HAIL THE CHIEF!

I am not terribly surprised to be reporting this, but the man who wrote the first program for the first personal computer (Bill Gates wrote the first BASIC compiler for the Altair) seems to be winning still. While Google are off with the fairies trying to break the grip of Microsoft on word processing and such things, they have taken their eye off the ball of their basic business -- searches. MSN Search now seems to index at least twice as many web pages as Google does (which would not be hard) and MSN does it much more quickly. Google can take a month or more to get a new page consistently available on their system, whereas MSN search gets it all up with systematic promptness. I have just installed the MSN Search toolbar on my browser and they will be my first port of call for searches from now on.

I am basically an investor in low-tech stocks but if I were an investor in hi-tech stocks, I would not be buying Google at the moment -- though hopefully, they may wake up to themselves in due course. Hubris tends to be self-correcting.

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ELSEWHERE

Patrick West correctly points out that Leftists have always celebrated "the community" (Gemeinschaft) and idealize a sense of community. Yet now they also celebrate "diversity" and "multiculturalism", which are antagonistic to the development of a sense of sharing or community. But Leftists never have had much concern for consistency, principle or logic. As long as they sound good at the time is all that matters to them.

Al Gore has repeated his "brownshirt" (Nazi Storm Troops) slur on conservative bloggers and there is even one Leftist blogger who seems to think that he has gone bonkers. America had a narrow escape indeed in 2000.

Those pesky genetics again: "Two New Jersey research teams are reporting discoveries about the biological nature of psychiatric disorders that may bring them closer to the ultimate goal of finding cures for complex diseases, such as autism and schizophrenia. Scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) have unveiled new information regarding the genetic, cellular and neurological bases of susceptibility to these diseases. Using data drawn from the Rutgers Cell and DNA Repository on 518 families, each with multiple autistic children, James Millonig and Linda Brzustowicz, assisted by Emanuel DiCicco-Bloom, led a team that further substantiates the link between autism and Engrailed 2 (EN2), a gene important in central nervous system development. Their research is presented in the November issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG)..... A second team led by Brustowicz and Bonnie Firestein, an assistant professor in Rutgers' department of cell biology and neuroscience, implicated a gene called CAPON in schizophrenia. A report of their research is available in the online journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine.... Researchers agree that there are environmental contributors to susceptibility to psychiatric disorders, but based on inheritance patterns of these diseases seen in families, the genetic component appears to be quite strong...."

I like it: "An advisory panel composed of over 100 Republican members of the House of Representatives has recommended ending all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The NEA is the federal government's chief source of funding for nonprofit theatre groups, dance companies, and arts presenters. The CPB is a major funder of noncommercial broadcast programming of the performing arts. The Republican Study Committee recommended that the two agencies be eliminated as part of its "RSC Budget Options 2005" report."

Raising the tax on hiring is the way to encourage job creation? "Louisiana is preparing to cut unemployment benefits, raise unemployment taxes on employers and trim spending on job training next year because of the mounting jobless claims after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, state officials said yesterday. Nationally, the number of job losses blamed on Katrina and Rita rose to 363,000 last week, the U.S. Labor Department reported yesterday".

Crusade misrepresentation again: "In 1979 I was taking a course on "Comparative Religion" at a highly respected, fully accredited, Christian (Baptist) four year liberal arts college. When we got to the section on Islam, we were solemnly informed that NO successful evangelism could begin with Muslims until Christians apologized for the Crusades. Not being the sophisticated, gentle soul you all know today I immediately threw up my hand to ask, "When do THEY apologize for the conquest of Christian lands in the Mid-east, Africa and the Byzantine Empire? When do THEY apologize for invading Spain, France, Hungary, and other parts of Christendom?" As I recall, the professor sputtered and mumbled and decided that it was time to move on to the next issue and I just wondered if the mush that passed for "Christian" scholarship had any intellectual credibility at all."... the Crusades were in effect a defensive war against a militant Islam"

A sad personal story about "white flight": "By this time all the good liberals who had nodded approvingly as all these changes were forced upon American society by judges, lawyers and bureaucrats were sitting in their suburban homes and school districts, smugly regarding the whites who remained in the cities as lowlifes and racists who were responsible for the problem in the first place: if it wasn't for the irrational prejudice of these neanderthal whites, the nice colored people wouldn't have anything to be upset about and things would be fine. It was always the liberals who kept the most distance between themselves and the blacks that were most anxious to make sure that everybody knew they weren't bigots. By the mid-`70s, the neighborhood was reduced to pimps and gangbangers driving around at 18 miles an hour with the lights off, the tax base was gone, the schools were shot, and Carter was president".

Antidemocratic Leftists: "When California lawmakers narrowly passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage last month, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he would veto it. Not because he opposes legal rights for gay and lesbian couples -- he doesn't -- but because he opposes treating California elections as meaningless. Five years ago, Californians went to the polls and approved Proposition 22, a ballot initiative confirming the traditional definition of marriage. Unless they change their minds or are overruled by the Supreme Court, Schwarzenegger said, their decision ought to be binding. As his spokesperson put it in a statement, ''We cannot have a system where the people vote and the Legislature derails that vote." Needless to say, liberal supporters of gay marriage had a fit.... today liberalism all too often displays a strong antidemocratic streak, and nowhere is it more blatant than on the issue of same-sex marriage."

See here for an excellent new blog from Germany (in English) by the noted Dutch author Leon de Winter.

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

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

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

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