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

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN NEW ORLEANS WAS GOVERNMENT

Government agencies constantly stopped people from being helped or helping themselves. Just one tiny excerpt from a detailed article:

"Yet, for all of the public angst over the federal government's - and especially FEMA's - post-disaster response, most observers have missed what is painfully obvious: the government's response was perfectly in character to how people in government act in such situations. To say this in an alternative way, government was being government the same way that a dog is a dog.

As anyone knows, dogs are territorial animals, and governments are territorial entities. The first rule that a government agent follows when confronted with an "emergency" is to "secure the area." For example, when two young men were merrily going on a murder and mayhem spree at Columbine High School in 1999, the vaunted police "SWAT" team stayed outside and encircled the complex because someone said that the area had to be "secured" before police actually could try to save anyone. (Of course, we found out later that not only did police fail to save people, but at least one person bled to death because police refused to get help until the man had died. This was not incompetence; it was the normal workings of the "I am in charge and don't you forget it" mentality that permeates government at all levels.)

Immediately after the hurricane had stopped in New Orleans, for example, a Wal-Mart had brought a truckload of bottled water; FEMA officials turned the truck away, declaring that it was "not needed." Before we dismiss this incident as yet another example of incompetent government, we should realize that the official's actions were completely within the character of government".

You really MUST read the whole thing in this case. You will be horrified

An Australian compares what happened in New Orleans with what happened in our last big flood, which happened right here in my home town of Brisbane in 1974. And everything he says is true. The water was over the top of the roofs of great tracts of houses here. I guess I don't have to tell you how differently the two situations worked out.

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I mentioned the yesterday the United Nations Human Development Index. One of my readers looked into it a bit more deeply and found this page -- where it tells you how the index is calculated. There is actually a bit of bare-faced fraud in it -- surprise, surprise! As my reader dryly comments: "I was interested to see the equations used to generate the index. In particular, the fact that the GDP per capita component is the only one that is subjected to logarithmic compression before being applied. I'm figuring they do that to make sure the US doesn't top the table -- can't have the evil hegemon pointing the way now can we?"

Walter Williams points out how price controls made problems worse for people evacuating Houston and Galveston before hurricane Rita.

It takes the Europeans to make heroes out of Palestinian suicide bombers. See here and here for brief reviews of a new movie called "Paradise now" about two Palestinian suicide bombers, about their "motives" and their "human side". It's a German-Dutch-French co-production, funded by the "World Cinema Fund", which consists of the Berlinale and the Bundeskulturstiftung (Federal Culture Foundation) -- it's the first movie produced with their help. For the "Evangelische Filmjury", it's the movie of the month, since it "invites us to reflect about the motives of the attackers", and Amnesty International awards it with it's "peace prize", because it's "weder belehrend noch moralisierend" - neither moralizing nor cautionary.... The movie won the audience's award and the "Blauen Engel" (Blue Angel) as the "best European movie" at the 55. Internationalen Filmfestspielen in Berlin 2005. The movie ends with the explosion of the bomb. But you do not see mutilated bodies. The screen simply goes white... At least Die Welt (a major German newspaper) had the grace to call the film "enttaeuschend" (disappointing).

Abraham Lincoln where are you? There's a Leftist Confederacy forming: "In answer to a growing swell of interest in realistic responses to the excesses of the present American empire, The Middlebury Institute has been launched by a group of activists and professionals to promote the serious study of separatism, secession, self-determination and similar devolutionary trends and developments, on both national and international scales".

The Red Cross racket: "This skewed giving to Red Cross would be justified if the organization had to pay the cost of the 300,000 people it has sheltered. But FEMA and the affected states are reimbursing the Red Cross under preexisting contracts for emergency shelter and other disaster services. The existence of these contracts is no secret to anyone but the American public. The Red Cross carefully says it functions only by the grace of the American people - but "people" includes government, national and local. What we've now come to expect from a major disaster is a Red Cross media blitz. .... The Red Cross brand is platinum. Its fundraising vastly outruns its programs because it does very little or nothing to rescue survivors, provide direct medical care or rebuild houses. After 9/11, the Red Cross collected more than $1 billion, a record in philanthropic fundraising after a disaster. But the Red Cross could do little more than trace missing people, help a handful of people in shelters and provide food to firefighters, police, paramedics and evacuation crews during that catastrophe. When New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer asked for documentation of 9/11 expenditures, the Red Cross' response was that it is federally chartered and not answerable to state government regulators."

There is an interesting post up at Sir Humphrey that requires a bit of deep thought. It is about Lefties backing evolution under a rational disguise while simultaneously irrationally denying free market ideas, despite evolution and free markets being very close analogues. The post is a response to a number of Lefty blogs getting all self-righteous about the current resurgence of the intelligent design/evolution controversy in education in America at the moment. Excerpt: "So economically speaking the analog of the ID proponent is the socialist. Scientifically the analog of the free marketeer is the evolutionist. An ID advocate who also wants to control the economy is at least consistent to a set of principles, even if you might disagree with them. Those deriding ID while backing market interference or planning are inconsistent and anything but rational, let alone moral".

Great! The disgusting Leftist so-called "International Freedom Center" has been dropped from the 9/11 site in NYC.

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

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

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

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

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29 September, 2005

AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL HISTORY

There is an excellent review of Australian politics here -- stretching back over a hundred years but focusing mainly on the achievements of Australia's present conservative Prime-Minister, John Howard. I liked this comment on the conflict between Billy Hughes, Australia's Prime Minister of World War I, and that great enemy of the American constitution, President Woodrow Wilson:

"At the Paris peace conference at the end of World War I, Billy Hughes insisted on annexing the South Pacific islands his country had captured from Germany and made little secret of his contempt for Woodrow Wilson, his Fourteen Points, and the League of Nations. Wilson returned the compliment, calling Hughes a "pestiferous varmint.""

The utter uselessness of the League of Nations certainly proved that Hughes was the wiser man.

And here's the Australian situation as of yesterday: "Australia has bounded into the world's top 10 competitive economies, winning praise for its long-term reforms and stability. The latest rankings of global economies, released today by the World Economic Forum (WEF) show Australia has jumped four spots to number 10. Finland clinched the top spot for the third consecutive year, followed by the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Taiwan and Singapore in the 117-country index. WEF chief economist Augusto Lopez-Claros said Australia had performed well on all three of the forum's competitiveness measures - macroeconomic stability, the quality of public institutions and technology".

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The coverup has begun: All those nice people in New Orleans were not behaving badly at all. ONLY "Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center". The initial media reports were all wild exaggerations, we are now told by the selfsame media. I am sure that the media DID exaggerate. What conservative would expect otherwise? And even among blacks ONLY about a third of black adult males have spent time in jail so I am perfectly ready to believe that most blacks in New Orleans behaved decently. But we seem to be moving swiftly towards a politically correct account that says that nothing nasty happened in New Orleans at all. When that Right-wing Death-beast (sorry: Democrat) Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people', he was just having bad dreams.

Sometimes, however, the media can't help telling the truth. Click the link and have a look at the photos accompanying this dreadful story: "Four Central Florida middle school students were arrested Monday for allegedly ripping off the clothes off classmates and then snapping photos with their cell phones, according to a Local 6 News report. Investigators said the boys, ages 12, 13 and 14 years old, attacked the girls Friday at Tavares Middle School in Lake County, Fla., in the back of a school bus. The boys then allegedly groped the girls and took pictures of them". I have also uploaded the pictures here in case they get taken down.

National Guard off the hook -- sort of: "The morning Hurricane Katrina thundered ashore, Louisiana National Guard commanders thought they were prepared to save their state. But when 15-foot floodwaters swept into their headquarters, cut their communications and disabled their high-water trucks, they had their hands full just saving themselves. For a crucial 24 hours after landfall on Aug. 29, Guard officers said, they were preoccupied with protecting their nerve center from the waves topping the windows at Jackson Barracks and rescuing soldiers who could not swim. The next morning, they had to evacuate their entire headquarters force of 375 guardsmen by boat and helicopter to the Superdome.... At the convention center, 222 soldiers trained in levee repair, not police work, locked themselves into an exhibit hall at the convention center rather than challenge an angry and desperate crowd of more than 10,000 hurricane victims at the center. The near-total collapse of communications made every task far more difficult, forcing some Guard commanders to use "runners, like in World War I," as one put it. With land lines, cellphones and many satellite phones out of action, the frequencies used by the radios still functioning were often so jammed that they were useless.... Yet questions about the first few days haunt many Louisiana guard officials: Should commanders have moved their headquarters to higher ground before the storm? Could they have better headed off the lawlessness or built more resilient communications?

On the United Nations Human Development Index Australia ranks third and of the top six countries, five are monarchies. As it says here: "The UN Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, and other factors for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being". You will never guess on which continent most countries with least human development are located. And if the United Nations says so, it must be right, mustn't it?

Great stuff!: "County Judge Carl Griffith said today he has become so frustrated with the federal relief effort that he has instructed all local officials to use police force if they have to to take supplies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "If you have enough policemen to take it from them, take it," Griffith said. His frustration comes as squabbling continues among federal, state and local over what some characterize as a woeful lack of communication."

A British blogger comments on the British Labour party: "You have been in power since 1997, and have achieved (aside form a bit of constitutional vandalism) very little. The greatest electoral mandate ever has been squandered. A lot more tax spent on utterly useless pen-pushers. Billions spent on management consultants, and an ever more thirsty-for-cash, but otherwise unreconstructed NHS. There has been little reform of education (except a lowering of standards). Tuition fees, a sticking plaster to cover the disastrous target of 50% participation in higher education without offering commensurate funding, has become this governments second-most unpopular policy."

Some heavy sarcasm from California Conservative: "Viagra is the pharmaceutical form of liberalism! Think about it. Like a Michael Moore documentary, Viagra delivers the look and feel of the real thing without the need for intellectual or spiritual honesty that true love (or a documentary) demands. And now that doctors have warned consumers that the drug can cause blindness, Viagra becomes an ideal metaphor of the Democratic Party".

If you want to know about the crazy leftist goings-on in Oregon, this is the blog for you.

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

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

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

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

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28 September, 2005

"DON'T TRUST THE BA****DS"

I have just put up the above heading as a motto in the green area at the top of this site. I intend to leave it there for some time. I am moving towards the idea that such a motto is indeed the best short summary of a conservative attitude. I think the psychological basis of conservatism is wariness and skepticism. And it is a wariness that is reinforced by experience as we go through life. Which is presumably why conservatism increases markedly with age. Aging tends to move people from Left to Right far more often than in the opposite direction. Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill are probably the two best known examples of such a movement in thinking.

But a conservative does not of course distrust everybody always. He is mainly distrustful of Leftists, reformers, planners, intellectuals and "experts" of all kinds -- as the historian Feiling, and many others have been pointing out for many years. But even in everyday life the conservative probably practices to some degree what Ronald Reagan so memorably said: "Trust but verify". How trusting of others conservatives are in everyday life is probably a matter of individual personality but, for all that, I think few conservatives would dispute that trust has to be earned rather than being assumed.

Leftists will no doubt say that my words above prove that conservatives are "misanthropic" (people-haters). I have however written a longish and carefully researched academic journal article on just that claim so further reading should clarify why that is not so.

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Phew! Read Steve Sailer on the contrast between the severe flooding in Bombay recently and the severe flooding in New Orleans! The Indians pulled together and there was NO reported crime! But India is of course an ancient civilization. I have four quite dark Indians living in my own large house with me precisely because of their highly civilized ways.

India and the Anglo-Saxons: "The United States has struck a historic deal with India under which India will be permitted to acquire civilian nuclear technology internationally while retaining its nuclear arms. According to the Indian Express, the US is offering India high-tech defence and space cooperation in terms of satellites and launch vehicles, Patriot and Arrow missiles and a greater role in global institutions. When Condoleezza Rice visited India in March, she said: "This is my first stop as Secretary of State in Asia. The President has personally put a lot of time and energy into the relationship. The US has determined that this is going to be a very important relationship going forward and we are going to put whatever time we need into it." The aim was to take US-India ties "to another level". According to her, the Bush Administration was sworn to assisting "India become a major world power in the 21st century". It is rare in the past 100 years that a US president has sent a signal of this dimension. It means that the US will help India realise the global aspiration that its size, geography and its post-1991 economic reform agenda have made into a national obsession. While Bill Clinton's 2000 visit to India symbolised a new outlook, the conceptual change has come under Bush. The core judgement is that a strong, democratic and influential India is an asset for the US in the region and the world... The Prime Minister's media aide Sanjya Baru has said, "India is an ancient civilisation and has a mind of its own on each issue. But our views are moving in parallel with the US and Anglo-Saxon world."

Dr. Jack Wheeler writes: "INFANTILIZOMANIA" Yes, I invented this term. You won't find it in Webster's, the OED, or Google. At least not now. Hopefully soon you will, as it becomes the accepted term for the neurosis with which all those on the Left are afflicted. Just as a pyromaniac is driven by a compulsion to set fires, a kleptomaniac by a compulsion to steal, and - everyone's favorite example - a nymphomaniac by a compulsion to have sex, an infantilizomaniac is driven by a compulsion to treat adult human beings as children. The compulsion to infantilize people is the neurotic compulsion of liberals. Liberals of course do not call it infantilizomania. They call it compassion. We can see the results of liberal compassion in the wake of Katrina: hundreds of thousands of New Orleans inner city blacks helpless to take responsibility for themselves. Liberal compassion is the modern form of the White Man's Burden, and has destroyed, just obliterated, three to four generations of inner city poor in America. How many more generations of inner city blacks have to be wiped out until liberals admit their compassion is a fraud of epically tragic proportions? It is a blatantly phony compassion. Compassion for the plight of others in difficult and desperate circumstances is a noble emotion. But it becomes fraudulent when you demand that your compassion be paid for with other people's money....."

Britain: An old girl with guts: "A retired social worker was jailed yesterday for seven days for refusing to pay a 53.71 pound increase in her council tax. Sylvia Hardy, a 73-year-old spinster, had refused all offers of help from well-wishers. She was making a stand in the hope of forcing the Government to reconsider an unjust tax, she said.... Her imprisonment will cost taxpayers five times more than her council tax arrears. She will serve only 3.5 days because all prisoners sentenced to twelve months or less are automatically released at the halfway stage. By that time it will have cost the state a total of 336 pounds, compared with council tax arrears of 53.71 pounds.... Hardy made her stand because her council tax had risen by six times the increase in her pension. She receives an occupational pension from her former employer, Devon County Council, and the state pension which, combined, give her a weekly income of 270 pounds. Over the past four years the council tax charge on her 130,000 pound flat [apartment] has increased by 38 per cent to 708.26 pounds, compared with a rise of only 6.8 per cent in her pension.... She continued: "Throughout history, people have fought to change laws which are unjust, and often the only way to do this is to break the law or ignore it and to accept the punishment. That is why I am appearing here today to accept my punishment for desperately trying to salvage my ever-reducing quality of life.

Full details here about how Chilean Marxist leader Salvador Allende was shot by his Cuban minders to prevent him surrendering to Pinochet's forces.

Indepundit has an amusing account (with photos) of a San Diego "Peace" rally.

I have just put up here an email from someone who thinks that most people never get out of mental childhood. It would certainly help explain a lot of Leftist thinking (if you can call it thinking).

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

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

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

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

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27 September, 2005

"GEORGE BUSH, THE MAN": A RARE BURST OF CANADIAN REALISM

Below is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the "Ottawa Citizen" on 9/11/2005 by David Warren. The link is to David Warren's own site as the article is no longer findable at its original source

"There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.) I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being, that when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military, efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another, who have cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail...."

I rarely say this but this time I am going to: Read the whole thing. The conclusion of his article is cutting: "Unlike his critics, Bush is a man"

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Hurricane Center: Global Warming Equals Fewer Storms: "Environmentalists who claim global warming has caused an increase in U.S. hurricane activity obviously haven't checked with the National Hurricane Center, which has kept statistics on major storms over the last 150 years. That's probably because those statistics yield one inescapable conclusion: If global warming has had any impact at all on hurricane activity, it's lessened - not increased - the frequency of major hurricanes". [There is much more about this on "Greenie Watch" -- e.g. here and here]

Owen Harries on intellectuals: "Why do intellectuals get things so wrong, so often?" Harries asks. "The question is worth asking because they are still with us, still vocal, still taken seriously by many as interpreters of the course of human history." In answering his own question, Harries suggests that intellectuals are often wrong because thinkers tend to demand coherence in human affairs, looking "for pattern, meaning, and consistency." Since intellectuals tend to be overwhelmingly secular, Harries observes that most intellectuals attempt to find such consistency in the form of ideology. "Ideologies vary a good deal, but among the things they have in common is that they all require great selectivity with respect to empirical evidence," Harries suggests. "That which supports the ideological creed is readily assimilated and emphasized; that which conflicts with it is either noisily rejected or quietly filtered out and ignored."

From a reformed Leftist: "I believe that the key to getting leftists change is to get them to open their eyes and get them off their left-wing media addiction (which leads them to EXCLUDE reading or watching anything that is right-of-center; in other words: their self-censorship - THEIR INNER EXILE). I believe that once reasonable people start to look at events from both sides, they will begin to "see the light." The leftists in the USA and Europe - (and in the academy and in the MSM) - live in a self-imposed totalitarian regime of their own minds; whereas tyrannies like the USSR actively censored all media and prevented their trapped citizenry from reading any real news, and from reading any real history (of Communism or anything else), or from reading Hayek - or anything that opposed their rigid ideology, contemporary post-modern leftists voluntarily censor themselves and restrict their reading and viewing of news and commentary to the left-of-center media (which is still MOST of the media, so they don't FEEL like their censoring themselves)."

Study shows FDR's "New Deal" was politically corrupt: "Couch and Shughart conclude that "political self-interest was perhaps the most important motive underlying the administration's spending decisions. A state's popular vote for FDR in the 1932 election and its importance to the President's electoral college strategy are consistently [statistically] significant determinants of the amount of federal aid it received."

Australian Left tough on terrorist suspects: "Labor wants police to have the power to search anyone found in a suspected terrorist "target area", without police needing a warrant. Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said today that, under a Labor plan, police commissioners would be able to lock down a suburb or area in which terrorists were suspected of planning an attack. Mr Beazley said the plan went further than the Federal Government's idea of allowing state police to detain terror suspects for up to 14 days or track suspects by using electronic tags. "We've put out one suggestion, which is similar to the legislation which exists now in NSW but is a bit tougher, and we think it should be picked up in the other states in a uniform way and by Canberra," he said. "And that is to give the capacity to the police commissioner in any jurisdiction to lock down an area in which you believe a terrorist threat may be emerging or where it's actually occurred," Mr Beazley told ABC TV. "This gives the police substantial powers of search and seizure".

Beazley is a bit wishy-washy about disowning the antisemites in his own party, however: "Opposition Leader Kim Beazley is coming under increased pressure from Australia's influential Jewish community to publicly repudiate Labor MPs who are "Nazifying" Israel, despite its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The latest bout of justifiable Jewish angst follows another ugly outburst by Labor backbencher Julia Irwin in federal Parliament two weeks ago".

There is an interesting article here on the weird Muslim beliefs about Jesus.

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

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

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

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

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26 September, 2005

BRITAIN SLOWLY SINKING UNDER SOCIALISM

From the time of the Thatcher reforms in the early 1980s, Britain has been the star economic performer among the major European nations. The British went from having the lowest per capita income of the European big four (Germany, France, Italy and Britain) to having the highest one, but now there are signs the economic sickness in "old Europe" is beginning to infect the British. The British economy had been growing an average of almost 3 percent yearly for the last two decades, which is quite respectable, given that French and German economies have grown much more slowly. Over the same period, the U.S. grew at an average rate of almost 4 percent, far higher than any of the major European economies.

When Tony Blair took office, he had the wisdom not to undo the Thatcher reforms. As a result, Britain has had the advantage of far freer labor markets, and a lower tax burden than most of its European competitors, along with a strong rule of law and relatively little corruption. Unfortunately for the British, the chancellor of the exchequer (i.e., treasury secretary) in the Labor government, Gordon Brown, has too much of a "social market economy" streak. As a result, domestic spending and taxes have risen rapidly, and consequently, as would be expected, economic growth has been falling to an annual rate of only 1.5 percent.

The Europeans, including Chancellor Brown, like to talk about their "social market economy" being superior and more humane than the freer U.S. market economy, but the facts paint a very different picture. Last year, the per capita GDP (on a purchasing power parity basis) of Britain. was only $29,600 as compared with $40,100 in the U.S., and the British on average are about 10 percent richer than other EU members. Even the poorest of the U.S. states, like Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi (all hit by Katrina), have slightly higher average incomes and the rich states, like Connecticut, have incomes roughly double those of the British.

More here

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Good to hear: "Israeli aircraft blasted suspected Palestinian weapons facilities and other militant targets throughout the Gaza Strip on Sunday, at the launch of what the military said would be a "prolonged" offensive against Hamas militants for bombarding Israeli towns with rockets."

A good rant from Unca Dave: "Fellow Americans, how much longer are we going to take this garbage? They've outlawed prayer. The Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are depicted as filthy slave owners. Christopher Columbus is now an eeeeevil European interested solely with enslaving the pristine, peaceful natives. Abraham Lincoln is called a racist. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro and other tin pot communist dictators with funny little hats and murdering Muslims are praised beyond description for being warm, feeling humanitarians by traitors like senators Kennedy, Kerry and Durbin. Same guys, on the other hand, have made the US out to be the bad guy for pouring water on the heads of the terrorists at Gitmo (horrors!) or, even worse, embarrassing them (how dare we!). Something's gotta give, and I have a feeling it's gonna give soon!"

More about a great hero of the Left: "A new book, about to be published in France "Cuba Nostra - Les Secrets D'Etat de Fidel Castro" by Alain Ammar has destroyed a very-well constructed myth by the left: The assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile while he was being toppled by Augusto Pinochet. This article by Eduardo Mackenzie has a brief on the book. "The fact is that Allende was not a suicide, he was not killed by the military that took the power in September, 1973. During the assault against La Moneda palace, the Chilean president was cowardly murdered by one of the Cuban agents that were in charge of his protection" says Eduardo. Allende was frightened by the military and wanted to surrender. Before he could do this, he was killed. It's the second major attack on this leftist myth this month! Early this month a new book by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin revealed that Allende, and other leftist leaders in Latin America received money from KGB...."

I have previously mentioned Allende's pre-war Fascism -- his antisemitism, eugenic ideas etc. Don't miss his "cure" for homosexuality!

Jeff Jacoby has a good summary of the Chrenkoff phenomenon and what it tells us about most of the media. If feel some totally unjustified reflected glory from the whole thing because Chrenkoff lives only about 20 minutes drive from where I do here in Brisbane.

Some good sense from Larry Elder. One excerpt: "Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman writes that before the imposition of minimum wage laws, black teens were more likely to be employed than white teens. After the imposition of minimum wage laws, an employment gap emerged between white and black teens, with black teens becoming increasingly less employed. Friedman finds " . . . the minimum wage law to be one of the most, if not the most anti-black law on the statute books."

East meets West: "Economic liberalization in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe is paying off. Per capita incomes in that region are growing faster than those in Western Europe. The fact that the new poorer EU members are catching up with the old is a tribute to the power of the market. The reforms in the new EU countries are not over, but their success should serve as an example to the moribund economies of France, Germany and Italy."

When will they ever learn?: "Barely two years since the last Concordes were retired, Airbus, the European aircraft consortium, is looking at plans for a new generation of supersonic passenger jets. The manufacturer, in which Britain's BAE Systems is a partner, is drawing up designs for a 250-seat plane with a range of up to 6,000 miles that could reach speeds approaching 1,500mph. It believes that rapid growth in the aviation market means that by 2050 there could be demand for supersonic travel on hundreds of long-haul routes". [Concorde never made a cent. All the costs were borne by the taxpayers]

Wicked Thoughts has just put up an oldie but goldie: "21 Ways To Be A Good Democrat". It's very much to the point. Have a look if you don't know it.

I have just put up here a very amusing response from a reader to the quote from Tibor Machan that I led off with yesterday. He explains how Leftists classify people (even though they are "all equal", of course).

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

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

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

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

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25 September, 2005

TIBOR MACHAN SUMS UP AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Excerpts:

Modern liberals, however, embrace a different view of human nature. They hold that we are basically moved by impersonal forces and have no capacity to initiate any improvements in our lives. Any such improvement has to come from the outside, and government, with its concentrated and massive coercive power, is the most promising candidate to bring about such improvement. This is, in fact, the intellectual source of the switch from the American Founders' original idea of individual rights to the idea of positive rights or entitlements that was the substance of Franklin Roosevelt's "Second Bill of Rights". Of course, many other factors influenced the change, including various special interests parading as the public interest, but all rested, fundamentally, on the switch from understanding people as self-starters to seeing them as passive participants within a society. The central issue is really about human nature-are we at heart self-governing, living entities, or are we being moved about by impersonal forces and in constant need of help from government?

Yet, as should be evident, the modern liberal's approach to advancing the lot of human beings is paradoxical. While denying that individuals can help themselves if left to their own resources and to voluntary cooperation, they affirm that governments-which are, after all, composed of individuals-can take the initiative and effectuate adequate solutions to human problems. How is this possible? Either we are helpless, in which case so is the government, or we can help ourselves, in which case it is best, in most cases, to leave us free to find our own solution to problems. Moreover, if we can take the initiative, then those who know the problems they face, who have access to what has come to be called local knowledge-which is where solutions most often lie-are in a far better position to address challenges facing them than far off agencies of governments.

The modern liberal, in point of fact, is a reactionary, one who still clings to the old idea that people in the main are inept and require some supreme ruler to run their lives, to take care of them. That is the foundational idea behind feudalism and monarchy, with tsars, Caesars, kings, queens, pharaohs, and other chiefs ruling the realm with the rest of us relegated to the position of subjects required to follow the leaders' will.

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A good article here on what is needed to get American immigration reform underway. One excerpt: "The only people whose interests would be harmed by a slowdown in immigration are not the immigrants already here-they would clearly benefit- but the ethnic activists who purport to speak for them and the employers who want a large, desperate pool of workers willing to toil for sub-American wage rates".

French academic Olivier Roy has a very reasonable article about Muslim terrorist motivations . One excerpt: "The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations"

Steve Forbes on how to use free enterprise to rebuild New Orleans: "Washington is appropriating tens of billions of dollars to rebuild New Orleans and the devastated Gulf Coast region. But one measure that would cost little and quickly spur an inspiring revival of this impacted area would be making the region a true free-enterprise zone. Residents and local businesses would be free from both federal and state capital gains levies. Parents would have genuine school choice: If they wanted to move their children to another school, they'd get a voucher or coupon equivalent to the amount spent per pupil in their current school. Pre-Katrina property tax rates would be slashed. Give people who currently live in the region or who move to it an income tax holiday: no taxes owed to Uncle Sam or state capitals for, say, ten years. With those kinds of incentives small businesses would flourish--a handful might even become tomorrow's Microsoft or Intel or Apple or Oracle. Job opportunities would proliferate. So would good schools...."

France to pay cash for more middle-class babies: "Middle-class mothers in France could be paid up to1,000 Euros (675 pounds) a month - almost the minimum wage - to stop work for a year and have a third child under a government scheme to boost the birthrate, already among the highest in Europe. Despite female employment statistics that are the envy of the continent, the government remains worried about the reluctance of better-educated women to have babies. A plan to be unveiled by the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, today is expected to double an existing cash incentive for big families."

Those Who Deny The Terrorist Threat....: "In the 1930's Adolph Hitler made no attempt to conceal his ambitions. Mein Kampf spelled out a dark strategic vision. Yet the West chose to either avert its gaze or deny reality. The prospect of fighting a major war so soon after the horror of World War I catalyzed the rationalizers. Some said Hitler was engaged in mere bravado; others said, he was a reflection of German national sentiment, not imperial ambition. Whatever the rationalizers said, they stood tremulous in the face of Hitler's goals. Now the West is engaged in its latest act of denial vis-.-vis radial Islam. The civil libertarians contend any modification of our laws in order to hunt down and destroy these shadowy killers in our midst represents a threat to the nature of our government and the Constitution. Therefore fighting an all-out war only damages our side.... Last, are the subversives from within who detest America so much they would prefer to see Osama bin Laden as president rather than George Bush. One might assume these people aren't taken seriously; alas they shouldn't be taken seriously, but in some circles they have influence. So filled with hate is this group that they do not even respect the laws that offer their freedom to resist".

Paul Mirengoff & Scott Johnson point out that the "living constitution" ideas of America's Left-leaning Supreme Court judges go back via Woodrow Wilson to Hegel, the same 19th century German philosopher who inspired Karl Marx. You can find some interesting quotations from both Hegel and Wilson in the Appendices here.

Since the Carnival of Cordite (roundup of gun blogs) has just given my GUN WATCH blog a good plug, I hope everybody with an interest in guns will read it.

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

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

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

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

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24 September, 2005

HISPANICS PROVE THAT IT WAS RACE, NOT POVERTY THAT WAS THE BIG PROBLEM IN NEW ORLEANS

What happened to the nearly 200,000 Hispanics living in and around New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit last month? I asked the question of one reporter who had called me to comment on the role race played in the evacuation fiasco, but she didn't know. In fact, at the height of the crisis, few in the media seemed the slightest bit curious about this population, despite hundreds of stories about poverty, race, and the failure of government to rescue the most vulnerable.

I wondered in part because I saw so few Hispanic faces among those stranded at the Superdome and Convention Center. Yet I knew that many Hispanics lived in New Orleans, occupying the same service jobs they do elsewhere, often on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Most are immigrants - often illegal - from Honduras and Mexico. Then, just when I thought they were nowhere to be found, I spotted a few Hispanic men in the television footage this week of crews cleaning up the debris that has overwhelmed so much of the Gulf Coast. Wherever they went to escape the storm, they're back - because there is work to be done, and they are eager to do dirty jobs that many others shun. I wonder if these images will sink in with the anti-immigrant crowd that imagines that Mexicans come to the United States looking for a handout......

The city's Hispanics didn't need the cavalry to come to the rescue, even though many of them are very poor. They did what immigrants always do: They relied on informal networks of family, friends and fellow countrymen, and pooled their resources to get out while they could.

More here

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Antisemitic Catholics still? Marathon Pundit has been following the strange doings at DePaul university, run by the Vincentians, a Catholic charitable organization. They have fired one professor (Klocek) who spoke in up in defence of Israel and now look likely to give tenure to a notorious holocaust denier and Hitler apologist (Finkelstein). And they are of course hosting the notorious Prof. Ward Churchill there too -- the man who thinks ordinary working Americans are like Nazi officials. How any Catholic organization can be permitted by the modern church to engage in such hate-filled antisemitic weirdness completely escapes me. I am sure The Holy Father would be horrified if he heard of it.

I have just posted here some correspondence between Chris Brand and Philip Clarke, Dean, Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University -- regarding the banning of this article by Prof. Fraser about Australian immigration policy. The reply Chris sent would appear to expose the complete dishonesty of Deakin university in the matter. Sadly, Prof. Fraser's predictions already seem to be coming horrifyingly true. See here. I don't suppose many Americans would be surprised, however.

IMAPP have recently put out a study which claims to show that children from families where the parents are married are less likely to be involved in crime. Their study is a meta-analysis and a bad one, with most of the studies surveyed apparently failing to take account of race. They DID however find one study by T.M. Franke which used good sampling and good controls -- including control for race. And that study DID support the expected correlation. You can find the abstract of the Franke study here

There is a fascinating summary here of the Golitsyn predictions. Golitsyn was the only Sovietologist to predict the downfall of the old Soviet system in Russia long before it happened. He even predicted the fall of the Berlin wall years in advance. Golitsyn certainly made monkeys out of all the "intellectuals" who pooh-poohed his predictions at the time he made them. One of his predictions is a little worrying, though: He predicted that the KGB would retain its grip on Russia. And since President Putin is a former KGB chief it looks like he was right about that too. (HT Swimming Against the Red Tide)

Tennessee bureaucratic idiocy: "The state is keeping 120 lawyers on its payroll to hear the appeals of people who claim they have been wrongly cut from TennCare, even though there have been few cases for them to hear -- 16, at last count. The state began hiring the lawyers in July and is paying the temporary legal help more than $519,000 per month, according to figures provided by the state Department of Human Services, which is overseeing the appeals process. One of the lawyers who became disgruntled and left said some co-workers filled their days working crossword puzzles and reading magazines, although they were instructed to 'look busy.' State officials denied this, saying the lawyers are constantly busy training, reviewing policy, and preparing for appeals hearings to come. ... Still, critics of the TennCare cuts say the payments to the lawyers are a huge waste of money that could be better used to help TennCare enrollees."

San Francisco bureaucratic idiocy: "If a big earthquake hits San Francisco and flames spread through the city, firefighters rushing in from elsewhere to help will encounter what could be a major problem -- their hoses will not fit the city's hydrants. It has been 14 years since a similar predicament contributed to the spread of the Oakland hills fire, in which 25 people died and 2,699 homes were lost. After dozens of firefighters from surrounding agencies found that their hoses couldn't be attached to Oakland's hydrants, state lawmakers required that all cities in California adopt a standard connection size by 1994."

Japan: Victory for small government: "Small government proponents just won an overwhelming electoral victory. But it was in Japan rather than the United States. In just-completed elections, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi won two-thirds of the seats at stake in the Diet or parliament, running on a platform of cutting government bureaucracy and smaller government and less spending. It was not just talk. For four years, he restrained government spending and even eliminated many large popular public works projects, indexed and increased employee contributions to politically sensitive pensions, and allowed private firms to compete for government functions."

Congress Considers Beer a Luxury--But Not Mink Coats, Private Jets, or Yachts: "President George H.W. Bush and Congress in 1990 raised a host of excise taxes on "luxury" items including expensive cars, fur coats, jewelry, yachts, and private airplanes. Included in the list of luxury items was beer, which at the time saw a doubling of the federal excise tax, from $9 to $18 a barrel. Fifteen years later, the taxes on expensive cars, fur coats, jewelry, yachts, and private airplanes have been rolled back. The beer tax remains, even though the main purchasers of beer are lower- and middle-income consumers. Taxes make up an astounding 44 percent of the retail price of beer, according to the Beer Institute".

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

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

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

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

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23 September, 2005

Brookes News Update

US economy, stock market mania and economic ghosts Austrian economics explains that the emergence of certain economic phenomena are invariably symptoms of a looming recession
Getting the Australian economy wrong - the consumer spending fallacy The dangerous myth of consumer-led growth still underpins all economic commentary, including that from professional economists
Debt, deflation and the US economy Those who worry about the US economy and debt are focusing on a symptom and not a problem
Diogenes' Lamp reveals all Jill Singer of the Herald Sun has made the amazing discovery that Gough Whitlam was responsible for Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Malcolm Turnbull has learned a lesson from Orwell's 1984. Unfortunately it was the wrong lesson. Not so funny is that the Brack's Government intends to destroy what is left of the state's education system and produce a generation of illiterates in order to satisfy the hateful political fantasies of the party's leftwing fanatics
Amnesty International leftists put the democracies on trial Amnesty International's disgraceful attacks on the US have laid bare its ideological bigotry
Good question, Senator Kennedy Forty years of dependency, sponsored by the Democrat Party, is truly the reason the poverty of spirit and means is so prevalent in New Orleans

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A VERY interesting report from a helicopter pilot working over New Orleans here. Excerpt: "The violence you heard about was only the tip of the iceberg. One of our Guard members was with the Fish & Wildlife and deployed early to NO as security. They encountered four dead men in a neighborhood who had been shot, execution style. Their wives had been raped... Our hangar in Baton Rouge housed 300 Border Patrol agents with all kinds of exotic weaponry. They were inserted into the bad neighborhoods and reportedly nailed about 25 of the goons from roving armed bands. They then just withdrew and let them lay... Some have claimed that racism caused black people to be left while white people were brought out. Of the 81 people I brought out, 2 were white. Both thanked me. Only 3 other people thanked us, as I recollect. When we cruised over flooded neighborhoods, we'd say to each other, "Hey, this is a high dollar neighborhood. Let's go back to the projects." We never pulled anyone out of a good neighborhood. They left before the storm. We were trying to maximize the number of saves we had, so we'd go to the "hood."

Norberg on globalization: ""When globalisation knocks at the door of Bhagant, an elderly agricultural worker and untouchable in the Indian village of Saijani, this leads to houses being built of brick instead of mud, and to people getting shoes on their feet and clean clothes - not rags - on their backs," he wrote in In Defence of Global Capitalism. "Outdoors the streets now have drains and the fragrance of tilled earth has replaced the stench of refuse. Thirty years ago Bhagant didn't know he was living in India. Today he watches world news on television." .... "The Asian economies are the most impressive economies today," he says. "Low-income Asian countries like Taiwan and South Korea were just as poor as African countries 50 years ago. Now they are 20 times richer. Since 1981, extreme poverty in the developing world has been reduced by half. It has dropped from 40 per cent to about 21 per cent. The world has never seen such a rapid reduction in poverty, hunger and infant mortality." Or as Norberg's website says: "In the poorest developing countries, somebody working for an American employer earns no less than eight times the average wage in their own country.""

The corrupt UN It's time utopian dreamers set aside their romantic visions of the United Nations just long enough to confront the reality of what the organisation has become. The penultimate report of the Volcker inquiry into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal has lifted the lid on what can only be described as a cesspit of corruption, cynicism and incompetence.... The shadow of suspicion now extends to the entire UN procurement bureaucracy. Last week, federal prosecutors in the US launched an indictment against the head of the UN's budget oversight committee, Vladimir Kuznetsov, on charges of laundering thousands of dollars worth of bribes paid by companies seeking UN contracts. Investigations are exploring irregularities in the awarding of UN humanitarian contracts in East Timor, Liberia, Eritrea, Lebanon, Cyprus and Syria. It is a debacle. It is a disgrace".

Gruesome: "Several health workers have been arrested in Shandong Province in the east of China after the authorities admitted that local officials had been forcing women to have abortions or undergo sterilisations. Sources in Linyi City and its surrounding counties claimed that up to 120,000 women had been coerced into submitting to the procedures and that some of them were in the ninth month of their pregnancies. The arrests follow the detention on 6 September of a local activist, Chen Guangcheng. Mr Chen had claimed that women with two children were being forced to undergo sterilisations, while women pregnant with their third child were required to have abortions."

More bureaucratic madness: "Hundreds of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned. US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees. Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption."

Funding phony claims is a real FEMA disaster: "Former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown's incompetence was writ large this month when FEMA frittered while New Orleans sank. Yet long before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, FEMA had developed a reputation of gross incompetence. The nation cannot assume that Brown's departure is all that is necessary to put the agency on sound footing. FEMA came under close scrutiny by the media in Florida last year after that state was hit by four brutal hurricanes in a matter of weeks. The findings weren't encouraging. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that after Hurricane Frances, FEMA gave away more than $31 million in disaster assistance to residents of Miami-Dade County who were about 100 miles south of the storm."

A lesson from Central Europe: "Slovakia has plentiful cheap, educated labour and business-friendly tax rates, including the flat tax which takes a straight 19 per cent and no more from corporation and citizen alike. This tax clarity has reduced widespread evasion and so hugely increased revenues."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots of interesting reading.

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

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

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

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

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22 September, 2005

POLITICS INHERITED TOO

Well, well, well! I have been pointing out for years what the geneticists have been pointing out since at least 1986: That political orientation is largely genetically inherited. But it seems that the message has finally got through to that august body, the American Political Science Association. Under the title: "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?" authors John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John R. Hibbing have an article (PDF) in the May 2005 issue of the American Political Science Review (Vol. 99, No. 2). The abstract of the article follows:

"We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics -specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins -we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes. We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation".

Seeing that political scientists are overwhelmingly Leftist and seeing that Leftists hate all ideas of heritability (except in the case of homosexuality), how did the authors get their article published in the word's most prestigious political science journal? Simple: They made their conclusions palatable by dredging up all the usual Leftist claims about the psychology of Left and Right and said that genetics must influence politics by making some people inherently more flexible than others -- with Leftists being more flexible of course. And if flexibility means having no principles at all, there could be something in that. Psychopaths are very flexible. (Hat Tip to Nebraskan Liberation)

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European leaders may scorn America but Europe's best and brightest are still flocking to the USA: "Since the 1970s, America has created some 57 million new jobs, compared to just 4 million in Europe (with most of those in government). For the last quarter century, the United States has enjoyed consistently higher rates of economic growth and productivity than European countries, and the gap has been widening. The United States is now at the forefront in many critical global industries, particularly finance, technology, and entertainment.... Under such circumstances, the United States remains a tremendous lure for many Europeans, especially younger, educated individuals. This is particularly true in technological fields, where Europe's best brains are leaving in droves. Some 400,000 E.U. science and technology graduates currently reside in the United States, and barely one in seven, according to a recent European Commission poll, intend to return. "The U.S. is a sponge that's happy to soak up talent from across the globe," observes one Irish scientist".

Daniel Pipes draws our attention to a rather amazing speech by Pakistan's General Musharraf. I had thought Indonesia's Gus Dur was the only pro-Israel Muslim leader -- but not so: "He began with the important observation that Jews and Muslims "have many similarities and few divergences in their faith and culture," then listed three specifics: belief in the oneness of God, shared ways of greeting, and a common phrase in the Talmud and Koran. And Moses, he pointed out, is the prophet most often referred to in the Koran. Mr. Musharraf noted how "our experiences and histories intertwine" and then elaborated on what he called the two communities' "rich and very long" history of interaction. He mentioned the "shining examples" of Cordova, Baghdad, Istanbul, and Bukhara, the golden period of Muslim Spain, and the joint experience of the Spanish Inquisition. Generalizing from the inquisition, he correctly asserted that Jews and Muslims "have not only lived together and shared prosperity, but also suffered together."

Straight talk: "When one of Britain's wealthiest men and a former US president join forces to announce a new plan to tackle poverty in Africa, beware. Any recovery strategy for the continent described as "ambitious and bold" - ie, expensive and experimental - should be treated with caution. And if the architects of such a plan appear to share the view of Tony Blair and his Africa Commission that more money is the answer to the continent's crisis - one would be well-advised to give them, and their plan, a very wide berth indeed.... Yet with the confidence that comes of having piles of money, and with not a little condescension, Scottish multi-millionaire Sir Tom Hunter announced last week that he and former US President Bill Clinton had teamed up to "construct a new model of poverty intervention".

How absurd: The FBI is joining the Bush administration's War on Porn. And it's looking for a few good agents. Early last month, the bureau's Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad.... The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography -- not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults. "I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent"

Good comment on the German political stalemate: "The German economy can probably survive a period of little or no active government. One of the great boom periods of the Italian economy in the 1980s was when it had no government for nine months".

From Dick McDonald: "Our relentless attacks on the LA Times and their leftist LDOs together the many of us who voted by closing our checkbook to that rag, may have delivered dividends. Today we were shocked to learn that (1) they fired Michael Kinsley, the delusional propagandist for the Democrat Party and (2) endorsed John Roberts for Chief Justice of the United States. Wow, hopefully that is a shot heard round the world, especially in the offices of the ACLU. But I will believe it when they do a detailed investigative report on a Democrat blunder. Until then, they can try to convince me they have changed."

The ways of Google sure are hard to follow at times. Dick McDonald's site has been up for about a year and he has lots of links from other blogs but Google do not appear to scan his site. Enter a string of text from his site and Google will not be able to find it. Why? Nobody knows. And finding a way of contacting Google to ask them is a work of near-genius too. I am using clusty.com a lot more these days. They can often find stuff that Google does not.

Canadian law enforcement is just unbelievable sometimes, as the latest posting on Strange Justice shows.

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

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

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

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

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21 September, 2005

EXCLUSIVE ANGLOSPHERIC INTELLIGENCE

Britain's domestic security chief has warned publicly that civil rights may need to be reduced to protect the public against the growing threat of Islamist terror. And in a startling expression of official British policy, Dame Eliza-Manningham-Buller, the director general of MI5, the British domestic security service, also made very clear she was opposed to indiscriminate increased intelligence sharing with all other members of the 25-nation European Union. The European Commission in Brussels has been pushing hard for all members of the 450-million population EU to step up intelligence sharing to combat both terrorism and organized crime.

But Manningham-Buller made clear she rejected this broad approach to intelligence sharing, even if it brought Britain into conflict with the EU overall. "There can be no coercion to share intelligence. ... If we splash it (intelligence) around carelessly we shall soon have none of it," she said in her speech delivered Sept. 1 in the Netherlands at the 60th anniversary of the AIVD, the Dutch security service. "So I could never agree to a compulsory exchange of intelligence as that would risk compromising valuable sources of intelligence. There would soon be little to exchange."

Manningham-Buller's comments reflect conflicts both old and new between the British intelligence and security services and other agencies in Europe's secret world. The French, German and other Western European security and intelligence services have long envied Britain's full access to and full participation in Echelon, the long-established elint, or electronic intelligence sharing agreement between Britain's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham and America's giant National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Md. President George W. Bush recently approved Australia being granted the same full access as Britain to the NSA's "crown jewels."

More here

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The "banned" article by Prof. Fraser about Australia's immigration policy is now online here. Prof. Fraser is a Professor of Law at Macquarie University in Sydney and wrote an article which called for a reduction in the number of black and Asian immigrants that Australia is allowing into the country. The article was accepted for publication by the academic law journal hosted at Deakin university in the State of Victoria but legal pressures were brought to bear on the university not to publish it and they caved in. As a consequence it will now get more publicity than ever. Prof. Fraser has asked that it be circulated to anyone "who might be interested in defending the editorial integrity of a university law review". I have put it online not because I wholly agree with it. I don't. I am not at all bothered by Australia's intake of Asians, for instance. But, as a libertarian, I will always do my utmost to defeat censorship.

Amazing French ignorance: The Foreign minister of France (no less) did not know that the Nazis had failed to invade Britain in World War 2: "He asked - while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed - whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy's question was met by his hosts with amazement. "But Monsieur le minister," Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, "England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II." The minister apparently was not content with this answer, which, according to the magazine, was given by the museum curator, and persisted, asking: "Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?"

Rabbi Spero has got it nailed: "In New Orleans, beginning Tuesday morning, August 30, I saw men in helicopters risking their lives to save stranded flood victims from rooftops. The rescuers were White, the stranded Black. I saw Caucasians navigating their small, private boats in violent, swirling, toxic floodwaters to find fellow citizens trapped in their houses. Those they saved were Black. I saw Brotherhood. New York Congressman Charlie Rangel saw Racism. Yes, there are Two Americas. One is the real America, where virtually every White person I know sends money, food or clothes to those in need -- now and in other crises -- regardless of color. This America is colorblind. The other is the America fantasized and manufactured by Charlie Rangel, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who constantly cry racism! even in situations where it does not exist, even when undeniable images illustrate love, compassion and concern. These three men, together with today's NAACP, want to continue the notion of Racist America. It is their Mantra, their calling card. Their power, money, and continued media appearances depend on it".

Price controls will impede Katrina recovery: "Governments from the Gulf Coast to California are urging investigations of "price-gouging," but gas, hotel, water, and other price increases after Katrina are not a moral failing by companies. They are an economic necessity. Price increases mitigate the shortages that occur after natural disasters by redirecting supplies and giving an incentive for individuals to conserve resources. Unfortunately, the stories of shortages and gas lines that fill newspapers after disasters are a product of governments' misguided attempts to prevent gouging. Since raising prices in the face of sudden scarcity is considered illegal "gouging" in twenty-three states, merchants have a reduced incentive to open stores or ship groceries, water, and emergency supplies to where they are most urgently needed. Even those who wish to keep their doors open as an act of service have their attention diverted from core business in order to control lines and ration the supplies they do have".

A good comment: "My trusty local paper has listed the top ten U.S. natural disasters according to the number of estimated deaths. It consists of seven hurricanes, the Johnstown Flood, a tornado, and the (1906) S.F. Earthquake. By far the worst disaster was the Galveston Hurricane (1900). Nine of the ten most deadly natural disasters occurred during the period from 1881 to 1938, with three major hurricanes occurring in the period 1881-1883. Katrina, the first event to make the top ten since 1938, does not even crack the top five. Although this is a crude measure that does not take into account many variables, it does tend to weaken the argument that deadly hurricanes have something to do with global warming". [See also here]

I have just put up on Education Watch a "Very short story" that I think everybody should read.

And I have just put up on Gun Watch a story about Scotland -- Yes, Scotland -- being the world crime capital.

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

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

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

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

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

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20 September, 2005

TWO INTERESTING QUESTIONS

Eleanor French Spreitzer writes: "Why did Michael Brown, ex-head of FEMA, lose his job because of poor performance of it and yet The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin and The Governor of Louisiana, Katharine Blanco, still have their jobs. If those two airheads had gotten the people OUT OF NEW ORLEANS, as they should have - FEMA would have been inconsequential. Conservatives/Republicans are always expected to live up to and suffer if necessary; the consequences of their actions, but Liberal/Democrats are given a free pass. Could this be because Conservatives/Republicans are adults and Liberal/Democrats are over-indulged, spoiled, brats???"

Eleanor has another question: "How many displaced "Katrina Kids" from New Orleans has Teddy Kennedy's private schools taken in. Teddy Kennedy and all his kids went to fancy private schools - surely those schools have room for a few dozen of the displaced New Orleans school kids. Teddy is soooooooooooooo concerned about affirmative action and Judge Roberts' view of it. Let's see what the view of affirmative action is with the schools that formed this gloriously concerned opinion of Teddy Kennedy. How many Katrina Kids have the schools of the kids of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Charlie Rangel, Sheila Jackson Lee, Harry Bellefonte, Bruce Gordon, John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Cynthia McKinney, Eleanor Norton Holmes, and the Liberal Left Media in general taken in. Why do I have the feeling the answer is NONE?

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THE COLOR OF CRIME

I guess everybody really knows this stuff already but it is good to see it being said openly

Today, September 14, the New Century Foundation releases The Color of Crime, our relentlessly factual study of race, crime, and the criminal justice system. For anyone who ever wondered just how much more likely blacks or Hispanics are than whites to commit various crimes, the answers are here. It takes hard work to pry the facts out of the reluctant grip of federal crime databases. But the results are eye-opening:

Blacks are just 13 percent of the population but they commit more than half the muggings and murders in the country. Hispanics commit violent crimes at about three times the white rate. The proportion of blacks and Hispanics in an area is the single best indicator of how dangerous it is. The racial mix is a much better predictor of crime rates than poverty, unemployment, and dropout rates combined.

Although Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby wring their hands over black-on-black mayhem, blacks actually commit more violent crime against whites than blacks. A black is about 39 times more likely to do violence to a white than the other way around, and no less than 130 times more likely to rob a white.

And yes, everyone's suspicions about rape are correct: Every year there are about 15,000 black-on-white rapes but fewer than 900 white-on-black rapes. There are more than 3,000 gang rapes of whites by blacks-but white-on-black gang rapes are so rare they do not even show up in the statistics.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

A majority of Germans have just voted for parties of the Left. Obviously, Germany has to go further downhill before it comes to its senses.

A good short summary of the recent meltdown of the Australian Left: "His party colleagues were "sewer rats". His successor as party leader is "one of the most indecent politicians". Political journalists are "dancing bears". Mark Latham, Australia's former Labor Party leader, publishes a memoir today that makes Alan Clark's account of political life in Britain look like the literary equivalent of a Conservative ladies' tea party. The Latham Diaries is a 429-page tome packed with such vitriol that it has caused disarray within his party and left many of its key figures shocked at the scale of his betrayal. Few escape his venom, particularly Kim Beazley, who replaced Mr Latham as Labor leader... In pre-publication interviews Mr Latham, 44, continued to turn the screw on the current Labor leader. He said: "I wouldn't make him the toilet cleaner at Parliament House, let alone the Leader of the Opposition.""

Another member of the Axis of Evil surrenders?: "North Korea agreed Monday to end its nuclear weapons program in return for security, economic and energy benefits, potentially easing tensions with the United States after a two-year standoff over the North's efforts to build atomic bombs. The United States, North Korea and four other nations participating in negotiations in Beijing signed a draft accord in which the North promised to abandon efforts to produce nuclear weapons and re-admit international inspectors to its nuclear facilities.... The Bush administration had said it was prepared to take tougher measures, including freezing North Korean assets abroad and pushing for international sanctions, if the latest round of talks collapsed."

There are summaries of the Hitchens versus Galloway "debate" here and here for those who take such shows seriously. Video feed included. Why anybody would think that pitting facts against hysterical assertions would make the slightest dent in the hysterical asserters escapes me.

I have just put up here an email I received about a United Nations report that I linked to which says that European agricultural protectionism is hurting African farmers. It seems that the story is a lot more complex that that -- as one would expect of a United Nations report.

There is a new lot of postings from Chris Brand up here -- with all their usual vast incorrectness about all matters racial. Incidentally, accusations that Chris is a "racist" rather founder on the fact that he is happily married to a very bright Han Chinese lady. I am very pro-Asian myself. I have four very polite brown men (from India) living in my own large house with me. But because we are prepared to speak the truth about race, both Chris and I are still "racists" to the simple-minded propagandists of the Left.

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

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

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

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

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

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19 September, 2005

UNUSUAL INSIGHT FOR THE NEW STATESMAN

In writing about the present German election:

"Germans can opt for a combination of nationalism and socialism, as they have done in the past after military defeats or economic depression. This is what Oskar Lafontaine's new Left Party is offering: a "popular front" combining disgruntled Social Democrats in western Germany and former communists in the east.

His alternative narrative tells of how a wealthy, cosmopolitan elite is destroying the "community" (Gemeinschaft) of the German Volk. He denounces "foreign workers", who are allegedly taking jobs from Germans, and he demands that only those who speak German and pay their taxes should be allowed to live in Germany. He even rants about the extinction of the "white peoples" of Europe. Little wonder that polls show the far-right vote, which had been rising in the east, shifting to the Left Party.

Lafontaine will fail, but the re-emergence of his brand of demagoguery tells us that something is stirring deep in die Heimat. Germany is paying the price for Schroder's shameless anti-Americanism, which has reactivated the anti-western forces that wrecked the Weimar Republic, wreaked havoc under the Third Reich, and paralysed the former East Germany"

So they are implicitly recognizing that Hitler's Nazism was akin to Germany's modern-day far-Leftism! Just sometimes reality overcomes the propaganda. The New Statesman is of course a major organ of the British Left. The "far-right vote" (the NPD) that they refer to never was far-right at all, of course. I have shown previously that they too have always been thoroughly socialist.

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ELSEWHERE

How far the BBC has fallen! "British Prime Minister Tony Blair has complained privately to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch that the BBC's coverage of Hurricane Katrina carried an anti-American bias, Murdoch said at a conference here. Murdoch, chairman of the media conglomerate News Corporation, recounted a conversation with the British leader at a panel discussion late Friday hosted by former president Bill Clinton. "Tony Blair -- perhaps I shouldn't repeat this conversation -- told me yesterday that he was in Delhi last week. And he turned on the BBC world service to see what was happening in New Orleans," Murdoch was quoted as saying in a transcript posted on the Clinton Global Initiative website. "And he said it was just full of hate of America and gloating about our troubles.... [Bill Clinton] agreed that the BBC's coverage was lacking. While the BBC's reports on the hurricane were factually accurate, its presentation was "stacked up" to criticize President George W Bush's handling of the disaster"

Same sex marriage versus democracy: "It is amazing how anti-democratic the movement for same sex marriage is. In various states, including Massachusetts, the measure only had a chance of being implemented by the courts, against the will of the legislature. Now, in California, the legislature has finally passed a same sex marriage bill, which the Governor has not yet decided whether to sign. But this apparently democratic decision violates a ballot measure that Californians voted for "overwhelmingly in 2000 that defined marriage as between a man and a woman." Clearly, same sex marriage is a measure that is supported by elites, but not by the common person."

Fat EU farmers impoverish Africa: "In Europe, farm subsidies have reached $51 billion, and although this sector accounts for less than two percent of the work force, it absorbs more than 40 percent of the European Union budget. In the European Union more than three-quarters of CAP support goes to the biggest 10% of subsidy recipients. Unfair trade policies continue to deny millions of people in the world's poorest countries an escape route from poverty, and perpetuates obscene inequalities, says the 2005 Human Development Report.... The Report said that sub-Saharan Africa, despite modest gains in exports, has become increasingly marginalized in the world market. Today, with a population of 689 million people, the region accounts for a smaller share of world exports than Belgium, with just 10 million people. The Report found that if Africa had maintained its share of world exports that it enjoyed in 1980, its exports today would be some US$119 billion higher. The authors conclude that in terms of foreign exchange this amount would equal about five times the aid flow provided by rich countries since 2002...."

And the EU still has the cheek to criticise the USA: "European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso Monday criticized the U.S. development aid strategy ahead of a U.N. summit of world leaders. Speaking at a news conference in Brussels, the former Portuguese premier said: "To use cases of corruption as a pretext for not being more committed to aid is not the right approach." Washington has long resisted calls to increase aid spending, arguing the money is wasted without political reforms in developing countries".

Leftists cook the books on foreign aid : "Two American NGOs, the Centre for Global Development and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have created an index of "commitment to development" to increase support for aid.... But the index, instead of being an objective statement of the efforts industrial countries make to help developing countries, is a highly subjective compilation of six equally graded components..... This index measures aid as a percentage of GDP, but sleights of hand are used to denigrate major donors, notably Japan, which is the second-highest aid donor in the world. The United States, which has contributed more aid than the next half-dozen donors since the Marshall Plan and which has recently stated it will increase its aid from nearly US$10 billion (A$15 billion) to US$15 billion a year by 2006, comes out as the second-worst performer after Japan in this index.... The US is the largest importer of labour-intensive goods from developing countries and among the highest importer of those goods per capita. This does not do it much good on the index. Australia has no agricultural protection, imports 40 per cent of its textiles, clothing and footwear with 80 per cent coming from developing countries, and that does not do us much good on the index either".

Some people accuse Ronald Reagan of being a big-government conservative. Milton Friedman has a most persuasive reply to that (short PDF).

A reader who is a long-time resident of Connecticut has just sent me a fascinating story of corruption in that State. You can find it here. It's a jolly good short story actually. It would make good set-reading for schoolkids.

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

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

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

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

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

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18 September, 2005

THE GREAT MISANTHROPIST

Karl Marx is the greatest philosopher of all time. Or at least this is what many BBC Radio listeners suggested recently when asked to nominate such a person.... The BBC result, however, underlines a strange blindness about Marx persisting within Western societies....

One response is to claim that Marx's philosophy was distorted by Lenin and Stalin. Marx himself, one often hears, was a humanist who wished to liberate people from their chains. Other apologists insist that one can distinguish between the young Marx and the old Marx: the youthful philosopher being more humanistic than the grayer, more callous political revolutionary.

Even cursory attention to Marx's writings quickly reveals the hollowness of such defenses. A consistent anti-human vision features throughout Marx's thought. For Marx, man is a being whose origins are irrelevant, whose future is extinction, and whose present is beyond his control. Even people living in Marx's Communist society have no possibility of a meaningful existence. Marx once described Communist society as one in which it would be possible "to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, just as I please."

This sounds idyllic until one realizes that, from Marxism's perspective, none of these activities can have any value for humans. For true materialists, there can be no qualitative difference between reading and fishing, working or sleeping, living or dying. Everything has the same value and therefore no value. In this world, there is no difference between Mother Teresa's work and that of a concentration camp guard. They share equally in a general irrelevance of everything and everyone.

This tells us that Marxism cannot be interested in justice or liberty. It insists that we are like driftwood, floating hither and thither on the waves of history. In such a world, our lives matter naught. Our deaths are irrelevant. We merely try and salvage whatever animal satisfaction we can from life, before our essential nothingness is finalized in our ultimate annihilation as living beings.....

More here

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SOME RECENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

Why corporations fund radical Islam
Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair
Aftermath of Disengagement
Numbers Racket - Book Review
Defamation ruling: Holocaust is undeniable
In a Ruined Country
Gaza still under "Occupation"
New York Times Interviewers Fake Rice Statements
Rubin's humiliating fate no surprise
UN sees one side of Arab-Israeli conflict

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ELSEWHERE

Welfare should be earnt: "Those who receive government help should be held to certain basic requirements. They should have a real job, for example, or be out every day actively looking for one. McDonalds is always hiring – just look at their signs on any street corner. Minimum wage sure beats no wage. After that, those living on the public dole should be held to standards of personal pride and respectability. Their yards shouldn’t be unsightly and all grown up with weeds. Their houses shouldn’t be peeling paint, or their windows unwashed. Assuming they aren’t just wandering around the streets, these people should also have to take a bath every few days, put on clean clothes, and even keep their hair trimmed neatly. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness, as the old folks used to say back before the Federal government took over being our savior.... There are three things that people certainly should not have if they’re on Welfare. If you are down on your luck and trying to save money to better yourself, then you shouldn't be wasting money on frills like cigarettes, or alcohol, or satellite TV. The hard-working people of America, who have to scrimp and save to make ends meet, should have whatever luxuries they can afford. But they shouldn’t have to provide those luxuries to the lazy slackers. Likewise, any type of drug abuse should get you cut off from all government handouts, immediately"

Will science help bypass the abortion debate? "Artificial wombs will be 'reality' within 20 years, according to the London Times. Indeed, 20 years seems a conservative estimate given an earlier report in The Guardian, another UK newspaper, which predicted them for 2008. Discussion of ectogenesis -- growing an embryo outside the mother's womb -- may sound wildly futuristic. But a few years ago, cloning and genetic modification seemed impossible. A few years before that, the idea of a 66-year-old woman giving birth was absurd; it happened last January. And only last week, British scientists received an official go-ahead to create human embryos from two mothers. For better or worse, new reproductive technologies are redefining the ground rules of reproduction. (And, no, the force of law can not hold back scientific 'progress,' as authorities have discovered repeatedly since Galileo's day.)"

If this ripoff of the insurance companies succeeds, insurance costs for everyone will go up nationwide: "Mississippi's attorney general on Thursday sued insurers to force them to pay flood damage from Hurricane Katrina, saying standard insurance polices have led homeowners to believe they are covered for all hurricane damage, whether from wind or flooding. Attorney General Jim Hood asked the Hines County Chancery Court to void provisions in the policies that attempt to exclude from coverage losses or damages directly or indirectly caused by water, whether wind-driven or not. Those losses could reach into the billions of dollars. Only about 3 in 10 houses in disaster-struck portions of Mississippi and Alabama had flood insurance, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates."

Blacks deceived by the Left: "Many white Americans sincerely believe that skin color no longer matters. They have shut their eyes to the facts that: this nation's churches remain heavily segregated, research shows children perform better in school when they are taught by members of their own race, and in the singles ads, many whites still seek white partners. Meanwhile, in the black community -- which I'm a part of -- we find people believing the other extreme: that racism is at the root of nearly every problem. They have shut their eyes to the facts that: minorities are this nation's new and fastest growing group of entrepreneurs, black public officials are found in the highest levels of government, and parental involvement is a key component of academic success. Think of it this way: When race is involved, most of us are wearing cultural shades."

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

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

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

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

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

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



17 September, 2005

LEFTISM AS PSYCHOPATHY

I have just put together a new (or newish) article under the title "Leftism as psychopathy". Because the idea is a rather bold one it has to be a longish article to be effective but I reproduce the "Summary and Conclusions" of it below. For details see the full article here or here.

All explanations simply push the need for explanation one step further back. If you show that Y is caused by X then the next question is obviously, "what causes X?". I think that what has been said so far has taken us through three such steps. We initially saw that ideologically-committed Leftists (as distinct from the much larger number of people who vote for Left-leaning political parties at election time) are motivated by a love of change. As the second step we saw that they love change because it gives them opportunities to strut and feed their large but weak egos in various ways -- including giving them opportunites for gaining power.

Now however we have come to the point of suggesting that the emotional shallowness that a large but weak ego implies may in fact be just one symptom of a much broader and more serious emotional and intellectual deficit -- psychopathy. Psychopaths are after all renowned for their emotional shallowness -- to the point where they can at times seem entirely devoid of emotion. Additionally, we have seen that Leftists not only have the moral imbecility of the psychopath but in fact proudly proclaim it -- in their "postmodernist" doctrine (See here) that everything is relative and nothing is better or worthier than anything else (except when it suits Leftists, of course). We have also seen that the other major characteristics of the psychopath -- indifference to brutality and reliance on lies -- are present in spades among Leftists. And most of all, the sense of superiority to others and the masked contempt for others are at once very psychopathic and very Leftist.

In a basic sense, then, it has been proven that Leftists are psychopathic: They have all the symptoms. To show that they and clinical psychopaths have similar brain function would be the next step but the study of psychopathy itself is still only in its infancy so that step would seem a long way off as yet. Psychologists might consider it a useful step to examine whether or not Leftists score high on standard questionnaires that are used to detect psychopathy but I have shown elsewhere the large problems in that.

In summary, then, Leftism at its deepest level would seem to be a form of sub-clinical psychopathy -- not normally severe enough to get the person into much trouble but severe enough to cause lots of trouble for others.

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ELSEWHERE

Tax hike fails by 2-to-1 margin: "A proposed half-cent sales tax increase for schools failed at the polls today in Nashville by a 2-to-1 margin. With 100% of all precincts reporting, there were 15,389 votes in favor of the increase, or about 30% of the votes tallied, and 36,090 against it, which is roughly 70% of the balloting, election officials said around 9:15 p.m. [Tuesday]. That total included early and paper ballots and all of Davidson County?s 172 precincts. The question was whether to raise the local sales tax, which if approved would have brought the combined Metro and state rates to 9.75 cents on the dollar. ... If the referendum had passed, 80% of the revenue generated by the tax would have gone toward schools while 20% was earmarked for a tax relief program for senior citizens."

Tort reform has worked in Mississippi "Prior to the legislation, Mississippi was known as the "jackpot justice capital of America." The American Tort Reform Association had labeled certain jurisdictions "judicial hellholes." A survey of more than 1,200 senior in-house counsels for the U.S. Chamber Commerce ranked Mississippi 50th in virtually every category of judicial system nationwide. Insurance companies were fleeing the state. Others were refusing to write new policies. The medical field was particularly strained: Liability insurance was in many cases unaffordable, and in some cases unavailable. One year later, the story is very different. Mass Mutual Insurance Group, St. Paul Travelers, World Insurance Co. and Equitable Life Insurance Co. are returning to Mississippi. State Farm Insurance eased its growth restrictions for homeowners' insurance and lowered its rates on property insurance. The Medical Assurance Company of Mississippi, which writes 60% of the medical malpractice coverage for doctors in the state, had raised its rates 20% the year prior to the tort reform legislation. After its passage, MACM did not raise its rates at all"

Why do we regulate? "Should government regulate business? I expect most people would answer 'yes' to that question, but if you ask them why, I expect these same people will have a harder time giving an answer that makes sense. Some may say, 'in order to prevent businesses from engaging in fraud or misrepresentation.' But we do not need regulation to do that; there are already many federal, state and local statutes against fraud and misrepresentation, and businesses that behave badly can be dealt with through normal civil and criminal legal means. Others who are a bit more sophisticated might argue that we need to regulate business in order to protect people from 'market failures.' However, the empirical evidence is that there are far fewer 'market failures' than commonly imagined, and many of these so-called market failures are actually a result of misguided government policy or regulation. For a minute, try to imagine a world without government regulation, but where all of the standard laws against theft, fraud, misrepresentation and bodily injury still exist."

See here for a good debunking of the common Leftist charge that Israel is a racist state.

Unlike PC non-Muslims, there is the odd Muslim willing to confront the Islamic nature of Islamist terrorism. See here

See here for a discussion of Tony Blair's U-Turn on multiculturalism after the bombing of London's "Tube".

See here for the Leftist view of an appropriate 9/11 monument.

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

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

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

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

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

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



16 September, 2005

HINTS ON REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS

A great article by Pete Wilson, former governor of California, telling how they got the vital Los Angeles I-10 freeway back into action so quickly after the 1994 quake. Excerpts:

I was advised that it would require some two years and two months to repair the bridges and restore the I-10 to use.... Instead, we completed the repairs and reopened the freeway to its normal heavy traffic in just 66 days. How? We did two things. First, I quickly exercised the extraordinary emergency powers conferred upon the governor of California by the state Government Code. I suspended the operation of statutes and regulations that would have required the protracted public hearings called for before environmental impact reports could be filed and acted upon, and I suspended other normally demanded procedural hurdles.

Second, we took a page from the book of private-sector incentives for accelerating performance. We told contractors bidding to repair the bridges that they must submit bids that specified not only the cost but the date of completion, and that they must agree to an added condition: For every day they were late, they would incur a penalty of $200,000; and for every day they were early, they would be rewarded with a bonus of $200,000. The winning bidder, C.C. Myers Inc., put on three shifts that worked 24/7. In order to prevent any delay in the work, they hired a locomotive and crew to haul to Los Angeles steel sitting on a siding in Texas. Myers made more on the bonus than they did on the bid. Incentives work.

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RECENT AUSTRALIAN NEWS ROUNDUP

America-hating Americans have their equivalents among Australian intellectuals -- Australia-hating Australians. The ever-iconoclastic Keith Windschuttle shows them for the hate-filled but otherwise empty vessels that they are. It is a long and thorough article that any Australian who is tempted to respect our intellectuals should read. It will cure such temptations forthwith. I liked this typically supercilious quotation that Windschuttle dug up: "Behold the man - the Australian man of today - on Sunday mornings in the suburbs, when the high-decibel drone of the motor mower is calling the faithful to worship. A block of land, a brick veneer [house], and the motor-mower beside him in the wilderness - what more does he want to sustain him, except a Holden [car] to polish, a beer with the boys, marital sex on Saturday nights . At age of sixty-five, equipped with dashing sports coat, matched luggage, good wishes from the bowling club, and two P&O cruise tickets, he imagines he is about to begin living, not knowing that he died many years before"

Australia's conservative reforms praised: "The International Monetary Fund has weighed into Australia's politically charged industrial relations debate, throwing its support behind the Federal Government's reforms in a move that has angered unions. Issuing a glowing report on the state of the economy, the organisation praised the Government's welfare-to-work changes, particularly moves to boost the workforce participation of Australians aged 55 to 64, which the IMF described as "middling" by international standards. The Treasurer, Peter Costello, seized on the support to bolster the Government's case for further economic reform. "The point of all of this is that we must keep the reform process going, if we want to stay near the front of the pack as one of the lead economies of the developed world," he said".

Outspoken Australian politician praised: "Tony Abbott, often accused of saying the wrong thing, has received expert plaudits for his forthright warning about the likelihood of a bird flu pandemic. American risk communication consultants Jody Lanard and Peter Sandman have written a detailed - and glowing - analysis of a speech by the Health Minister in which he warned that such a pandemic could dwarf the health consequences of a terrorist attack. "Minister Abbott is saying the kinds of things government officials normally recoil from saying," doctors Lanard and Sandman wrote. "They imagine that being this candid, this alarming and this uncertain about anything is bound to boomerang badly . Abbott's speech did not do any of that. "By levelling with the public, [Mr Abbott] made a solid, informative contribution to an aspect of pandemic preparedness that has been badly neglected around the world - the preparedness of the public.""

Australian SUVs under attack: "Four-wheel-drives would leap in cost by thousands of dollars under a controversial plan to keep the fuel guzzlers out of city streets. The House of Representatives environment committee has urged the Federal Government to consider increasing the tariff on four-wheel drives (4WDs). Only farmers and others with a legitimate need for a 4WD would be spared the price jump under the plan. Imported 4WDs attract a 5 per cent tariff while other imported cars attract a tariff of 10 per cent, a concession originally intended to help farmers. But 4WDs now make up about one in five new cars sold and have become the car of choice for countless city-slickers"

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ELSEWHERE

Countries rated as good places to do business are good generally: "Doing Business in 2006 was published today (midnight GMT), tracking the state of red tape across the world... There are many wise things to be said about this data, and I'll try to say them over the next few days. But since this is a blog let me go for the cheapest headline. The top ten business environments in the world, as measured by the 'Ease of Doing Business index': 1. New Zealand; 2. Singapore; 3. United States; 4. Canada; 5. Norway; 6. Australia; 7. Hong Kong; 8. Denmark; 9. United Kingdom; 10. Japan [Note that fully half of them are English-speaking]

Was relief to Katrina victims slow because of racism? Jeff Jacoby points out: "Katrina devastated more than black-majority Orleans Parish. Four other Louisiana parishes and three coastal Mississippi counties, all with substantial white majorities, suffered heavily too. Government relief reached them no faster than it did New Orleans. If this were truly a racist country, it would have."

"Logical Meme" has been blogging up a storm. He's got a post on the vast bias shown by "Newsweek" and has also started a series on "Debunking Slavery Myths", the first installment of which is here. He is also getting steamed up about the MSM's burying of the story re. dozens and dozens of brutal murders reportedly having taken place at the Superdome and Convention Centers. He's been posting regularly on it -- e.g. here

Carnival of the Vanities is up again and very informative about the posts this time

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

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

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

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

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15 September, 2005

EU SHENANIGANS

They are trying to give themselves power to jail British and other national citizens

EU shoots itself in the foot: "Brussels has been given the power to compel British courts to fine or imprison people for breaking EU laws, even if the Government and Parliament are opposed. An unprecedented ruling yesterday by the supreme court in Europe gives Brussels the power to introduce harmonised criminal law across the EU, creating for the first time a body of European criminal law that all member states must adopt. The judgment by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg was bitterly fought by 11 EU governments, including Britain, and marks a dramatic transfer of power from national capitals to Brussels.....

Some national government officials said that the issue was so sensitive that EU lawmaking would grind to a halt and member governments would refuse to pass legislation rather than accept harmonisation of criminal law. One diplomat said: "This stuff is political dynamite in the UK, Holland, Italy, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where they are as keen on their sovereignty as anyone. Imagine how Italians would react if their criminal law was rewritten at EU level. Ironically, it means less will be done at EU level.""

I doubt in any case that any attempt to enforce such EU edicts in Britain would get past the House of Lords. The Law Lords could well rule that Britain is not bound by something outside specific treaty obligations. Note this comment: "Gerald Barling, QC, a leading European expert, said that the European court had declared that the powers to introduce harmonised criminal laws were already there. "But that in itself is arguable - the Community treaty itself does not directly say so," he said".

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ELSEWHERE

Putting America under foreign rule: "Though John Roberts may be on the firing line this week as his Senate hearings begin, it's sitting Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who is making big court news. In the Sept. 12 New Yorker, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin pens a profile of Kennedy, who vigorously defends his use of foreign laws and constitutions to interpret U.S. laws and our Constitution. Some in Congress believe Kennedy's position - and those of several other Court Justices - is a clear violation of both U.S. law and the Justices' own solemn oath to uphold solely the U.S. Constitution.... The use of foreign and international laws in deciding Supreme Court decisions has outraged many present and former policymakers in Washington. "Relying upon foreign law, particularly international covenants to which the United States is not a party, is an illegitimate source of interpretation for the Constitution," former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese told NewsMax. "It is impossible to reconcile foreign customs or opinions of law with the meaning of the Constitution," he added..."

Is this the ultimate madness? They are disarming the National Guard in New Orleans.

American Fascism? "'All Our Visitors Bring Happiness,' reads the wrought iron sign on the front column of Albert Cousin's 102-year-old Victorian house. Not Wednesday. Sheriff's deputies in body armor and holding rifles came to try to force Cousin and other residents of St. Bernard Parish to get out of town. ... For the past few days, residents have found comfort in food and water brought by units of the Georgia National Guard, who arrived Labor Day weekend. ... With such efforts under way, the rousting of residents was left to deputies from neighboring parishes, and law enforcement members from as far away as Oklahoma City. The forced eviction of stubborn occupants of this parish, the first community downriver from New Orleans, is more aggressive than similar efforts in the city."

Great stuff!: "Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee said he has 'commandered' the Sam's and Wal-Mart stores in the parish and ordered them to open as soon as possible. Lee said he took the action after he learned that a Wal-Mart store wanted to open recently but was told by FEMA officials that it could not. 'I am upset with FEMA and some of their regulations,' Lee said. After talking about the situation concerning the Wal-Mart on Thursday, Lee said he briefly talked to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans on Friday. He asked her to check on the situation and find out if there was a legitimate reason to keep the store closed. But because of communication difficulties, he did not hear back and took the situation in his own hands. Lee said he gave handwritten notes to Wal-Mart stores in Harvey and Kenner saying they were ordered to open as soon as possible. Lee said Parish President Aaron Broussard agreed with the decision. Lee said anyone from FEMA who tries to close either store will be arrested by deputies."

FEMA should be shut down : "What if there was no such thing as FEMA? I asked myself that question after reading about the Federal Emergency Management Agency's bungled efforts to serve the poor and suffering in the area formerly known as New Orleans. Following Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, FEMA was criticized for inaction, epitomized by Director Michael Brown's August 29th memo suggesting workers be allowed two days to get to the ravaged region. (Incredibly, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke defended the two-day delay as necessary to provide workers with adequate training.)"

Labor regulations suspended to "aid hurricane recovery": "Last week President Bush, in order to speed the hurricane recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast, suspended labor regulations that control wages for workers employed by federal contractors. The additional flexibility will help create new jobs and speed the rebuilding process, raising the larger question of whether the rules should be reinstated even after the emergency has passed. The so-called 'prevailing wage' regulations which date from the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act require that federal contractors pay employees a government-determined minimum wage."

"Living wage" laws don't help low-income families: "In July, Sonoma, California passed an ordinance requiring certain employers to pay $11.70 an hour with health benefits or $13.20 without health benefits, indexed to the consumer price index. The ordinance applies to companies with a city service contract worth at least $10,000, nonprofits with city contracts of at least $75,000, and companies that receive city loans or economic assistance worth at least $100,000. But a new study of 'living wage' laws indicates the Sonoma City Council's decision may not help those the law is intended to benefit."

For old-timers or those who are interested in the history of American conservatism, there is a good review here of a recent book by Priscilla Buckley, sister and co-worker of Bill Buckley.

Chris Brand has a HUGE coverage of the controversy over male/female differences in IQ which I have just posted here

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

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

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

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

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

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14 September, 2005

YOUNG AUSTRALIANS BECOMING MORE CONSERVATIVE

An "Absolutely Fabulous" generation of ageing hipsters with straitlaced children is emerging across Australia, as flower-power parents grow old dis-gracefully and are viewed with amazement by their offspring. New research has found that 50-somethings have clung to baby boomer ideals of the 1960s and '70s, with a relaxed attitude towards such matters as prostitution, premarital sex and divorce. However, like Eddy's bespectacled daughter Saffy in the sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous", typical 20-somethings are more conservative than their parents and are happy to settle down with partners, mortgages and steady jobs....

Attitudes prevalent among the middle-aged include an impatience with fussy food, an appetite for the good life and a positive outlook. Their children, however, are more into spirituality than the Sex Pistols. They worry about healthy food, feel that religion plays a strong part in their lives and are believers in marriage and the family unit....

The study finds that spirituality has enjoyed a renaissance: in 1978 only 26 per cent of young people viewed religion as important to their lives. Among today's parents, it is 36 per cent while their children are holier, at 40 per cent. On moral issues, young people are far less liberal than their forebears. Just 22 per cent agree with legalised prostitution, compared with 60 per cent in 1978. The proportion backing legalised marijuana has fallen from 39 per cent to 27 per cent. Even support for pre-marital sex has taken a knock, from 84 per cent of 20-somethings in 1978 to 69 per cent today.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Democrat politics in Louisiana: "Sen. Bill Frist rode to the rescue in more ways than one last week, with his call for a comprehensive congressional investigation into the failings of planning and execution of preparing for Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing relief effort. Frist's efforts weren't intended as a slam at President Bush, who has taken a pummeling in the media from Democrats in Congress, their operatives, and cooperative journalists who were willing to set facts aside for the opportunity to create a political fire storm around the Republican president. Instead, Frist's call for an investigation sent many Democrats running for cover.... "In the end, if the Democrats want to place blame, they know the behavior of their party members, for a generation really the only party in power in New Orleans and Louisiana, is damning, and they don't want to draw any more attention to the issue than the media wants to." Senate Appropriations Committee staff late last week were drawing up statistics on just where the hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for New Orleans went over the years.... If I were a local politician or a state or local bureaucrat down there, I'd be nervous about now."

See here for how the Levee Board in New Orleans mis-spent its budget

See here for how the Levee Board was under investigation for corruption prior to Katrina

Local corruption: There is an interesting parallel to the recent failure of State and local authorities in New Orleans in the matter of Multi-Drug-Resistant-TB (MDRTB). Note this excerpt: "In the United States, a very effective national TB control program was decimated when the government, in their "wisdom" chose to give discretion on the spending of public health funds to state governments. In 1972 when this change was first contemplated, informed observers testified to the US Congress, predicting that giving discretion on TB public health funding to state governments would lead to a public health disaster: a resounding resurgence of TB! These experts were roundly ignored, yet this "block grant" exercise of the 1970s directly led to the 20% resurgence of TB in the United States (35% in children) in the 1980s and 1990s, which required a huge outlay of new funds to return to control. Not having learned their lesson, high officials in the US government continue to try to reintroduce this concept". [As a good Federalist, my view is that both State and Federal governments have their place and I think that in cases where the need is uncontroversial and strong leadership is required (which it certainly is in the difficult case of MDRTB) the Feds are usually the right place to look. After New Orleans, I suspect that the Feds will now be given full authority to override immediately the local and State bodies in managing the initial reaction to major disasters]

Canadians back down on Sharia law: "Ontario has reversed course on plans to let Islamic sharia law to be used in settling family disputes and will ban religious-based arbitration altogether, to the dismay of other groups that had used the system. A spokesman for Premier Dalton McGuinty said that the Canadian province will dispense with all types of religious-based dispute settlements on issues such as child custody and divorce, allowed under its 1991 Arbitration Act. The decision comes after months of controversy and debate over the use of sharia - a code of law based primarily on the Koran as well as the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad - to settle family issues. Critics had said it strips women and children of their rights and had rallied to have Ontario prohibit it. There were protests in Toronto and other Canadian cities, as well as in Europe."

Gaza: "But as inhabitants celebrated the end of Israeli military occupation, there were fears that Palestinians have traded one form of control for another. While there may no longer be any visible signs of an Israeli presence, Gaza's economy, security, transport and basic utilities like water and electricity, will remain in Israeli hands for the foreseeable future, leaving some Palestinians to complain that they are now inmates of a "giant prison"... Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Information Minister, said that the priority must be to give Palestinians freedom of movement, to allow the Gazan economy to export goods and attract investment. "Without freedom of passage and mobility, Gaza will be doomed to be a prison - rather than the beginning of a peace process," he said. Israelis insist that only when the Palestinians have demonstrated the ability to control militant groups and maintain security will Israel consider making further concessions."

The latest post on Strange Justice concerns my home State of Queensland and the case deserves a lot more publicity than it is getting, in my opinion.

There is a new conservative blog that you might like to have a look at here. He calls himself "The Right-Wing Warmonger Who Is Always Right". He's got a sense of humour anyway.

There have been recent objections from British Muslims about official Holocaust remembrance. I have a couple of recent posts on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH that comment on the matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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13 September, 2005

Cricket: My hearty congratulations to the England team for just barely managing to pull it off this time. Doggedness is rewarded in the end. Cricket is of course the world’s most widely-played bat-and-ball game, thanks to its avid following in the Indian subcontinent. How odd that the British invented most of the popular sports —tennis, cricket, golf, soccer etc and yet are usually so bad at sporting competitions.

BNP Update: It is a great relief to me personally that the threat of a Fascist Britain has receded. The British police realized that they didn't have a legal leg to stand on in seizing the BNP paper and released it eventually. "At about 1800hrs today (12th) two BNP officials received telephone calls from Kent Police who admitted they made a mistake and that the print run of 60,000 copies of our monthly newspaper can be uplifted at the earliest opportunity from the HM Customs compound at Dover docks.... The news came as a response to a legal letter delivered by a barrister, acting on behalf of the BNP that we would press for “serious and maximum damages” against Kent Constabulary for the loss of earnings from our newspaper and a further expectation of taking the Force to the European Court of Human Rights. [An online copy of page 1 of the seized publication can be accessed here (PDF).]


MORTALITY COMPARISONS REVEAL USA RESPONSE TO KATRINA WAS EXCELLENT

I have lifted this optimistic post from Reliapundit. See the original for links

Nagin - the inept and negligent and hysterical mayor of New Orleans - who bears major responsibility for the horrific conditions in the Superdome and the Convention Center (because he FAILED to evaucate his poor citizens from the city, and because he FAILED to provide security or sustenance to those who followed his advice and sought shelter where and when he advised them to, and then failed to get his governor to allow the Red Cross or the Salvation Army in to his city to replenish sustenance for his citizens) - predicted a death toll in New Orleans alone of perhaps as many as 10,000 people.

This prediction horrified the public and made people want to BLAME SOMEONE!

The current death toll from Katrina in New Orleans - and the rest of Louisiana and Mississipp and Alabama - is less than 400. This number is SURE to go up, but it is VERY UNLIKELY that it will reach 10,000 or anything near that dire and irresponsible prediction.

BY COMPARISON: the 2003 heat-wave in Europe killed 35-40,000, (14,847 in France alone; 20,000 in Italy).

And Hurricane Katrina was a HUGE natural cataclysm which wreaked huge damage to 90,000 square miles! In fact, in terms of the force and breadth of the physical destruction it wreaked, Katrina was the worst natural disater to hit a developed nation in all of human history.

I think this proves that the HYSTERICAL charges by the Left and the MSM they dominate (that the Bush Administration dropped the ball) are entirely unfounded.

In fact, if you subtract the horrifying images of the Superdome and Convention Center from the "newsreels" (and your memories) there was next-to-nothing wrong with the federal response (or the federal, state and local responses in Mississippi and Alabama, whose coasts were savaged more completely by Katrina than was the city of New Orleans). And when considers the FACT that the Superdome and Convention Center debacles were strictly the result of local and state government incompetence, it means that there was absolutely NOTHING wrong with the federal response. PERIOD. Eventually, this truth will come out. The truth always does.

In addition, when New Orleans is restored, renovated and repopulated in RECORD TIME, this will seen as a huge triumph of the federal government's wonderful efforts (huge and comprehensive efforts which went nearly completely UNREPORTED by the MSM but which are compiled HERE by RELIEFWEB, an outfit run by the UN....

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ELSEWHERE

Stupidity about fuel prices: "What is it about the price of gasoline that turns seemingly normal politicians into barking economic demagogues? When Jill puts her house on the market for $450,000 -- triple what she paid 10 years ago, but the going price in her neighborhood today -- the politicos understand that the 200 percent markup is the result of supply and demand in the real estate market. Senators don't call press conferences to denounce Jill as a profiteer. Attorneys general don't threaten to prosecute her. Governors don't compare her to looters. But when Joe's service station ups the price of gasoline by $1 a gallon, the political world freaks out. Never mind that a Category 4 hurricane has devastated oil production throughout the Gulf Coast, depleting the nation's already strained refining capacity by 2 million barrels a day and driving up the price Joe's wholesaler is now charging *him*. For some reason, politicians forget everything they learned in Economics 101, and rush to savage Joe for "gouging" his customers".

Victory for privatization in Japan: "Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, won an overwhelming election victory yesterday, crushing the Opposition, destroying rebels from within his own party and securing his reputation as the country's boldest and most brilliant post-war leader. As counting continued early this morning, Mr Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party took 296 of the 480 seats in the lower house of the Japanese Diet, one of the country's biggest-ever election victories. New Komeito, the LDP's coalition partner, was projected to win at least 30 more seats. It was the first time that the LDP has won an outright majority since 1990 and represents a vindication of Mr Koizumi's risky decision to call a snap election after the defeat of his proposals to privatise Japan's postal services". [This puts the rest of the world to shame. Who else is trying to privatize their postal service?]

Tough new U.S. nuclear policy (about time!) "A president of the United States would be able to launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes against enemies planning to use weapons of mass destruction under a revised "nuclear operations" doctrine to be signed in the next few weeks. In a significant shift after half a century of nuclear deterrence based on the threat of massive retaliation, the revised doctrine would allow pre-emptive strikes against states or terror groups, and to destroy chemical and biological weapons stockpiles.... It came to light as Iran insisted, in defiance of the European Union, that it would continue processing uranium at its Isfahan reactor. The US has called on the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Tehran for failing to shelve its nuclear programme. Referring repeatedly to "non-state actors" - parlance for terrorists - the doctrine is designed to arm the White House and US forces with a new range of threats and sanctions to counter the situation of threatened nuclear attack by al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates. The document's key phrase appears in a list of pre-emptive nuclear strike scenarios, the first of which is against an enemy using "or intending to use WMD".

Just one step away from book-burning? "The entire print run of this month's edition of the British National Party newspaper was seized by police yesterday. Sixty thousand copies of The Voice of Freedom were confiscated at Dover. Police said: "They have been seized so we can see if any criminal offences have been committed." The papers were being carried by lorry from a printworks in Slovakia. The BNP later decided to publish the edition on its website. The 16-page issue leads with the headline "What about showing some solidarity with the British people?", under the words "Britain gets bombed but it's Islam that gets the sympathy" Spokesman Dr Phill Edwards said it was "a serious attack by the state on freedom of speech"." [The BNP website also seemed to have been taken down when last I checked]

A heartfelt email from one of my Jewish correspondents: "The heart breaks at the destruction of Synagogues in Gaza. Paula Stern has written about it. Read her chilling account, her heartfelt grief at The face of Islamic intolerance, and pass it on. I've run out of words".

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

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

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

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

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

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12 September, 2005

WHAT THE PEOPLE THINK ABOUT CRIME

I once did some academic studies of this subject (See here and here and here and here) and not much seems to have changed. There are still too many court sentences that treat criminals as needing sympathy rather than deterrence. The following reports the results of a survey carried out for a Brisbane Sunday newspaper but there is no doubt that similar results would be obtained in many other parts of the Western world

Queenslanders have savaged the state's judiciary for going easy on criminals. Just 3 per cent think Queensland courts impose sentences that reflect the crime, while 92 per cent think violent criminals should be dealt with more harshly. About 87 per cent support the introduction of a "three strikes and you're out" policy of mandatory jail terms for criminals convicted of the same offence three times. Four-fifths support convicted child sex offenders being jailed for life. Fifty-four percent support re-introducing the death penalty.

"There's a genuine concern that punishments do not fit the crime," said social analyst David Chalk of AustraliaSCAN. "Underpinning this whole thing is a sense that we know we are vulnerable and we rely on the system to protect us." .....

Ninety-two per cent of respondents say homeowners should be allowed to use any force necessary against burglars in their homes. While 91 per cent of people feel safe in their homes, only 12 per cent think the state is safer than it was in 2000, and two-thirds say police are losing the battle against crime.....

More here

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ELSEWHERE

There are transcripts here and here of two good speeches which were delivered on the Israel / Palestine conflict in the Australian Parliament recently. Also, there is a fascinating extract from an article by Caroline Glick. In this longish article she points out that Gaza - which now has no sovereign power laying claim to it apart from the Palestinians, IS actually a sovereign Palestine under conventions of international law.

France's rising political star and probable next President, Nicolas Sarkozy, is a free marketeer, in a French sort of way. He's also surprisingly pro-American and very popular.

Protesters condemn Canada's sharia court plan: "Hundreds of human rights campaigners staged protests yesterday in 11 cities in Europe and North America against Canadian proposals to set up the first court in the Western world to use Islamic law to settle family disputes. The demonstrations registered outrage over the recommendations of a government report which advocates the introduction of voluntary tribunals based on sharia -- the strict Islamic code -- into the legal system of Canada's most populous province."

Not that '70s show : "The story of Hurricane Katrina is first and foremost a tale of Mother Nature's wrath and the resulting human misery: thousands of deaths, destroyed homes and businesses, family break-ups, psychological demoralization and other hardships too painful to recount. But Katrina is also an economic story in terms of its effect on U.S. commerce, trade, energy, shipping and overall growth. Here the doomsayers and pessimists will again be proven wrong. This is not the 1970s. After more than 20 years of deregulation the U.S. economy is flexible and resilient -- even in the face of short-run shocks. ... In the 1970s, government-applied price controls and supply rationing created a dysfunctional economy that looked like a pinball machine on permanent tilt. Today, with few exceptions, price controls have been rejected. Auto and truck drivers would rather pay $4 a gallon for gas they can get, than have government mandate $2 a gallon for gas that's unavailable."

Reliapundit says: "The failure of Governor Blanco to allow the Red Cross or Salvation Army into Nalwins and to resupply the 'dome or the Convention Center - and the failure of the MSM to adequately report that this was the cause of the terrible suffering we all witnessed for 4 days after Katrina hit - is a scandal and it's called BLANCOGATE! The failure of Mayor Nagin to follow his city's Hurricane Evacuation Plan is a scandal and it's called NAGINGATE. Together, these scandals - which togther were responsible for the horrific scenes of suffering at the Superdome and the Convention Center - are called KATRINAGATE! Blanco and Nagin should resign IMMEDIATELY."

U.N. says Australia a great place to live (A bit arbitrary but nice anyway) "Petrol prices might be soaring and house prices falling but Australians don't really have much to whinge about. We live in one of the healthiest, richest and most highly educated places on earth, a UN report said this week. Our life expectancy has climbed to 80.3 years, fifth-highest in the world, income per person is the eighth-best in terms of buying power, and we are as well educated as any other nation. When these indicators are put together, the UN's measure of human development ranked Australia third out of 177 countries - only Norway and Iceland surpassed Australia at the vanguard of human progress... The human development index, prepared by the UN Development Program, assumes wellbeing is about more than the rise or fall of national incomes. It tries to create a broader indicator of achievement by combining income with health (measured by life expectancy) and education (measured by literacy and enrolment levels)".

Anglicans rediscover God -- when it suits them: "In an all-too-predictable twist Middle East studies, and scholars such as American Lawrence Davidson, have been enlisted to justify an ancient manifestation of anti-Semitism revived: replacement theology, sometimes called supersessionism. This doctrine, as proposed by St. Augustine, asserts that the Jews fell from divine favor when they refused to accept Christ, and that God chose the Church to replace them. In the updated version of replacement theology, Palestinians are the new chosen people. The modern Jewish state is considered an occupying power because the Jews forfeited their right to the promised land. But modern adherents to replacement theology would find their hatred a hard sell if they relied solely on New Testament imagery; instead, they describe Israel as a Nazi state or compare it to apartheid South Africa, making sure that Israel's status as the new Rome is clear. And of course, the Palestinians are cast as the new Jews. The Anglican Consultative Council recently affirmed its support for replacement theology when it accepted the September 22 divestment recommendation by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN)."

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

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

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

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

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11 September, 2005

Let's start out today remembering the many good innocent people just going about their daily tasks who died on this day in 2001 as victims of the 21st century's version of Fascism

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WHY DO MANY SMALL STATES DO SO WELL?

Because they respect the individual more and are hence more nimble in moving towards market-based policies and giving people choices

"Iceland: Why is this cold, rainy land with its stark volcanic landscape, without much in the way of natural resources, one of the wealthiest places on Earth? Small states, in the past, were most often poorer on a per capital income basis than large states, but in the last half-century many have become much richer then their large neighbors. Among the wealthiest places on the planet, in addition to the United States, we now find Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland, none with many natural resources.....

After obtaining freedom 15 years ago, Estonia rapidly moved to establish a rule of law, protect private property and create a sound currency. Estonia removed most price controls, discarded useless regulations, privatized most state-owned enterprises and established a free-trade regime. The result has been the largest percentage increase in real per capita incomes of any of the former communist states.....

Former Iceland Prime Minister and current Foreign Minister David Oddsson detailed how he took a typical, economically stagnate, Scandinavian socialist welfare state and turned it into an economic tiger by privatizing state industries, freeing labor markets, and reforming the financial structure. Iceland has been engaged in a massive tax reduction (for instance, the corporate tax rate has been cut from 50 to only 18 percent, and the inheritance tax to a maximum 5 percent). Yet government revenues have steadily increased because of the resulting economic dynamism, and the national debt has fallen from 50 percent of gross domestic product to only 15 percent."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

The people speak: "More than three-quarters of California voters remain concerned about illegal immigration, and two out of five support the "citizen patrols" on the state's borders, according to a statewide Field Poll released Wednesday. The survey, conducted of 426 registered voters from Aug. 19-29, also showed sharp divisions over whether Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should call a border emergency, with 44 percent favoring the move and 40 percent opposing it.... About half of the voters (49 percent) said they were "extremely concerned" about illegal immigration, with another third (32 percent) saying they were somewhat concerned. Nearly two-thirds said they perceived that the flow of illegal immigrants across the border is increasing. Poll Director Mark DiCamillo said there's no telling whether concern over the issue could rise to a major campaign issue in the governor's race next year. In 1994, he noted, exit polls showed it was the top reason voters gave for backing then-Gov. Pete Wilson for re-election. Proposition 187, which sought to end most state services for illegal immigrants, was a big part of Wilson's campaign...."

Australian Prime Minister gets tough: "Islamic leaders have reacted angrily to the Prime Minister's plans for new terror laws, claiming he has undone any good achieved by his recent Muslim summit. Many who attended last month's summit criticised the proposals to create a new incitement offence and extend the existing list of terrorist groups to include those who advocate terrorism.... Mr Howard said the incitement offence would "address problems with those who communicate inciting messages directed against other groups within our community, including against Australia's forces overseas and in support of Australia's enemies".... Asked about deporting firebrand clerics, the Prime Minister yesterday said: "I take the view that people who are dual citizens do run the risk of being deprived of their Australian citizenship if they break a relevant Australian law."

Government was the problem yet again: "Hurricane Katrina is yet the latest example of `government' - at all levels - failing the people `it' is supposed to serve. This is not a matter of Republican or Democrat; it is a matter of the expected arrogance, aloofness, diffidence, innate corruption, coldness - and sheer incompetence - that always permeates all levels of government. Katrina is just the latest example. Pick your poison: from bungled investigations to billion-dollar rip-offs, `government' in our country is more often than not more a problem than a problem-solver. Liberals - and this is why they have lost power nationally - still cling to the notion of using the government to `do good.' But, even when well-intentioned, government efforts to solve a problem rarely work; and often they actually make that problem worse.

Krauthammer on Katrina: "In less enlightened times, there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews). A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush. This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I'll give it a paragraph...."

Hooray! Collapse of a New Orleans legal system that was good for nothing anyway: "More than a third of the state's lawyers have lost their offices, some for good. Most computer records will be saved. Many other records will be lost forever. Some local courthouses have been flooded, imperiling a vast universe of files, records and documents. Court proceedings from divorces to murder trials, to corporate litigation, to custody cases will be indefinitely halted and when proceedings resume lawyers will face prodigious -- if not insurmountable -- obstacles in finding witnesses and principals and in recovering evidence. It is an implosion of the legal network not seen since disasters like the Chicago fire of 1871 or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, events in times so much simpler as to be useless in making much sense of this one."

Arab Christians persecuted: "Christians in the Holy Land have handed a dossier detailing incidents of violence and intimidation by Muslim extremists to Church leaders in Jerusalem, one of whom said it was time for Christians to "raise our voices" against the sectarian violence. The dossier includes 93 alleged incidents of abuse by an "Islamic fundamentalist mafia" against Palestinian Christians, who accused the Palestinian Authority of doing nothing to stop the attacks."

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

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

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

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

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

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10 September, 2005

ONE REASON WHY GERMANY HAS 12% UNEMPLOYMENT

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democrats have pledged action. So has Angela Merkel, whose conservative parties lead the polls for the Sept. 18 elections. Her would-be government partners, the Free Democrats led by Guido Westerwelle, have been most vocal in promising the same. What Germans of all political stripes seem to want is action to reduce the battery of 90,000 laws and regulations and curb the powers of the 4 million bureaucrats that economists say stifle initiative and motivation.

But tell that to the managers of small businesses who have heard such promises before. Indeed, just mention the word "bureaucracy" to Patricia Ferer and her eyes roll, the hands go up and the frowns set in..... Ulrike Hoerchens, an expert on regulations at Germany's Federation of Retailers, which represents 100,000 retailers, hears these complaints all the time. "Red tape strangles many businesses," she said.

Udo Robakowski, 34, was one of those who nearly suffered. In a burst of optimism, he moved to Berlin from Cologne in 1998 and plunged into setting up a top quality shoe shop in Berlin's elegant Charlottenburg district. But the enthusiastic Rhinelander has become increasingly frustrated with the bureaucracy, the complicated tax structure and the endless regulations. "I had 10 years' experience in the shoe business before I set up my shop here," Robakowski said. But one day, he recalled, the Obermeister, the superviser of the Meisters, the title given to those who have passed the examinations for making and mending shoes, turned up. "He wanted to see my Meister's certificate. I never did the exams. He then said I did not have permission to carry out all the shoe repairs. "He then threatened to fine me 25,000 deutsche marks," now about 12,500. "It was so stupid. All he had to do was to look at the quality of my work."

Robakowski, who employs two people, said that he could easily employ more but that it would cost too much. Hoerchens explained: "Once a retailer employs six people, the employer has to register his staff. You cannot imagine the bureaucracy. You have to fill in 18 different forms and many from different departments. "This costs time. It costs money and you really need help to do this. Each employee costs the employer an additional 4,500."

Asked whether the situation would change after Sept. 18, despite the loud promises, neither Hoerchens, Ferer nor Robakowski was willing to place bets.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

One for the "Unbelievable" files: "Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic. Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing."

California tries to mandate higher unemployment again: "For the second time in two years, the Legislature is sending Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a bill raising the state's minimum wage. And for the second time, the governor is expected to veto it, setting the stage for a possible ballot-initiative fight on the issue next year and possibly carrying repercussions for the governor's agenda in the Nov. 8 special election, Democrats say".

A people disaster: "Buildings can be rebuilt, but "The Big Easy" has died and cannot be resuscitated. People will remember the Superdome as a concentration camp, a huge "rape room." They will forever wonder if the cop they see stayed on duty or became a predator, or whether he did anything but watch. Many will feel some small sense of shame each time they turn on that TV they stole (or bought from a thief). The rest of the country and the rest of the world now has put their whole city and anyone admitting to have lived there into the same category as British soccer fans, politicians and people who cheat on their marriages -- okay most of the time, but never quite trustworthy. It is already happening. Cities where the refugess are being taken are putting extra police on duty around them to guard against a spread of the problems which have been so widely reported. And this is the tragedy following the tragedy, because the vast majority of these folks are good people, who only need a safe place to stay while they come to terms with the world as it really is. The looters generally won't leave their loot, for fear that someone will do to them what they did to someone else. I predict that, as a direct result of the mess in Louisiana, there will be a resurgence in militia and local posse membership. Now that we have seen Americans turning into animals, a lot of Joe Sixpacks are going to look around and realize that the only way to protect their families and their homes will be by turning into Joe SixGUN. Expect a lot of the towns near New Orleans to openly support these groups as they form or come back to life.

Britain: Abortion laws too lax: "Powerful public support for an overhaul of the 40-year-old abortion laws has emerged from a Daily Telegraph survey of the nation's attitudes to the key ethical and moral issues of the day. Only 27 per cent of those questioned believed that the current 24-week legal limit for termination should be retained. Fifty eight per cent said abortions should not be carried out after the 20th week of pregnancy, with women more likely than men to favour tighter controls"

Phenomenal economic turnaround under GWB: "We are currently within a hair's breadth of achieving 5 million new jobs since the president's tax cuts were fully implemented in May 2003. If we hit it this month, that would mean 5 million jobs in 28 months. When the new jobs numbers are reported four weeks from now, maybe it will be time for the administration to crow a little bit. Perhaps the reason President Bush has had so much trouble selling his admirable Social Security reform plan is that so many people think his economic performance is weak. But perhaps so many people think this way because the press systemically tells them so"

Oil for Food scam: $12 Bn illegally misallocated; Kofi Annan's son was involved in a $64Bn contract but Dad apologises and keeps his job. The UN secretary general's behaviour, and the "free ride" liberals have given him compares poorly to the standards of ethics demanded in your average democracy. Peter Reith lost his job as an Australian federal minister because his son used $50,000 worth of calls on a government phonecard. UN practice is at the banana republic level.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- but a bit over-clever and thus hard to follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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9 September, 2005

THINK ISRAEL

Below are just some of the recent articles up on Think Israel

DANGERS OF CAPITULATION
I WAS THERE: IMPRESSIONS OF KFAR MAIMON
A DAUGHTER OF ISRAEL
A SALUTE TO THE TRUE LEADERS
THE UNBEARABLE EASE OF DESTRUCTION
GAZA VERSUS BERLIN
GOING BEYOND SCAPEGOATING
ISRAEL AND THE HOLOCAUST
GAZA'S HISTORY AND THE JEWS
ISRAEL: THE JEWISH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION STATE
OCCUPATION AND SETTLEMENT: THE MYTH AND REALITY
THE OSLO SYNDROME
WHY SOME JEWS STILL BELIEVE IN ARAB MYTHS
SCORCHED-EARTH KULTURKAMPF

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ELSEWHERE

The end of a golden age for Jews: "Pipes contends that the mega-events of the last few years may have ushered in a less favorable era for American Jewry: "The Jews' Golden Age in America began in 1950, when social restrictions were eased in universities, banks, businesses, clubs, etc. This period may now be ending with the growth of the American Muslim population. Within that community, there are significant elements that see American Jewry as their prime enemy; they perceive Jews as the cause of Islamic failure.... "Militant Islam cannot be compared to any segment of Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. These religions do not embody groups with totalitarian utopian ideologies that seek world hegemony. In fact, militant Islam resembles fascism and communism more than any religious movement. "All we can do presently is prepare ourselves for worse to come".

Birth order does affect some things: "Younger children do less well in terms of overall educational attainment than their older brothers and sisters, new research reveals today. A first child is typically at least a year ahead of a third-born brother or sister at the equivalent stage at school, it shows. At the same time, it suggests that parents with limited financial resources may invest more time and money in the education of their eldest child. The findings are claimed to represent the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of family composition on educational achievement. They will influence the long-running debate about why first-born children are typically more successful than their younger siblings. The research was carried out by Kjell Salvanes of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and will be presented today to the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society, hosted by University College London. Working with colleagues at UCLA in the US, he analysed the entire population of Norway aged 16-74, between the years 1986 and 2000".

If you have not seen it already, Chrenkoff has a MOST interesting comparison between the situation in Louisiana and Mississippi. Miss. was worst hit but fared much better because of superior leadership. I don't need to tell you which political parties the respective leaders belong to.

Great news for Australian conservatives: "More young people voted Liberal than Labor at the last federal election, dispelling the popular belief that they are more likely to vote for left of the centre parties, a study has found. Political scientist Clive Bean said research into the political attitudes and voting behaviour of people aged 30 and under had found "substantially" more had cast their vote conservatively in last year's federal election. Professor Bean, from the Queensland University of Technology, said a poorly performing federal Labor Party under former Leader Mark Latham could be partly to blame. "In Australia, as in other countries such as Britain and the United States, the conventional wisdom has been that young people are more likely to vote for left of centre parties," Prof Bean said. "But an analysis of voter behaviour at last year's Australian federal election has shown this is not always the case. "Young men were far more likely to cast a conservative vote, and with young women it was a fairly even split between the two major parties."

Australian economy holding up well: "Australia's economic growth surprised observers with its strength yesterday but the outlook was met with caution for the year ahead. In the past three months, the country's Gross Domestic Product surged 1.3 per cent to add a further $2.7 billion to the national accounts. The result was well above most economists' expectations, which ranged from 0.7 to a steady 1 per cent, and took the yearly rate to 2.6 per cent. The number though is still well below the trend average of 3.75 per cent and lower than the past few years' rate of 4 per cent.... The impact of petrol prices and dampened consumer sentiment and spending were seemingly overshadowed by booming business investment, and the upward resources spike.... The Australian result reverses an emerging worldwide trend of slower economic growth."

The astrobiologists will love this report on Comet Tempel 1: "Dust emanates from the comet in frequent outbursts, likely a result of being warmed by the Sun. The dust kicked up by the impact was not the same as surface dust, but it spread through space and dissipated in a manner similar to the natural outbursts. While more analysis is needed, the interior is clearly different from the surface. Inside, the comet harbors a relatively high concentration of organic compounds, the stuff from which life is made. The organics were more prevalent during and after the outburst than the water and carbon dioxide that routinely escape from the nucleus, or hard core of the comet. The results were presented to reporters in a teleconference today and will be published later this week by the journal Science.

Strange Justice has a post up about a blogger in big legal trouble over exposing injustice

I often have up here postings about how something "is all in the genes". I have such a posting up today on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

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

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

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

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

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8 September, 2005

REBUILDING AFTER KATRINA

Amid the constant negative whining and criticism coming from the Left via the media, we hear almost nothing about what to do next in hurricane-hit areas -- except of course calls for even more bureaucracy. So Jack Kemp's thinking is refreshingly constructive. Excerpt below:

"There are a few simple things Congress could do immediately to facilitate the rebuilding effort in the private sector. For example, the entire storm region could be turned into an enterprise zone, suspending burdensome federal regulations, such as the Davis-Bacon Act and the Jones Act. Also, onerous regulations imposed by the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communication Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency could be suspended.

Certain taxes, such as gasoline taxes, telephone taxes and others could be suspended for the duration of the emergency. Individuals living in the storm-affected region and companies doing business there could be relieved of the outrageously complex and economically destructive federal tax code.

For example, the individual income tax and the death tax could be suspended for people living in the storm region. Rules relating to retirement accounts could be relaxed to give people access to capital.

Small businesses could be relieved of payroll taxes, and companies in the region subject to the corporate income tax could be relieved of the most economically damaging features of the current corporate tax code. They could, for example be allowed to write off all investment spending (e.g. spending on plant, equipment, structures, machinery and technology) immediately rather than having to depreciate it over a period of years. In fact, now would be an ideal time to allow companies to choose to be taxed under a simplified reformed system of taxation, the blueprints of which are well developed and could be enacted into law in short time. To further increase access to capital, the capital gains tax could be eliminated.

Displaced individuals could be given education vouchers they could use to enroll their children in schools anywhere in the country. Similarly, vouchers might be used to transform low-income and public housing to give people property rights and pride of ownership in their dwellings. Housing vouchers, for example, could be used not only for homeowners whose houses were destroyed but also for renters and Section 8 housing residents to make a down payment on a house anywhere in the country.... "

"Marginal Revolution" also has two posts on privatising flood prevention and FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency). See here and here

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ELSEWHERE

An excellent point: "New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives."

If you have not seen it already, read Brad De Long's posting about the "plan" for dealing with a hurricane disaster that the State and local Democrat representatives for New Orleans had ready. The "plan" consisted of telling the poor: "You're on your own". But only the Mormons were in fact ready to look after their own. So that makes it all George Bush's fault, of course. There is more on that here.

A realistic black guy's take on what happened in New Orleans. Excerpt: "The pictures I have been seeing are of people - black people - stealing shoes, diapers, and television sets. Not food and definitely not water. Not unless the armfuls of clothing, shoes, and appliances I see people wading through the streets with count as food and water. Now, if all the looters were looting out of desperation, how desperate were the guy and girls I saw toting several boxes of size 13 Nikes? How desperate was the fellow with the stack of diapers? What, is it that he has several babies at home suffering from loose bowels? .... Desperation? Yeah, right. I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem. The entire firearm department at a Wal-Mart department store, for example, was cleaned out and the looters used the stolen weapons to rob people. How low is that? Everybody is suffering and the black people would seek to rob people who are suffering just like themselves."

Some wise words from Thomas Sowell: "During good times or bad, the police cannot police everybody. They can at best control a small segment of society. The vast majority of people have to control themselves. That is where the great moral traditions of a society come in -- those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them that they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them. Now we see what those do-it-yourself standards amount to in the ugliness and anarchy of New Orleans. In a world where people flaunt their "independence," their "right" to disregard moral authority, and sometimes legal authority as well, the tragedy of New Orleans reminds us how utterly dependent each one of us is for our very lives on millions of other people we don't even see. Thousands of people in New Orleans will be saved because millions of other people they don't even know are moved by moral obligations to come to their rescue from all corners of this country. The things our clever sophisticates sneer at are ultimately all that stand between any of us and utter devastation.

Rebecca Hagelin has similar observations. Excerpt: "Why do we as a nation produce and embrace a pop culture that glorifies rap and hip-hop music, that teaches men to prey upon women and engage in senseless violence, and that is now, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's recent survey on media and youth, the number-one music choice of teenagers from all races and every socio-economic status? .... Why is it not only common knowledge but also accepted practice that organized crime and gangs hold much of the power and control much of the commerce in New Orleans? Will New Orleans return to business as usual? Or will you uplift the entire community by throwing out the thugs and their vile wares for which New Orleans is infamous? When you think about it, the values of the thugs involved in the post-Katrina crime wave really weren't all that different from those that have flooded sections of New Orleans with societal sewage for years."

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

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

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

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

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

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



7 September, 2005

WOMEN'S RIGHTS CAN BE WRONG

A recent very sophisticated econometric study by Silvia Pezzini of a huge body of data from several European countries looked at the effect of women's rights legislation on women's happiness. The study found, predictably, that getting access to the contraceptive pill was a great load off women's minds. What was much more interesting however, was the effect of laws that made divorce easier and laws that give working women maternity benefits. It was found that easier divorce REDUCES women's happiness overall and that job protection laws for mothers only worked for women who continued to be employed. Particularly in countries like Sweden, the main effect of maternity benefits for working women was that private employers stopped hiring women. Following is an excerpt from the conclusions of the paper:

"The main finding is that following the introduction of birth control rights, women who could take advantage from the policy (that is, they were of childbearing age at the time the policy was introduced) consistently registered an increase in welfare. The magnitude of the welfare gain is equivalent to the return from achieving higher rather than middle education and a third of the size of the gain from being married or cohabiting. It is approximately one tenth of the effect of going up one level on a 12-category scale of income....

At the same time, other women's rights have been less beneficial. The analysis shows that mutual consent divorce laws have decreased women's welfare, while granting high maternity protection in the workplace did not have significant effects, possibly because of negative feedback effects on the `employability' of women.

Source (PDF)

No-one really knows why easier divorce has made the majority of women unhappier but easier divorce certainly reduces the security of marriage and women do tend to value security in relationships highly.

USA Better for Working Women than Sweden

Just as one follow-up to the above, people might be interested in some findings in a 2004 book Key Issues in Women's Work by Catherine Hakim. Swedish women in the workplace who become pregnant must under Swedish law be given all sorts of benefits that few private businesses can afford -- so 75% of Swedish women work for the government. Nobody else wants them. And here's one result of that -- a result that should rile feminists no end:

"What is more, the glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendly Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will US, and it has also grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. In Sweden 1.5% of senior management are women, compared with 11% in the US."

Source

Conservatives keep telling Leftists that things are not as simple as you think and that coercion doesn't work very well -- and Leftists continue not to listen to that. But conservatives generally have the last laugh -- because human beings and human society ARE complex.

I say more about male/female matters in today's POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH.

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ELSEWHERE

Genetics will out: "A New Zealander who inherited $NZ1 million ($927,000) from foster parents who saved him from a childhood in institutions has been jailed indefinitely after 221 convictions in a 30-year life of crime, a newspaper reported today. A judge told Christian Harry Brusey, 46, he was a professional criminal who posed a risk to the safety of community despite his extraordinary upbringing by caring and affluent parents, The Dominion Post reported. The Wellington High Court was told Brusey was saved from life in an institution at the age of four by a wealthy couple and given the best education money could buy. But he turned to a life of crime with convictions for vicious sex attacks, theft, fraud and burglary with violence. Inheriting $NZ1 million when his foster parents died did not change him. "Maybe he was just born bad," detective Tim Leitch told the paper after Brusey was sentenced to preventive detention, which means he can be held indefinitely.

This is one poll you won't hear much about: "Most Americans, 55 percent, also say Bush does not deserve a significant level of personal blame for problems in the federal response to the crisis. And while 44 percent do assign him blame, only about half of them, 23 percent overall, blame him "a great deal."" There is a good coverage of the media frenzy on Newsbusters

A good post from Commonsense & Wonder: "How incredibly stupid is this? With housing and construction costs skyrocketing, a situation that Katrina is likely to exacerbate, the U.S. government wants to tariff Canadian lumber because it is too cheap. If the Canadian government wishes to subsidize their lumber industry with Canadian tax dollars so that U.S. citizens can purchase cheaper lumber what sane person in the U.S. would want to stop them?"

Three Cheers for "Price Gougers": "With every disaster or crisis, it seems that the public, press and politicians require a remedial course in Economics 101. In fact, apparently we need an ongoing educational campaign even when there is no catastrophe, as demonstrated by the recent foolish legislation in the state of Hawaii to cap wholesale fuel prices. Note the subhead in the linked story: "Some analysts warn move may spur supply problems." Really? Only "some"?"

Brits love the Gurkhas so this announcement should be popular: "Gurkhas, or Nepalese serving in the British army, are to be put on a par with British-born soldiers when it comes to family accommodation, British Defence Secretary John Reid announced this week. From April 1 next year, Gurkhas will be entitled to family accommodation once they have served for three years, and if they are accompanied by their spouses and children, he said. "The new arrangements put those Gurkhas who are eligible on the same footing as all other service personnel when it comes to the allocation of family accommodation," he said. In a statement, the Ministry of Defence in London said the announcement was proof of the government's commitment to ensuring that terms and conditions for Gurkha service were fair and equitable. Some 3,500 Nepalese serve in the British army, continuing a tradition that dates back two centuries. An estimated 43,000 Gurkhas were killed or wounded in action in the two world wars. Last year the government said it would grant the right to settle in Britain to those with at least four years' service.

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

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

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

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

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6 September, 2005

GARBAGE SOCIOLOGY

Australians have repeatedly in recent years elected to power one of the world's most conservative governments -- so what do the sociologists find about Australian attitudes? This:

"Australians are now less conservative in their social and political thinking than they were under Paul Keating. The notion the country has swung to the Right under John Howard is challenged by the first major study of social attitudes since Labor lost power in 1996. Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report finds most people are satisfied with the economic gains made since the Prime Minister's election, and that they enjoy their work, are proud of their families, and feel confident and optimistic about the future. Most would happily give up tax cuts in exchange for more government spending on health or education, and support for immigration has more than doubled since the Keating years. "There has been no big swing to the Right on social issues," says Shaun Wilson, a lecturer in sociology at Macquarie University, who helped write the report.

Sheer Leftist boilerplate in other words. In the unlikely event that the study was done with proper academic care (i.e. with such things as a split-plots design, verified random sampling, balance against acquiescence, control for social desirability etc.), it just shows how slanting the questions can produce any answers you want. Sociologists generally know nothing about psychometrics but they are great at Leftist bias. I am a psychometrician who taught in a Sociology Department for 12 years so I know whereof I speak. If the "research" concerned ever gets published in a refereed journal, I look forward to having fun with it -- as I have done on many previous occasions.

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A good comment from Frum on the New Orleans disaster: "There may well be fault on the part of the federal government and this administration. I'm certainly open to evidence on that point. But to review the wild, contradictory, and utterly opportunistic charges from the administration's critics is to enter a realm of madness. Some patient bloggers are responding to the charges one by one. Here is a post in reply to the charge that the levees were somehow neglected. Here is an accounting for the Louisiana National Guard: 8,000 of whom remain on duty in-state, including the Guard's most pertinent engineer group, numbering four battalions. Here is a crushing reply to those who blame the Bush administration for hurricanes - when hurricane activity has in fact dropped since 1940. Here is one of many stories detailing how the notorious New Orleans police force led the breakdown of civic order".

One of the most objectionable Leftist accusations about NO is fisked here. (Via Les Bates)

Brits trapped in NO: "During seemingly endless days and sleepless nights, the British survivors' fear of the hurricane's destructive force was transformed into terror of the other survivors. Mr Nelson, 21, and Jane Wheeldon, 20, told The Times how they and some 50 other foreigners - many of them British backpackers - were ordered by the US Army to gather together to protect themselves from resentful locals. "The army told us to stick in a group and for the women to sit in the middle with the men around the outside and to be ready to defend ourselves," .... The "internationals", as the army labelled the stranded tourists, were among the few white people in the stadium. Marked out by their skin colour and unfamiliar accents, they were verbally abused, while their luggage made them targets for robbery."

Fabulous news: "The treatment of high blood pressure, a condition affecting 18 million Britons, is being reviewed after research indicated that combining two drugs dramatically reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes. A combination of new hypertension drugs and a common statin used to lower cholesterol cuts the chances of a heart attack or stroke by almost two thirds, a study of more than 19,000 patients with high blood pressure has revealed."

EU threatens slap on wrist: "The European Union on Thursday urged Iran to return to the negotiating table to discuss its nuclear program and threatened to take Tehran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions if it did not. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers, Britain, France and Germany briefed the EU nations on the collapse of negotiations with Tehran and said U.N. intervention could well become the only option."

German Socialists prefer Russia to the USA: "At the yesterday's extraordinary meeting of Social Democratic Party (SPD), German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said SPD will go to elections independently and put forward Russia as a key foreign policy partner of Germany. SPD met in Berlin for a day yesterday, August 31, 2005. The highlight was parliamentary elections to be held on September 18, one year ahead of the schedule. Even before the meeting was opened, Schroeder announced SPD will go to elections independently, not in alliance with the Green Party. Contrary to the major rival - Christian Democratic Union, which leader Angela Merkel stands for the Berlin-Washington political cooperation in the election program, Schroeder has put forward Russia as the major partner in foreign policy"

No safety for Arab Christians in Palestinian areas: "Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched".

Not all readers here may be aware that I have been putting up a few postings on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH about America's North/South war. I jib at calling it a "civil war" because as far as I can see it was just another war of independence -- and as a libertarian, I tend to sympathize with wars of independence. And slavery was already on the way out at the time anyway. All other civilized countries managed to ban it without a war.

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

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

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

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

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

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5 September, 2005

LET'S NAME THE REAL PROBLEM IN NEW ORLEANS

One of the privileges of being a blogger is that you can speak the truth as you see it without being censored. And I am going to excercise that privilege now. From what I have seen of the pictures and news reports (including blogger reports) coming out of NO, the main problem there was not meteorological but racial. As even this very cautious report notes:

"Although TV correspondents covering Hurricane Katrina avoid commenting on the obvious, their cameras hold back nothing. The people who couldn't or wouldn't leave New Orleans are overwhelmingly poor and black. As are the looters.... None of this, of course, excuses the looting, except perhaps to obtain food and water to survive. And it certainly doesn't excuse the shooting. Some looters even fired shots at rescuers Thursday, interfering with their critical missions as the city descended into near-anarchy"

And one of the reasons why black leaders and Leftists are shouting so loudly about Bush "not caring" about blacks has been to divert attention from the fact that it is "back to the jungle" behaviour by many blacks that has been a major part of the problems in NO -- if not the major problem. As soon as normal restraints were loosened large numbers of blacks completely ignored all laws and decencies and behaved like insensate beasts -- looting, raping and even shooting at rescue helicopters. For troops to be sent in with "shoot to kill" orders against black gangs and looters in an American city is so extraordinary that it reveals how total was the breakdown of civility in post-hurricane NO.

Given the fragility of civilized behaviour among large numbers of blacks, it seems to me that this should be a wake-up call to Americans every bit as vivid as the 9/11 events were. Black criminality must now be targeted as relentlessly as the lawless Muslim regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq were. All criticism of "racial profiling" must stop. "Racial profiling" must in fact be stepped up if the large bestial section of the black population is to be put in the one place suitable for them -- jail.

Robert Tracinski also summarizes the real problems in NO well:

"It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting".

Tracinski blames the problems on the culture of dependency fostered among blacks by the welfare state but, as far as I can see (and as Mark Steyn notes), normal black behaviour in Africa is comparably brutal most of the time and there is no welfare State there.

Here is just one example of a blogger report out of NO. The author of the report emailed me: "I actually had to remove the sentences about "they were animals" in order to get a link from one major site" -- so even bloggers have trouble getting the truth out.

And for comparison, note the comparatively minor death toll from the huge flooding in Eastern Europe in 2002: "Across Europe and Russia, flooding in recent weeks is responsible for the deaths of at least 97 people. The floods have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes, ruined harvests, and destroyed buildings and roads. In Germany alone, 15 people have died and 25 are missing". There are of course virtually no blacks in Eastern Europe. And note all the stories of looting, raping and gang violence in this report. (NOT).

Update

There are comprehensive updates here and here of how local officials prevented the timely evacuation and rescue of the city.

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Amazing achievements of Britain's Indians: "Mr Sheikh was just 14 and newly arrived from Uganda, his family one of the 80,000 Asians expelled by the then President, Idi Amin. In their homeland Mr Sheikh's father had owned a chain of clothes shops: the family was affluent. When they landed at Stansted Airport in September 1972, their wealth confiscated by Amin, they were penniless. "All we knew was that we had to work, and work hard, to do well and give back something to this wonderful new country which had taken us in." Today, Mr Sheikh's company, Clifton Packaging, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary, has an annual turnover of £6.5 million..... Last week that recognition came. Mr Sheikh became one of just hundreds of British Asians, the majority second generation, who were proud of the Institute of British Asians' announcement that Asians, while making up no more than 2.5 per cent of the British population, account for 10 per cent of its economic output, generating £103 billion into the economy. It was, said the institute's chairman, Khalid Darr, a "staggering" achievement. "Entrepreneurship," he said, "coupled with a wonderful work ethic, fuelled by a desire to better oneself, is a potent force driving the British Asian business community.""

Keith Burgess-Jackson tells it like it is about the Left: "James Taranto prepares the Best of the Web Today page for The Wall Street Journal. While I appreciate his work, and look forward to it each weekday, I must take exception to one of his pet phrases, "the Angry Left." The Left isn't angry; it's hateful. Anger can be righteous, as when one is wronged by another. If you throw an egg at my house, I'll be angry at you, and rightly so, since you had no right to deface my property. There's even a word for righteous anger: indignation. There is nothing wrong with anger per se. Whether it is wrong depends on its object and the circumstances. Anger at those who wrong one is appropriate; anger at those who are innocent is inappropriate. Anger can be either wild, uncontrollable, and irrational or focused, controllable, and rational. What's pathological is not anger itself but the inability to get angry at those who do you down. Hatred is different. Hatred is personal. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., hatred is "The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another; the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation; enmity, ill-will, malevolence." There is no such thing as righteous hatred; nor is there a word for it, as there is for righteous anger. Hatred is necessarily wild, uncontrollable, and irrational. Whereas anger can be the impetus to justice, hatred is almost always the impetus to injustice...."

Keith (himself a lawyer) also has some interesting comments on the issues raised by the death of Justice Rehnquist. We will be hearing MUCH more about that issue.

Robert Hayes is having a big blog-fight with a slimy feminist blogger. Interestingly, the fight centred around a number of errors of fact in an original post made by the feminist blogger. Far from admitting the error, she tried to evade it. As it happens, I made a small error of fact in one of my posts yesterday too. My reply to the person who pointed out the error? "Thanks to you, I have now fixed the error". I like to think that summarizes the difference between Leftists and Rightists. Leftists cannot handle the facts. Conservatives put the facts first.

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

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

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

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

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

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4 September, 2005

Yesterday and Today (a list)

By Evan Sayet

"At the end of the previous administration we were in a recession. Today we are in what is known as a "Golidlocks" economy -- "just right" for sustained, longterm growth.

At the end of the previous administration America was still reeling from murderous attacks on our embassies, buildings and warships -- with 9/11 already planned and moving into place. Today America has gone almost four years without a single successful attack on America -- or an American interest outside the Middle East!!!

At the end of the previous administration taxes were high across the board. Today everyone who pays taxes keeps more of their income.

At the end of the previous administration Afghanistan was ruled by the vicious Taliban and was home to the terror training camps and organizational center of al Qaeda. Today Afghanistan is a democratic ally fighting and defeating the terrorists.

At the end of the previous administration Syria was continuing its vicious occupation of Lebanon. Today Lebanon is free.

At the end of the previous administration the horrific terror tactics of the Palestinians was devastating the tiny democracy of Israel. Today terror against our democratic ally is down by over 90 percent.

At the end of the previous administration Pakistan was a nuclear armed enemy of the United States, aiding and abetting the Islamic fascist terrorists behind 9/11 and other murderous attacks upon our civilians. Today Pakistan is an ally of the United States fighting and defeating the terrorists.... "

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

Oh Dear! IQ is not only real but we are now finding where it is in the brain: "Highly intelligent people use slightly different brain circuitry to solve IQ test problems than their less gifted peers, some new studies have found.... "Where in the brain is intelligence? Are we getting close to an answer?" Richard J. Haier of the University of California at Irvine, who has conducted many studies on individual differences in intelligence, asked rhetorically. "I think we are." One new study has found that although people show increased activity in several brain regions while taking IQ tests, gifted people show even greater activity in these regions. This difference was especially pronounced in a zone called the posterior parietal cortex, at the top-back of the head, the researchers found, suggesting further study of this area might give insights into how intelligence works. The researchers-Kun Ho Lee at Seoul National University in Korea, and others at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and other institutions-published the findings in the Aug. 22 early online edition of the research journal Neuroimage.... However, at least one previous study did find a special role for this region, as Lee did. Also, Lee and colleagues noted, this area was enlarged in Einstein's brain.... One variable that has confounded IQ-test studies is that some of them actually find lower, not higher, brain activation among gifted people. This fits neatly with a hypothesis proposed by Haier-that more intelligent brains work more efficiently, so that brain circuits unnecessary for the task at hand aren't used".

Astounding news: "Scientists have created "miracle mice" that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals. The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail. And when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate, the US-based researchers say. Their discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine. Details of the research will be presented next week at a scientific conference on ageing titled Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, at Cambridge University in Britain. The research leader, Ellen Heber-Katz, professor of immunology at the Wistar Institute, a US biomedical research centre, said the ability of the mice at her laboratory to regenerate organs appeared to be controlled by about a dozen genes. Professor Heber-Katz says she is still researching the genes' exact functions, but it seems almost certain humans have comparable genes".

Hugo Chavez meets Katrina and the waves: "Two nights ago the Discovery Channel broadcast a segment on the recent 'Si' vs. 'No' referendum concerning Venezuela's Marxist President Hugo Chavez. From a production point of view the show was excellent. Journalistically it was balanced to a high degree of fairness. Of course as one might expect, those opposing Chavez stood in the light, while Chavez's supporters were sometimes misguided and even violent. They wore red -- the colors of North Korea, North Vietnam, COSATU, Red China and the now defunct Soviet Union. They said things like, 'There are only two possibilities in this election. Chavez stays or there will be war.' So much for democracy and pluralism; this is the face of fascism, red style."

Chez Joel has found some really strange stuff on a site devoted to Hugo Chavez, that great revolutionary hero of Venezuela.

Amazing good news on the U.S. economy. Could GWB be doing something RIGHT?: "The nation's unemployment rate dipped to a four-year low of 4.9 percent in August as companies added 169,000 jobs, a sign that the labor market continued to gain traction before Hurricane Katrina struck."

Logical Meme says that new layers to the “Bush-Caused-Katrina” meme and the “Bush-Doesn’t-Care-If-Blacks-Die” meme are taking shape within the MSM. The unfolding events, and the inevitable Congressional Hearings to follow, provide an excellent opportunity to watch how media bias, the politicization of a hurricane, and the conspiratorial grievance mindset of the "civil rights movement" unfold.

The Hurricane: In 1977, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, environmentalist lawsuits sank a 25-year plan designed to protect New Orleans from a Cat 5 hurricane. So it's Bush's fault. See here and here for lots of background.

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

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

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

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

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

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3 September, 2005

SOME RECENT EXCELLENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

Women Are Their First Prey
Phoenix from the Ashes?
Defamation ruling: Holocaust is undeniable
In a Ruined Country
First they came for the Jews!
Cartoon: "T" is for Freedom Fighter
Israel's days of infamy
Ronaldson demands deportation
Denial is scourge of Islam
The protocols of the elders of the BBC
United Nations bankrolled latest anti-Israel propaganda
Adjournment Debate
Critique of Leadership
O'Loughlin spins for the Palestinians
Radical Islamists challenge govts efforts at control
Muslim leaders in feud with the BBC
How to watch the TV news
WHAM! CRUNCH! KAPOW! TAKE THAT, RUSSELL BALDING!
Into the underworld
A New Chapter In The Sorry Book Of The Palestinians.
Why Tolerate the Hate?
Ideas will be crucial to victory

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ELSEWHERE

Interesting comment from "Theodore Dalrymple": "My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s, and I remember such authors as Plekhanov and Maurice Hindus and Edgar Snow. It was always clear that my father's concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov.... I think the great disjunction between my father's expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement".

Poll: 64% favor teaching both creationism, evolution: "In a finding that is likely to intensify the debate over what to teach students about the origins of life, a poll released Tuesday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools. The poll found that 42 percent of respondents hold strict creationist views, agreeing that 'living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.'"

Bush does what he can about gas prices: "President Bush raised the possibility Wednesday that Hurricane Katrina will lead to even higher gasoline prices and shortages in some areas, even as his administration moved to release oil from an emergency government stockpile and to temporarily ease pollution standards on gasoline and diesel fuel. 'Our citizens must understand the storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and distribute gasoline,' Bush said in a Rose Garden speech after meeting with top officials to discuss the crisis."

Turkey: Islamic openness and honesty on display: "One of Turkey's best-known novelists has been charged with insulting the country's national character and could face a prison sentence. Orhan Pamuk is scheduled to go on trial on 16 December and could face up to three years in prison for comments on Turkey's killing of Armenians and Kurds, his publisher, Tugrul Pasaoglu, said yesterday. 'Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,' Pamuk said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper in February."

The entrepreneurship engine : "A remarkable new survey by ACNielsen International Research finds 724,000 Americans use eBay, the online auctioneer and general marketplace, for their primary or secondary income. That figure is up from 430,000 in a similar 2004 survey. ... So eBay can properly be viewed as America's No. 1 generator of, not just businesses, but jobs. As David Faber of CNBC said recently, 'If eBay employed the ... people who earn an income selling on its site, it would be the nation's No. 2 private employer, behind Wal-Mart.' But eBay doesn't employ them. They employ themselves. Their own cash and reputations are on the line. They innovate, they compete, they work hard. What eBay and other online sites provide is the platform: a storefront that's electronic, not brick and mortar; a market of 157 million registered users worldwide; plus help in expediting payments, shipping packages and detecting fraud."

An old conundrum: "The sickeningly obvious truth here is that if we want an intelligent President and Congress we will need intelligent voters to elect them. A uniform national literacy test that is, race, gender, age, and financially neutral is the obvious solution. Then, an election would be an intelligent democratic exercise rather than a popularity contest among illiterates fought with handshakes and 30 second TV commercials. Of course, the Democrats object. If they can get elected with votes from criminals, illiterates, and those selling their votes for entitlement money, well, that's a good enough democracy for a modern Democrat. Yes, the Democratic strategy is slowly subverting our democracy, but, more importantly, it is an immediate threat to national security. Our Southern border remains wide open to nuclear, biological, and chemical, terrorists. Why? Because the Democrats profit most electorally from the constituency that wants the border open. It's just that simple: votes and the power that comes from them matter more than anything to a Democrat."

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

I have just put up a post about the parasitical "Art" establishment on Leftists as Elitists

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

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

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

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

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

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



2 September, 2005

Brookes News Update

US economy, commodities and China : Rising commodity prices have been explained largely in terms of rapid growth in the US and China. But some think that it is "excess money" that is really driving commodity prices rather than growth
Australia, recession and our boom: The Australian economy is displaying all the symptoms of a classic boom at its peak. Is this a question of not if but when?
Ralston Saul: Nonsense from an anti-market ideologue: Ralston Saul is an anti-market ideologue who speaks with an authority that he has not earned. His intellectual shallowness was exposed by his silly assertion that a truly intelligent person never uses words like inevitable, fact or truth
Australia, free trade and consumers' well being: A favoured criticism of some Australian commentators is the issue of free trade. It is argued that this policy leads to a flood of cheap imports that destroy our industrial base and cause unemployment and economic misery
Israel withdraws: What's done....is done: Gaza, as horrific as it has been, is just a preview of what is to come, thanks to Sharon, Condi and Dubya. By all means, let's appease genocidal terrorists, and hope they won't take advantage of our societies
Believe it or not: Abortion causes illegal immigration: Who will 12 million aborted Americans? Most likely, 15 million more foreign-born Hispanics with a propensity for hard work and a burning desire to reclaim the American Southwest for Mexico

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Poverty. A good email from a reader: "The poverty statistics in the US are fraudulent. They are produced by bureaucrats who have a vested interest in exagerrating the number. Case in point is myself. I am considered to be living in poverty despite being a homeowner and business owner with a 6 figure net worth. For the past year I have been involved in a new business venture and haven't yet turned a profit or taken a salary so my income last year fell below the poverty line. The poverty figures are based on income exclusively hence I am "living in poverty". Half of all Americans "living in poverty" are homeowners. The reality is that less than 1% of Americans are living in true poverty. True poverty is being homeless and/or not having enough to eat. Most Americans who are "living in poverty" have more than enough food to eat and a home to live in".

There is a furious response in Spiegel, Germany's major noewsmagazine, about the general German response to hurricane Katrina, Excerpt: "Hurricane Katrina has cost the lives of hundreds and devastated the US Gulf Coast. But instead of aid donations and sympathy, the Americans have heard little more than a haughty "I told you so" from Germany. It's another low point for trans-Atlantic relations -- and set off by a German minister. How pathetic.... It's not the American people's fault that the storm hit and they couldn't have stopped it. The Germans, on the other hand, could have done a lot to prevent World War II. And yet, care packages still rained down from US troops." Some American responses to the German attitude here

Disasters unlimited: "When disaster subsidy zones are created, disasters proliferate and tragedies continue. Almost one thousand years ago in England a subtle lesson in the limits of public authority was offered by King Canute who, when implored by fawning courtiers to demonstrate his regal powers by commanding the ocean waves to halt their assault of the shores, waded into the surf, held up his hand in mock gesture, and permitted all to observe his royal drenching. Canute could not avoid the force of Nature. Today, government intrusion into these areas produces a severe loss of individual responsibility and leads to the prospect of an all-powerful government attentive to special interests."

Good point from Michelle Malkin: "Bean-counting government bureaucrats are free to take race, ethnicity and gender into account when doling out public funds to non-white-male contractors. But God help law enforcement officers, air marshals and border agents who try to use those same factors to combat terrorism and protect American lives."

Good quote from Wizbang: "The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers. When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden's safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn't irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community."

Good comment from Robert Bork: "Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the Court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal."

There is a big list here of military bloggers -- good for first-hand reports not filtered through a hostile mainstream media.

I am afraid that my taste in visual art is as shallow as my committment to music is deep. As I am writing this I am listening to Sir Edward Elgar's "Where Corals Lie", sung by Dame Janet Baker -- and it is moving me to tears, as it always does. But in visual art I must confess that the only prints I own are by Namatjira. My only consolation for such a plebeian taste in paintings is that the Queen has some Namatjiras in her collection. So I was most interested to read this article by Ernest Gombrich, a great art historian and critic, which praises the paintings of Winston Churchill. I had always thought that Winston was just a senile old dabbler. But I bow to greater expertise.

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

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

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

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

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1 September, 2005

ANOTHER CASE WHERE THE "ANTI-ZIONIST" MASK SLIPS

Rod Liddle knows antisemitism when he sees it

Sometimes things are altogether more simple than we wish them to be. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the eminent chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, recently refused to attend the Holocaust memorial day. When asked why this was so, he muttered something about how lots of people had been killed all over the place, not least the poor Palestinians and why shouldn't we remember them, etc., etc. In the liberal press, extravagant excuses were made for Sacranie and his ludicrous chef de cabinet, Inayat Bunglawala. But I suspect that the simple answer, the one we didn't want to hear, is the most accurate: Sacranie and Mr Bunglawala don't like Jews. They are both unequivocal anti-Semites. You do not refuse to grieve for one bunch of people because another, much smaller, bunch of people have been murdered as well. Nor should you automatically equate Jews with the right-wing Zionism of Ariel Sharon: that would be like equating all black Zimbabweans with Robert Mugabe.

It's a racist thesis, isn't it? Those people who are opposed to Israel's policies are usually at pains to point out that they are not being anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist. It is not the Jews to whom we are opposed, they say - it's the Zionists. In which case you'd expect them to be happy to spend two minutes in silence commemorating those six million Jews, those non-Israeli citizens by definition, murdered by the Nazis. But Sacranie and Bunglawala wouldn't even cross the road to attend such a memorial. It wasn't because there are altogether too many of these sorts of commemoration these days, to the extent that they have become almost meaningless. It was because the commemoration was for the Jews; ergo, in my book, they're anti-Semitic. They're Jew-haters. I thought as much at the time and think it even more so now.

(Article originally here. Reprinted here and here)

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German wisdom: "You won't believe this: In an article in Frankfurter Rundschau, a leading left-wing daily, Germany's environmental minister Juergen Trittin holds U.S. president George Bush responsible for hurricane Katrina. Yes, that's right. The hurricane Katrina that killed dozens of people, that destroyed countless homes, flooded parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, that left millions without electricity - it's all Bush's fault, according to a leading member of the German green party, who happens to be environmental minister in chancellor Schroeder's cabinet. Never mind that statistics don't show any particular increase in the frequency of hurricanes in the U.S. in the last decades."

More on Wal-Mart: "Yet the fear that an enormous corporation like Wal-Mart could send smaller retail stores out of business while creating a hostile, anti-competitive environment is enough to mobilize union labor against an unfair, working environment. Yet at the end of the day, consumers still flock to Wal-Mart by the millions to buy merchandise that is considerably cheaper, regardless of how much better the store down the street treats their workers. So far regulators have been able to prevent Wal-Mart from acquiring banks or industrial loan corporations. Perhaps if you do not shop regularly at Wal-Mart you may one day be able to open up a banking account with them, or apply for a credit card with a low interest rate that you can go use somewhere else. The future is anyone's guess."

"Poverty line" is all a matter of definition: "Census Bureau tomorrow will release the latest statistics on poverty in the United States, the income level of an average household and the number of Americans still lacking health insurance. ... Perhaps no statistic has more critics than the poverty rate, which in 2003 stood at 12.5 percent, the latest Census data available. University of Chicago economist Robert T. Michael, who chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel tasked to update poverty statistics a decade ago, called the current poverty data "truly awful."... Officially, the poverty rate has drifted upward since 2000, from 11.3 percent to 12.5 percent in 2003. But a more sophisticated measurement that the Census also publishes, which accounts for variable costs of living, rising medical expenditures and more accurate price inflation, shows the official rate has consistently understated poverty. By that alternative measure, the percentage of Americans below the poverty line has risen from 12.8 percent in 2000 to 14.2 percent in 2003. Using such measurements, last year the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee found poverty rates nearing 16 percent in the late 1980s".

Interesting snippet here (from "Playboy", of all places) about the improper use of dogs by police to sniff out drugs. There is a good article on the civil liberties implications of the matter here

Do-gooder ethics: "Federal authorities are investiing records to find out if some of the Medicaid identification numbers that D.C.-based Voice of Social Concern Association Inc. submitted to the government for payment belonged to recipients who were deceased, records obtained by The Washington Times show. In addition, documents filed in U.S. District Court show authorities are questioning a pattern of billing for rides that coincided with major holidays and with a three-day stretch in February 2003 when blizzardlike conditions paralyzed the D.C. area."

The French "social model" at work: "Should we stick a nightstick in their faces and force les femmes to ride ze bus? That's one bus company's basic idea. The company is taking some former passengers to court. Why? Because those commuters got off the bus and started taking a car. See, it's a car-sharing 'scheme.' A nefarious plot. And the court has set a date to hear this case. It's France. Who's doing the suing? Transports Schiocchet Excursions ... let's call it TSE so you don't have to hear what passes for my French any more. TSE has a route from France to Luxembourg, which is where a group of French cleaning ladies works. TSE says the cleaning ladies are guilty of -- hold on, let me double-check to make sure I'm getting this right -- ah yes, 'an act of unfair and parasitical competition.'"

Mark Kleiman has a stinging rejoinder to the attempted defence of himself by the contemptible Prof Juan Cole -- whom I have already mentioned a couple of times.

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

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

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

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

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