone of the cabinet's decision -- it noted that "sanctions will be enacted following a legal examination, while taking into account both the humanitarian aspects relevant to the Gaza Strip and the intention to avoid a humanitarian crisis" -- critics hastened to denounce the move. One United Nations official interviewed on Israeli Army Radio termed the decision "collective punishment," and "a violation of international law," while UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared that any interruption in the utilities would be "contrary to Israel's obligations towards the civilian population under international humanitarian and human rights law."

The UN statements were, typically, hysterical in tone and dead wrong on the law. If Gaza is territory under the control of the enemy -- as it manifestly is under Hamas -- then the Israeli government is both within its rights and arguably obliged by its responsibilities to its citizens to treat the strip as "hostile territory." Siege and blockade of a hostile territory is a legitimate tactic of war, used in declared and undeclared (e.g., Cuban) conflicts and explicitly recognized by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Conventions' sole limitation is that there be "free passage of all consignments of food-stuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under fifteen, expectant mothers, and maternity cases" (Fourth Convention, art. 23) -- and even this exception was conditioned on there being "no reasons for fearing... [t]hat a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy" (for example, if resources destined for humanitarian aid will be commandeered by the enemy). Israel has carefully respected this requirement.....

To the joy of Hamas, Gaza is now Judenrein. But it is a miserable place. Its residents, having voted for a regime that is waging war on Israel, must now suffer the consequences of their electoral (and military) support of the terrorist group. Of course, a cut-off of electricity, water, and fuel, might strengthen the extremists among them, so Israeli authorities are wise to weigh their actions carefully. But if they choose to reduce supplies to their enemy -- a measure far less aggressive than a military takeover -- they are absolutely legally entitled to do so. If Palestinians wish to claim equality among the nations of the world, they should expend energies building a state at peace with its neighbor and supplying its citizens with basic services, rather than devoting themselves to destroying their neighbor and then carping about the standard of living that Israelis allegedly owe them.

Source

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TSA still hopeless -- after 6 years : "The Department of Homeland Security has made some progress in making air travel more secure but has yet to implement recommended improvements in screening passengers and air cargo, a Senate panel was told Tuesday. Although it has made progress in inspecting checked baggage and securing some mass transit systems, the Transportation Security Administration has not implemented a government-run program to match passenger information against terrorist watch lists, leaving some airlines to rely on foreign contractors to carry out the vetting, said Cathleen A. Berrick, director of homeland security at the Government Accountability Office. TSA also currently lacks the technology to detect explosives on passengers, carry-on baggage and foreign cargo traveling on passenger planes, she said."

Britain. Revolt against atheist bishops: "The Church of England is facing a rift similar to that in the US Church after hundreds of leading evangelical clergy were told to invite bishops from outside their dioceses to carry out ordinations. Members of the 1,700-strong Reform group were told at their conference that they must not be afraid to ignore the wishes of their diocesan bishop if he refused to ordain conservative evangelical clergy. The advice mirrors the situation in the US, where conservatives have even had their own bishops ordained by evangelical Archbishops from Global South provinces such as Uganda. The Rev Rod Thomas, the group's new chairman, urged his members to resist the Church of England's "increasingly liberal agenda".

Attack on British drinkers: "According to the report, men who drink between 22 and 50 units of alcohol per week, and women who drink between 15 and 35 are most likely to reside in middle-class suburbs such as Harrogate and Runnymede. The news has been followed by the predictable clamouring of society's new high priests – the interventionist scientists – calling for the government to raise alcohol taxes in order to discourage consumption. Fears that the health service will come under unmanageable pressure as a result have been used as arguments for new government intervention to stop this social 'crisis'. It would be refreshing if these scientific puritans would finally realise that the NHS does not exist for their own intellectual titillation, but to serve its customers – the British people. We are not there to make its life easier, but vice versa. To constantly try and mould individuals into a convenient model for a failing health system is both misguided and draconian public policy."

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

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

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

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

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18 October, 2007

Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer

Fury that anybody would say publicly what every single scientific study of the subject has shown

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion. James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks "in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of "scientific racism"....

Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint."

More here

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Amazing projection: "In a move eerily reminiscent of the Soviet "peace offensives", 138 leading Muslim scholars have composed a letter to Christianity's leaders, with Pope Benedict's name heading the list, requesting a meeting to discuss the "common essentials of our two religions." The authors warn that "the survival of the world" is at stake if the two religions do not make peace, which, the Muslim authors believe, is possible since the basis of Islam and Christianity is "the two commandments of love." While it is at least admirable that these learned representatives of Islam acknowledge that their religion is at war with Christianity (since much of the Christian world is in denial), the main sticking point, the letter makes clear, is the aggressive nature of Christianity. The Muslim scholars emphasize that: "As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them - so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes."

Islamic Tolerance in the Islamic Republic: "A Christian couple were flogged in Iran for participating in an "underground Church", an Iranian Christian group said in a report on its website earlier this week. The unnamed couple were arrested on September 21, 2005, the report said, adding that a Revolutionary Court reviewed their case in July 2007. Even though the couple had decided to marry seven years ago, the country's marriage laws - which prohibit the union of ex-Muslims and members of other religious minorities -- prevented them from obtaining a certificate of marriage. The report said that the woman was born a Christian in an Assyrian-Iranian family and the man was a convert to Christianity prior to getting married. The court ruled that both the man and the woman were Mortad, a description of someone who has committed apostasy by leaving Islam."

US loses cotton subsidies fight: "The US could face billions of dollars in trade sanctions for failing to scrap illegal subsidies paid to American cotton growers. The World Trade Organisation ruling is a victory for Brazil's cotton industry and for West African states which say the payments harmed their producers. Brazil hailed the ruling, saying US subsidies had hit world prices, hurting farmers in Brazil and elsewhere. But US officials believe the payments comply with international trade rules."

San Francisco jail folly: "While the public clamors for safer streets and a crackdown on quality-of-life crimes, San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey is quietly allowing scores of drug users and petty thieves to walk out of jail early so they don't have to sleep on the floor. The early releases were ordered last week even as all but one wing of a 360-bed County Jail at San Bruno sat empty, the result of budget and staff shortages. It's just the latest wrinkle in San Francisco's revolving-door justice system, and it helps explain why - despite the public furor - it's so hard to keep petty criminals behind bars. "If they keep bringing more people in for low-risk crimes, at some point I'm not even going to take them," Hennessey said. "And that point is coming up pretty darn soon."

Frequent abuse of the Violence against Women act: "The restraining order issue is a nightmare. The father is booted out of the marital home and pushed to the margins of his children’s lives. The orders are often based on false accusations, and are used as custody maneuvers or as punitive measures by angry soon-to-be-ex-wives. Some judges simply rubber stamp protection order requests. One example is the David Letterman case from a couple years ago, where a judge granted a lunatic woman a restraining order against Letterman because she said he was sending her harassing messages through his TV broadcasts. District Judge Daniel Sanchez, who issued the order, explained, “If [applicants] make a proper pleading, then I grant it.” As if what matters is not the accused’s guilt or innocence, but instead whether the accuser knows how to fill out a form properly. Other judges may doubt the veracity of the charges but nevertheless decide to “err on the side of caution” by granting them. VAWA and VAWA-funded DV service providers have contributed greatly to the restraining order problem."

Gore rules out presidential bid: "Former US Vice-President Al Gore has ruled out again making a late entry into the 2008 presidential race. ... Gore, the beaten Democratic candidate in the 2000 election, had repeatedly stated he had no interest in standing again for president. But a national organisation which has campaigned for him to stand once more for the White House said traffic on its website had surged in the wake of his Nobel triumph."

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

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

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

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

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17 October, 2007

Feminists are sexy, rubbishy study finds

Stupid propaganda only below:

Popular stereotypes of feminists as unattractive and sexually unappealing are wrong -- in fact feminism may improve romantic relationships, a new study suggests. The findings, by Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., appear this week in the research journal Sex Roles.

Rudman and Phelan surveyed 242 American college students and 289 older adults. They examined people's perception of their own feminism and its link to relationship health, measured by a combination of overall relationship quality, agreement about gender equality, relationship stability and sexual satisfaction.

Feminism was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women, they found, while men with feminist partners reported more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction.

The findings provided no evidence for the notion that females who champion women's rights are likelier to be single or lesbian than others, Rudman and Phelan added. Indeed, they found that feminist women were more likely to be in a heterosexual romantic relationship than nonfeminist women.

Source. Journal abstract here.

This study is a prize example of how deeply unserious and totally unscholarly most psychological research is. It draws inferences about whole population subgoups ("feminists") from groups of respondents that are ludicrously unrepresentative of any known population. The use of an accessible group of undergraduate students is simply boring. We all know that students can usually be relied on to give the "right" answers to questionnaires. But in this case an even more unrepresentative group of respondents was also used: 289 respondents to an online questionnaire. Who answers online questionnaires? Heaven knows. That their responses will differ from the vast majority who do not answer computer surveys seems more than a little likely, however.

The plain boring old truth is that facts about a group can only be gleaned either by surveying the whole group or a representative sample of them. As there was no attempt at any kind of representative sampling on this occasaion, no inferences can be drawn from the results. In my own psychological research, I almost invariably used general population sampling but I was one of the very few who were interested enough in truth to do so.

I showed years ago that a major feminist myth was the reverse of the truth when examined on a general population sample so I have little doubt what a serious examination of the hypothesis allegedly examined above would show.

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Money not good for marriage: "Wealth has many perks: great vacations, beautiful houses and nice cars. But if its marital bliss you're looking for, don't expect money to help. Almost half of America's rich say they're unhappy in marriage, a study found. What's worse: More than that say they've been unfaithful in the last three years. Of those confessing to an affair, more were women (61%) than men (43%). The reason cited most frequently by both sexes: variety. That's according to Prince and Associates, a Connecticut firm that tracks the habits of the rich. They asked 433 breadwinners (56% male and 44% female) with a net worth over $1 million about their relationships. Thirty-eight percent of the participants had a net worth of $10 million or more. So it's probably not a surprise that 30% of Prince's survey group said they were considering a divorce. Most men responding to the Prince & Associates survey (75%) said cost is their main obstacle to getting a divorce, and 61.5% said they feared it would hurt business dealings and opportunities. Just 7.7% of men cited harm to the kids" [Caution: No information about sampling method]

GWB defends free trade: "Alarmed by slipping support for free trade even among Republicans, President Bush is arguing that protectionism will cut Americans out of chances for more - and better - jobs. Bush has launched a blitz on behalf of pending free trade pacts with four nations. He continued the push Saturday in his weekly radio address "More exports support better and higher-paying jobs," the president said. "And to keep our economy expanding, we need to keep expanding trade."

Norwegian Government to Companies: Include 40 % Women on Boards or be Dissolved: "The left-leaning government of Norway has issued an ultimatum to businesses: increase the number of women on the board of directors or be dissolved. 140 Norwegian companies must increase the number of women on their boards of directors to 40 per cent or face state-enforced dissolution, according to the Norwegian news service Aftenposten".

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

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

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

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

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16 October, 2007

The Leftist hatred of Israel IS antisemitism (Jew-hatred)

And Jews who hate their Jewish identity are all too common. They don't like being in a hated group so they join the haters in an effort to cast off that identity

Antisemitism (AS), like any other prejudice, is the unfair treatment of individuals based on group characteristics. In academia, antisemitic prejudice operated in various vicious forms before the defeat of Hitler, the most notable example being the prejudicial treatment of German Jewish academics. In the years after the war, and until recently, this sort of prejudice was essentially eliminated at least at an organizational or institutional level not only in European and Australian universities, but also in North American universities..... During the last decade, however, some subtle forms of AS have arisen in the democracies of the free world. I regard the move by various academic organizations and institutions to boycott all Israeli academics in such matters as academic contacts, appointments to editorial boards, and collaboration in internationally funded research, as underpinned by antisemitism, even though some Jews have supported the boycott.

Let me give you the background, which you might like to supplement with the list of boycott highlights I have provided at the end of your handout. The academic anti-Israeli boycott began in April, 2002 on British soil, when The Guardian published an open letter from Professors Steven and Hilary Rose (both are Jews). The letter, signed by over 120 people, advocated a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel until Israel changed its internal policies which were labeled an apartheid regime, and its external policies such as the way it dealt with the problem of the so-called militant Palestinian freedom fighters. A few weeks later, a similar initiative was begun in Australia, headed by a Jewish and a Christian Lebanese academic, and this letter initially secured some 90 signatures. The proposers set up a petition online, which is still registering signatures (about 3000 so far).

The first thing that struck me about this proposed boycott is that this action against individuals because of the policies of their government is not proposed for academics living under governments whose policies are far more objectionable than Israel's. It is this feature that makes me suspect that this boycott is antisemitic rather than merely anti-Israel or anti-Zionist. For example, no boycotts have been proposed of Chinese academics on account of the Chinese government's policies toward Tibetans and the Falun Gong. This boycott applies a double standard, in a prejudicial way, and singles out members of the Jewish state for special treatment.

We are all familiar with double standards when it comes to judgments of Israel. A particularly notable application of the double standard occurred when Louise Arbour the U. N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and former Canadian member of the Supreme Court argued that if Israeli (but no other soldiers) accidentally killed civilians, they should, in her expert opinion, be charged with war crimes. The 2nd and 3rd web references under the first claim analyse Arbour's opinion in some detail, and I think this is justified, given the status and supposed legal expertise of this former supreme court judge.

But rather than cite other examples of the double standard that is applied to Israel, let me just refer to a recent statement by Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who declined an invitation from the Imperial College London because of its support for the boycott. This Nobel laureate wrote: "I know that some will say that these boycotts are directed only against Israel, rather than generally against Jews," he wrote. "But given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, boycotting Israel indicated a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than anti-Semitism."

Much more here

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Big rise in serious British crime: "Deployments of armed police have increased by 53 per cent in a decade, according to the Home Office. The number of incidents rose from 12,379 in 1996-97 to 18,891 in 2005-06. In London, the number rose from 2,439 to 4,711 while in the West Midlands it went from 270 to 1,044."

Oh to be a Muslim in Britain, and to enjoy the fruits of being a protected class: "Politically correct MoD officials are to issue free hijabs to female Muslim troops - while front line soldiers are having to buy their own kit. Under new service dress regulations, six of the Islamic hijabs will be given to each Muslim servicewoman wanting them. But it has sparked fury amid an MoD cash crisis. Squaddies also claim the hand-out is unfair as they pay out of their own pockets to observe strict military dress rules. The Sun can also reveal that so far, NONE of the ten serving female Muslims even wants to wear hijabs at work. But MoD officials have ordered a batch of 95 - costing hundreds to the taxpayer - just in case new recruits do. One serving NCO told The Sun last night: "It's stupid officials being too PC again, spending money on pointless things rather than on the front line."... Earlier this year squaddies in Iraq were forced to buy their own kit. One dog handler forked out 85 pounds for new boots after his feet were left in agony by ill-fitting kit."

Israeli medics treat Iraqi Arabs: "Israeli doctors screened 40 Iraqi children suffering from heart disease Tuesday - a rare case of direct cooperation between the Jewish state and the Arab country. The doctors said they hoped their work would help improve relations between the two Mideast nations and ease tensions between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.... The Iraqi children and their parents gathered at an outpatient clinic in the Red Crescent Hospital in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Most of the families were Sunni Muslims of Kurdish origin who live in northern Iraq. Also among them were three Sunni families who live in Baghdad. One child screened Tuesday was 4-year-old Mustafa, who Houri said was diagnosed with crossed arteries and would need two surgeries in Israel soon to unfold them before they harden. Mustafa's mother, a Kurdish woman who identified herself only as Suzanne because she feared reprisals from militants in Iraq, said traveling to Israel made her "anxious. Not because I'm going to a country considered an enemy of Iraq, but because I'm afraid of retribution by Iraqi militants, by the terrorists back home." "Israel is a good country. It's a country that has mercy on other people," she added. Abu Ahmed, 36, a taxi driver from the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, said his 12-year-old daughter, Basita, underwent a successful surgery in Israel last year. "The Israeli doctors, bless their hearts, stitched a notch in her heart," he said. "They told me today that she recovered completely, and I'm grateful to them and their country for helping us out."

Why the Left hates America: "America has been enormously beneficial to the World. Technological and scientific contributions aside, she saved the World in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War with her own blood, stamina, resolve, convictions and material resources. One of the results was the effective democratization of Germany, Italy and Japan, the three bestial aggressors of WWII. Another result was the effective containing worldwide of Soviet Expansionism and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, along with the democratization of Eastern Europe. In a period of about ten years, America had liberated diminutive Grenada and little Panama, stopped pro-Soviet-communist expansionism in Central America, expelled Saddam Hussein’s hordes out of Kuwait, and defused the conflict in the Balkans. In less than a two-year span, America had freed 30 million Afghanis from the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and 27 millions of Iraqis, from Saddam Hussein. In the process, America had given Afghanis and Iraqis the opportunity to, for the first time in their more than 5,000 years of history, breathe the fresh breeze of effective democracy".

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

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

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

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

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15 October, 2007

RECENTLY UP ON ICJS

Dawkins's views on the Jewish Lobby
The Camel in the Tent
Martyrs of the middle classes
JI splinters now threaten Aussies
Security and Defense: Goodwill gesture or kiss of death?
Academic Freedom and sloppy research
Rudd vows to charge Iran leader
Bring him to justice
Young Somalis lured home by Al-Qa'ida
The Left among us like victimhood
Islamic cleric preaching 'extremism, hate'
YUSRA

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One reason why you should make the subject line on your emails short and to the point: "When her computer pinged the arrival of her 30,000th unanswered e-mail, Vanessa Fox dared to fulfil the office worker's darkest fantasy: she declared "e-mail bankruptcy" and deleted them all. Fox, an internet strategist for online property company Zillow, said she felt both "terror and relief" as her inbox registered zero for the first time in a decade, then horror as it started filling up again at a rate of 1,000 e-mails a day. The Seattle-based strategist, who formerly worked for web giant Google, says e-mail overload is a problem she cannot easily solve. "Anyone working in an office knows the feeling of guilt about not answering all the serious e-mails," said Fox, 35."

More BBC deception: "The creative director of the BBC is embroiled in a new crisis over alegations that he presented the film of an American director as his own work. Alan Yentob has been accused of presenting a film about a reclusive 1960s pop star as his own when the interview was in fact conducted by Stephen Kijak, a US film-maker. Viewers who have seen the film on Scott Walker, part of Yentob's Imagine series on BBC1, claim the programme was a "shameful deception" because it left the impression that Yentob had done the interview. The BBC insists Yentob - who has said there can be "artifice without deception" - has done nothing wrong and used standard industry practice by editing Kijak out of his own film. The controversy, however, raises new questions about widespread broadcasting techniques."

The unhappy French: "It is sometimes the case that Britons living in France, or dreaming of doing so, are blissfully unaware of the extent to which France is a stressed and unhappy nation. Seduced by summer images of elderly men playing boules, the cafe culture, and lunches of seemingly limitless duration, it is easy to forget that France is a functioning society with all the problems and complexities that that entails. The French are popping anti-depressants at an extraordinary rate. It is estimated that 3.5 per cent of the population are taking medication for depression at any given time. While this might be good news for the drug manufacturers (some of whom are French), it does paint rather a worrying picture of the general mental state of the nation. The suicide rate in France is amongst the highest in the industrialised world. At 17.6 per 100,000 head of population it is around 2.5 times the rate of the UK." [Unsustainable arrogance has its price]

FEMA aiming for even bigger bungles: "The Federal Emergency Management Agency is quietly drawing up plans for a handful of disasters: devastating earthquakes beneath San Francisco and St. Louis and catastrophic storms in South Florida and Hawaii, FEMA's chief said Thursday. In a departure from its traditional expectation that states develop such responses, the agency is forming "base plans" for responding to specific calamities, FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. FEMA officials expect to finish plans for a massive Bay Area quake by the end of the year and are at work on another response blueprint for a large quake on the New Madrid fault, which runs from southern Illinois to northeastern Arkansas and lurks beneath St. Louis, Paulison said."

Unionists taking last chance to get realistic: "Two labor strikes this fall have been short, but the outcome is still tough for auto workers: After years of rising pay and benefits, the tide has turned the other way. The next generation of United Auto Workers will receive lower pay and benefits than their predecessors, judging by the contracts reached or ratified this week. If there's a big pattern in the current round of auto-industry bargaining, that's it. Officially, pay cuts aren't part of the deals. But the launch of a two-tier system, offering many new hires lower wages, raises the curtain on an era when overall pay will be lower. In benefits, a new contract ratified by UAW workers this week allows General Motors to contribute to a cash-balance retirement plan for new entry-level workers, rather than providing a guaranteed pension. Meanwhile, in deals cut this year and in 2005, union workers and retirees will be shouldering more of the rising costs for healthcare, and the companies less. All this marks a major shift for a union that has often set a standard for organized labor nationwide. This time, too, the labor trend in Detroit could have spillover effects beyond the auto industry."

The religion of peace in Nigeria: "Militant Islamists in this city in the northern state of Borno have sent three letters to a church warning that members would be attacked in the next few days, raising tensions where 50 Christians were killed and 57 churches destroyed last year. Leaders of the Christian Association of Nigeria told Compass that the letters were dropped onto the premises of the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (EYN), in the Polo Area of Maiduguri, on separate days last week. Mosque calls to prayer were sounded at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. last night, hours when Muslims do not usually observe prayers, putting police and security agencies on alert. By 6 this morning, police armored tanks were patrolling the streets to thwart any plans to attack Christians."

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

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

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

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

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

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14 October, 2007

Not sure about this but it's a theory

Is Hillary stealing the GOP's thunder?

The person who is elected president will need concrete proposals, but the G.O.P. contenders scarcely have them. Mike Huckabee has some sketchy plans. John McCain answered one element of middle-class anxiety yesterday with his new health care plan. Others seem to have decided concrete proposals are for geeks. In this way, the Republican Party has abandoned the Hamiltonian ground. It has lost intimate contact with the working-class dreamer who longs to make good.

Instead this ground is being seized by a Democrat. Over the past few months, Hillary Clinton has issued a string of specific policy programs aimed directly at members of the aspiring middle class. Yesterday, it was a tax credit for college. Earlier in the week, Clinton offered a plan to give families down the income scale access to 401(k)-style plans. Right now, 75 million workers have no employee-sponsored pension accounts. The way our tax code is structured, people up the income ladder get big tax incentives to save, while working people, who have the most trouble saving, get the smallest incentives.

Under the Clinton plan, if a family making up to $60,000 a year put $1,000 into a new 401(k) account, they would get a $1,000 matching tax credit. The plan would create millions of new investors. Struggling families could choose mutual fund options and participate in the capital markets. They'd be encouraged to move away from a month-to-month mentality to a saving-for-the-future mentality.

Clinton's plan poaches on economic values that used to be associated with the Republican Party. Moreover, it undermines the populist worldview that is building on the left of her party. Instead of railing against globalization and the economic royalists, Clinton gives working people access to Wall Street and a way to profit from the global economy.

No Republican would design asset-building plans the way Clinton does. No Republican would pay for them the way she does. But at least she has a middle-class agenda. Right now, the general election campaign looks like it's going to be a replay of the S-chip debate. The Democrats propose something, and the Republicans have no alternative.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Fascist airports in America: "I do a tremendous amount of flying commercially, most of it internationally, and there is almost nothing about air travel that promises the convenience and relaxation it had many years ago. But, beyond all of this unpleasantness it is today painfully obvious that an air passenger--once inside the confines of an airport in any part of the world--has no rights whatsoever. This includes not even the right to be protected from security and law enforcement personnel who do not seem to understand any force other than deadly force. Security, police, and passenger screening personnel in any airport have near-dictatorial powers and almost limitless discretion to decide who needs to be put into a chokehold and thrown into a windowless room until someone can decided what set of ridiculously overblown charges need to be leveled against them".

Iran's War on Women: "When the women of Iran risk their own lives and that of their children and husbands to commit an illegal act of assembly for a peaceful demonstration against the unjust laws of the Islamist regime, they hope that the world is listening and supports them in their struggle for freedom and emancipation. But the world seems to be turning a blind eye to their pleas and when they get beaten, arrested and thrown in prisons, not a single government or NGO make an attempt to speak out in defense of their human rights."

Circumventing regulatory corruption in Chattanooga: "The Driver chuckled at the question. He liked chatting with new people. He enjoyed being on the move. He wanted to start a business where he could be self-sufficient, set his own hours, and build towards something a little bit bigger than he started with. "I used to drive a regular cab and wanted to keep doing it, but the hoops they make you jump through to get certified are crazy and way out of my budget," he said. The more he tried to play by the rules, though, he said, the more the city regulators seemed to enjoy shutting him out. The board that grants licenses in Chattanooga is partially run by local cab company owners -- would-be competitors, in other words. It's a process that, if not actually corrupt, at least gives the impression corruption is a distinct possibility, as even local press and politicians have begun to note. So he bought a limousine instead. The regulations are much less onerous, and he now happily ferries gobsmacked travelers in absurd luxury for the same rate as a cab.

Condy gets it: "Rice, on her way to Moscow, accused Iran of "lying" about the aim of its nuclear program and deceiving the U.N.'s atomic watchdog about its intentions. "There is an Iranian history of obfuscation and, indeed, lying to the IAEA," Rice said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. U.S. officials long have accused Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons behind the facade of a civil atomic energy program, charges Tehran denies. The Bush administration is pushing for new sanctions to punish Iran, but has yet to gather enough backing at the U.N. for such a move."

Democrat elite show their opinion of the workers: "They are worlds apart: the brash, gun-loving, God-fearing, Southern fans of Nascar racing, and the button-downed, suit-wearing political elite in Washington. But the loathing of the Nascar crowd for the inhabitants of Capitol Hill has reached new heights after the decision by Washington political aides to get inoculated before attending a race this weekend. To compound the error, the aides in question are Democrats, a party that has been so keen to regain the votes of white Southern males that it has even given them their own demographic term: "Nascar Dads". The decision to get immunisations, against hepatitis, tetanus and diphtheria, is as much a political blunder as a cultural clash."

Some cojones in Germany after all: "Ashkan Dejagah, the Iranian-born German soccer player who sparked an international controversy for his refusal to play in Israel, has been permanently suspended from the German Under-21 team, Theo Zwanziger, the president of the German Football Association (DFB) announced on Thursday. In his meeting with Israel Football Association chairman Avi Luzon, Zwanziger seemingly backtracked from a statement he made earlier in the week in which he supported the Dejagah's right to refuse to play, saying instead that the DBA "will not let this slide; he will be taken care of and suspended." The decision comes one day after a spokesperson for the German government condemned Delagah's position."

No cojones in Britain. They aim to desecrate Christian graves on behalf of Muslims: "A third of a million bodies could be dug up from a historic east London cemetery to make way for a new Muslim burial site. Tower Hamlets council is considering reopening its Cemetery Park in Mile End in response to a long-running campaign for a Muslim graveyard in the area. The park, off Bow Common Lane, was deconsecrated as a Church of England cemetery by Parliament in 1966, after being deemed full with about 350,000 bodies buried there...."

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

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

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

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

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13 October, 2007

Obama's "patriotism". The empty vessel sounds again

Excerpt from Jeff Jacoby

Wrapping up an interview on "kind of a lighter note," a KCRG-TV reporter observed that Obama wasn't wearing a flag pin and inquired: "Is this a fashion statement? Those have been on politicians since Sept. 12, 2001." Obama could have lightly waved off the query -- "Nope, no fashion statement; I'm just not a lapel-pin kind of guy" -- and nobody would have given the matter a second thought. Instead he went out of his way to politicize it. "The truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin," he said. But "that became a substitute for . . . true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security." And so, he declared, "I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest. Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism."

Obama brought up the subject again a day later. "I probably haven't worn a flag pin in a very long time," he told a campaign crowd in Independence, Iowa. "My attitude is that I'm less concerned about what you're wearing on your lapel than what's in your heart. You show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who serve. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and ideals." As for Americans who do wear a flag pin, Obama was scornful: "I noticed people wearing a lapel pin and not acting very patriotic."

This, surely, is something new under the sun: a candidate for president disparaging the sincerity of voters who wear the American flag, and loftily insisting that he "won't wear that pin." Of course Obama is free to believe that "speaking out on issues" is the best way to show "true patriotism." But does he really imagine that the many Americans who do "wear that pin" do so as a *"substitute"* for true patriotism -- as a hypocritical affectation, in other words -- rather than as a *symbol* of it?

Perhaps Obama, reflecting the post-1960s culture in which he came of age, simply doesn't recognize the power and significance of such symbols in sustaining a nation's identity and values. Many contemporary Americans, raised on the dogma that what they feel in their hearts matters more than how they conduct themselves in public, have little appreciation for traditions, manners, and emblems that earlier generations were taught to honor. We live in an era, after all, when worshippers attend church in shorts and flip-flops; when the civic inspiration of Washington's Birthday has been replaced with the antiseptic nullity of Presidents Day; when smoking is taboo but foul language is ubiquitous; when countless couples disdain a marriage license as "just a piece of paper." So why should the American flag pin on someone's lapel be entitled to deference or respect? ....

Sure, there are some phonies in every crowd, but my guess is that most Americans who wear a flag pin are citizens who genuinely love their country. My guess is that most of them vote, too -- and probably not for the candidate who questions their patriotism.

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Newt Gingrich has here a very interesting comparison of mediaeval Venice and the USA today.

Why conservative think tanks are needed: "My own think-tank slogan is: "No one knows when the Berlin Wall will come down." It is imperative to maintain intellectual sanctuaries in a world where Harvard University forbids the discussion of certain important issues and Columbia University welcomes the contributions of a master terrorist. Our sanctuaries have been instrumental to the expansion of human freedom in recent decades. We are laying the groundwork for further advances--as opportunities arise, as they surely will"

Muslim abuse of defamation laws failing: "Nothing gets a journalist's attention like a subpoena. While authoritarian regimes silence critics by murdering or jailing them, journalists (and other critics) in the United States face gentler, but still effective, intimidation: libel lawsuits. Over the last few years, Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars, and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits' outcomes-poorly covered by the media-represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees.

British libel laws becoming less oppressive too: "A journalist who suggested that a former police officer may be corrupt was cleared of libel in the Court of Appeal yesterday. In a victory that strengthens the media's right to report on matters that are in the public interest, the appeal judges said that Graeme McClagan had acted responsibly in his research for the book Bent Coppers. Michael Charman, who was a detective constable in the Metropolitan Police, claimed that it was libellous because it suggested that there were grounds for suspecting him of involvement in corruption. The judges ruled unanimously that Mr McLagan had taken steps to verify the story and that as a result of his honesty, his expertise, his careful research and evaluation of the material, his book was protected by a defence of "public interest". It is thought to be the first time that the defence has been argued successfully for a book".

Walter Williams on Rush Limbaugh: "Over the span of some 20 years, Rush has been attacked from just about every leftist corner, as would anyone who tirelessly espoused the founding principles of our nation -- private property, rule of law and limited government. What has made Rush so effective with this message has been his ability to put things, and ask questions, in a manner that the average citizen can understand and relate to, and do so with a bit of humor. Humor creates madness among leftists who want their interventionist agenda taken seriously."

Paging Mr. Orwell: New Taliban Constitution would ban "un-Islamic thought": "The Taliban has published a shadow Afghan constitution outlining an alternative hardline government to that of President Hamid Karzai. The 23-page document envisages a country where women would remain veiled and uneducated, "un-Islamic thought" would be banned and human rights would be ignored if "contrary with the teachings of Islam". The Constitution of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, comes days after the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, said that the Taliban will need to take a role in the peace process in Afghanistan."

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

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

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

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

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12 October, 2007

Brookes News Update

The US economy's bubble: casting the runes: The real problem is not interest rates, exchange rates, unemployment, etc., it is bad economics. So long central banks and economists refuse to jettison Keynesian fallacies and the fallacy of the stable price level, and adopt sound money policies the US economy will continue to suffer periodic economic crises
What is happening to the US dollar?: Reading about the US dollar has once again brought home to me just how little our economic commentariat understand about the link between exchange rates, money supply and the balance of payments
Kevin Rudd promises us economic planning: Carr and Rudd can call their economic meddling `industry policy', `industrial intervention', `picking winners', `promoting sunrise industries', etc., but it still amounts to dirigisme. This kind of economic policy should remind us of the folly and arrogance of would-be central planners
Phoniness in and out of uniform and the Democrats: Democrats, Soros-funded bigots and leftwing journalists are waging an outrageous campaign of falsehoods against Rush Limbaugh. But their real target is the First Amendment
John Kerry and the Bruce Springsteen cavalcade of hatred: Poor little Bruce Springsteen is upset because patriotic Americans object to his anti-victory music. In this twerp's political world patriotism is wishing defeat for your country's defeat.
How the diseased left see the world: The same diseased left that supported every communist dictatorship that can be named is the same diseased left that refused to speak out against Saddam's sadistic regime, and opposed the liberation of Iraq. These totalitarians have made themselves willing accomplices of terrorism as the de facto alliance between the left and Islamofascism clearly reveals
The way to win the immigration battle: Thus, proposing the elimination of immigration is not only the right thing, it's the only thing. The present course of action guarantees eventual defeat
Return of Tariff Wars: Tariffs are back on the political agenda along with all the usual mercantilist fallacies
Silence in Syria, panic in Iran: Syria and the tyrants in Tehran are in a state of panic. They have just discovered that Israel and the US have developed the capacity to penetrate these tyrannies' air defences without being detected
A quiet triumph over Al Qaeda may be brewing: The Bush Administration, most likely through the CIA and DIA, has pulled off a fantastic maneuver to split the global Islamic jihad movement at its base. This is the kind of stuff we may not hear about in detail for another fifty years. Congratulations to our President and our brave soldiers and intelligence assets for making this happen
Osama bin Laden and Larry Flynt: Larry Flynt is another story. Where one thinks we have too much democracy (although the Osama crowd doesn't even know what democracy is), Larry is under the impression that we are fast losing ours. Funny, I happen to believe that is exactly what is taking place in America today
Greens using Wal-Mart to bully suppliers: In a squalid attempt to ingratiate itself with green fanatics Wal-Mart has turned to bullying its suppliers into accepting green mandates. It has also partnered a coalition of 315 institutional investors who have graciously taken it upon themselves to decide the planet's economic destiny. Aren't we the lucky ones?
Warm, watered and well fed is better: Even the dumbest sheep in Australia knows that being warm, watered and well fed is better than being cold, thirsty and starving. So what does that make politicians who fall over each other to praise the green myth of man-made global warming?

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ELSEWHERE

Terrified of the Greenies, GE gives its light bulb business to China: "General Electric is taking another step away from its industrial heritage by closing seven light-bulb factories in the US and Brazil with the loss of 1400 jobs. The move is part of a $US500 million ($568 million) restructuring of the conglomerate's slow-growing industrial unit and is aimed at reducing GE's reliance on low-margin businesses. Under the plan, GE would close one plant in Brazil, which has around 900 employees, six factories in Ohio, part of GE's 26 light-bulb plants in the US, and some operations in Mexico. GE's lighting division employs around 25,000 people around the world. GE had already signalled the intention to scale back its lighting division, which had sales of $US3 billion last year, and has been dogged by falling demand for traditional incandescent bulbs. But Thursday's decision to curb activities at a business that has been a cornerstone of GE for 128 years underlines the changing nature of the world's second-largest company. Jim Campbell, the head of GE's consumer and industrial unit, which has already lost 3000 people over the past year, said the restructuring of the lighting unit was "one of the most important things we have done in the 100-plus years history" of the business."

Making a difference: "Ordinary Americans are tracking down U.S. Web sites used by al Qaeda and jihadi sympathizers and then using the Internet to persuade the service providers to snuff out the sites. "I do this because it has to be done," says one blogger who calls himself a "counter-cyberjihadist" for his campaigns to post on the Web the Internet service providers (ISPs) that host the pro-jihad sites. A perfect storm of complaints forced several ISPs to shut down Web sites just days before al Qaeda released a tape of Osama bin Laden in August, says Aaron Weisburd, director of the Society for Internet Research and host of the Web site Haganah.us. He released a list of 19 pro-jihad Web sites, some of which were shut down in August. The tactic was so effective that al Qaeda later said it was forced to disseminate the video directly to the networks, Mr. Weisburd said."

Marriage of Muslim Woman to Non-Muslim Man - Forbidden and Invalid: "A fatwa issued in August 2007 by the secretary-general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA), Dr. Sheikh Salah Al-Sawy, states that marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man is forbidden and invalid, and that children born of such a union are illegitimate. The following are excerpts from the fatwa, which was posted on the website www.islamonline.net: "Marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim [man] is forbidden and invalid - that is a consensus among Muslims. A [Muslim] woman who has taken the liberty [of marrying a non-Muslim man] has removed herself from the fold of the Muslim community - and one who has done so knowing that it is wrong, has done something strictly forbidden, and has committed an open [act of] abomination that may hurl her into the abyss of heresy and apostasy".

Helpfully highlighting Osama's next target: "New York's iconic Empire State Building is to be lit up green from Friday in honor of the Muslim holiday of Eid, the biggest festival in the Muslim calendar marking the end of Ramadan, officials said. "This is the first time that the Empire State Building will be illuminated for Eid, and the lighting will become an annual event in the same tradition of the yearly lightings for Christmas and Hannukah," according to a statement.

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

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

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

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

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11 October, 2007

The evidence for Neocommunism

There is a compelling factual case to be made that the contemporary radical Left can properly be called "Neocommunist." The Hard Left is grounded in Marxist vision of creating a "new man" under a system led by a vanguard that knows best what the rest of society needs. And Neocommies behave in patterns with startling parallels to Old Communist tactics.

The Neocommies are not members of a Communist Party, and are part more of a movement than a conspiracy. They are utterly different from traditional liberalism in America and Europe. Traditional liberals were democratic -- people like Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson and Harry Truman. They fought passionately against the Totalitarian Left, as Ronald Reagan did when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan started as a democratic liberal, and became the most famous conservative of the 20th century. As he said so often, he didn't leave the Democratic Party -- it left him.

Over time, the Democrats became more totalitarian in spirit and practice after the first wave of the New Left started its takeover of the Party in the 1970s and 80s. Half a century ago, true liberal Democrats like Harry Truman told Americans the truth about Stalin and the new Cold War -- and were hated for it by the Hard Left. The American Labor movement was dominated by true liberals like George Meaney, who earned their positions by expelling Communist infiltrators, and in some cases throwing out entire Stalinist unions like the Longshoremen's Union. Today's Labor movement has gone back to Leftist bosses....

True liberals drew a bright line in the sand to separate themselves from Communists, including the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which literally took its orders from Moscow. Combined with strong Democratic support for the national defense, the purge of Communist elements is precisely why liberals earned credibility and trust from the American people. In much of the 1950s and 1960s, "liberal" was not a dirty word, it was a boast. Had the true liberals given in to the Communists, they would have been marginalized by American voters. A Democratic Party with a strong anti-military, anti-victory wing would never have supported a strong national defense, and would not have been trusted in the face of the obvious menace of Stalin and his heirs.

Today the voters have not yet caught on to the real radicalism of the Left. If they do, Democrats will once again have to choose between the totalitarian impulse and being small d-democrats. Because our Democrats are emphatically not small-d democrats. They will use and manipulate their voters, but they don't listen to them. Whenever possible, they accomplish unpopular policy initiatives through the courts, our least democratic government mechanism, one never designed to lead in formulating social policy.....

Today's Neocommunists prefer to call themselves Marxists, which has again become a respected word on college campuses. But Marxism is Communist ideology. What else could it be? If you read carefully, Neocommunism is really out there, only slightly disguised. Just as Soviet propaganda insisted America was rotten to the core, so does the Hard Left and the institutions it controls parrot the line. The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, now a favorite history textbook in the colleges, is proud to "revise" everything we think we know about America, from the true people's point of view.

The heroes of today's aging New Left are the Old Communist Left, not the democratic liberals of the past. Karl Marx is considered the most important "philosopher" in Britain according to the BBC's Radio 4, polling its own audience. Guess how the captive BBC audience learned respect for old Karl? From the BBC itself, one of the biggest neo-Marxist Organs of Propaganda, paid for by the suckered British license holders.... Along the same lines, famous Communist thug, hero, martyr, and poster-boy Che Guevara just received an adoring tribute from Reuters, the big European news service, for "Che Guevara's ideals."

A new Stalin-Nazi alliance is alive in Europe and parts of the US, as Leftists openly ally themselves with Islamic Fascists. Islamists worship Allah and the Leftists worship atheism, but the ideological differences are not that big compared to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Common enemies and common goals overcome doctrinal differences, to be worked out later.... Conversions to Islam are now common in Britain, especially among "alienated youths." That's where the Nazis made their converts in the 1920s and 30s. "Alienated youths" are always the easiest targets for any totalitarian creed. It's another sign of political danger.

Today's resurgence of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda is yet another cultural alarm bell shrilling, kicked off by the new "Red-Green" alliance. (Green is the color of Islam.) London's mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone was elected by a Red-Green alliance. Even Britain's Prince Charles likes to parade around in a Lawrence of Arabia costume, according to Mark Steyn's recent column. Prince Charles is an empty-headed fool, but Mayor Red Ken Livingstone is a true knave and demagogue. Totalitarians need both knaves and fools....

The aging New Left has simply become the Neocommunist Left. If you don't believe it, just ask them politely what they really believe. Or check out Moveon.org and many other locations on the web. It's not a secret.

The methods of Neocommunism parallel those of Old Communism to an astonishing degree. The routine use of orchestrated group lying (so that many different people are suddenly making the same accusation); The constant use of innocent-sounding front groups like MoveOn.org and Media Matters; The use of stooges (like military retirees, both real and phony); The need to whip up the rage of the faithful with constant disinformation about the enemy (i.e., America and conservatives); The infiltration of media and government....

The ideological goals of NeoCommunism have not changed one bit, which is why the term "communism" is so accurate. The sucker goal is to create Paradise on Earth by overthrowing democratic capitalism. The real goal is to enable the rise of a new ruling class with huge power over ordinary people....

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

Fantasies about Jewish power are the historical core of antisemitism: "What is anti-Semitism? Most any attempt to define the term or, even more controversially, pin the label on someone, brings to mind Justice Potter Stewart's famously pithy 1964 definition of hard-core pornography: "I know it when I see it." But, of course, different people see different things, and so the debate continues. In this instance it continues over at Open University, where Jeffrey Herf piggybacks on a recent review of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, to make a point about the Judeocentric nature of Nazi anti-Semitism. According to Herf, "the distinctive and defining feature of Nazism's radical anti-Semitism was precisely the idea that Jews were at the center of mid-20th-century history, that they had started World War II, made possible the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, and conducted the war as one of extermination aimed at the German people." Herf, a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park, concedes that racial biology played a role in the Nazi worldview, but maintains that at the core of modern anti-Semitism is "the attribution to Jews of enormous power used for evil purposes." It is that tradition of anti-Semitism that Herf hears echoes of in Mearsheimer and Walt's case against the "Israel lobby."

Another "brilliant" U.S. army firearm: "In 1990 I was issued an M1911A1 .45 caliber pistol that had been manufactured by Remington Rand during WWII. Though a stout and reliable firearm, my "Colt" had one limitation. Its accuracy. To put it mildly, I was surprised the bullets ever hit the ground. At 25m I had a shot group of around 2 feet. Now, I was (and still am) by no means an expert on firearms, and stories abound regarding the inaccuracy issues of the M1911A1, but the one thing I did know was the .45 was, and still is, used extensively in pistol competitions, so I knew the weapon design was not the issue, nor was the ammunition, but I was at a loss as to why I literally couldn't hit the target right in front of me. This went on for a year or so until we got a new Platoon Leader in our company who also happened to be something of a shade-tree gunsmith and a Colt collector. What he said was, no the weapons aren't bad, and the ammunition, while not match grade, wasn't the cause, but rather, the Army's level of "tolerance" in key components. Bottom line, all my troubles centered on the barrel and barrel bushing. Upon further inspection it was noted that when fully seated (slide all the way forward) my barrel was still capable of movement, a LOT of movement, as was explained to me, which obviously was having an effect on my accuracy. Unfortunately, as the LT explained, that "slop" was still within Army tolerance, so technically there was nothing to be done."

Even the stupid pro-Muslim Swedes get attacked: "Turkish hackers have attacked more than 5,000 Swedish Web sites in the past week, and at least some of the sabotage appears linked to a Swedish newspaper's publication of a disparaging caricature of Islam's prophet. Around 1,600 Web sites hosted by server-provider Proinet and 3,800 sites hosted by another company have been targeted, Proinet spokesman Kjetil Jensen said. Jensen said the hackers, operating on a Turkish network, removed all files on the Web sites and in some cases replaced them with messages. According to Swedish news agency TT, the Web site of a children's cartoon called Bamse was replaced by a message saying Islam's holy prophet had been insulted."

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

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

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

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

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10 October, 2007

Brits getting poorer under socialism

While the average household gross income has climbed over the past decade from 34,796 to 53,835 pounds, people have far less of that money to spend each month after they have paid essential bills. In 1997, when Labour came to power, people were left with 34.5 per cent of their gross income once they had paid taxes, national insurance, mortgage or rent. Now they are left with 32.6 per cent, says a report by uSwitch, a price comparison website.

It is the latest survey to highlight how millions of households have failed to benefit from the strong economy because of rising taxes and escalating bills. Ernst & Young, the accountants, calculated this year that the average family had 838 pounds left to spend each month, compared to 899 four years ago. The uSwitch report makes clear that many household bills have actually risen more modestly than people's salaries, including the monthly, electricity, water and gas bills.

Increases have hit four key areas in the past 10 years. Petrol [gasoline] - often the biggest cost for a family after their housing - has increased by 55 per cent and phone and internet bills have risen 77 per cent as millions more use broadband and mobile phones. The cost of getting on to the housing ladder has more than tripled, but taxes are perhaps the most significant cost. Council tax rose from an average of 688 a year to 1,321 - an increase of 92 per cent, or three times the rate of inflation.

Mike Warburton, one of the City's most senior accountants, said: "The Government can argue that tax rates have not gone up and that they are merely benefiting from people's rising incomes. But a lot of indirect taxes have gone up, especially council tax. This is why pensioners - on fixed incomes - are so badly hit. The squeeze is definitely on." The report from uSwitch comes a week after it emerged that stamp duty had risen by more than 40 per cent in the past year alone, as the Government cashed in on ballooning house prices.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

The Leftist hatred of patriotism is self-defeating: "For the Left, with its traditional emphasis upon fraternite, or the cultivation of human solidarity and communal values, such realities are particularly difficult to reconcile with an ethos of limitless criticism. To say that we are a part of one another-or even to acknowledge that man is by nature a "political animal," thinking here of Aristotle and not of James Carville-is not merely to say that we should deliberate together; it is also to say that, at some point, the discussion ceases and we make a commitment to one another to act together. Furthermore, it is to say that we cannot sustain serious, demanding, and long-term commitments to one another if those commitments are regarded as provisional and easily revoked for light and transient causes. We make an agreement and we agree to stand by it. Call it a contract, a covenant, or a Constitution, it is the same general kind of commitment, a commitment not merely of the intellect but also of the will. For any freely organized political undertaking, this vital qualification presents a difficulty. But for the Left, it becomes a profound dilemma"

Media lies: "We are being fed false and misleading information, in matters big and small. It has come from trusted sources such as established newspapers, experienced journalists, Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel Peace Prize winners. It has been going on for a long time, sometimes by carelessness and sometimes by deliberate lying. I have compiled a list of 101 such incidents. Did you know that Time magazine and other news organizations had a Vietnamese communist on full-time staff in Vietnam during that war? Do you remember that ABC, CBS and NBC have all rigged cars or trucks with explosives or other devices to make them look dangerous on TV, or that Consumer Reports lied about the Suzuki Samurai enough to put it out of business? Do you know that multiple "veterans" of the Viet Nam and Iraq wars who told of atrocities there were never even in the military? Did you realize reputable news organizations such as the Boston Globe and Reuters cannot tell the difference between a real soldier and a toy doll, commercial pornography and soldiers committing rape, a burning tire dump and a bombed building, a fired and an unfired rifle round, or footage of the North Pole and a clip from the movie Titanic?"

Neo-Cons and Neo-Commies: "Everybody talks about the evil Neo-Cons, but nobody talks about the resurgent Neo-Commies. "Communist" has been expelled from the Politically Correct lexicon -- which tells us a lot about the Commissars of the PC. They bear the most amazing resemblance to the old Commissars of (deleted) who killed 60-100 million people in the 20th century. (And Kim Jong Il, not to mention Red China, are still doing it....) Mikhail Gorbachev, who should know them when he sees them, recently warned about a "resurgence of Stalinism" in Russia and Eastern Europe. The history of Communist crimes was being erased, he said. Well, he was right. But resurgent Stalinism is not limited to those countries. It's in the US and all over the world, as David Horowitz, another former radical, continues to document in great detail... So here's a proposal. Let's allow the Left to rant about Neo-Cons; but conservatives will be allowed to call the "new" Left exactly what it is: The Neo-Commies. Fair's fair. Words mean things. These folks crawling all over Moveon.org and other Soros fronts are not "Marxists" or "Progressives," "Radicals" -- or especially "Liberals" in any real meaning of the word. They are Neo-Commies."

The Sun Rises In The East: "That this recent Gallup poll finds, "that only 9% of Americans say they have a great deal of trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news `fully, accurately, and fairly,' " is about as surprising as a similar percentage might not believe the sun rises in the East. That, "Nearly half of Americans -- including over three-quarters of Republicans -- perceive the media as too liberal while fewer than one in five say the media are too conservative," is similarly not surprising. Study after study has found the overwhelming liberal orientation of most journalists, particularly at the national level."

Hillary has no problems with a crook: "Sandy Berger, who stole highly classified terrorism documents from the National Archives, destroyed them and lied to investigators, is now an adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Berger, who was fired from John Kerry's presidential campaign when the scandal broke in 2004, has assumed a similar role in Clinton's campaign, even though his security clearance has been suspended until September 2008. This is raising eyebrows even among Clinton's admirers. "It shows poor judgment and a lack of regard for Berger's serious misdeeds," said law professor Jonathan Adler of Case Western Reserve University"

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

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

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

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

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9 October, 2007

FAR-LEFTIST RAGE

The Far Left has seen their ideology resoundingly rejected by the American populace. While it may well be that a majority of Americans have grown weary and disgusted with the Iraq War and willing to punish the Republicans for our failures there, in fact, socialism and socialism-lite, ie the European model, have been found wanting by the voters. This is partially recognized by the fact that the Democrats routinely eschew calling themselves liberals and focus on the language of their politics rather than the ideological beliefs that underpin their policies. The recent unearthing of the memo from the early 90s suggesting achieving universal government run health care in stages, by stealth (re: the S-CHIP debate), is another example of the Democratic perception that a straightforward approach to their goals of increased government control over the economy is a losing proposition.

When one's ideas are rejected, especially when those ideas form an important part of one's self-image, it is a personal injury. People respond to personal injury with pain and anger. When the anger is internalized, the risk of depression and despair becomes significant. Many find it more tolerable to eject the anger, ie defense known as projection, and are then drawn into all the psychological problems that flow from that. One's opponents then become evil, rather than wrong, misguided or simply in disagreement, and every reverse simply fuels the rage burning inside. Such a cycle would appear as follows:

Anger -> Projection -> Attribution of unacceptable impulses to the "enemy" -> Fear of the projected/disowned anger being returned (retaliation) -> Overt paranoia -> Further rejection -> Intensified anger

Under the influence of such rage, encapsulated by the feeling that one is manifestly correct and no other possible interpretations of others' behavior are tenable, reason is lost. We see this rather graphically in the imbroglio over Rush Limbaugh and his supposed anti-military comments. I rarely listen to Rush and have not read a transcript, however, on the face of it, the charges against him are risible. No one with any sense is going to believe Rush is anti-military and people like Harry Reid and Tom Harkin are pro-military in comparison. Even the Far Left should be well aware that this is a losing argument. Yet they convince themselves they have a winning argument and only the weakness of their champions in the Senate and House prevent them from beating Rush and getting him off the air. Jane Hamsher, the proprietor of a major website on the Left, (see Siggy for a rather witty and biting appellation) can barely contain herself:

Is That A Fat Lady I Hear Singing? Pills Limbaugh just keeps diggin' and diggin'. I've been delighted to see that it's been all over cable news today, and Wes Clark has been promoting the move to get Limbaugh off Armed Forces Radio Network.

She goes on to approvingly quote Digby:

Newtie's now irrelevant. Delay is gone. Only Rush remains and he is probably the biggest prize. On a purely practical, hardball political basis, the Democrats should have been working to take him out for years. Now is their chance to turn the Republicans' patented hissy kabuki back on them and hoist an avowed political enemy with his own poisonous petard at the same time. There are many others who will happily take his place, no doubt about it. But his voice is uniquely associated with the radical wingnuts, and it is an important symbolic message to the country if they can finally make an example of him.

I have become extremely reluctant to link to any Left wing sites because when visitors come here from their sites they come armed with invective and rarely read and understand what I write. For any visitors from the Left, I am not here commenting on your ideology; I have no problem with your distaste for Rush and I have no reason to support him. Beyond the fact that he hardly needs my help, I rarely listen to him, preferring NPR when I am interested in gaining any depth on issues (despite the fact that I so rarely agree with NPR's point of view.) I am suggesting that your tactics and strategy involved in going after Rush Limbaugh suggest an inability to adequately appreciate how your attacks are being and will be perceived. Your anger is blinding you and confusing you. As for the Democrats, ultimately, unless they can find a way to repudiate the most angry within their party, they will find themselves irredeemably tarred with all the worst aspects of the Far Left.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Tories crow, as Brown loses his bottle: "BRITAIN'S Gordon Brown is facing the gravest crisis of his brief prime ministership after a Conservative surge in opinion polls forced him to scrap plans for an early election to win his own mandate from voters. After two months of letting speculation run that he would call a poll in the autumn, Mr Brown told the BBC yesterday that there would be no election because he wanted time to show Britons his "vision" rather than merely his "competence". But as some cabinet members privately expressed disquiet over Mr Brown's handling of the issue, an elated Conservative leader, David Cameron, said the Prime Minister had "shown great weakness and indecision". [For non-Brits, the Cockney term "bottle" translates roughly as "courage"]

Christianism Alert! Presidential Candidate Preaches From Church Pulpit, Says Faith "Plays Every Role In Life": "I am sure the media, Democratic presidential candidates and Andrew Sullivan will be all over this outrageous violation of the separation of Church and State. Except the won't. Why? Because the Christianist in question is none other than the Obamessiah himself. Obama told the congregation at Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville Church, South Carolina, "I can be an instrument of God they same way all of you are." An instrument of God as President? Of the United States? Oh my. Funny, for all the media reports of Bush being a daffy Christian who talks to God, I don't remember seeing him actually preaching from the pulpit of a church."

Syria: where 1930s Germany meets Borat: "The Jews did 9/11. They control the mass media, international banking, the UN, and Washington. The Holocaust never happened, or if it did, the Jews orchestrated it to exploit public sympathy for their "entity" in Palestine. Welcome to Syria, best described as 1930s Germany meets Borat, a land of paranoia where everyone is being watched. And that includes you. It is easy to miss this if, like most foreigners, you study Arabic at the university and your contact with locals is limited. But leave campus, speak only Arabic, immerse yourself in the society, and a totally different picture emerges. When I first arrived, a lot of people told me: "We are not against Jews, we are only against Zionists." But cross the language threshold and the extent and ferocity of the antisemitism hits you like a slap in the face. The guy who ran the corner shop near my flat refused to sell Coca-Cola because: "It is a Jewish corporation. Everyone knows that!" Walk into any Damascus bookshop and you will find all the classics, from Mein Kampf to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I once found a book entitled Jews of Damascus. Just don't ask why all the photos are black and white."

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

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

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

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

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8 October, 2007

Megan McArdle misses some very basic stuff

Megan McArdle ("Jane Galt") is a very smart lady who seems to have learnt a lot about economics when she did her MBA. She has written much that I admire. She seems to be a bit light on psychology, however. Her recent article on racism and sexism in America shows very little understanding of impression-formation and the stereotyping literature, or, indeed, of current politics.

She quotes research studies which show that people with identical resumes get preferential treatment if they are white or male and infers racism and sexism from that.

She totally ignores the very well-known effects of affirmative action -- effects that Clarence Thomas has recently waxed eloquent about. The plain fact is that affirmative action has totally betrayed back people by creating the reality of a "black" university degree -- a degree which may signify negligible academic achievement because of the different standards applied to blacks both at the time of admission and during their university studies. There was even one case where a black graduate of a New York university was barely literate.

Does Megan think people are unaware of that? Does she think people are unaware of what has been one of the major political issues in America for decades? So if two people offer resumes that claim identical academic qualifications and one of the applicants is black, does Megan think that any rational person would regard the "black" degree as REALLY equivalent to the degree held by the white candidate? Surely the question answers itself. Under such circumstances it is a very good bet that the white candidate REALLY IS more qualified than the black candidate. Favouring the white candidate shows realism, not racism.

The situation with women is a bit more complex. Megan refers to a study by feminist Elizabeth Spelke which shows that men and women with identical mathematical qualifications are not treated equally. The male candidate is preferred. To understand that, it helps to know that the research literature on stereotyping shows the exact opposite of what most people believe. See here and here. What that literature shows is that impression-formation is very responsive to reality. If people think that women are not generally good at mathematics or interested in it, that will probably be true IN GENERAL (though not of course without exceptions).

And all the research that has ever been done on mental abilities has shown that women are best at verbal skills while men are best at mathematical skills. Does Megan really think that people are unaware of that difference between the sexes? They are certainly not. They might not know of the research but they know of the reality that it describes. So when people judge that men and women with ostensibly similar qualifications in mathematics are probably not really equally able at or interested in mathematics, they are simply doing something that humans do well -- using ALL the information they have to make a decision rather than just relying on a few bits of paper before them. Again, their lower expectations of female mathematical ability are realistic, not "sexism".

Megan should give her fellow-Americans more credit for intelligence and good sense.



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Articles recently up on ICJS

Was Israel hurt by Ahmadinejad at Columbia?
Bollinger stuns Ahmadinejad
Senator Troeth speaks out about kidnapped soldiers
Readers subjected to slant and error
Support Danny Lamm
Teach our 'nakba' too, say Arab-born Jews
A matter of education
The Question Of Islam
Crusader for refugees
Libel Tourism: Where Terrorism and Censorship Meet
Looking for Scapegoat, World Again Turns to Jews
In India a Jewish outpost withers

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ELSEWHERE

Ho Hum! UN fraud again: "Tsunami reconstruction funds worth $US500 million are being lost to fraud and corruption because of the failure by the United Nations to implement its own anti-fraud measures. This claim is made by the UN's former deputy director of investigations, Frank Montil, a former ASIO officer who for a decade was the deputy director of the UN's internal watchdog unit, set up to investigate fraud and corruption within the UN and its agencies. In an exclusive interview with the Herald, Mr Montil said "the oil-for-food scandal taught them nothing". The fraud and corruption which had been occurring during the tsunami reconstruction period would come back to haunt the UN, which had wilfully ignored all the warning signs. As a senior UN investigator, Mr Montil was sent to the devastated areas of Indonesia after the tsunami. His task was to assess the risks of fraud, waste and mismanagement to the public funding that the tsunami public appeal generated and for which the UN was responsible for allocating"

Waiting for the furious protests from Western Leftists: "Two men in Saudi Arabia have been sentenced to 7000 lashes each after being convicted of sodomy and have received their first round of punishment in public, a newspaper said today. The men, who were not identified, were meted out an unspecified number of lashes in public in the the southwestern city of Al-Bahah on Tuesday evening, the Al-Okaz daily reported. They were then returned to prison where they are to be held until the full punishment is completed, the newspaper added, without saying how many sessions this would involve. Homosexual acts are illegal in Saudi Arabia, which metes out strict punishment based on sharia, or Islamic law."

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

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

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

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

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7 October, 2007

More Leftist bigotry from NPR

National Public Radio was one of the first out of the box greeting Clarence Thomas's memoir, My Grandfather's Son. Nina Totenberg acknowledged that it was, "in some ways a beautifully written book" but went on to declare it "a book of complete bitterness and rage." The Washington Post's front page announced that Thomas had "settled scores" in his "angry" book. And Washington Post columnist (as well as Charen pal) Ruth Marcus writes of Thomas's "blast furnace" anger.

Imagine that. He hasn't gotten over it. Totenberg, for those who may have forgotten, was the journalist who first reported that Anita Hill had made allegations against Thomas (though at the time, Hill had not agreed to go public). And she was a prominent Hill enthusiast during the contretemps.

Totenberg affects surprise that Thomas is angry? It would require a masochist not to be angry. Imagine that your spotless reputation had been thoroughly trashed before a worldwide audience. Imagine further that everything you had attempted to accomplish in your career was undermined in two weeks by ideological opponents ready to do anything to keep someone with your heterodox views down. It is my experience that people often become enraged when they read even small inaccuracies about themselves in the newspapers. Contemplate enduring a campaign of vilification. How many years is it supposed to take to get over something like that? Is Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky thing?

Actually, speaking of President Clinton, the brouhaha over Thomas and what he did or did not say to Hill now seems almost quaint in retrospect. Even if we assume (and I do not) that the worst of Hill's allegations were true, they do not stack up to the kind of brutish behavior attributed to Bill Clinton by Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick. But the very same people who adjudged Thomas one of the lowest creatures on Earth, found Clinton's behavior a private matter of no consequence with no public implications.

More here. For a brief but thorough refutation of the Anita Hill perjury, see here.

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ELSEWHERE

Several readers have asked me to link to Stewart Dimmock Day. Stewart Dimmock is the British truck-driver who got the British High court to criticize Al Gore.

An amusing comment from Taranto: "Apparently there are a lot of New York Times readers who go to bed hungry each night. Well, that's probably true. They're all on a diet."

How stupid can an Archbishop get? "The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has launched a renewed attack on the war in Iraq and called for "urgent attention" to stabilise the country. [And just how does he propose to do that?]

BBC admits goof: "Peter Fincham, the Controller of BBC One, resigned yesterday after the publication of a damning report outlining a litany of errors that led him to release inaccurately edited footage of the Queen. Following him was Stephen Lambert, the producer of the footage, which purported to show the Queen storming out of a photoshoot when she was actually walking in. Accused of "cavalier" editing, Mr Lambert was forced to quit his job as chief creative officer of RDF Media - the production company also behind Faking It. A three-month inquiry by Will Wyatt, a former senior BBC executive, concluded that the incident revealed "misjudgments, poor practice and ineffective systems", with BBC employees described as "naive" although nobody "consciously set out to defame or misrepresent the Queen". [I doubt that there was anything unintentional about it. Lots of BBC types are anti the monarchy]

It's the Joooos again: "When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said, "Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of - we might as well say it - Israeli and Jewish input." He added the obvious: "a lot of money comes to the Democratic campaigns" from Jewish contributors." [A now familiar phenomenon: Antisemitism from a Leftist Jew who hopes they will come for him last]

Anthropologists join war against Taliban: "In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy. Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team's ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations - in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe - has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results. Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit's combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February"

1 in 5 Dems admit they want to lose war : "Nearly one out of every five Democrats thinks the world will be better off if America loses the war in Iraq, according to the FOX News Opinion Dynamics Poll released Thursday. The percentage of Democrats (19 percent) who believe that is nearly four times the number of Republicans (5 percent) who gave the same answer. Seven percent of independents said the world would be better off if the U.S. lost the war."

Decency prevails at last in Britain: "Iraqi interpreters and other key support staff who have risked their lives to work for Britain are to be allowed to settle in the United Kingdom, The Times has learnt. Hundreds of interpreters and their families are to be given assistance to leave Iraq, where they live under fear of death squads because they collaborated with British forces. Those wishing to remain in Iraq or relocate to neighbouring countries will be helped to resettle. After a two-month campaign by The Times, Gordon Brown is set to announce that interpreters who have worked for the British Government for 12 months will be given the opportunity of asylum in Britain. The offer also applies retrospectively to interpreters who worked for the Government but have ceased to do so. Government sources have disclosed that a few hundred vital support staff would also be helped, although they declined to give details."

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

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

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

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

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6 October, 2007

When & why I left the Democrat party

Post below excerpted from The Anchoress. See the original for links

My turn from left to right began with the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas debacle, and Captain Ed does a great job of demonstrating in this post exactly how despicable and underhanded was the behavior of the left in that circumstance.

Ed has been writing about Clarence Thomas for several days now, and all of his posts are worth reading, but do read that first one I've linked to, because I remember watching that exchange and becoming more and more frustrated by what I saw members of my party doing. I remember watching this "high-tech lynching" and knowing that Thomas was correct; that was exactly what it was. I remember people testifying on behalf of Thomas and both the press and the congress simply dismissing them (in much the same way Democrats dismissed Gen. David Petraeus, recently) before they'd opened their mouths. I remember the whole sense of bared-teeth salivation coming from my party, and I remember thinking, "wait.this isn't right." It was like a coming of age.

I remember reading my local newspaper and finally canceling it, because the writing had clearly and distinctly moved from "reportage" to "propaganda" in the space of what seemed like a few weeks. When I called to cancel the subscription they asked why and I told them pretty much this: "I'm very interested in these hearings, and I look to the paper for information and instead I'm being served something very different from what my own eyes are seeing, what my own brain is receiving. Instead of unbiased information that allows me to decide for myself, I'm getting something very unbalanced, and I don't want it."

A few hours later a woman from that newspaper actually called me up and asked me if it was true that I had canceled my subscription because of their coverage. I said yes, and she said, "you mean you actually believe him?" I was stunned. "Yes, I do," I said. "And I can't believe you're calling me like this. Your job is supposed to be about informing, not persuading." She sputtered but by then I was hanging up.

The Clarence Thomas hearings were the beginning, for me. They were when I began to open my eyes and see something happening within my party - the Democrat party my entire family had been loyal to for as long as I could remember - that I really did not like.

I didn't leave the left just then. But I started paying more attention to everything, and trusting the press and my own party a bit less.then a bit less.then a bit less. When it got to the point where I felt I was no longer allowed to dissent from the "Democratic position" without being thought of as a "bad person," when it began to feel like I was simply supposed to "fall in line," and parrot the party, when I began to feel completely disrespected by other Democrats for daring to think for myself and form my own opinions, (when I was essentially made to feel that I was not entitled to those opinions or to full respect for them), and when it became clear to me that the word "liberal" no longer meant "open-minded, respectful and broad" but quite the opposite, that's when I finally left the left.

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ELSEWHERE

Giuliani has a chance: "Yes, Giuliani has supported legalized abortion, various policies collectively referred to as gay rights, and gun control measures. And yes, those issues will cause millions of primary voters to pull the lever for someone else. They are important, mainstream issues, not topics cared about only by some unintelligible cult. But polls show a significantly large minority of Christian right voters supporting Giuliani in the primary even after being apprised of his position on the three most prominent social issues. The truth is that even the oft-caricatured voters of the Christian right also care about leadership qualities, taxes, crime, a strong defense, and the war against jihadist terrorists. The Christian right, or at least a very large percentage thereof, feels a particular affinity for Israel. After all, the Bible says that Jews are God's chosen people, and that Israel is their land. Those who vow to wipe Israel off the map, therefore - and who, worse, would attack us in the United States in part because of our diplomatic support for Israel - are seen as particularly dangerous and particularly to be opposed... anybody who can be trusted to support Israel and, most importantly, to battle with effectiveness and competence against those who would destroy Israel, is somebody worthy of at least potential support."

Reagan forgotten: "We've been hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan from the Republican presidential field of late, but there is little trace of him in the position papers issued by the various campaigns thus far. Take energy. Whereas candidate Reagan proposed to solve the energy crisis of the 1970s by abolishing the Department of Energy, deregulating the energy sector, and letting free markets rip, candidates Giuliani, Romney, McCain, and the rest propose to solve today's energy crisis with elaborate national energy plans, lavish subsidies for favored fuels and industries, mandatory renewable-energy consumption orders, and government dictates to manufacturers regarding how energy-related goods and services are made."

Dishonest US farm policy: "Politicians claim to be friends of the small 'family farmer' but most government payments go to large farms. Half of all U.S. farms receive nothing at all because they don't grow corn, wheat, cotton and other major crops that qualify for commodity payments. Because most payments are based on a farm's past production history, they likely have little effect on current commodity prices. But they do cause land prices to be bid up, meaning those who own the most land receive the most benefits. Escalating land prices, in turn, raise the cost of entry into farming, hurting the little guy again."

The myth of U.S. manufacturing decline: "Politicians acting on behalf of particular industries or unions routinely cite the erosion of U.S. manufacturing primacy as justification for trade barriers. But here's the kicker. U.S. manufacturing is not in decline - not by any stretch. Manufacturing is thriving by historic standards and relative to other countries' manufacturing sectors. In 2006, the sector achieved record output, record sales revenue, record profits, record profit rates, record return on investment, and record exports. U.S. factories continued to be the world's most prolific in 2006, accounting for just over 20 percent of the world's manufacturing value-added. By contrast, Chinese factories accounted for just 8 percent. And 2006 was not an aberration. Since the nadir of the manufacturing recession in 2002, all of those indicators have been trending upward. The most recent quarterly Census data show that the trends have continued into 2007, where second quarter sales, profits and output are at all time highs.

Iran supplying Taliban with EFPs: "Iran is supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan with the same bomb-making equipment it provides to insurgents in Iraq, according to British military intelligence officers. US Army General Dan McNeill, the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, said that the discovery of more than 50 roadside bombs and timers in lorries crossing the border from Iran last month proves that Iran's Quds Revolutionary Guards are actively supporting the Taliban.... He claimed the vehicles contained materials to make explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), a type of roadside bomb. Britain and America have accused Iran of supplying such bombs to Iraqi insurgents."

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

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

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

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

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5 October, 2007

Sadness: Not Middle English after all

I have always been something of a language fiend And it has always interested me how words from older forms of English (Old English and Middle English) that no longer form part of Modern English can still be found in some dialectical forms of English -- particularly in Scots. The Scots in fact have a whole consonant (the guttural in "Loch") that is lost to modern English.

I was once, for instance, talking to a lady from the English Midlands and she described someone as "nesh" (meaning sickly, weak). I of course looked it up and found that it came straight from Old English (Anglo-Saxon). Most pleasing.

American speech also preserves some older forms (the pronunciation of the letter 'r', for instance) so I was quite excited to see the following sentence in Taranto: "this dumb-ass redneck from Alabama cleped it". I immediately recognized "cleped" as a Middle English word so felt quite excited to see such a survival in Alabama.

On digging deeper, however, I found that the writer was in fact referring only to the College Level Examination Program. What a disappointment.

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ELSEWHERE

Not amazing: "The Department of Homeland Security (no less) cannot even keep its own email service secure! Trust your government to protect you?? Better get a gun, maybe several.

Have a look here at the Islamic losers who fancied that they could take over the U.S. government.

Terrorist Bill of Rights: "This week, House Democrats say they plan to hold hearings on a misguided bill that would grant habeas corpus rights to terrorist detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The proposal would allow terrorists to publicly challenge their status as detainees in the U.S. court system, fracturing the cohesive structure already in place to ensure that highly dangerous suspects are held and processed in a secure and timely fashion. House Republican leaders are furious that Democrats are seeking to give unprecedented legal protections to terrorists, calling the measure a "terrorist bill of rights." The Republicans are justified in protesting the plan that would give special rights to terrorists - rights not afforded to our own men and women in the armed services serving overseas"

A Leftist comment on a washed up Pelosi: "If there was any doubt before, which there wasn't, it's gone now. Watching Nancy Pelosi on The View yesterday morning provided the final proof that the backbone of the House is only as strong as its speaker. Her body language said it all. There she sat in the center of the table, sandwiched between Elizabeth Hasselbeck and the "Is the world flat? I don't know" lady, looking anxious and devoid of stately confidence. She could barely look in the eyes of America's Favorite True Believer on her left, who immediately smelled fear and pounced on her prey. "If the violence in Iraq had gone up," she started in (I'm paraphrasing), "you would be insisting that the surge was a failure. Now that the reports say it's gone down drastically, aren't you willing to admit that the surge is a success?" So what does Pelosi do? ... she looks somewhere in Hasselbeck's general direction and squeaks meekly, "But that's still a lot of deaths." (I'm not paraphrasing). She then quickly changes the subject"

Where Have All the Peaceniks Gone?: "Three days ago we saw the first pictures of Burmese villages being destroyed. We have learned about the massacres of monks and other civilians peacefully protesting in Myanmar. British PM Gordon Brown said that "the death toll in the Myanmar crackdown to be `far greater' than has so far been reported." That's at least three whole 24-hour news cycles, plenty of time to start a storm of protest. Where is the BBC? The Guardian? Der Spiegel? Der New York Times? Where are all the peaceniks of the Left? Mother Sheehan, where art thou? As far as I can tell, Burma's fascist massacres of peaceful Buddhist monks has not yet led to a peep from our self-proclaimed peaceniks. Where are they?"

Wackjob Dems Lose - Senate Intel Bill Passes: "The Senate has scrapped its bid to obtain the archive of daily intelligence briefings given to the president on Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. That request was among several controversial provisions dropped from an intelligence bill, leading to the measure's unanimous Senate passage Wednesday. The provision sought to give the Senate and House intelligence committees access to all presidential daily briefs between 1997 and 2003 that referred to Iraq _ an attempt to determine whether the White House mischaracterized intelligence prior to the war. Senate Republicans objected, saying the documents had already been reviewed by an independent commission, according to a congressional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The final version of the bill also dropped a requirement that the director of national intelligence conduct an assessment of the effects of global climate change on national security. The overall legislation would give Congress' approval for the whole range of intelligence programs over the coming year, including spy satellites and eavesdropping, human spying and battlefield collection, along with recommended spending levels."

An atheist who believes -- in Jewish conspiracy theory!: "A renowned atheist cited the "Jewish lobby" as a model for his campaign to promote atheism in the United States. Richard Dawkins said he wanted to gain the same kind of influence as the Jewish lobby, saying it "monopolizes" U.S. foreign policy. "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told -- religious Jews anyway -- than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolize American foreign policy as far as many people can see," Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist who advocates atheism, told the Guardian newspaper. "So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place." Dawkins, an Oxford professor who wrote the best-seller "The God Delusion," told the Guardian that he wants to organize American atheists to counter the influence of religious groups." [For someone as hostile as Dawkins it does figure. The man is just a hater].

Chaliapin: Is there any greater work of art than Feodor Chaliapin's rendition of the "Twofold Litany of St. John Chrysostom"? There is a tiny excerpt from it here. Although I am an atheist, I undoubtedly have strong religious instincts and I am very pleased about that. It means that I can relate to some of the most profound of human experiences. The loss is great for those who cannot.

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

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

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

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

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4 October, 2007

SOWELL ON FLYNN

Thomas Sowell has another one of his admirably balanced articles here -- where he broaches the heavily forbidden topic of the heritability of IQ. He is not a psychometrician, however, so he misses a few things.

He points out the long-standing evidence that IQ is strongly hereditary but then goes on to question that evidence on the basis of research by James Flynn -- who has documented a large rise in IQ scores throughout the 20th century. Since genetics do not change over such a short time, one might conclude that the causes of IQ are therefore non-genetic and presumably environmental. He seems to miss the point that psychometricians have always said that the environment has SOME influence on IQ. He is right, however, in saying that environmental improvement is universally seen as what lies behind the "Flynn effect". Exactly what environmental factors lie behind the "Flynn effect" is a decades-old topic of research and discussion among psychometricians but it is a controversy largely unknown to the general public and Sowell has done us all a service in bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.

Sowell would seem to be of the view that the famed black/white difference in average IQ is called into question by the Flynn findings. It is therefore regrettable that he does not mention that the changes of the 20th century seem to have affected most groups equally. Blacks now score more highly than they once did but so do whites. The black/white gap, in other words, has NOT been narrowed by the general rise. That the gap remains the same DESPITE obviously favourable environmental circumstances would therefore seem to STRENGTHEN the evidence in favour of the black/white gap being wholly genetic.

The broadest explanation for the rise in IQ scores over the 20th century is that it reflects the advantages of modernity in general: The elimination of hunger in Western countries, improved perinatal care (particularly less damaging obstetric practices), improved medical care generally, greater access to mental stimulation via movies and TV etc. But the leading cause is thought to be greater test sophistication. The many more years that kids now spend in education makes them good at test-taking strategies generally (e.g. the wisdom of guessing when you don't actually know the answer).

All these influences are essentially one-off however. Once the major limits on maximum brain development are removed, no further improvement in IQ scores can be expected. And in some countries that does already seem to have happened. Test scores there have ceased to increase. Environmental influences do have SOME effect on IQ but once the environment is removed from the equation, the still-large remaining differences in scores between individuals can only be genetic. So Flynn's findings in fact STRENGTHEN the evidence in favour of genetics being the overwhelming influence on IQ.

And the twin studies showed that long ago, anyway. Twins usually have extremely similar environments but identical twins have almost exactly the same IQs whereas fraternal (genetically different) twins may or may not. I personally know of one set of fraternal twins where one flunked High School and the other got a University degree.

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The DEMOCRAT ATTEMPT TO "GET" LIMBAUGH

More Leftist dishonesty -- smearing Rush Limbaugh: "The latest attempt to crush Rush is by pretending that Rush called any soldier who questions the war a "phony soldier." The claim is baldly false. Peter Wehner over at National Review has a transcript of the call that is the root of this made-up controversy. In short, it is clearly that when Rush talked about phony soldiers, he was referring to actual phony soldiers: people who have made up military credentials in an attempt to add heft to their criticism. And there have been a lot of such phony soldiers during the course of this war and its criticism. Yet since that time Senators Kerry and Harkin and others have been smearing Rush with these false charges. It would be kind to assume that they simply haven't heard the show or seen a transcript, so don't know that the remarks were taken out of context. That would show an astonishing degree of irresponsibility, not to bother having staff actually check what someone said before taking to the Floor of the Senate to denounce him. But I think the truth is that they do know that what they are saying is absolutely untrue and simply don't care. [Kinda amusing that one of Limbaugh's Democrat accusers is himself a phony war hero -- as is another]

Attack on Limbaugh aimed at talk radio generally: "If you need any proof that the Democrats are going to try to rip the guts out of talk radio when they gain control of the White House, you need look no further than the current storm surrounding Rush Limbaugh. The instigator here is Media Myrmidons. They like to call themselves "Media Matters" but myrmidons fits so much better. Media Myrmidons is an ultra left-wing machine created by Hillary Clinton and her supporters and backers to carry forth the attack on conservative talk radio. Media Myrmidons started this attack on Limbaugh by writing that Rush called "service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq 'phony soldiers.'" Media Myrdions is lying .. and they know they're lying. They also know that they can depend on the mainstream media in this country to not only ignore their distortion, but to actually work to support and spread it. This whole mess starts with a clown by the name of Jesse Macbeth. Macbeth became very popular with the media earlier this year when he started telling stories about all of the hideous crimes he saw our soldiers commit while he was serving in Afghanistan and Iraq as an Army ranger. Oh, how the leftist media sopped it up. The only problem was, Macbeth was lying. "Jesse Macbeth, 23, Tacoma, Washington, sentenced today in connection with his fraudulent claims of military service. Macbeth never traveled outside the U.S. with the Army"."

No consistency in Leftism again: "Ah Democrats. Too clever by half, again. In denouncing Rush Limbaugh, Reid had to admit that in Iraq: "Our troops are fighting and dying to bring to others the freedoms that many take for granted." This is the same Harry Reid who in April pronounced the war in Iraq was lost."

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ELSEWHERE



Palestinian Propaganda Coup finally coming apart: "Last month, a French court heard an appeals case whose forthcoming verdict will have far-reaching ramifications for all who value truth and accuracy in Middle East news reporting. The case involves Philippe Karsenty, a French journalist and media commentator, who was found guilty of defamation after he called for the firing of two France 2 Television journalists responsible for the Sept. 30, 2000, news report on the alleged killing of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It has been seven years since France 2 Television broadcast the excruciating footage of Mohammed and his father Jamal crouching in terror behind a barrel in Gaza's Netzarim Junction while, according to the report, under relentless fire from IDF soldiers. The 59-second clip, which ends with the boy apparently shot dead, was presented around the world as an unambiguous case of Israeli savagery. Shortly following the al-Dura incident, however, a series of inquiries cast grave doubt on the accuracy of the original France 2 report. And yet France 2 refused to release Abu Rahmeh's full 27 minutes of raw footage. It did, however, agree to let three prominent French journalists view the footage. All three concluded that it comprised blatantly staged scenes of Palestinians being shot by Israeli forces, and that France 2's Jerusalem Bureau Chief Charles Enderlin had lied to conceal that fact.

Cheap wine: I have just bought from my local liquor store a box containing 6 standard bottles of Australian Chardonnay wine -- for $18, a similar amount to what I often pay for a single bottle. I intend to open one of the bottles immediately after I post this. Should be interesting. Many cheap Australian wines are quite good and, even though I give away thousands of dollars to selected recipients, my Presbyterian upbringing always makes me interested in a bargain: "Waste not, want not", and all that. Update: It is a perfectly pleasant wine -- though with a bit of bitterness in the aftertaste. Great value for $3.00!

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

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

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

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

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

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3 October, 2007

TIKKUN FAILS TO LOOK IN THE MIRROR

Does this sound like a pretty good comment on the Left?

"What we are suggesting is that being stuck in a doctrinal belief system which is intolerant of another's personal interpretation, or one which disregards facts and foments intolerance of others while setting its followers apart as elite and uniquely special, is a move away from our full potential and from the kind of reasoning that has brought humanity its marvelous advances"

That statement is an only slightly edited version of a passage from a long article in "Tikkun" -- a Left-wing Jewish periodical with vague pretensions to being religious. It is meant to apply to religious fundamentalists and is basically an attack on fundamentalist Christians and Jews.

The theme of the article is that the Christans and Jews concerned are "rigid" in their beliefs. They are incapable of changing their views in response to new evidence. Does that sound like anyone you know? Does it sound like people who blame "poverty" for everything, even Islamic hostility to the West? DESPITE the fact that Bin Laden is a billionaire and most of the 9/11 hijackers were thoroughly middle-class?

Tikkun also seems to be unaware that the concept of mental rigidity has been actively researched by psychologists since before WWII and in fact originates with the Nazi psychologist Jaensch. Nazism and Communism are siblings, however, so it is not particularly surprising that the transplanted German Jewish Marxist theoretician Theodor Wiesengrund (aka Adorno) carried on the Jaensch research after the war, making much of it in his co-authored 1950 book "The Authoritarian Personality". Wiesengrund also thought that it was conservatives who are mentally rigid.

The Wiesengrund/Adorno theory attracted a lot of attention and follow-up research and the outcome of that research was precisely the opposite of what Tikkun asserts. Far from being a general attribute with deep roots in the architecture of the brain, rigidity was in fact found to be highly situational. People who were rigid in one way were often not at all rigid in other ways.

So mental rigidity does exist. We would hardly have Leftism otherwise. But rigidity in political or religious matters does NOT imply a general handicap or trait of rigidity. People who are rigid in their politics can easily be very flexible in other ways. And the "flexibility" of Leftists when it comes to morality of any sort is a good example of that.

I was myself intimately involved in the psychological research I have just described for around 20 years and my many published papers on the subject offer a comprehensive introduction to the whole body of research on the topic. A brief summary of the research with full citations can be found here

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ELSEWHERE

There have been warlike women at least since Boadicea: ""I was a member in good standing with the NDP and was in solidarity with gender parity on party executives and at party meetings. I believed in affirmative action and testified in favor of it in front of legislative committees at Queens Park in Toronto. I was no reactionary behemoth back then. But when I would hear how women would govern by consensus and that there would be no more war I drew the line. I would inevitably point out that Margaret Thatcher led Great Britain into the Falklands Islands War against Argentina in 1982. Almost to a woman, the response to that would be, 'Thatcher's more like a man.' As one might imagine, this would be said in the most derisive way imaginable. Yet history demonstrates that women leaders -- be they monarchs or presidents -- will just as surely go to war as their male counterparts and very often for the same reasons."

"New Deal" debunked: "Sometimes, books create paradigm shifts in how we view history. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes, is just such a book. An absorbing journey through that era, it sets the record straight on both the causes of the Great Depression and how the New Deal policies failed. Conventional wisdom holds that the Great Depression was sparked by the 1929 stock market crash; that capitalism had to be saved from itself; that Hoover failed to do so; and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped us through the period with his New Deal policies. But this narrative, as Shlaes makes clear, fails to recognize how the economy actually works since it reflexively champions government as a savior for the common man. In reality, reckless government intervention can make a bad economic situation much worse. The New Deal, in fact, is what put the "Great" in the Great Depression."

Leftist "Strib" to be less Leftist and more local: "The new owners of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune have parted ways with veteran editorial page editor Susan Albright because she did not want to focus on local issues. It also appears the Strib lost the law suit over hiring the former editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The story notes the chairmen of the paper is now acting as publisher because Par Ridder was forced out by a court ruling. Chairman/publisher Harte echoed what I wrote earlier about the St. Paul Pioneer Press being the better read of late because it contained local information, not just a rehash of last night's network news and editorials that could have been from the NY Times."

From the inimitable Ann Coulter: "Uttering lines that send liberals into paroxysms of rage, otherwise known as "citing facts," is the spice of life. When I see the hot spittle flying from their mouths and the veins bulging and pulsing above their eyes, well, that's when I feel truly alive. This happens, I dearly hope, once a week when my column is released. But the public gnashing of teeth that I incite occurs approximately every six to eight months, which is rather peculiar, since I believe I annoy liberals much more often than that. Liberals' response to unbridled right-wing speech makes the Muslims look laid back. Reacting with stupefied indignation whenever someone disagrees with them-especially in a way that makes people point and laugh at liberals-they seem to be in a constant state of outrage. Liberals, and the conservatives who fear them, have a look of perpetual outrage, kind of the way Nancy Pelosi has a look of perpetual surprise".

Senator Tom Harkin, another Democrat phony: "While running for his Senate seat in 1984, and again while running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, Harkin has faced criticism for claiming that he had flown combat missions over North Vietnam. In a 1979 round table discussion with other Congressional Veterans, Harkin said of his service as a Navy pilot: "One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions". These comments were later published in a 1981 book by David Broder. After subsequent inquiries by Barry Goldwater and The Wall Street Journal, Harkin clarified that that he had been stationed in Japan and sometimes flew recently repaired aircraft on test missions over Vietnam. His service flying F-4s and F-8s was later, while he was stationed in Cuba. References to this controversy were deleted from Wikipedia by staffers from Harkin's senate office"

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

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

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

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

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2 October, 2007

Leftist hypocrisy again

Last week, every major newspaper in Texas published a report of a study by "nonpartisan" Texans for Public Justice. It detailed the amounts of money that donors contributed to legislative and major statewide races during the 2006 election. One implied TPJ criticism echoed by the newspaper reports: Millionaire contributors have too much influence on Texas elections.

Most of the articles singled out Houston builder Bob Perry, who favored Republican candidates. His 2006 total: $7.1 million.

What neither the authors of the TPJ study nor any of the journalists reporting the story mentioned was the fact - easily found on the TPJ Web site - that one source of TPJ funding is the "Open Society Institute, New York, NY." The institute - as easily determined by five minutes of Google research - was founded by billionaire George Soros, who remains its chairman. During a 2006 interview, Soros told a New York Times writer that he gave "something like $27.5 million" to MoveOn.org and other anti-Republican groups during the 2004 election campaign.

I mention all of that simply to say ... It's a good thing George Soros doesn't reside in Texas. If he did, the "nonpartisans" at Texans for Public Justice would be pouncing on him like a duck on a June bug. Don't ya think?

Source

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A quality person: "Last Wednesday, while flying from Phoenix to the Alamo City on U.S. Airways Flight 207, a San Antonio man, Gil Anderson, witnessed something memorable. Shortly before takeoff, he overheard a flight attendant tell a young uniformed soldier sitting in front of him: "A lady in first-class wants to switch seats with you." The soldier accepted the offer and walked up to the first-class section. "When the lady came back to our area, I had a tear in my eye," Anderson said when he phoned this column soon after his plane landed. "I gave her a little round of applause. "Then, by golly, everybody in that area started applauding," he said in a voice tinged with emotion. "It was a very moving moment." Acknowledging the applause of Anderson and the other passengers, the first-class lady said simply: "I did it because he deserves it."

PBS Rewrites World War II with Ken Burns' 14-1/2 hour documentary "The War": "Although promoted as "non-partisan," it keeps up a relentless monotone drumbeat of political correctness, incessantly hammering American mistakes, incompetence, and racism. Burns' documentary is a propaganda pulpit, e.g., for activist Black liberal historian John Hope Franklin. Franklin boasts that after a military recruiter told the young Harvard Ph.D. that he had "everything right but color," he decided to sit out the war because he was "too good" to fight for such a country. Burns made little attempt to juxtapose Franklin to his documentary's footage of African-Americans who fought heroically for America as pilots, artillery men, and Marines. Burns conjures the impression that all Japanese-Americans were sent to concentration camps. Japanese-Americans in Hawaii such as Inouye were not interned in local Manzanars. They comprised a third of the population and an even larger share of Hawaii's skilled manual laborers, so to round up these loyal Americans would have shut down the islands' economy. Burns credits the founder of our present welfare state Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt for what went right in the war. But when loyal Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were forcibly herded into camps like Manzanar, FDR's responsibility for this racial discrimination is downplayed."

We Shall Overcome: "Perhaps ashamed that during both major Civil Rights battles (the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movements), Democrats allied themselves against African Americans, modern Progressives not only proclaim themselves the defenders of Civil Rights in America, but they also continue to wage the battle against racism as if it's still Selma, 1964. In the Progressive world, racial oppression is an omnipresent aspect in the fabric of American life, with every white American (who isn't Progressive, of course) a slavering racist anxious to degrade and dehumanize blacks".

European Protectionism Targets American Companies, Worldwide Innovation: "Unable to defeat American companies in the open marketplace, protectionist European bureaucrats are instead resorting to litigation and regulation to kneecap American companies and protect their own. This week, the European Court of First Instance (CFI), Europe's second-highest court, upheld a $690 million European Commission (EC) antitrust judgment against Microsoft, which it accused of "abusing its market power." And precisely how did Microsoft abuse its power? According to the EC, by having the audacity to cater to consumer preference by including its digital media player in Windows. It should be noted that when Microsoft compliantly offered a stripped-down version of Windows without the media player, almost no one chose to purchase that version. Just brilliant, those European central planners."

President Thompson: "Conventional wisdom is hardening around the proposition that Fred Dalton Thompson is too lazy, ill-prepared, tired, old, lackluster, inexperienced, inconsistent and bald to make a successful run for President. Of course, conventional wisdom rarely gets anything right. When it does, it's only by accident. In this case conventional wisdom is not just wrong but comically so. Thompson will win the Republican nomination for two reasons. First, he's a very impressive candidate. Second, there's no realistic alternative. He will win the general election for the same two reasons":

Europeans Want America to Stay in Iraq: "The Atlantic Community Editorial Team asked European policy experts for their opinions on proposed ways forward in Iraq. Respondents from ten different countries provided some surprising results. While the American public and policy debate revolves largely around exit strategies and "redeployment," there is apparent consensus among European policy analysts that American troops should remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. In contrast to both European media opinion and the prevailing views of American liberals, our respondents supported sustained troop levels. Many consider the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal to be counter-productive and even outright dangerous, saying that lack of American involvement would drive Iraq into further chaos."

Another triumph of British bureaucracy: "The government has paid out a record 450,000 pounds for an end-of-terrace house in one of the Victorian streets being bulldozed across northern England to make way for modern housing developments. A Cheshire-based property investor picked up the payout, which is more than double the price that any other property has fetched on the same road in the last two years. Property experts said it could be completely refurbished for less than 100,000 pounds. [Governments have always done housing badly]

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

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

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

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

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1 October, 2007

Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt

What FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 30s. Excerpts:

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was "strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan..America today literally asks for orders." The Roosevelt administration, she added, "envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy." That article isn't quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. But it underscores his central argument: that there are surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler.

With our knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, we find it almost impossible to consider such claims dispassionately. But in the 1930s, when everyone agreed that capitalism had failed, it wasn't hard to find common themes and mutual admiration in Washington, Berlin, and Rome, not to mention Moscow. (Three New Deals does not focus as much on the latter.) Nor is that a mere historical curiosity, of no great importance in the era following democracy's triumph over fascism, National Socialism, and communism. Schivelbusch concludes his essay with the liberal journalist John T. Flynn's warning, in 1944, that state power feeds on crises and enemies. Since then we have been warned about many crises and many enemies, and we have come to accept a more powerful and more intrusive state than existed before the '30s.....

In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as "Fascist means to gain liberal ends." He wasn't hallucinating. FDR's adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done "many of the things which seem to me necessary." Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, "If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere." She added that if she were younger, she'd like to lead "the Fascist Movement in the United States." At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, "The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America."

Roosevelt himself called Mussolini "admirable" and professed that he was "deeply impressed by what he has accomplished." The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt's 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices..Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism." The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised "Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies" and "the development toward an authoritarian state" based on the "demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest."

In 1973 one of the most distinguished American historians, John A. Garraty of Columbia University, created a stir with his article "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression." Garraty was an admirer of Roosevelt but couldn't help noticing, for instance, the parallels between the Civilian Conservation Corps and similar programs in Germany. Both, he wrote, "were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth `off the city street corners,' Hitler as a way of keeping them from `rotting helplessly in the streets.' In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency."

And in 1976, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan incurred the ire of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), pro-Roosevelt historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and The New York Times when he told reporters that "fascism was really the basis of the New Deal."

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About time: "Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead apologized today for the school's lack of full support for the three lacrosse players falsely accused last year of raping an escort service dancer. It was Brodhead's first public apology for the university's handling of the case, which drew worldwide media attention. He said the university should have done more to reach out to the players and their families at a time of great peril. "This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it and I apologize," he said.... "If there's one lesson the world should take from the Duke lacrosse case," Brodhead said, "it's the danger of prejudgment and our need to defend against it at every turn." His short speech was greeted with a standing ovation by many in the crowd.... Brodhead forced the resignation of the lacrosse coach and canceled the 2006 Duke lacrosse season after the dancer claimed she was assaulted at a lacrosse team party on March 13, 2006"

Life in the California dream world: "A rash of recent murders has not only shattered the peace in Sacramento, it has shaken our community's sense of itself as a safe place to live and raise families. Two weeks ago, armed robbers broke into a home in southeast Sacramento County where residents were apparently selling drugs. Detectives say the assailants shot to death Sean Aquitania, a visitor at the home who tried to fight them off. One of the killers then walked outside and shot Aquitania's 7-month-old son, Sean Jr., in the head. The boy was strapped in a car seat, helpless. It was the cold-blooded murder of an infant. And it didn't happen on the streets of bloody Baghdad. It happened on a neighborhood cul-de-sac here in Sacramento. As local residents absorbed the horror of the deliberate murder of an infant, someone pumped four bullets into 21-year old Rodrigo Rodriguez, a scholarship student at the University of California, Berkeley, the first of his family to go to college, a young man who organized food drives and tutored kids from poor neighborhoods. The killing took place outside a barber shop in Oak Park two days after baby Sean's murder. Witnesses say the killer shot twice, and after Rodriguez fell, twice more. The shooter then jumped into the passenger seat of a waiting car and drove away."

British Leftists to destroy the navy that Napoleon and Hitler could not: "Ministers have drawn up confidential proposals to slash the number of ships in the Royal Navy, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose. The expected reductions follow a fierce row between Service chiefs and the Treasury over defence spending. The Ministry of Defence has produced a plan to decommission five warships from next April, which would reduce the Navy's capability to the level where it could carry out only "one small-scale operation".

Superannuated traitor now totally nuts: "Daniel Ellsberg must miss being in the spotlight. The former star of the radical left, best known for giving the New York Times the "Pentagon Papers", is on the comeback trail, trying to restablish his radical credentials on the college speaking circuit. But times have changed and Ellsberg knows he must change with them; he must become as hysterically unbalanced in his criticism of government as any other lefty if he expects to stand out in a crowd. At American University on September 20, Ellsberg didn't disappoint. He said: "And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran - an escalation - which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps."

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

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

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

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

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