THANK YOU RUPERT MURDOCH

My local Brisbane Sunday newspaper is "The Sunday Mail" -- a Murdoch title. It gives a degree of coverage to views congenial to conservatives that would, I think, make most conservative buyers of American newspapers pretty envious. In this day of the internet, one could do worse than simply log on to the Brisbane paper and not buy the local rag at all. A sampling of the stories in the most recent issue:

Home truths for feminists: "The bar desperately needs more women barristers," Mr Meagher said while still a Court of Appeal judge in 2002. "There are so many bad ones people may say women can't be good barristers and are hopeless by nature - but that is not so. It's a pity the able people don't come."

Germaine Greer: 147 school students were surveyed and not one knew who she was.

The religion of peace: "I started surfing the Islamic media. Take Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the controversial Egyptian imam who was recently fawned over by the Mayor of London even though he promotes the execution of homosexuals, the right of men to indulge in domestic violence, and the murder of innocent Jews. During the brouhaha it went unnoticed that he also wants to conquer Europe. Don't take my word for it, just listen to him on his popular al-Jazeera TV show, Sharia and Life."

Establishment church perversion: "Deep down, I guess, the Senate's "Forgotten Australians" report came as no great surprise. The extent and depths of the cruelty and depravity revealed were shocking but, somehow, the mere fact that children in institutional care had been mistreated was something of a given.... However, I don't know that we even began to suspect that abuse existed in places such as orphanages and children's homes that we fondly believed were kind and charitable. But now we know that up to 500,000 kids were in care over the past 100 years and a disgraceful number were brutalised and abused... How did this happen? More mystifying, how did those who purported to serve God or to be obedient servants of the state come to be instruments of sadism and sexual exploitation?"

Andrew Bolt's column, on how far Left and antisemitic the Greens are, also appeared but the link is to a sister newspaper in Melbourne. I have excerpted the article on GREENIE WATCH

There was also another article called "What happened to willpower?" that I could not find online so I have reproduced it here

Even "The Simpsons" cartoon was good but I don't know how to find that online. It takes such a good swipe at the decay of the schools, however, that I have put up the three central panels of it here

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PERSONAL

Unlike most bloggers, I don't say much about myself but any guy weird enough to have five regular blogs should presumably say something. So: 1). My 17 year old son told me yesterday that his bedtime reading at the moment is "Critique of pure reason" by Immanuel Kant. I didn't even know he had heard of Kant. But I was reading St Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo at his age so I understand his interest. His main enthusiasm is mathematics, however, and he is thinking of becoming an actuary. I myself taught statistics at university for many years so I understand that too. 2). I live in a 10 bedroom house but my Presbyterian upbringing makes me not like seeing things "go to waste" -- including accomodation. So I share my house with others. The others have always comprised an ethnic mix and they at the moment include an Indian, a Bangladeshi, a Chinese, a Korean and a Filipino. So I guess that must make me the world's weirdest "white supremacist" -- which is what Captain Clueless once accused me of being (because I oppose affirmative action and made fun of his support for it).

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ELSEWHERE

Email from a reader: "Some Christian fundamentalists have come to the belief that the Anti-Christ was Muhammad himself. According to this thought, the Devil was beside himself after Jesus' sacrifice and while the spread of Christianity was proceeding unimpeded throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and into Asia. So he got an Arab merchant (a pederast to boot), lured him to the desert and gave him a book that taught the opposite of what Jesus said; instead of loving your enemy is hate your enemy, cut off his head and spite him and his family, and if you are not yet strong enough lie and deceive until you can (all in the Koran). As far as theological models go, I think that this thesis is actually inherently logical. One could even consider all the oil under Arab lands as the "devil's gift". On a more somber tone, but still on the same subject, I can only describe the children's massacre in Russia as nothing else but Satanic".

A normally Leftist newspaper, the "Pasadena Weekly" has just put up three pro-Bush letters. They must have got a lot of similar letters to do that. One letter aptly refers to Michael Moore's 9/11 film as the Leftist "New Testament". See here or here. The Stalinist iconography of the paper's front page is amusing too.

There is an article here that strongly reinforces Randall Parker's point about the oppressive effects of polygamy. Similar rules in the West produce similar results to what happens in Muslim lands -- fanatical and punitive puritanism.

This article says that gambling on scientific truths would help keep scientists honest. Something is needed, for sure.

An amusing example of the dilemmas that the theorists at PETA get themselves into.

I have just put up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE some comments and quotes from Theodore Dalrymple about an alarming trend in British medicine.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and EDUCATION WATCH. Mirror sites here, here and here

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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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