SOME ECONOMIC ISSUES

Massachusetts: State eyes tougher welfare rules: "About 10,000 additional Massachusetts welfare recipients, including many people with disabilities, would have to work, and thousands who already have jobs would have to labor for longer hours under new rules recommended yesterday by a special state panel. The proposed changes, which would have to be implemented by October of next year to put Massachusetts in compliance with federal welfare rules, would force as many as 5,600 disabled people to meet work requirements and compel some recipients to work for as many as 34 hours a week, up from the current maximum of 30 hours. Overall, the recommendations would increase the number of Massachusetts welfare recipients who have to work from roughly 12,700 to about 22,000. A total of 49,000 families are currently on the state's welfare rolls."

Why Personal Retirement Accounts? "There is little risk in personal retirement accounts. A recent study done by the CATO Institute has shown that there has been no 20 year period where that has been a loss in the market. In fact, the 3.36% rate of return on investments in the period between 1929-1948 is still much greater than the rate of return retirees receive currently on Social Security. And with future retirees facing a negative rate of return, the current Social Security system is much riskier than market investments. Besides, money will not simply disappear from the Social Security Trust Fund during the transition to private accounts."

Globalization takes off: "We're in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history. Last week, the World Bank released a report showing that global growth "accelerated sharply" this year to a rate of about 4 percent. Best of all, the poorer nations are leading the way. Some rich countries, like the U.S. and Japan, are doing well, but the developing world is leading this economic surge. Developing countries are seeing their economies expand by 6.1 percent this year - an unprecedented rate - and, even if you take China, India and Russia out of the equation, developing world growth is still around 5 percent... This is having a wonderful effect on world poverty, because when regions grow, that growth is shared up and down the income ladder. In its report, the World Bank notes that economic growth is producing a "spectacular" decline in poverty in East and South Asia..... What explains all this good news? The short answer is this thing we call globalization. Over the past decades, many nations have undertaken structural reforms to lower trade barriers, shore up property rights and free economic activity. International trade is surging.

Really free enterprise: "Slugging is a term used to describe a unique form of commuting found in the Washington, DC area sometimes referred to as "Instant Carpooling" or "Casual Carpooling". It's unique because people commuting into the city stop to pickup other passengers even though they are total strangers! However, slugging is a very organized system with its own set of rules, proper etiquette, and specific pickup and drop-off locations. It has thousands of vehicles at its disposal, moves thousands of commuters daily, and the best part, it's FREE! Not only is it free, but it gets people to and from work faster than the typical bus, metro, or train. I think you'll find that it is the most efficient, cost-effective form of commuting in the nation"

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

ELSEWHERE

Why Bush is misrepresented as a religious fanatic: "Fleischer says that the critics "believe their policies are so correct that no reasonable person could see things differently - unless people like President Bush are blinded by an extreme faith that prevents them from seeing the facts." To him, this is the same narrow-mindedness that critics claim to find in conservative Christians".

Britain to deny young women private sector jobs (As has already happened in Sweden): "Mothers will win the right to a year's paid leave after having a baby as part of a massive overhaul of childcare" [What employer in his right mind would hire a young woman under those circumstances?].

Amusing: The one thing that Leftists will normally allow as genetically-inherited is homosexuality. Yet it is also one characteristic for which the evidence of genetic inheritance is quite equivocal. On my reading of the matter, homosexuality can be caused by several things -- one of which could be in utero damage. Ruling out environmental causes (which Leftists do) is certainly sheer dogmatism.

Primitive party animals: "Since the 1976 presidential election, the Democrats have not received more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Most organisms, except for very primitive ones, usually modify their behavior after repeated failure in order to survive. Much has been written about why the Democrats continue to fail in the polls. But as an economist, I have been particularly struck by how they have failed to learn sound economics, despite all the empirical economic and political evidence of what works and what doesn't. Let's start with taxes. There is overwhelming evidence our present maximum tax rates on both labor and capital are so high they reduce economic growth, job creation and the general level of wellbeing for Americans. Despite this, Democrat candidates from Walter Mondale to John Kerry keep proposing higher marginal tax rates on labor and capital. ... Higher tax rates are not only an economic loser but are also a political loser."

Is it the government's business if you lose money gambling? "As legalized gambling spreads across the states, a branch of the federal government that deals with drug and alcohol addicts is studying ways to help compulsive gamers -- and looking to Louisiana, especially, for inspiration....Louisiana Association on Compulsive Gambling Executive Director Reece Middleton, who took part in a meeting this summer with representatives from other state programs, says the federal government may be close to taking action. "You've got a proliferation of legalized gambling across the country, and you've got an increase, I believe, of people getting in trouble," he said. "I just think it's gotten to the point where all of a sudden it's real hard for the federal government to ignore the question anymore." .... "It's absolutely urgent that a national initiative for gambling treatment be forthcoming, and that it be forthcoming from a federal government," Middleton said".

Nazis were normal Leftists -- not insane: "Now the book the Florida State University professor fine-tuned - "The Nuremberg Interviews" - is being heralded for giving the world new insights into the chilling thoughts of Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of more than 6 million Jews during World War II.... "There is this kind of inner logic behind the outer madness," Gellately said of the book's 33 interviews. "That's the horror of the thing." That's because, Gellately said, for the most part, these Nazi rulers were as normal as next-door neighbors. "I think we all have an idea about what makes the Nazis tick. Some of us think they were demonic or crazy ... Really, two people in the book are like that, but they are not the interesting ones," Gellately said. "Most of the other ones are like you and me. They are well-educated, rational, sensible." They pour out their thoughts to Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, who kept detailed notes of his interviews with the war criminals and witnesses awaiting trial in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946..... "They had a sense of duty, perverted, but they were rational, kind of cold, calculating killers," he said, "not this emotional, go-out-and-shoot-their-friend-in-the-woods kind of thing. You can't prove these were guys that actually hated the Jews or actually ever hit anyone".

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

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

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

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

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

LEFTISTS: PRO-DARWIN OR ANTI-DARWIN?

Whichever suits at the time, of course

The recent success of Christians in getting school textbooks to point out that evolution is merely a scientific theory -- not something totally grounded in replicable fact -- has enraged Leftists no end. As far as I can gather, the tiny success that has provoked all the rage is an arrangement whereby some school textbooks in Georgia have not been changed but have just had a sticker inserted in them pointing out the status of the evolution theory. So now there is a very popular site on the web from which Leftists can download "alternative" stickers designed to ridicule the Christian ones. So in the question of how mankind got here in the first place, Leftists are proud "Darwinists" and ridicule anyone who questions evolutionary explanations.

You know what's coming next, don't you? That good old Leftist inconsistency and opportunism. Leftists are fervent ANTI-Darwinists when it comes to explanations of human nature. People (such as sociobiologists) who use concepts of evolutionary biology to explain how mankind is innately tribal, territorial, aggressive, selfish etc. are treated as anathema by Leftists. The most prominent of the sociobiologists is of course Harvard Prof. E.O. Wilson. In good Harvard style he is actually quite Left-leaning and very much a "Greenie" so he seems to have earned some personal forgiveness from the Left in recent years. As he himself summarizes: "My writings on sociobiology in the '70s had the implication that ordinary instinctive human behavior does indeed have a biological basis, which in turn originated through a long period by natural selection. At that time, the academic left included many social scientists who based their social programs and reasoning on the assumption that humans are a blank slate, so I was a prime target of the left. And now, promoting conservation as strongly as I do, I'm sometimes a target of the right".

I could go on to give umpteen quotes showing what a core assertion the blank slate status of human nature is for Leftists and how genetics and biological thinking upset that claim at every turn but I think my readers will already have seen plenty of that. Wilson himself gives a pretty good history of the Leftist attacks on his work. Apparently, to Leftists, evolution affected every organ of the human body except the brain! Pathetic.

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

ELSEWHERE

A libertarian message to the defeated Left "When you seek to gain by the use of force, don't be shocked when others turn it around on you. When you look to government and seek the enforcement of your preferences on others, you invite others to respond forcefully in return. When you urge government to implement your "programs", you're granting the use of force against those who don't agree with you. That attitude is now coming back to haunt you.... You self-righteously demanded that your social programs be implemented through government, by force, funded by money stolen from all of us, whether we agreed with those programs of not. In so doing, you granted to government the power, and the ever-increasing funding, to do with us what it would. Now you are faced with the disgusting spectacle of seeing that power turned back against you because your "opponents" may now be in control. You sought to exercise forceful "mob rule" when you were in the majority, but now a different mob is in charge. You eagerly pushed power into the hands of government, blanking out the truth that you were effectively pushing all of us into forceful bondage. By believing that force is moral if the cause is good, you've laid the basis for the use of force for causes that others believe are good. Just as you forced others to support what you thought was good, they will now force you to support what they think is good."

Those racist conservatives again: "The idea that racial civil rights programs were the sole province of liberal Democrats is an urban legend promoted by Democrats to keep African - Americans voting for them. A cursory examination of history will reveal that civil rights legislation was implemented, proposed and/or endorsed by Republicans. It was during the Eisenhower presidency that the 1957 Civil Rights Act was passed. Eisenhower's Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, crafted the legislation in March 1956. Brownell wanted a new division within the federal Justice Department to monitor civil rights abuses. It was because of Brownell that the Kennedy administration was able to intervene on behalf of civil rights activists. Ironically, some Democrats criticized Eisenhower for pandering to the black vote. It was Eisenhower who desegregated public facilities in DC during his first term -Truman did not do it. It was Eisenhower who enforced school the Supreme Court school desegregation order in 1957. Fifty years earlier it was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who invited the African-American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House. Contrast this to the Democrat segregationist President Woodrow Wilson. Republican Senator Jacob Javitz once proposed an amendment to a mental health bill (S.1576) to deny funds to states with segregated mental health facilities. The Democrats denied the amendment. It was Richard Nixon who implemented affirmative action".

Tibor Machan: "Whenever I speak up for liberty, there's bound to be someone who accuses me of favoring the individual as against the community, favoring rights as against responsibility and obligations. But it isn't so at all. Champions of individual liberty often believe even more firmly than critics in doing the right thing, including acting generously, compassionately, and helpfully -- in the spirit of community. What they insist on, however, is that all such responsibilities and obligations be carried out from personal conviction, not from fear of going to jail or being fined."

Judicial arrogance in Australia too: Australia's High Court is the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS). It is however much less prone than SCOTUS to making the law up as it goes along. It does however have some Left-leaning Justices, most particularly the openly homosexual Michael Kirby. Kirby is legally qualified but began his rise to prominence via the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, a pseudo-court set up to mediate union disputes. He has recently spoken with rather surprising frankness of a need for the High Court to become a sort of political opposition to Australia's now well-entrenched conservative government. An article here sums up pretty well my own response to such outrageous presumption.

Good to hear that President Bush is listening to Sharansky: "Sharansky's ideas are clear: no concessions, funds or legitimacy for the Palestinians unless they adopt democracy, but a modern-day Marshall Plan for the Palestinians if they embrace democratic ways. The same hard line that worked for Ronald Reagan against the Soviet Union, Sharansky argues in his book, would work for Israel against the Palestinians." I couldn't agree more.

Andrew Sullivan, in his usual supercilious way, has voiced his support for the brainless Leftist "Buy nothing" day. Pejman puts him right, however -- pointing out that the only people likely to be hurt by such tactics are the poor, particularly people in poor countries who make so many of the things that we buy.

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

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

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

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

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

HITLER'S SOCIALIST PREDECESSORS IN AMERICA USED PUBLIC SCHOOLS

No one can measure the monstrous impact of government schools imposing racism and teaching racism as official policy for so long. Government school racism did much more damage than private enterprise could ever have afforded to do.....An eye-popping historic photo of a segregated class chanting the pledge of allegiance is here..... When government began socializing schools in the late 1800's, it expanded government-mandated racism.

The pledge of allegiance was written in 1892 by a bigot who was a self-proclaimed National Socialist. [Again see here].

Francis Bellamy and his cousin and cohort, the author Edward Bellamy, wanted government to take over all schools as a socialist monopoly, end all of the better alternatives, and use government schools to produce an "industrial army" (a Bellamy term) explicitly modeled upon the military in order to nationalize the economy and create a society of totalitarian socialism as described in the book "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy. It explains the modern Military-Socialist complex. The Bellamy boys actively promoted what they called "military socialism." Part of the plan was the pledge.

The Bellamys and the pledge influenced the hate-spewing paramilitary societies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (62 million dead), the People's Republic of China (35 million dead), and the horrid National Socialist German Workers' Party (21 million dead). (Death tolls from Professor R. J. Rummel's book "Death by Government" which is also available).

Most so-called conservatives are ignorant of the pledge's deplorable past, and to the extent they do know, they cover it up. Republican socialists have been duped into robotically chanting the pledge and there are probably socialists in-the-know who laugh silently at the spectacles.

The government forced children to attend segregated schools where they recited the Pledge using it's original straight-arm salute. The practice began three decades before it was adopted by the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and the government school racism continued through WWII and beyond, and the government schools still exist to this day.

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

I have recently written two new articles. I submitted both to Tech Central Station but they were too controversial for TCS, I am afraid. One is on called "Understanding Women" (see here or here) and the other is "Down with Education" (see here or here). If anybody wants to recommend them for publication to someone else, please do so. They are pretty heretical.

"Crooked Timber" is run by a group of Leftist bloggers who fancy themselves as intellectuals. At least one of their members, however, is very shaky on basic philosophical terms. He cannot decide on whether he is discussing "ab hominem" arguments or "ad hominem" arguments. It's not a typo. D and b are not close together on the keyboard. He just doesn't know his Latin. For his information, "ad hominem" means "to the man" while "ab hominem" means "from the man". The latter makes no sense in the given context, however.

Promethean Antagonist proudly informs me that he is a "Red-stater" but he is still a classical music fiend, as I am. He wonders whether the dreadful garbage that constitutes most classical music of the last century or so is the product of the rise of Leftism over that time. I certainly see a destructive attitude behind most of the "music" concerned and destruction is what the Left is all about too. Many of their policies (e.g. punitively high taxes) make sense only if you assume that their chief priority is to impoverish the rich rather than enrich the poor. And innovation at all costs (even if it the results are unpleasant) is another theme common to both the music and the politics.

Reliapundit is trying to analyse why the Left have always accepted a lot of Christian references from other Presidents but go ballistic over GWB's Christianity. He thinks that Islamic fundamentalism terrifies them so they take it out (with typical Leftist logic) on Christian fundamentalists. I myself think that the Left tolerated Christianity in the past because they thought it was in decline. But now that it seems to be gaining influence they are terrified that it may be their own Leftist religion that is going down the plughole! They are fighting like cornered rats. What fun!

Amusing: "Spiked" notes that the "tolerant", multi-culti, postmodernist moral relativists of the left have been hoist on their own petard by the creationists. If all points of view are equally valid, why not creationism? Why not indeed. So apparently creationism is already making something of a comeback in the schools.

The famous "gay-hate" murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming that filled Leftists everywhere with such delicious indignation looks like it was not an anti-homosexual crime at all. It was a drug crime and Shepard was picked up only because he looked like he had money. It was still of course a shocking crime but "homophobia" had little or nothing to do with it.

Frank Devine sets out well the strategic reasons why the USA is in Iraq. Having an American Army slap bang in the middle of the Islamic world does tend to make Islamic governments a lot more cautious. David Horowitz spells out the reasons even more.

Interesting thought: "The conservative insight has always been that the destruction of pain is impossible and an attempt to do so will destroy us. The liberal dogma that culminated in this election is that pain is the fundamental human injustice that must be destroyed. America does not believe this false maxim of the left".

I enjoyed Jonathan Chait's acerbic comments on whom the Democrats should nominate as their Presidential candidate for 2008. Excerpt: "Probably the only worse option than Dean or Clinton, short of nominating Paris Hilton, would be to renominate John Kerry, who, reports have suggested, inexplicably harbors ambitions of running again in 2008. In a previous column I compared Kerry's contribution to his own campaign to an anchor's contribution to a boat race. In retrospect, I seem to have given him far too much credit."

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

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

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

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

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

SOME FUN WITH A LEFTIST NINNY

I am indebted to the mini-Chomsky himself, the great Brian Leiter, for a recommendation of a long article by Orcinus about the probability of America "going Fascist". Seeing Hitler was a socialist and Mussolini was a Marxist, you might think Orcinus is worried about arrogant trends in the Democratic party but, no, it is the GOP that he thinks is likely to "go Fascist". The Leftist origins of Fascism don't get a mention, in fact, so one knows immediately that the article will be low on scholarship. And its chief scholarly source for the nature of Fascism is in fact R.O. Paxton, the "historian" (much lauded in the N.Y. Times, of course) who said Hitler was an "antisocialist" -- when the very name of Hitler's political party was (translated) "The National Socialist German Worker's Party"! I think I have already at this early stage said enough about the article concerned to dismiss it for the claptrap it is but I cannot resist having a bit more fun with it.

The body of the article is in fact made up of what is actually a rather good proof of the idiocy of its conclusions. Orcinus quotes a long line of sources from the 1930s which offer all sorts of evidence for the claim that America was on the brink of going Fascist then. But it didn't happen! America did get the Mussolini-admiring FDR but thanks to the U.S. constitution and the U.S. Congress there were lots of limits placed on what he was allowed to do. So if America did not go Fascist during the Fascist era despite the many pressures towards it that Orcinus ably documents, how likely is it likely to go Fascist now, when Fascism is thoroughly discredited? The question answers itself, I think.

But let's have a look at a bit more weirdness. Take this Orwellian statement: "This tendency has finally metastacized into a genuinely dangerous situation, one in which the GOP has become host to a Stalinist movement that exhibits so many of the traits of fascism that the resemblance is now unmistakable." Quite aside from the fact that this great intellectual cannot even spell "metastasized", he is asking us to believe that the people who opposed Communism for decades and finally destroyed it utterly are themselves communists! I guess it's not impossible but seeing that the GOP and their Christian allies have always advocated the exact opposite of communism, the writer is clearly in cloud-cuckoo land. If you can say that free-enterprise=Stalinism, you might as well say black=white. I guess that a Leftist "postmodernist" would have no problem in doing exactly that, however.

More fun: Orcinus also looks for the day when "the attack style of politics -- in which the smearing an opponent substitutes for the lack of any substance or accomplishment -- has been relegated to the ashheap of history". Well. He got his wish. I think John Kerry has now been so relegated. Whoops! In true Leftist "projective" style, Orcinus was actually referring to the GOP rather than John Kerry, it seems!

Orcinus also deplores the way that "families, longtime friends, and communities are being torn apart by the divisive politics of resentment and accusation". He must be talking about all those guys documented at length on Leftists as Elitists! You could not conceivably get more resentment and accusation than is documented there.

Orcinus is a real humanitarian by Leftist standards, however. He ends up conceding: "Conservative-movement adherents are still human beings, and seeing them in terms of participating in a kind of fascism should not render them into mere discardable objects". He must have written that for the benefit of those of his colleagues who still admire Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

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

ELSEWHERE

Wicked Thoughts has just put an atom bomb under another one of Brian Leiter's arguments. The only possible way Leiter will be able to cope with it will be by ignoring it.

SUVs: "Motorists who buy big four-wheel-drives to be safer on the roads could be doing the wrong thing, according to the latest crash research. A study of more than one million crashes involving vehicles manufactured between 1982 and 2000 has revealed higher injury rates for people in four-wheel-drives. The worst performer was the Toyota Landcruiser"

An interesting editorial in "The Australian" suggesting that the leadership in the three Anglosphere countries of the USA, the UK and Australia are all preaching a future-oriented message of hope rather than delving back into the animosities of the past.

A good commentary here on the absurd "unfair dismissal" laws introduced by Australia's last Leftist government and defended fiercely by them ever since. Now that Australian conservatives have control of our Senate, the laws concerned should soon be repealed.

More evidence that the Australian Labor Party is much further to the Right than the U.S. Democrats. A recent declaration by a Labor party spokesman: "Labor's future economic policies will be tailored to enrich the affluent as much as the poor"

Surprising realism from San Francisco: "A Latino attorney general? A black woman as secretary of state? Who would have imagined it 50 years ago--or even, more recently, say, during the Clinton administration? Give President Bush credit for breaking barriers that his Democratic predecessor never got around to. Just don't tell that to white liberals thrilled with the idea of minorities doing well--as long as liberals can claim credit. If they can't, or if the minorities happen to be conservative, things can get messy. The American people are about to get a sense of just how messy, now that Bush has nominated Alberto Gonzales to head the Justice Department and Condoleezza Rice to run the State Department".

There is an article here which disputes the claim that prohibiting abortion leads to large numbers of deaths at the hands of "back-yard" abortionists.

The Leftist nonsense about "curing" criminals fails again: "Nonviolent drug offenders diverted to rehabilitation programs under Proposition 36 had higher rates of rearrest than those who remained in the criminal-justice system, a UCLA study released today says. Researchers found that offenders who enrolled in treatment programs created by the 2000 ballot measure were 48 percent more likely to be arrested for a drug offense within a year than those who entered treatment through drug courts or as a term of their probation".

Chris Brand has been having a good chortle over derogatory comments about British education made by Prince Charles. I have transferred Chris's post on the subject here.

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

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

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

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

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

FROM BROOKES NEWS

US economy: storm clouds ahead What needs to be understood is that the so-called business cycle is a monetary phenomenon that presidents can do nothing about until the economics profession comes to understand that fact
Professor John Quiggin gets it wrong on taxes and jobs The idea that any government cure unemployment by simply putting people on the public payroll should be too absurd to consider
Arafat: A Guerrilla and Statesman? I Want To Gag! Arafat, the godfather of modern terrorism, was barely cold and yet world dignitaries and the media rushed to offer their condolences
The Clinton Legacy: the 2004 Presidential Election Did Americans need a kinder gentler President Bush,to lead our country in the war against terrorism? No. Only Kerry, the Democrats, and the terrorists thought we did

Details here

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

ELSEWHERE

Interesting that there now seem to be several scientists who are contending (as I immediately did) that the "hobbit" bones discovered recently in Indonesia are not of a new species at all but are rather the bones of a race of homo sapiens. See here and here. The initial claims that the bones were of a new species focused on what were claimed to be different facial features but anyone who has seen the pictures of Truganini, the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine, will see very similar features to that of the "hobbit" -- though Truganini did have a much higher forehead -- higher even than most modern-day Westerners. More recent claims, however, focus on the proportionately longer arms of the "hobbit", identifying that as a crucial difference from modern man. As I myself and various of my relatives have unusually long arms, however, I think this is clutching at straws too. I think there can be little doubt that all the characteristics of the "hobbit" can be found in modern man too. Even the very short stature is not all that unusual. I was at a Vietnamese restaurant recently when a Vietnamese family who were also dining there got up and left. I noted that the elderly matriarch of the clan cannot have been much above 4' tall. And Vietnam is quite close geographically to Indonesia. But a country that is even closer to Indonesia is Australia and there are still pygmies in Australia too. See here and here for my previous posts on that matter.

Those pesky genes again: "Genetic factors influence female infidelity and the number of sexual partners women have, British scientists said on Wednesday. They studied the responses of 1,600 pairs of identical and non-identical twins in a confidential survey to look at the impact of genes on behavior. "We found that around 40 percent of the influence on the number of sexual partners and infidelity were due to genetic factors," Professor Tim Spector, director of the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas' Hospital in London, told a news conference".

What happens when the law is an ass: "A mob angry about recent child abductions cornered plainclothes federal agents taking photos of students at a school and burned the officers alive, mistaking the agents for kidnappers in the latest example of vigilante justice in a country beset by high crime."

The Clinton library: "Maybe I haven't visited enough presidential libraries. And, yes, I do know they all inevitably have something worshipful about them; it's in their nature. But I can't recall anything - anything! - so blatantly partisan, so full of just plain bullfeathers, so completely . . . Orwellian in its approach to the truth as one display at the newly opened Clinton Library here in Little Rock...."

A message to Europe about American values: "If these beliefs seem strange to you, they shouldn't. For these are precisely the beliefs that powered Western Europe - you -- from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, on to the Enlightenment, and forward into the modern world. They are the beliefs that made Europe itself the glory of Western civilization and - not coincidentally - ignited the greatest outpouring of art, literature, music and scientific discovery the world has ever known including Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Issac Newton and Descartes. It is your abandonment of these beliefs that has created the gap between Europe and the United States. You have ceased to be a Judeo-Christian culture, and have become instead a secular culture. And a secular culture quickly goes from being "un-religious" to anti-religious. Indeed, your hostility to the basic concepts of Judaism and Christianity has literally been written into your new European Union constitution, despite the Pope's heroic efforts to the contrary.

Tim Worstall is having a good laugh over the fact that the most successful program yet for dealing with sexual offenders was devised and carried out by a Christian group. One in the eye for the know-all "professionals" who are always talking about curing criminals rather than punishing them but who have yet to find a way of doing so.

Leftist amorality: "Those who cannot stand President Bush don't realize that any philosophy or political vision that lacks the idea of good and evil will not fly with most Americans. Liberals excuse most evil with stories about bad luck, disease and other impersonal forces that make people do bad things. Good deeds, in turn, come about through good luck. There are a few matters about which even liberals moralize - sexism, racism or economic inequality. But assault, battery, robbery, burglary, theft, laziness, recklessness and the like, these are due to sad circumstances. That's why they believe the poor are all deserving, because they deny that poverty is ever the result of irresponsibility. The basic thesis behind the modern liberal mentality is the denial of free will.... Unless they toss their derisive attitude toward the rest of us who think it is perfectly sensible to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, the sophisticated ones will be seen for what they are: People essentially lacking a serious understanding of our distinctive human nature."

Why liberals can't compete in the values arena: "Liberals and traditionalists are talking about entirely different things when they address values. Like Big Brother in George Orwell's chilling novel 1984, liberals employ a NewSpeak lexicon in which the word values is unrelated to its historical meaning. Two things explain this gulf. First, liberalism is the American sect of the international religion of socialism. Second, socialism is a secular and materialistic religion. When liberals speak of values they are talking about material goods and services, which are presumed to flow exclusively from collectivized government. Those values fall under the heading of so-called social justice, or redistribution of income and property as equally as possible."

Who's afraid of inequality? "Because inequality springs from diversity, individuality, talent and creativity, it should be celebrated and the institutions that allow it protected. History and theory show that the use of naked government aggression is not a moral or efficacious way of dealing with poverty. Rather, the market economy, the best system for poverty alleviation, is to be strengthened and supported through property rights and the rule of law."

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

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

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

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

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

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

To all my American readers. And for those blessed with the faith may it be a holy day too.

Australia is nearly a whole time zone ahead of the USA so you might well be reading this before your Thursday. Thanksgiving Day is of course a specifically American holiday. Australia does not celebrate it nor do we have anything similar. Athough we have many holidays, our only feast day is Christmas day. I have put up here some reasons why conservatives in particular have reason to be thankful today. And for the lesson that Thanksgiving itself has to conservatives, see here. But let me finish with some wonderful words from the great inspirer:

"While never willing to bow to a tyrant, our forefathers were always willing to get to their knees before God. When catastrophe threatened, they turned to God for deliverance. When the harvest was bountiful, the first thought, was thanksgiving to God. Prayer is today as powerful a force in our nation as it has ever been. We as a nation should never forget this source of strength. ... Through the storms of Revolution, Civil War, and the great World Wars, as well as during times of disillusionment and disarray, the nation has turned to God in prayer for deliverance. We thank Him for answering our call, for, surely, He has. As a nation, we have been richly blessed with His love and generosity." --Ronald Reagan

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

ELSEWHERE

GWB's firmness pays off: "France told an international conference on Iraq Tuesday it was time to put aside differences over the U.S.-led invasion and help the country put an end to violence".

NewMark's Door has a useful roundup of the various ways in which the Berkeley claims of voter fraud in Florida have been demolished.

Sad news: The geneticists are avoiding research that might produce a cure for Alzheimers disease because the incidence of Alzheimers correlates with both race and IQ. So finding the genetic details behind Alzheimers might also lead to finding the genetic basis for high IQ and race -- and that would be political dynamite. It would cause the Left to go into paroxysms of denial, with the scientists concerned being immediately labelled as "Nazis" etc. So once again the Left are the chief enemies of human welfare.

Amazing! Rupert Murdoch writing an editorial in the WSJ! As if his own media outlets are not enough! But the WSJ is frantically pro-immigration and so is Rupert so it is not so surprising after all.

Krauthammer is being a bit simplistic in saying that GWB can do what he likes in his second term because he has no heir waiting in 2008. He does. His brother Jeb. Jeb has said that he is not interested but that is probably just an opening gambit. And with his Hispanic connections Jeb would hoover up the big Hispanic vote: Plenty to put him in the White House. Only Arnie would have greater public appeal and getting the constitutional barrier cleared for him before 2008 is a big ask.

The United Church of Christ, a "peace with justice" church (translation: "appeasement and socialism" church) is trying its hardest to get time for Iran to develop nuclear weapons! There is a copy of an email from them here which says that "possession of a nuclear weapon is the best deterrent to a pre-emptive strike by the United States". Americans are greatly endangered by such America-haters of the Left.

U.S. Presbyterians admire Hezbollah but don't like to admit it: "Two officials of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have left their jobs one month after taking part in a meeting with Hezbollah, a Lebanese group listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. In an announcement yesterday, the Louisville-based denomination gave no reason for the departures of Kathy Lueckert and Peter Sulyok, nor did it say whether they had resigned or been fired.... John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, announced their departures "with sadness" in a memo to staff. He declined to comment further.... What generated particular controversy were the comments of one member of the committee who made the trip, Ronald Stone, a retired professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In a news report widely broadcast on Arab television, Stone told Hezbollah leaders that "according to my recent experience, relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders."" [The church was obviously not outraged enough to sack the antisemites].

Sowell: "At least as far back as the 1930s, the intelligentsia and others have warned against military spending as setting off an "arms race" in which each side escalates its military buildup in response to the other, making the whole thing an expensive exercise in futility. The same notion was repeated throughout the long years of the Cold War. Today's version is that, no matter how many Middle East terrorists we kill, new ones will take their place and we will have nothing to show for all our efforts and sacrifices. People who talk this way are completely undaunted by the fact that Ronald Reagan proved them wrong during the Cold War."

Senate: It's time to "go nuclear" : "With Democrats not flinching, it's time for the Republican leadership to exercise the mandate on judges handed to them by the American people. In other words, it's time to 'go nuclear.' The so-called Nuclear Option is nothing more than a correction of the current interpretation of Senate rules to reflect the unconstitutionality of filibustering judicial nominations. It would rely on a ruling from the Chair -- most likely Vice President Dick Cheney -- that would declare such a filibuster unconstitutional. The majority would then uphold that ruling by simple majority vote."

There are reports that Europeans are boycotting American products as a result of the recent U.S. election. David's Medienkritik has some sarcastic comments.

Keith Burgess-Jackson has a great attack on the racist, sexist and homophoblic bigotry of the Left.

Fabian's Hammer has changed his focus a bit recently. Instead of concentrating just on China, he is now focusing on Maoists worldwide. There are still an amazing number of such dismal critters around, unfortunately.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots of interesting links

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

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

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

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

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

LAKOFF AGAIN

A message has come down from an ivory tower in the People's Republic of Berkeley in the form of an article in The Nation by linguistics professor George Lakoff. He is trying to do what he calls "framing" -- what others might call "agenda-setting". He has seized on the survey results that show moral values to have been important to some people who voted for GWB in the last election. He wants to convince Democrats to campaign on moral values too -- but different moral values. He wants Democrats to proclaim that their moral values are better and truer and more American than those silly conservative moral values.

Nice try, George! But it won't wash. Why? Because one of the most consistently proclaimed assertions of Leftist intellectuals like George is that there is no such thing as right and wrong and that all values are arbitrary. So who is going to believe that all these preachers of moral relativism have suddenly become committed to high moral values? George is trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Sudden conversion to morality will be seen for the hypocrisy that it is.

And I have to laugh at George's first sentence: "We are the 55 million progressives who came together in this election, voted for Kerry and rejected the Bush agenda". Is that a Royal "we" George? The presumption of a Berkeley professor pretending to speak for 55 million diverse Americans is hilarious -- and his claim that the 55 million were all progressives certainly strains beyond breaking point the meaning of that much-abused word. The vast majority of the Kerry voters were minorities who think the Dems will give them more handouts. And a lot of those minorities have very punitive views on many things -- such as wanting homosexuals to be castrated. Is that "progressive"? If you say so, George.

In reality, of course, the only thing the Left of politics believe in is power -- as I pointed out yesterday. They may claim to have such values as "tolerance" but as Christ said: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:20) and never has there been such an outpouring of intolerance and hate-speech from the Left as what we have seen recently. As this Australian writer says: "It's amazing the amount of vitriol that has been launched by people who paint themselves as "tolerant liberals" against evangelical Christians in recent months. There are pages of this stuff in the Sydney Morning Herald's "Webdiary". In almost all cases these critics have not spent two minutes actually investigating what Family First Party or evangelical Christians actually support. Is this not the very definition of ignorant prejudice?" And we all know how much "tolerance" Christians and conservatives get on American university campuses. Read here if you don't.

Dennis Prager is also good on the divergence between normal American values and what the Left do and advocate. One excerpt: "To most Americans, Michael Moore is a Marxist who has utter contempt for most of his fellow Americans, who goes abroad and tells huge audiences how stupid and venal his country is, and in his dishonest propaganda film, portrays the American military as callous buffoons. Yet, this radical was given the most honored seat at the Democratic Party convention in Boston, next to former President Jimmy Carter. To most Americans, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are race-baiting demagogues. Yet they are heroes to the Democratic Party. Most Americans do not see their country as the bigoted and racist nation regularly depicted by both black and white Democratic leaders. To most Americans, a man who wears women's clothing to work is a pathetic person in need of psychotherapy. To the Democratic Party, he is a man whose cross-dressing is merely another expression of multiculturalism. The California legislature, controlled by Democrats, passed a law prohibiting employers from firing a man who shows up to work wearing women's clothing."

I have more on Lakoff 's Mommy/Daddy theory of values here. (Hint: In Lakoff's predictable Leftist world, Daddies are hopeless unless they become like Mommies. Maybe Lakoff's father used to beat the tar out of young George and every Daddy in the world now gets the blame. Given Lakoff's talent for overgeneralization, I would not be at all surprised).

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

ELSEWHERE

There is another article here (and a previous one here) which portrays GWB as very much his own man who bows to nobody in the pursuit of his agenda: Not all a puppet of the "neocons" or anybody else. The Left portray GWB as a puppet of Karl Rove or the neocons because they cannot admit how smart and capable he is beneath his relaxed Texan manner. And some conservatives portray him as a puppet because they don't want to face the fact that their guy is more realistic than they are about such things as immigration, Iraq and how to use government. Both groups are kidding themselves and would do a lot better to face reality instead of indulging in puerile conspiracy theories.

A blog I particularly enjoy is Blithering Bunny. He has up at the moment some quite amazing stuff about the EU. It is hard to decide which is more corrupt: The EU or the UN. The EU certainly shows that the great European tradition of authoritarian government (e.g. Bismarck, Hitler, the Tsars and various Kaisers both Austrian and Prussian, Lenin, Stalin, Napoleon, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Papadopoulos, Horthy etc etc) is still alive and well. And why am I not surprised to read this: "Jose Manuel Durrao Barroso, New president of the European Commission, former Prime Minister of Portugal: As a young man, he was an activist in the extreme left-wing Maoist Party"? And they have the cheek to criticise the great Republic, the USA!

The Iraq insurgents are undoubtedly organized but by whom? "There is a growing conviction among some foreign observers and American intelligence experts - though apparently not yet in the Pentagon - that what is happening now in Iraq is not just the reaction to the American occupation by a small group of "dead-enders" (as suggested by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) or a spontaneous insurgency. Indeed, these observers believe that the suicide bombers, the roadside bombs and the attacks on Iraqi police and other so-called "collaborators" in Mosul and the Sunni towns in the Tigris valley are part of an organized guerrilla war... The events of the past few weeks do seem to point to a well-organized and -planned campaign against the coalition forces. As soon as American troops smash resistance in one place, such as Fallujah, it pops up elsewhere. Hundreds of well-armed and organized insurgents attacked the key city of Mosul earlier this month and took nine police stations; the stations have been recaptured, but the attacks caused mass desertions among the police force".

"With the absentee votes in California and Washington finally counted, it appears that overall turnout was up 12 percent. John Kerry's popular vote was also 12 percent above Al Gore's. But the popular vote for Bush was up a stunning 20 percent. Before the election, some liberal commentators were claiming that Bush would win no votes he hadn't won in 2000. Not quite: He won 10 million more".

Wayne Lusvardi has an article up which asks: Did we have to destroy Falluja to save it?

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

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

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

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

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

LEFTISTS DROP THE MASK

I must say that I have been totally surprised at the way the American Left has dropped the mask in the post-election period. These great advocates of equality and mockers of IQ are suddenly breaking out all over to proclaim that they are elitists and saying how much more intelligent they are than anyone else; these great defenders of the common man have suddenly started to abuse in the vilest terms all the common men who voted for George Bush; these pretenders to such high principles as "tolerance" and "compassion" have suddenly started admitting that only power matters to them; and these great opponents of racism are abusing America's most prominent black woman using the vilest racial slurs and images (e.g. here). All the things that I have long said about the Left are suddenly being confirmed by Leftists themselves.

Tyrrell proclaimed in the 80s that the American Left was undergoing a "crackup". I think it is clear now that the crackup is complete. If the Democrat party is ever to win national elections again it will have to do what the Australian Labor party did years ago -- firmly distance itself from such loonies and become little more than an alternative conservative party. Now that they have given up pretending to be what they are not, real Leftists have put themselves outside mainstream politics.

There are some good posts showing the utter lack of any consistent principle in Leftist arguments here and here and here.

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

ELSEWHERE

There is is an apparently popular homosexual/Left-oriented blog called "Americablog". It is one of the most misnamed blogs there is. Here is a sample of its "wisdom": "It's high time we started fighting back against the far-right and their religious coup against our democracy. And I think the way to do it is to give them what they want, and watch the American people freak out. First off: 1. A constitutional amendment banning divorce; 2. A federal law making adultery a felony; 3. A federal law making blow jobs (i.e., sodomy) a felony, even for married couples in the privacy of their own homes. We can then move on from there later. I'm quite serious. The next time the fundies want an amendment "protecting" marriage, we ought to give it to them". The author is obviously totally absent from the real world and its politics -- whether in America or anywhere else. Good to see, though. The more such voices are heard on the Left, the less likely the Left are ever to win anything. The blurb about the author of the blog says: "John Aravosis is a Washington DC-based writer and political consultant, specializing in using the Internet for political advocacy". May he get lots of Democrat customers! He doesn't even seem to know the difference between blow-jobs and sodomy! The world of the Left sure is a weird place.

Well, I was wrong about how the Democrats would explain their defeat in the Presidential election. As soon as I knew the result, I predicted that the Dems would blame their defeat on Osama bin Laden's threatening last-minute videotape. In actual fact, most of the Dems seem to have blamed their defeat on stupid evangelical Christians or on "rigged" voting machines (despite all the evidence that "it aint so"). It seems, however, that I was spot-on as far as John Kerry himself was concerned. He thinks his defeat was all Osama's doing. So my prophetic powers aren't so bad after all. In science, of course, the ability to generate accurate predictions is the ultimate test of a theory. Incidentally, it still cracks me up that in his videotape, bin Laden relied so heavily on the claims of Michael Moore. Even when he is trying to attack it, he still depends on the products of American culture!

What are Democrats about? "Once more, the theme of themelessness. Cover the Democrats for any length of time and you become expert in campaigns that don't seem to be about anything. They have policies; Democrats are good at policies. But all too often the campaigns lack a message -- a sense of what the candidate's about and what he aims to do. Democrats don't have a monopoly on such campaigns; if anyone can remember the theme of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential bid, he's probably got it mixed up with some other campaign. But John Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis ... never really delivered a compelling message to American voters. And there were times during each of their presidential campaigns when the candidates knew it, when they sensed they weren't connecting, brought in new advisers and asked what it was they stood for."

I should stop looking at Daypop.com. It leads me to so much amusing Leftist tripe that I hardly know where to begin in commenting on it. Anyway, a big deal in Democrat circles at the moment seems to be the idea of "Re-Branding" the Democrat party. As usual, they are relying on slogans rather than policy. But some of their slogans are shots in the foot. How about this one: "National security first. Presidential yachts later, Much later". I think most people would expect that to be a GOP slogan, given the Democrat wobbling on Iraq and John Kerry's expensive toys. And how about this: "Our Congressional leadership isn't under any sort of criminal investgation. That would just be bad form" I would be most surprised if that did not remind people of Bill Clinton's impeachment or Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. And how about: "Our God gets along fine with your God, or Allah or Buddha or... whatever". To equate the Christian God with Allah in a heavily Christian country is REALLY going to win the Dems a lot of votes, isn't it? And how about the sheer cheek of this: "We won World War II". Can you imagine how many World War II veterans and their families would be antagonized by that slogan? It was the blood of Allied servicemen that won World War II, not the fatcats of the Democratic party. And so on .... These galoots plainly have not got a blind clue about what they are doing.

Matthias Doepfner, Chief Executive of German publisher Axel Springer AG, has written a blistering attack in the daily Welt against the cowardice of Europe in the face of the Islamic threat: "Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work for us. ... In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner instead of defending liberal society�s values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China. ... For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy � because everything is at stake. ... While the alleged capitalistic robber barons in American know their priorities, we timidly defend our social welfare systems. ... These days, Europe reminds me of an elderly aunt who hides her last pieces of jewelry with shaking hands when she notices a robber has broken into a neighbor�s house. Europe, thy name is cowardice."

Old news now but good news: "The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state's hate-crimes law yesterday, saying the measure is too broadly worded. It was the first application of the 2000 law, which called for up to five extra years in prison for crimes in which the victim is chosen because of 'bias or prejudice.' Forty-eight states have hate-crimes laws, but Georgia's was the only one that did not specify which groups qualified for protection." For more on hate and hate-crimes see here.

I have just tried Google's new academic search tool: Google Scholar. It's got a long way to go. Using the search term "Ray, J.J.", it picked up only 38 out of my nearly 300 scholarly publications and failed to direct the reader to any of the copies of them that are online! Standard Google will get you to copies of all of them!

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

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

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

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

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

POPULATION DENSITY

My post yesterday about the correlation between high population density and Democrat voting elicited a bit of correspondence so I thought I should say more about it. The famous case of Kitty Genovese being stabbed to death while lots of her fellow New Yorkers looked on without raising a finger was of course mentioned. NYC people are of course famous for not wanting to get involved but they do have good reason for that. Crime there was at one stage so bad that getting involved would have guaranteed a short life. And the law there penalizes getting involved too. I understand that to this day you can be sued if you intervene to help someone and the outcome is not universally satisfactory. So crazy Leftist law is at least one reason for the NYC situation. If gun ownership had not been so controlled in NYC, for instance, Kitty Genovese's assailant could well have got his head blown off before he killed her. And NYC has such a lot of crazy Leftist law (including rent control!) because of its huge Jewish population, who to this day are still overwhelmingly lockstep Democrat voters. So NYC pathologies are a good example of some of the ills that Leftism leads to but there could be causes of the Leftism other than high population density. And it should be noted that the Netherlands have long had high population densities combined with a low crime rate -- though that has changed with the recent Muslim influx there.

On the other hand, psychologists have done a lot of work on the effects of crowding -- including some famous white-rat studies. And such studies have of course shown a great upsurge in pathlogical behaviour (including sexual deviance!) as a result of crowding. So while NYC is no proof of anything by itself, it must be admitted that NYC people and overcrowded white rats do have some things in common!

On the third hand, it could be argued that a largely parasitical underclass living on welfare and crime thrives only in big cities and "get out the vote" drives do end up with a lot of them voting Democrat. So it could be purely the tendency of big cities to attract an underclass that gives the Democrats an edge there.

On the fourth hand, the normal human tendency towards division of labour is at its peak in big cities. In NYC, people even delegate to others the walking of their dogs! So if delegation is such a habit in the big cities, it must seem fairly natural to delegate your caring and compassion too. And that is what Leftism offers. Leftism is caring shoved off onto others.

So in the end I do think that a crowded urban environment makes you less caring about those around you (and hence makes you more Leftist) but I don't think that that is the whole of the story. I think there are other causes of that big-city Leftism too. And it must finally be noted that what one person sees as overcrowding, many others (Japanese?) may not -- though there is surely not a total disconnect between objective circumstances and what is perceived.

Reliapundit has more on the subject.

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

ELSEWHERE

Ratzinger is right: "A leading contender to become the next Pope has launched a fierce attack on the forces of secularism, arguing that they were fostering intolerance in Europe and forcing Christianity underground. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 77, one of the Vatican's most powerful figures, said that liberal consensus had now evolved into a "worrying and aggressive" ideology. As a result, "Catholic and Christian religion" had been pushed out of the public debate and was being "driven into the margins". Coming shortly after European Parliament MPs refused to approve the Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione as European justice commissioner because of his strong Catholic views on gays and women, his statements might be seen by some as something of a manifesto.... Describing the development of a "secular ideological aggression" across the continent as "cause for concern", the cardinal said: "In Sweden, a Protestant minister who preached about homosexuality on the basis of an excerpt from the scriptures was put in jail for a month. "Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality, which opens up space for freedom for all. It is beginning to change into an ideology which, through politics, is being imposed."

Antisemitic Norway: "Norway managed to forbid Jews from marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a step the French haven't yet taken. The local TV2 News reported that no Norwegian Jews participated in Oslo's commemoration of Kristallnacht."TV2 also reported that the authorities, saying they didn't want trouble, forbade any Jewish symbols, including Stars of David and Israeli flags," according to Israel's Arutz-7 radio station. "On the TV2 evening news, a group of Jews and their friends who wanted to take part in the commemoration were shown being firmly told by a policeman to 'please leave the area,'" according to a dispatch from an American journalist living in Norway, Bruce Bawer, on AndrewSullivan.com. "This in a city where Muslim demonstrations take place on a regular basis, and include signs and banners bearing hateful, barbaric slogans.""

When an England football team that included some blacks played in Spain recently, some Spanish fans chanted racist epithets at the England team. See here for the righteous wrath over it. One of my readers however doubts that the motivation was really racist. He writes: "First of all it was really useful that it happened right next to the commentators microphones. Next, these "racists" seemed to only target one black player and not all the black players. Odd behaviour for diehard racists".

Jim Bennett's book about the Anglosphere is out at long last. See here. We might think that the co-operation between the USA, the UK and Australia is just a matter of "blood is thicker than water" but Bennnett shows it is much more than that. There is also a related site here.

One in the eye for those who say GWB is a puppet of the neocons: "Because Ignatieff originally supported the invasion of Iraq, there are people who think he's become some sort of apologist for the administration. Not so. Ignatieff is no fan of the president or, for that matter, the entire Bush clan, whom he refers to as "the Corleones of American politics." It is simply that "it never pays, never, to underestimate this president, intellectually or politically," he says. "He is not the cipher of Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice. He is the boss. There is absolutely no question about it. Sorry." [Ignatieff is a Harvard history professor]

Lileks is good on the Leftist hatred of the Boy Scouts: "Move over, OBL - our new national threat comes from the BSA. They're a strange, religiously oriented group that's stated purposes ought to make your blood run as cold as chilled mercury. We've had remarkable success in recent years keeping them from undermining American power, thanks to the U.S. military. But now it's official, and what was once a shadowy war is out in the open. The Pentagon has informed all bases not to sponsor the Boy Scouts of America.... Boy Scouts haven't been suing anyone for the right to hold compulsory God and country rallies in schools across the land. The American Civil Liberties Union is forcing the issue. The people barging into the courts are the ones obsessed that Boy Scouts might be using public school rooms after hours to learn knot tying"

There is a particularly amateurish version of Carnival of the Vanities up at the moment -- overdue as well.

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

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

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

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

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

SOME BAD NEWS FOR DO-GOODERS

Hunger campaigners help warlords: "When Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine was transmitted on BBC News on 23 October 1984, the idea immediately took hold that this was a natural disaster - `a biblical famine', in Buerk's words - which would be alleviated by massive food aid. There was a severe drought in the region, but the creation of famine was a military tactic of the Dergue government of Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu. For journalists like Buerk and activists like Geldof, the wars in Ethiopia were an inconvenience which were complicating relief efforts. Yet the wars were the principal cause of the tragedy... As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984-85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies.... Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory. One point is certain: the war which we helped fuel continued for another six years, claiming many thousands more lives.

Post-colonial Africa: "Today there is no public security. Slavery is found once more in Sudan, and sinister forms of domestic enslavement that involve the trafficking of children exist elsewhere too. Fiscal management is a farce- and Nigerian misappropriation of public funds is a farce played on a global stage. Transport is haphazard and unreliable. Education and public health struggle on in deplorable conditions. And nothing can be done without lies and bribes and payoffs at every step and every social and political level, all public revenues tending to leak away into private hands. Corruption is universal, malignant, and destructive"

Most poor people in our society would not be made better off by more money -- which is why lottery millionaires constantly end up broke.

How do you waste half a billion dollars worth of poverty-alleviation funds? Easy! You give it to a city government to spend. Excerpt: "City Hall squandered much of the half-billion dollars in federal aid it received over the past 30 years to revitalize its downtown and neighborhoods and to recharge its ailing economy, a Buffalo News investigation has found. Buffalo gets more federal community development block grant aid per resident than all but one city in the country because of its pervasive poverty. But three decades and $556 million later, there is scant evidence of the federal government's largess".

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

ELSEWHERE

Patrick Cox has a fascinating article in TCS showing that the vote for John Kerry was highly correlated with population density. The "Red" states do of course have generally lower population densities. He also quotes research showing that people in more crowded environments (like NYC) are less kind, caring and responsible towards one-another. He resists drawing the obvious conclusion so let me spell it out: Crowding makes you less "caring" and less caring people voted for Kerry. Why? Dead simple: Leftists are people who want government to do the caring rather than do it themselves. So of course city-dwellers voted for someone who promised more government welfare. It lets them personally off the hook. All the Leftist talk of "caring" is camouflage. They are really people who DON'T care. One look at how they behave when they get unrestricted power (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) tells you that. And they have lately become very vocal about their detestation of ordinary people. See Leftists as Elitists for many examples of that.

Wow! The Australian Left is learning even if the U.S.Left is not: "Mark Latham has dumped key Labor policies and embraced small business, the self-employed and the "upwardly mobile" as he attempts to reinvent the Labor Party and bolster his leadership.... Jettisoning the ALP's traditional preference for public-sector delivery of social services, Mr Latham embraced upward mobility in the workforce and promised the party would be driven by pragmatism, not ideology. In a key shift to its approach to the workplace, Mr Latham said Labor had to realise that workers were no longer just people on a job site that could be unionised. Instead he called on the party to make a philosophical shift to embrace "the upwardly mobile".... "The new middle-class is here to stay with its army of contractors, consultants, franchisees and entrepreneurs," Mr Latham told the Fabian Society in a speech in Melbourne.... Among the election commitments ditched yesterday were key pledges to provide free hospital care for over-75s, an $8-a-week tax cut for people earning under $52,000, and its $800million compensation and protection blueprint for Tasmania's old-growth forests.... Labor's policy soul-searching came as influential ALP figures called for the party to move back to the centre to embrace ordinary Australians. Australian Workers Union national secretary Bill Shorten warned the federal ALP would be consigned to more election defeats unless it widened its appeal beyond the nation's left-wing intelligentsia".

I thought that having values was "intolerant": "European interior ministers have signalled a tougher line on immigration by agreeing to bring in new requirements to ensure immigrants integrate into their new society. At a ministerial meeting in Brussels, all 25 European countries agreed to make newcomers learn the local language and what they described as "European values"."

The huge FDA bureaucracy failed to protect people so this galoot wants more of the same: "At least five medications now sold to consumers pose such risks that their sale should be limited or stopped, said a government drug reviewer who raised safety questions earlier about the arthritis drug Vioxx. In testimony yesterday before the Senate Finance Committee, Food and Drug Administration Reviewer David Graham cited Meridia, Crestor, Accutane, Bextra and Serevent. The nation is "virtually defenseless" against a repeat of the Vioxx debacle, he said." [Dismantling the failed bureaucracy concerned would make more sense]

LOL. The poor petals!: "Canadian censors are likely to approve Fox News Channel for airing on digital television starting next year, reports Toronto's Globe and Mail. The far-left newspaper describes Fox as "the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right."

Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknoll organization has done another dissection of Leftism that is worth reading.

Right Dominion has some derisive remarks about the new Bill Clinton library and its contents.

A note from a reader about my second post yesterday: "Congratulations....a milestone indeed and best wishes on his university studies. Our 5th grade son [my new step-son] goes to a Catholic School and we couldn't be more pleased....especially since it's about 1/3rd the cost of his old "elite" Episcopal school. We like the religious instruction, albeit Catholic instead of our Presbyterian/Methodist bent and the firm but fair discipline and even Jack likes wearing a uniform. And no surprise the parents are involved in everything. I went to 'hotdog' day at lunch and almost every kid had a parent or grandparent there."

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

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

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

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

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