FROM BROOKES NEWS

The yuan and the US economy There are strident calls for the US to do something about the yuan. The situation is more complex than they realise
Productivity, wages and labor markets Labor reform per se cannot bring about a continuous increase in productivity: only a continuously expanding capital structure can achieve that
Anti-American Ba'th activities in Paris Proof that the French [Vichy] Government is giving support to the thugs who are waging a terror campaign in Iraq. There seems to be no bottom to the depravity of the French Government
Wages and labor markets According to Keith Hancock free labor markets produced "sweated labour, long working hours, unsafe and unhealthy factories . . ."
Like banging my head against the wall Israel is not in an intifada - the entire world is in a war. A war with a savage subculture that is out to kill everyone who is not part of it - a war against Islamic-Nazi crazies
George W. Bush and His "Stupid" Kool-Aid Drinkin' Buddies Why will the left lie, cheat and smear to give a conservative the boot? And what is it that socialist elitists hate so much about the structure of America?

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

The Leftist idea of themselves as an elite can get pretty amusing. Take this sentence from the top Leftist blog: "The conservative bigotted position is untennable. It has no basis in fact or reason. Arguments against gay marriage are predicated entirely, 100 percent, on emotion. And the vehicle for those emotional appeals are the word "marriage". A mere semantic." If the writer of that is a truly elite person, how come he has the English language skills of a dribbling idiot? "Bigoted" has one t. "Untenable" has one n. And the singular subject "vehicle" should be followed by the singular verb "is". And what he means by calling marriage "A mere semantic". I have no idea at all. And Leftists lap up such illiteracy at the rate of hundreds of thousands of hits every day! His wisdom must be profound. Too profound for me, certainly. If I were as prone to spelling and grammar mistakes as Kos is, I would at least use a spellchecker and grammar checker. But to do that I guess you have to be humble enough to admit your limitations. And humble is just what Leftists are not.

Oh dear! A Leftist has woken up to what bad advice George Lakoff gives: "Overall, I have a deep fear that if liberals are taking this stuff too seriously we could be about to drive ourselves off a cliff."

The United Methodist Church is promoting a far-Left "anti-corporate" petition that wants just about everything put under socialist control. That is of course about what we have come to expect of the declining older Protestant churches. Their new faith is more in Leftism than in the Gospel of Christ. It is therefore also no surprise that three scriptural passages that they quote in alleged support for their views say pretty much the opposite of what the church advocates: "Ecclesiastes 3:22 "So I saw that there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work for that is their lot," Luke 10:7 and 1 st Timothy 5:18 "the laborer deserves to be paid", Matthew 20:8 "Call the laborers and give them their pay." As far as I can see, those scriptures envisage that you work for your living -- not get it in a socialist handout!

Still some backbone among some Methodists? "Nineteen months ago, the Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud gave a sermon that began and ended with Jesus saying, 'Peace be with you.' In the middle, she told her congregants that she was living in a 'covenant relationship' with another woman. Stroud's disclosure was no surprise to her flock at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, a 210-year-old Philadelphia parish that welcomes gay men and lesbians. ... But Stroud's sermon was a challenge to the national church's rule against self-avowed gay men and women in the ministry, and it set in motion an investigation and charges that will culminate Wednesday in a church trial before a jury of fellow ministers."

Cafe Hayek pulls apart the nonsensical statement that �half the country can't afford health care.� It might be of some interest to look at the cost of health insurance though. I have a very high level of insurance that covers me for the best private hospital treatment there is here in Australia. And Australian private medicine is so good that we even have Japanese coming in for transplant surgery right here in my home town of Brisbane. My health insurance premiums are $212 per month. Lots of smokers would spend $300 per month on their habit. So how's that for affordability? Since lots of poor people smoke, I think it has to be seen as totally affordable.

The poor are very few: "As it is, less than three percent of the American work force earns the minimum wage or less, and more than half of them are under 25".

Soviet Canada: Trotsky's triumph: "In Canada, the people sheepishly accept all this crap, and we never even had a Stalin to terrorise us into submission. But then you don't have to train sheep to be sheep. People here like the 'nanny state,' as it saves them from having to think for themselves. A highly educated friend of mine (in response to my contention that a truly free market in insurance would result in lower rates than government mandated and controlled insurance) had this to say, 'But I don't want to have to investigate and compare companies; it's way easier for me just to pay the government.'"

Amtrak: On time for yesterday: "On-time performance has long been Amtrak's principal strength ... not the trains, but the financial crises. Little seems more predictable than Amtrak's periodic budget crises and calls for more money from those na�ve enough to believe that nostalgia should be publicly financed, like defense or welfare. The latest chapter is a new U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General report indicating Amtrak is experiencing unsustainably large losses and is deferring needed investment."

TSA -- bullies at the airport : "If you traveled by air last week for the Thanksgiving holiday, you undoubtedly witnessed Transportation Security Administration agents conducting aggressive searches of some passengers. A new TSA policy begun in September calls for invasive and humiliating searches of random passengers; in some instances crude pat-downs have taken place in full public view. Some female travelers quite understandably have burst into tears upon being groped, and one can only imagine the lawsuits if TSA were a private company. But TSA is not private, TSA is a federal agency -- and therefore totally unaccountable to the American people."

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

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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