FROM BROOKES NEWS

Consumer confidence and consumer spending equal twaddle Every day in some paper or other an economics commentator will solemnly write about the state of consumer confidence or spending
Australian economy: how high must interest rates go to stop the boom? The policy of unleashing an avalanche of credit into the economy triggered off an inflationary boom which eventually forced interest rates to rise
Keynesianism and interest rates Still lurking in the Keynesian woodshed is the myth that interest is a monetary phenomenon that is artificially keeping capital scarce
The myth of the neutral interest rate policy It is widely accepted that by means of suitable monetary policies the US central bank can navigate the economy towards a growth path of economic stability and prosperity. This view is false.
Phillip Adams: keeping the red flag flying and other media delights The far left's most embarrassing spruiker, Phillip Adams, is entering a twilight state of advanced, ossified senility

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Surprise! Leftist intellectuals back Cuba: "About 200 intellectuals, activists and artists from Latin America and elsewhere issued a letter Monday urging the top United Nations human rights watchdog to side with Cuba in an expected battle over the communist country's rights record..... Nobel Peace Prize laureates including Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina and Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala signed the letter, as did South Africa's Nadine Gordimer and Portugal's Jose Saramago, both recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among American signatories were actor Danny Glover, author Alice Walker and historian and activist Howard Zinn." [Leftists like Castro because when they meet him he sounds just like them. And he sounds just like them because he IS like them. The only difference is that he is in power]

Non-existent airline security again: "Federal agents arrested 27 illegal immigrants at the Piedmont/Triad International Airport in Greensboro, North Carolina. What were these guys doing when they were arrested? They were working on commercial jet airliners! You know, like the ones that al Qaeda terrorists flew into the Twin Towers on 9-11. This strikes me as a pretty lax approach to national security. These 27 men originally came from a variety of countries, including Sudan, Chile, Peru, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Venezuela, Mexico, and Laos. But they had one thing in common: they almost all possessed valid North Carolina driver's licenses - as well as other documents including airplane-repair licenses, phony Social Security documents, counterfeit green cards, and even a falsified passport".

Border security bill added to war spending plan: "The House today added a bill aimed at tightening border security to the $81.3 billion war spending package, a politically charged measure that has drawn criticism from Mexico but praise from some lawmakers for thwarting terrorism. By voice vote, the House attached the bill that would require states to verify they aren't giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses, would give judges broader power to deport political asylum seekers whom they suspect may be terrorists and would allow the completion of a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border."

Another female columnist comments on Estrich: "Take Susan Estrich, the fiftysomething American feminist law professor and commentator, and her battle with Michael Kinsley, opinion page editor of the Los Angeles Times.... Entertaining as it is, the now-famous email exchange (at http://www.dcexaminer.com) exposes two things: that Estrich doesn't deserve a column in the Los Angeles Times because she can't write coherently; and that what "popped her cork", to use Kinsley's phrase, was actually a Los Angeles Times opinion piece ... written by a woman. Only it was the wrong sort of woman, a conservative. The catalyst for Estrich's rage was an article, headlined, "Feminist Fatale: Where are the great women thinkers?", which claimed that ideological feminism had "ghettoised and trivialised the subject matter of women's writing" and "tried to systematically shut out - and shout out - dissent". The article was by Charlotte Allen, an elegant writer who edits the inkWell weblog for the Independent Women's Forum, an American pro-woman organisation run by women, established "to combat the women-as-victim, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism".... Estrich wanted a column in the Los Angeles Times and thought she could bully her way into one. Her brand of feminism is reserved only for women like her, which is probably why it has lost its appeal".

Peace freak: "A member of an evangelical church that preaches non- violence pulled a gun at a weekly service and fatally wounded seven parishioners before killing himself. The man, identified as Terry Ratzmann, 45, shot 11 people as he walked down the aisle through the 80-person congregation of the Living Church of God at a suburban Sheraton hotel on Saturday, then turned the gun on himself.... Neighbours said that Ratzmann was a computer programmer and avid gardener who had built a garage, a greenhouse and a filtration system that collected rainwater for fish tanks, in which he raised trout. One neighbour described him as so gentle that when rabbits got through his fence, he snared them in humane traps and drove miles to release them. "He was the quietest guy in the world, the nicest," he said".

That "diverse" old Philadelphia: "Police and prosecutors concerned with a spate of killings in the city begged the public for more help identifying murderers. District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham vowed that her office will protect witnesses, even if it means sending a moving van to their home to take them to safety the day they come forward. "We cannot only move you out of the city, we can move you out of the state; we can move you across the country," Abraham said. Within the past eight days there have been 21 homicides in Philadelphia, including three in the late-night and early morning hours after the prosecutor made her appeal Monday. The latest deaths brought Philadelphia's 2005 murder total to 78, up from 66 at the same point a year ago, police said. Homicide Capt. Richard Ross said police have had to solve most of the crimes without the public's help."

Abortion: Britain's Conservative leader has come out saying that he wants abortion to be more restricted than it now is (One in four London pregnancies now end in abortion). He has won the endorsement of the Catholic Church over his remarks but whether he will have the guts to campaign on it in the forthcoming election remains to be seen. Details here

Israeli cabinet minister and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky is very popular in the White House so the Left loathe him. Steven Plaut has the story.

Michael Darby has re-emerged with lots of information about the state of play in disastrous Zimbabwe plus other posts on China, East Timor and slavery. See here (PDF).

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

My latest posting on MarxWords shows Marx's contempt for Disraeli. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" deals with the "missing" resurrection appearances in Mark.

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

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