Tuesday, August 16, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I offer an historically-based definition of conservatism

On Majority Rights I note a surprising victory in Britain -- where race-relations law was applied to protect whites from discrimination too.

On Greenie Watch I cast a skeptical eye on the story about Siberia heating up

On Blogger News I look at the controversy over whether the earth's atmosphere in getting warmer -- as measured by satellites and weather balloons.

On Political Correctness Watch I note that it is now officially incorrect in Britain to portray Osama bin Laden as a bad guy!

On Education Watch I look at whether American High School students really are poorly educated or whether they are just lazy.

On Socialized Medicine I note a striking example of how bureaucrats cover up the failures of public medicine

On Gun Watch I have a post called "All the news that's fit to slant" which notes how even FALLING deaths from gun use can be reported as bad news in the media.

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ELSEWHERE

Offensive British class-consciousness: "British Airways faced a fresh row last night over flying with empty seats while refusing to take passengers still stranded at Heathrow airport by last week's wildcat strike... Around 600 frustrated travellers were still waiting for their flights last night and BA admitted that the backlog would take until tomorrow to clear. However, the airline refused to say how many flights had departed with empty seats in first and business class because of its refusal to offer an upgrade to marooned economy-class customers.

How the pathetic British police "get tough": "Police have expressed regret for the treatment of a great-grandmother who was woken by officers at 4am, arrested and kept in custody for 13 hours. Eileen Kearsey, 79, says she was treated like a suspected terrorist when police followed up a complaint made two months earlier by her neighbour. She was eventually released without charge at 5pm the next day, after being questioned, fingerprinted and having a DNA sample taken."

Virginia: Court sustains loyalty oath in schools : "A federal appeals court yesterday upheld a Virginia law requiring public schools to lead a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance Edward Myers of Sterling, a father of three, claimed the reference to 'one nation under God' in the Pledge was an unconstitutional promotion of religion. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling that the Pledge is a patriotic exercise, not an affirmation of religion similar to a prayer. 'Undoubtedly, the pledge contains a religious phrase, and it is demeaning to persons of any faith to assert that the words 'under God' contain no religious significance,' Judge Karen Williams wrote. 'The inclusion of those two words, however, does not alter the nature of the pledge as a patriotic activity.' Myers and his attorney, David Remes, said they have not discussed whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court."

Leftist blogger Balletshootz has an interesting essay about political leadership in which he traces Democrat failure to their namby-pamby and vacillating ways. I think he has a point, though the constant comparisons of GWB to a chimp are pretty juvenile. The Left never seem to have enough of making that comparison, which doesn't say much for the depth of their ideas. I liked this quote: "Along the far left, the rhetoric is too shrill in tone and anti-authoritarian in attitude to signal fitness for any kind of leadership. These are the howls of the malcontented, the powerless, the wounded animals flailing for attention."

Leftists hate the truth: "I think it was Barbara Walters who unwittingly gave away the leftist media's secret the other night while supposedly heaping high praise on the newly dead Peter Jennings. Between gushes of admiration and sighs of sorrow not seen since the apostles lost their Lord, Walters waxed poetic about this Canadian-born socialist whose mother had raised him to hate America. On and on she went until, near the end, she offered the highest praise a leftist could fathom: "What made Peter great was that he knew there was no such thing as the truth." If there is no such thing as the truth then what was Jennings using as the basis for his reporting? Republicans know. He made it up".

A thought-provoking article from Paul Sheehan: "It's time someone praised and defended reckless teenage girls and young women who behave badly, dress provocatively, engage in risky sex, and get pregnant. They are the normal ones. The rest of us are the deviants. They are behaving in the most natural way. The rest of us are mutants.... Children are the most important asset in our culture, so society should be structured around this central reality. Instead, we are structuring society around consumerism - a treadmill of bigger homes, more possessions, more holidays, more glamour - for which we run the risk of becoming impoverished. When the pattern of peak reproduction at peak fertility is broken, as it is now, women are forced by economic circumstances or social pressure to postpone pregnancy. Collective fertility inevitably falls, usually below replacement level. Societies such as Australia's and most in Western Europe now depend on imported fertility. Immigrants".

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 8/16/2005 06:22:00 PM

Monday, August 15, 2005

 
ASIANS -- SOME COMMENTS FOR WHITE NATIONALISTS:

I have lived my entire life in a highly multicultural society so I am acutely aware of racial and ethnic differences. I grew up in an Australian country-town (Innisfail) that was only half Anglo. The rest were Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Maltese, Yuogoslavs, Chinese, Sikhs, TIs (Melanesians) and Aborigines (blacks). And when with that perspective I look at my fellow Anglo-Australians I see people of admirable restraint, fortitude, good humour and moderation in all things. But that is only the majority. There is also a minority who are shitheads and morons.

Now I could sound like an uncomprehending elitist in saying that. Maybe I am just wiping off working class people and glorifying middle class people like myself. It is however if anything the reverse. If anything I find something like three times as much good sense in the workers as I do in the bourgeoisie. But there are shitheads in both camps. And I find that even the difficult cases among the workers are not much of a problem to me personally. Because I was born into an Australian working class family, working class thinking and conventional wisdom is an open book to me. I know all the key words and key phrases and I defer to no-one in my knowledge and enjoyment of the brilliant Australian slanguage. And I certainly did put all that to the test when I spent a couple of years as a boarding house proprietor in a "depressed" area (Ipswich) of Brisbane. I was really dealing with the hard cases there. A significant number of them in fact came to me directly from "the big house" (jail). Yet such is the power of a shared culture that I was in all cases able to handle to my satisfaction the people concerned. I always knew the right words to use. The people concerned were a considerable problem to others (and to themselves) but they were well within my capacity to handle -- though the time I threw a druggie through a closed door was approaching my limits. Words are wasted on druggies. So there is no doubt that I am as much an insider to basic Anglo-Australian culture as anyone ever will be. I am of my culture and I appreciate it and enjoy it.

But much as I am at home among my own people, I am still delighted at the sterling qualities I find in Asians. I find scarcely any shitheads among them. And I put my money where my mouth is. I actually share my large house with Asians -- mostly South Asians. None of them are of course flawless human beings but when I think of their relaxed good humour, their intelligence and their unfailing politeness and restraint I cannot see that they are inferior to anyone or that they are anything but an asset to any environment they inhabit.

Now somebody will want to tell me that it is different in England. And it certainly is different superficially. The way just about EVERY small business in London is run by South Asians is pretty amazing (though the way English shop-assistants treat their customers makes it a lot less amazing). And when I am in England and I walk into one of those Asian shops I am greeted with the wariness and reserve that experience has taught the proprietors concerned. But I only have to exchange half a dozen words with the people concerned before all that changes. Because I genuinely like and admire Indians, that message gets through almost as fast as a bullet and it is soon smiles all round. I remember once when I was in an Indian shop in London and some old English prick was telling the Indian proprietor how great the English were and how the world owed them a living. As I walked out, I "accidentally" shouldered him hard enough to knock him over. I felt embarrassed that a fine Sikh gentleman had to put up with such crassness from the prick concerned.

And nor am I talking about immigrant Indians only. I have also lived in Bombay and I can only admire the cheerfulness, enterprise and good humour of the street-people there.

I certainly don't think that all races are equal any more than I think all people are equal but I also think it is absurd to say that there is something special about someone just because his skin is pink. Each case must be judged on its individual merits but it seems to me that on any non-racial scale of values the Asians average out well ahead. And we live in a century that will see that proven. Ironically, the poison that has held the Asians back so far is of Western origin -- socialism. If any people are instinctive capitalists it is the Indians and Chinese.

And the claim that Asian cultures are tribal is a grave misconception. Asian culture is a culture of reciprocity. So if you treat them well or do them a good turn you generate enormous feelings of obligation in return. So when I walk into an Indian shop where I am known and buy three samoosas for my lunch I will occasionally get a fourth one popped into the bag as a gesture of goodwill. What is problematical about a culture like that?

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ELSEWHERE

Sanity creeping in to the TSA at long last: "The federal agency in charge of aviation security is considering major changes in how it screens airline passengers, including proposals that an official said would lift the ban on carrying razorblades and small knives as well as limit patdown searches. The Transportation Security Administration will meet later this month to discuss the plan, which is designed to reduce checkpoint hassles for the nation's 2 million passengers. It comes after TSA's new head, Edmund S. "Kip" Hawley, called for a broad review in hopes of making airline screening more passenger-friendly. An initial set of staff recommendations drafted Aug. 5 also proposes that passengers no longer have to routinely remove their shoes during security checks. Instead, only passengers who set off metal detectors, are flagged by a computer screening system or look "reasonably suspicious" would be asked to do so, a TSA official said Saturday. Any of the changes proposed by the staff, which also would allow scissors, ice picks and bows and arrows on flights, would require Hawley's approval, this official said, requesting anonymity because there has been no final decision".

Arizona: Challenge to law on illegals dismissed: "A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 200 in Arizona, which prohibits illegal aliens from receiving some public benefits, has been dismissed by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The suit, brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Friendly House, a Phoenix-based nonprofit social service agency, was dismissed by U.S. Appeals Court Judges Alfred T. Goodwin, Johnnie B. Rawlinson and Thomas M. Reavley, sitting as a visiting judge. The panel said the plaintiffs had not shown they had been injured by implementation of the new law. 'The appeal is dismissed for want of jurisdiction. The district court record reveals that there was no case or controversy between plaintiffs and the state of Arizona when pleadings were before the district court,' the panel said."

An interesting argument here in favour of splitting Germany up into East and West again. The still socialistic East keeps Leftist politicians in power in the country as a whole. Rather like the way the socialistic North keeps Labour politicians in power in Britain as a whole.

Chris Brand has just done some new posts with lots of news about the increasing media acceptance of IQ

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 8/15/2005 06:45:00 PM

Sunday, August 14, 2005

 
THE MOST MORONIC ARM OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

Or the most visibly moronic anyway

The obnoxious TSA again: "No, I haven't got some great alternative but do I need to in order to notice that there's something amiss with the way the matter is dealt with? Here a coat must come off, there it doesn't matter; here you should remove your glasses, there it's unnecessary. Here the wrist watch needs to be put into that little tray, there it can stay on your wrist. And it goes on like that, from one airport to the next. And if you assume you have a clue what the next one will demand of you, you are in for a surprise. And for threatening looks, even words, should you make mention of the fact. Yes, words. Several times, after I make polite mention of the inconsistency of their procedures, a gruff TSA official has told me to 'shut up.' Other times I have been told that if I say another word, I will be arrested. And I do not mean a word like, 'I am about to carry some bombs on this plane,' but, rather, 'Why is there no consistency in how this procedure is being administered?'"

Does the TSA take the prize for bureaucratic stupidity? "Pretend you work for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You're a high muckety-muck at Houston Hobby Airport, and you've learned that a flight with 136 passengers and 5 crew will make an emergency landing there. It seems some passengers discovered a note in their seat pocket claiming a bomb was on board. You're responsible for getting these 141 souls off the plane before they're blown to kingdom come. Do you: 1. prepare to evacuate them ASAP when the plane touches down; or 2. find your airport's most isolated runway, order the plane to land there, and then leave everyone aboard for an excruciating hour. We can all guess which option the TSA brainiacs chose when Southwest Airlines Flight 21 was diverted to Houston Hobby last Friday."

Still no precautions against another Lockerbie: "Nearly four years after 9/11, Americans flying on passenger planes remain vulnerable to another terrorist attack in the air because of lax screening of the millions of tons of cargo loaded into the belly of aircraft, a three-month CNN investigation shows. While screening of passengers and their luggage has been shored up dramatically since hijackers commandeered four planes and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, little has changed regarding the security of cargo, according to an FAA inspector and the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission."

DHS might let air passengers keep shoes on: "The Department of Homeland Security is seeking new security screening technology that would allow air travelers to board flights without removing their shoes. The department also is testing a privacy-sensitive version of an X-ray machine that has drawn complaints because although it is able to detect weapons beneath clothes, the initial version also provided a nude image of travelers. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is asking companies to develop a machine that can examine shoes while still on passengers' feet. Agency officials hope to begin testing this winter. The agency also is testing a version of the contentious backscatter X-ray machines that will outline the human form while screening for weapons, unlike the current design that shows a realistic image of naked bodies."

More like perverts than security people: "Consider if one is looking for a needle in haystacks, and haystacks are passing through one's presence on an hourly basis. Would anyone grab a random handful of each haystack that passed by and expect to find said needle by examining in minute detail each piece of hay in that handful? Of course not. Yet most air travelers think an invasive search of a 45-year-old man traveling with his wife and kids, or running a rod down the skin-tight top between the breasts of a pretty 16-year-old blond girl with a tan and painted nails (all 20 of them -- I counted) makes them safer. I might join the march in the streets protesting this idiocy, but of course I'd be the only one on parade. My fellow citizens might even be provoked by my lack of support for our nation's hardworking security people."

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ELSEWHERE

Big victory for Arnie (and California): "In a victory for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Supreme Court overturned two lower courts on Friday and put back on the ballot a voter initiative that will determine who draws up California's state legislative districts. If voters approve Proposition 77 in November, it would take the responsibility for drawing the state's political map out of the hands of California's Democratic-controlled legislature and give it to a panel of retired judges. Schwarzenegger hopes the idea will enable more moderate politicians to win legislative districts that in the past have been carefully divided into Democratic and Republican strongholds. A legal battle erupted long before the election because its sponsors changed the language of the petition voters signed in 17 places before submitting it to state officials. Two lower courts ruled that the changes tainted the process but California's top court disagreed in a 4-2 decision, saying the changes were unlikely to have misled those who signed the petition.... The ruling ordered election officials to proceed with putting Proposition 77 on the November ballot."

A Leftist repents: "What he and a large part of the mainstream liberal-left don't and won't confront is that they have become the fellow travellers of the psychopathic far-right.... If you start by refusing to look Baathism or Islamism in the face, the logic of blaming everything on Tony Blair and George W Bush pushes you into making ever more excuses for the extreme right.... good motives of tolerance and respect for other cultures have had the unintended consequence of leading a large part of post-modern liberal opinion into the position of 19th-century imperialists. It is presumptuous and oppressive to suggest that other cultures want the liberties we take for granted, their argument runs. So it may be, but believe that and the upshot is that democracy, feminism and human rights become good for whites but not for browns and brown-skinned people who contradict you are the tools of the neo-conservatives. On the other hand when confronted with a movement of contemporary imperialism - Islamism wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar - and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal to boot, they feel it is valid because it is against Western culture. It expresses its feelings in a regrettably brutal manner perhaps, but that can't hide its authenticity.

Immigration and the welfare state: "More and more of my constituents are asking me when Congress will address the problem of illegal immigration. The public correctly perceives that neither political party has the courage to do what is necessary to prevent further erosion of both our border security and our national identity. As a result, immigration may be the sleeper issue that decides the 2008 presidential election. The problem ... will not be solved easily, but we can start by recognizing that the overwhelming majority of Americans -- including immigrants -- want immigration reduced, not expanded. Amnesty for illegal immigrants is not the answer. ... We must end welfare state subsidies for illegal immigrants. ... Without a welfare state, we would know that everyone coming to America wanted to work hard and support himself."

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 8/14/2005 08:01:00 PM

Saturday, August 13, 2005

 
A DEFINITION OF CONSERVATISM

Leftists talk a lot of nonsense about conservatism being opposition to all change, when every conservative I know would like to see a HEAP of things about the world changed. So what IS the basic core of conservatism? Below is how Keith Feiling, an eminent historian of the British Conservative party, defined what he saw as the lasting core of British conservatism over a couple of hundred years:

"It is a scepticism, amounting to disbelief in any purely intellectual process as a means to explain rights and duties or to justify political obligation. They distrust general notions such as "the community" and would argue that the despotism of reason may cloak as much sinister self-interest and self-deception as any other tyranny. Burke made eloquent how he hated 'the very sound' of abstract rights, insisting that men do not act on metaphysical speculations. And even more. His teaching was that the rules of politics are but morality enlarged, and that all moral questions are mixed questions; not to be resolved by pushing some one abstract principle to its extremity which must end in force, open or concealed, but always by reference to relation and circumstance and moral effect......

And it is not hard to see how that caution flows through to distrusting government, distrusting theory-based "reforms" and advocating individual liberty etc. (if my link to Feiling's article gets overloaded, you can also find it here and here)

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ELSEWHERE

Anti-democratic "liberals" (so what else is new?): "Liberals have been beating their collective breast in recent years over the Bush administration's post-9/11 assault on civil liberties. But Michigan Democrats--from Gov. Jennifer Granholm to the State Board of Canvassers--have joined ranks with a radical, 1960s-style Trotskyite group to deny state residents the most basic of all rights: the right to vote. The group, which lives in a Malcolm X-inspired fantasy world and calls itself By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), has been engaged in a long guerilla campaign to prevent the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) from getting on the state ballot. This initiative, backed by Ward Connerly, the California businessman who successfully spearheaded a similar effort in his home state, seeks to end, once and for all, racial preferences in public universities and state government. Polls have repeatedly shown that over 60% of Michigan voters oppose preferences"

Big labor destroys American jobs: "It is truly an amazing thing that the MSM (main stream media) has covered the breakup of big labor so much over the last week without mention of how anti-American labor always has been.... A union seeks to reverse economic progress out of economic ignorance and Democratic exploitation. Instead of getting a higher wage by being worth a higher wage to a free employer, the union seeks to get it through extortion: "give it to me or I'll go on strike, and with my Democratic friends in Washington I'll make it illegal for you to fire me while I'm on strike." This has nothing whatsoever to do with economic progress. It is one part economic ignorance and one part the Democratic exploitation of labor for their money and votes. It is shameful, disgusting, and anti American.... While the Democrats have legalized this domestic extortion, they have not been able, despite their best efforts, to prevent Americans from raising their standard of living by buying cheaper and better goods from overseas. This means that unionized American companies must close down and eliminate the union labor that made the higher priced, lower quality domestic goods. Unions therefore have destroyed major American industries, caused huge unemployment, not raised the general wage level, stolen from the poor, and deposited workers in the unemployment lines without a sense of how to contribute in a free country".

Far-Left lawyers: "the ABA opposes even laws that prohibit adult incest -- a position that would disgust the vast majority of Americans. The ABA also advocates not just abortion on demand but federal and state funding of it -- a position far outside the mainstream. And even in this time of war, the ABA opposes the federal law that requires universities accepting federal funding to allow the armed services to recruit on campus. ...the ABA's "Special Committee on Gun Violence," ...advances the view (according to its Web site) that "the perception that the Second Amendment is somehow an obstacle to Congress and state and local legislative bodies fashioning laws to regulate firearms remains a pervasive myth." This is a stunningly extreme (not to mention misinformed) statement. ...Within the ABA there is some hushed concern about its stagnating membership and creeping irrelevance to the practice of law. But precious few insiders are willing to recognize that the ABA is reaping what it has sown for decades: Its increasingly vocal advocacy of an increasingly extremist agenda appeals only to a minority of the profession."

A great post from an American expatriate in Tokyo. One excerpt: "Night or day, the Ginza district of Tokyo is impressive (actually Ginza is just one urban marvel in greater Tokyo), a cacophony of lights and pristine shop windows containing some of the most creative contemporary commercial art I've seen a longtime -- far better in design and aesthetic impact then some of the crap (to use Morgan Spurlock's word) that the non-commercial art elite tells us to digest (occasionally financed with tax dollars). The architecture and general design scheme around me was something I'd call postmodern sci-fi. The future had finally arrived and capitalism's mark was something that would have made Ayn Rand proud. I couldn't help but contrast the beauty, life, and dynamism around me with the stale and oppressive conformity and drab ugliness of an anti-capitalist ambience ("art" by bureau decree). The free people who walked around me were not obedient clones to an ideology "for a better world," they were manifestations of a better world - bourgeois materialism taken to its limits".

What a narrow escape America had from getting another psychopath (after Clinton) as President! There is still more coming out about the defamatory lies John Kerry told about Vietnam. Without the media covering up for him he would never have got past first base. Note this article: "Vietnam veteran Steve Pitkin claims that John Kerry pressured him to lie in 1971 when he claimed U.S. soldiers engaged in atrocities during the Vietnam War. Pitkin had been a key participant in John Kerry's infamous "Winter Soldier" hearings of the same year, which concluded that the U.S. military was allegedly engaging in war crimes against the Vietnamese..... Pitkin discloses that his lack of candor in the 1971 film clip actually reflected his efforts to avoid giving Kerry what he so desperately wanted: war stories about how American troops in Vietnam were daily committing war crimes in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide in that 10-year conflict. In the end, Pitkin said, he gave in to Kerry's pressure and made up allegations of war crimes."

Realism about nukes: "Yet the notion that the nuclear genie can be willed out of existence through the efforts of right-thinking people is as absurd as it is wrongheaded. Just as guns and knives will be with us forever, so too will the bomb. We need bunker busters because North Korea and Iran are using underground facilities to build weapons that threaten us, and we must be able credibly to threaten in return. We need to have nuclear tests because the reliability of our principal warhead, the W-76, has been seriously called into question, and China must not be enticed to compete with us as a nuclear power. In neither case does the U.S. set a 'bad example.' Rather, it demonstrates the same capacity for moral self-confidence that carried America through World War II and must now carry us through the war on terror. Looking back after 60 years, who cannot be grateful that it was Truman who had the bomb, and not Hitler or Tojo or Stalin? And looking forward, who can seriously doubt the need for might always to remain in the hands of right? That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it is one we ignore at our peril"

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

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

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 8/13/2005 07:43:00 PM

Friday, August 12, 2005

 
Brookes News Update

Is the world suffering from a glut of global savings? Explains why the idea that there is a glut of global savings is nonsense
Liberalism breeds terrorism Being a rational thinker, it is often impossible to understand how Democrats can be so stupid
Why should Israel retreat from Gaza? Will the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza be a victory for Muslim terrorism
Islamic fundamentalism? It just snuck up. Thanks to Muslim terrorists Britain's 'Bobbies' no longer just carry a nightstick as they have for generations but are touting submachine guns through London's theatre district
The ACLU: abortion right, death penalty for serial killers wrong? The Left are hypocritical in their arguments. They want to protect the guilty while saying it's OK to kill those helpless victims who can't defend themselves
Sewer Art Has Become "The Art of Law" California Attorney General Democrat Bill Lockyer used taxpayers' money to fund anti-American 'art'
Environmentalists Demonize CAFTA Objections leveled against the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by the environmental establishment organizations are exaggerated

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ELSEWHERE

I have to laugh a bit at the pomposity of Leftist blogger Neiwert. Apparently the Califonia chapter of the Minutemen has gained some Nazi hangers-on and one of them unfurled a Swastika flag at a recent rally. Neiwert is of course condemnatory. If it had been a hammer and sickle banner, however, it would no doubt have been seen as quite chic. Being myself a libertarian, the evil twins of Communism and Nazism are abhorrent to me and in my view anything associated with mass-murder should be abhorrent to all decent people. But that puts Neiwert's type outside the realm of decent people as they are only too quick to at least excuse, if not admire, such mass-murdering creeps as Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Trotsky etc.

Confirmation of my analysis of Leftism from an unlikely source. The following (dated August 11) appeared on a site called "Revolutionary Left": "In my attempts to research the contribution of the Hippocratic school to psychiatry I came across [Dissecting Leftism]. Not sure how it came up in a search, but anyway; I just thought I'd share this piece of sheer idiocy with everyone. I mean, this guy equates "leftism" with Nazism... rrright- and he has a PhD? Look at the list of his other websites- "PC watch," "Greenie Watch" and "Education watch." Why does education need to be "watched?" .... He's right on about me though, I'm a leftie because I want attention"

There is an hilarious story from Germany's major newsmagazine here saying that America is collapsing in the face of economic growth in China: "China's steep climb has left America in a collective state of shock. The era of American dominance is heading towards its end, the century of Asia - with China as its central point - has begun. . For most experts, it is only a question of time until the Chinese economy surpasses the American. .nearly everyday the Americans experience a feeling that was earlier unknown to them: They are being trumped. .Two unequal competitors are facing off in this struggle: There are the Chinese bursting with self-confidence . and there is the USA, economically and militarily number one by a long distance, but weary and increasingly plagued by self-doubts". The fact that America is in fact surging ahead economically because it can give all the shit jobs to impoverished Chinese to do somehow gets ignored. Leftists never can see the obvious.

Amazing media hypocrisy: "Nothing heroic done by American troops in Iraq is likely to make headlines in the New York Times or be featured on the big three broadcast network news programs. That fact has now been belatedly recognized in a New York Times opinion piece, but with a strange twist. After briefly mentioning a few acts of bravery in Iraq -- including a Marine who smothered an enemy grenade with his own body, saving the lives of his fellow Marines at the cost of his own -- the Times' writer said, "the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II." Think about that spin: The reason we don't hear about such things is because of the Pentagon, Bush and "the culture at large."

Black racism: Leftist, of course: "Conservative African Americans Tuesday slammed liberal black activist Dick Gregory for referring to a Cybercast News Service reporter as a "white boy" during a nationally televised cable news program Monday night. Gregory later apologized for the remark. The exchange took place during the "Hannity & Colmes" program on the Fox News Channel. Gregory and Cybercast News Service Senior Staff Writer Marc Morano discussed comments Gregory made during an Aug. 6 march in Atlanta commemorating the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Reading from Morano's article, co-host Sean Hannity asked Gregory to confirm whether he had made a number of controversial remarks during the event. The activist readily acknowledged that he had referred to Republicans as "white racist thugs" and called the United States "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet." But, when Gregory hesitated in his responses, Hannity turned to Morano for confirmation. "You don't have to confirm what I said," Gregory charged. "I've already said it. So I don't need no white boy to come on and say yes, he said it."

Good comment from Medved: "Media stories about the London bombing suspects suggest they became radicalized because of the 'oppression of Muslims around the world.' While it's true that hundreds of millions of Muslims live in miserable circumstances, who's actually responsible for that oppression? Fifty nations boast Muslim majorities and not one of them boasts economic prosperity and a functioning democracy. ... The true oppressor of Muslims is Islam itself, with teachings that destroy any chance of progress, peace or freedom."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again and quite well-done this time. Too often you get desperate attempts to be funny that just make the whole thing hard to follow.

There is also a big new lot of posts up from Chris Brand, with his usual total disregard for political correctness.

And Wicked Thoughts put up quite a range of funny-but-serious posts yesterday.

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

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

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/12/2005 06:39:00 PM

Thursday, August 11, 2005

 
A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF LEFTISM

This was written back in the 50s but there is still much truth in it. Some excerpts:

Strictly speaking, although he calls himself one, the modern liberal is not a liberal at all, but a collectivist. He is strongly defended by a dogma and when this is attacked he becomes contemptuous, derisive, and replies with verbal formulas and sarcasm. He has an unshakable, unrealistic conviction of his own infallibility and intellectual superiority.... Although modern liberals are actually few in number compared to true liberals or environmental liberals, their influence is felt out of proportion to their number because their anxiety presses them to force acceptance of their needs and since, by nature, they are clever, vociferous, and exceptionally articulate. They are the policymakers behind the scenes in government or the writers of articles of opinion in intellectual magazines and other media of communicatio

Characterologically this liberalism represents a misfired solution to the problem of guilt and anxiety: the anxiety gets bound up in political attitudes and ties, fixed to a specific and characteristic ideology. These "self-evident" truths the modern liberal sees as unshakable and unarguable, since any attempt to challenge them shakes the very core of his defenses and stirs up intolerable anxiety. The modern liberal ... is further from genital primacy [than the true liberal] and less capable of rational functioning. He expounds all the ideas of the true liberal, not any longer for their own sake, but because they give him the feeling of righteousness and purpose. His humanitarianism is largely rationalization. His concern for others is not at all sincere, as in reality he is quite venomous, and his sympathy for the underdog is merely a reaction formation. The modern liberal lives almost entirely in his intellect.

the [modern] liberal uses intellectual contempt, arrogance, and clever verbal castration. His wit is barbed, amusing at the expense of others. He is void of kind or gentle feelings, except superficially in his causes, and that of course stops all argument, since anyone who "feels so deeply" about the injustices of the world must be above reproach. This intellectualism is his chief defense against feeling, especially his guilt and anxiety which color and pervade all his attitudes. His anxiety makes immediate fulfillment of his needs imperative, so he tends to favor revolutionary rather than evolutionary tactics. Since his real problem lies elsewhere, he is never satisfied, but needs to advocate constant change and expediency rather than long-range goals

He can allow himself to be aggressive only in causes and abstractions. Any other aggression fills him with intense anxiety and leads him to pacify, compromise, appease. For this reason he is unable to assume responsible leadership whether it be in government or in raising a child. Privilege he wants as a right and not something that must be earned competitively. The liberal's intellectualism, guilt, and fear of the father leads directly to his egalitarianism. He feels guilt at his own success or advantages and is thus opposed to differences in social structure. Basically he needs to feel that all people are the same. They are brothers and should fraternize freely.

Many injustices are committed on the altar of social consciousness.... I do not mean to imply that a sense of social justice is pathological. One has to look at the source. In the [modern] liberal the express motives are not the real motives. There is a great difference between a stock altruism based on hidden guilt and a genuine feeling for the golden rule, reality based. This stock altruism is not open to argument, because the [modern] liberal does not argue rationally, rather he uses sarcasm to imply that any intelligent and reasonable person would think as he does. He supports his premise by rhetoric rather than logic. He mentions reason often in his arguments-and even enthrones it as a panacea but seldom is he open to it.

The modern liberal is contemptuous of capitalism. The expressed reason is that capitalism is cruel and heartless: the real reason is that capitalism is cruel to him, because it is a system in which individuals must compete on their own, which he cannot tolerate.[Thus the modern liberal advocates that the government interfere in the constructive work of others]. The expressed motive is to help those unable to succeed; the real motive is to eliminate success, so that he will not have to feel anxious and inferior.

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

ELSEWHERE

Lord love us! What has the world come to? In The Guardian, of all places, we find an article reporting that there is such a thing as general mental ability (popularly known as IQ) and that it is highly hereditary! I guess that after around 100 years of scientific evidence to that effect, the truth is getting just too hard to ignore. Excerpt: "Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry are trying to unravel how much genes, rather than environmental factors, affect a child's academic prowess. By analysing the test results of 6,000 twins, they were able to see clear genetic factors emerging for both numerical skills and reading ability. They compared test results for seven-year-old identical twins, who share the same DNA, with the results from non-identical twins, who only share 50 per cent of their DNA, to assess how much was down to genes. Yulia Kovas, who led the investigation, said: 'Our work shows that there is a substantial genetic overlap between maths and reading, but also between maths and general intelligence. 'It seems that there is a group of "general" genes that govern our achievements at school."

Further to my comments yesterday about Bruce Kovner, a regular reader who was once himself a NYC financial trader writes: "I knew him when I worked at CS in the early 90's. He was/ is everything he is described and even more. He was also fair in his dealings with banks when other hedge fund operators were complete shitheads. We sat down once for a conversation about markets. That conversation taught me a few things about trading which I haven't forgotten".

Blair gets a deserved boot up the backside: "Two of Britain's closest allies in the war on terrorism made scathing criticisms of the Government yesterday for being soft and indecisive in dealing with Muslim extremists at home. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both countries that co-operate closely with Britain against al-Qaeda, said that Tony Blair's Government had consistently failed to tackle Islamic militancy. In a farewell interview with The Times, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the outgoing Saudi Ambassador to London, said that he had been "going around in circles" during his 2�-year posting in a failed attempt to make Britain understand the danger posed by Saudi dissidents in London linked to al-Qaeda".

U.N. corruption: "A federal prosecutor investigating corruption in the $64 billion oil-for-food program issued the case's first criminal charges against a U.N. official, accusing a former Russian procurement officer of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from companies doing business with the United Nations. Alexander Yakovlev, 52, pleaded guilty to three counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, said David N. Kelley, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The charges could carry a penalty of up to 60 years in prison. The case against Yakovlev grew out of the United Nations' own investigation of its marred oil-for-food program, and it came on a day when a U.N.-appointed panel accused Benon V. Sevan, the program's former director, of receiving nearly $150,000 in kickbacks from a company run by relatives of former U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali"

There is an amazing post up on Strange Justice that shows what a huge problem are wrongful convictions in the USA and why so few get reversed.

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/11/2005 07:49:00 PM

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

 
EGO AND POLITICS

I often make the point that Leftists have big but weak egos. They think they are wonderful but need constant approval from others to reassure themselves of that. So they advocate anything that sounds good at the time regardless of any adverse long-term consequences that it might have.

The converse of that, of course, is that conservatives have no need of all that hoopla. They just quietly get on with lives that they are broadly satisfied with. Ronald Reagan, of course is an excellent example of conservative humility. As Nancy Reagan said: "I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie. He had absolutely no ego, and he was very comfortable in his own skin; therefore, he didn't feel he ever had to prove anything to anyone." And as Cal Thomas said: "He was hated for precisely the same reasons he was loved. He had convictions and made those without them look weak. ... He knew who he was before he came to office; he did not need the office to complete him." And Eamonn Butler noted Reagan's lack of egotism too:

"The pompous conceit of the media Establishment is parried by Reagan's own epitaph on his administration, which reveals his own complete lack of both pomposity and conceit, tempering his pride in having changed minds and changed events: "Men and women across America for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends, we did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.""

But Jeff Jacoby sums up Ronald Reagan's humility best. A small excerpt:

"But one trait has gone largely unmentioned: His remarkable humility.... But if no man was his better, neither was he the better of any man. That instinctive sense of the equality of all Americans never left him -- not even when he was the one with fame and power. I don't think I have ever heard a story about Reagan in which he came across as arrogant or supercilious. In a number of reminiscences this week, former staffers have described what it was like to work for the president. Several have recalled how, even when they were at the bottom of the pecking order, he never made them feel small or unworthy of notice. To the contrary: He noticed them, talked to them, made them feel special. Reagan climbed as high as anyone in our age can climb. But it wasn't ego or a craving for honor and status that drove him, and he never lost his empathy for ordinary Americans -- or his connection with them"

But, as great an example as Reagan was, one swallow does not make a summer so I thought readers might be interested in another example of an American conservative with vast influence but who nonetheless needs and seeks no praise or fame -- so much so that most people have never heard of him. I quote a few excerpts from an article about him by a Leftist journalist who, in a typically uncomprehending Leftist way, can only see the self-effacing manner of the man as "nutty"!

"If no one knows anything about Bruce Kovner, it is because he likes it that way. Yet the unassuming manner is camouflage for one of the most powerful people in the country, culturally, financially, and politically. Kovner, 60 years old and divorced, manages the largest hedge fund in the world and every year ratchets higher on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.... He's a neoconservative godfather. He is among the backers of the Manhattan Institute and the fledgling right-wing daily the New York Sun.... Most important, Kovner is chairman of the American Enterprise Institute. The right-wing think tank has supplied the government with the most powerful ideas in foreign policy in a generation... This is perhaps Bruce Kovner's signal (and shared) achievement: to underwrite what had been extreme ideas and bring them into mainstream discourse.... Now and then, Kovner's spending is directly political; last year, he spent a lot to re-elect President Bush. But his main interest has been quietly strategic: the idea factory. "Bruce is an intellectual. He understands the world of ideas," says Norman Podhoretz, the legendary editor of Commentary.... But again there is his outward manner: self-erasing. His press has been mostly limited to financial journals.... A socialite who encounters him at the opera is surprised by his schlumpy dress and regular-guy mien: "You'd never know he's a jillionaire." "One of his distinguishing characteristics is humility," says Thomas Carroll, president of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability. "If you meet him on the street, you would never know who he was. There's no fanfare, no pomposity, no effort to get people's attention." .... Kovner, over two decades, has underwritten the infrastructure the neocons have used to achieve their current prominence. On the fifth floor of the AEI building, the Project for the New American Century helped lay the ground for the Iraq war .... He plays visionary and psychiatrist to the AEI board. "He's brilliant," says Perle. "He's intellectually rigorous, balanced, and thoughtful.".... I gained the impression that everyone I had talked to gave me: that of a thoughtful, unpretentious, and highly reserved person, a man with a musical voice and a self-effacing manner"

And one of the comments about Kovner that the journalist records is insightful. It is a comment from another whizz in financial trading:

"Kovner's objectivity made him great. "If you can find somebody who is really open to seeing anything, then you have found the raw ingredient of a good trader-and I saw that in Bruce right away." Weymar told me that one of the most important qualities of a trader is ego strength, the self-confidence that allows a person to acknowledge his mistakes and not fall in love with his ideas. "The biggest risk in trading is hubris."

So we see again that a really strong ego leads to humility. It is weak egos who need to boast and cannot admit that they are less than wonderful.

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

ELSEWHERE

A reader has pointed out to me an amusing response to the Guardian article I mentioned yesterday. The article said basically that the poor were in desperate need of having more money shovelled at them. More money would reduce their stress and make them happy. But another constant Leftist theme that goes back at least as far as Marx is that money does NOT make you happy (See e.g. here). So which is it? Why bother redistributing such useless stuff? One never expects logic or consistency from the Left, of course.

What a relief! The shuttle got home safely. More from good luck than good management, though. NASA has a lot to answer for.

AFL-CIO splitup ominous: "Despite wide coverage of bickering among Big Labor's top brass, the mainstream media overlooked the real story: The acrimony among several union chiefs amounted to little more than political posturing, blame-shifting, and a wrestling match over control of more than $10 billion in compulsory union dues. These developments only mean that America will face even more union militancy and even more coercive organizing. All the fireworks aside, the power to force more than twelve million workers to pay union dues or be fired - the crown jewel of all Big Labor special privileges - was unaffected by the shake-up. At its core, the controversy was simply a debate over tactics toward achieving the same end: corralling even more workers into union affiliation.... These militant tactics involve attacking companies until they agree to herd their employees into forced unionism without even so much as a workers' vote."

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/10/2005 06:56:00 PM

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Blogger News I look at how to improve majority rights.

On Dissecting Leftism I note that up until the 1990s Sweden was Fascism in slow motion

On Greenie Watch I note that the antarctic is the key to sea-level rise but that the antarctic is COOLING overall

On Political Correctness Watch I report the failure of a religious vilification trial in Australia

On Education Watch I note that homeschooling in Germany is FORBIDDEN! You must obey! Not much has changed since Hitler's day.

On Socialized Medicine I report a case of public hospital waiting times forcing a British boy to go all the way to India for surgery

On Gun Watch a psychiatrist examines the anti-gun mentality

On Leftists as Elitists I note the colossal and unjustified arrogance of the Art world

On Majority Rights I look at ideology and IQ and note that Leftists are in fact DUMBER.

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

ELSEWHERE

There is a review in The Guardian of a book (The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier by Richard G Wilkinson) which claims to show that poor people suffer more stress and therefore die younger on average. So shovelling more money at the poor will save their lives! I expect that this will be a staple Leftist argument for a while now. But to say that the problem is money is just a typical Leftist kneejerk reflex. As a former boarding house proprietor in a poor area, I can emphatically confirm that the poor do indeed suffer more stress. But it is not for want of income. Australian welfare benefits are generous. When I was a student many years ago I lived on them myself with no adverse effects. No. The reason that the poor are stressed is because of one-another! The people they associate with tend to be stupid, dishonest and violent. And that leads to no end of stress, believe me! But it is too much to ask that a Leftist make any serious inquiry about WHY people are poor in countries that do so much to help them. To Leftists, it's "the system". In the Middle Ages it would have been "demons". Both explanations are equally empty.

There is a good critique of the incoherence of Marxist and socialist theory here. It's rather amazing that intelligent Leftists still think that way but the hate-filled conclusion they come to matters far more to them than how they got there.

Paul Johnson on antisemitism: "What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one). In Japan, anti-Semitism was and remains common even though there has never been a Jewish community there of any size.... Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts. Like all mental diseases, it is damaging to reason, and sometimes fatal".

A good quote from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Historically, Democrats had "rewarded the articulation of moral purpose more than the achievement of practical good."

Democracy demands ousting the incumbent class: "These days, there are fewer and fewer competitive congressional elections. That is a very worrisome trend, because political competition matters a great deal. More candidates for office and the increased turnover of representatives produce better choices for voters. Political competition also heightens voter interest, stimulates the adoption of distinctive policies by candidates and parties, and produces higher voter turnout. This is not the outcome our constitutional framers intended. The House of Representatives was designed to be the legislative body most responsive to public opinion. But the decline in competitiveness makes the House less representative. This is not the outcome our constitutional framers intended."

Don't get into a lather over sweatshops: "San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing the city council to adopt an ordinance that forbids the use of municipal funds to purchase uniforms and other clothing made in 'sweatshops.' Across the country, colleges often adopt similar standards for clothing displaying their school logos. North American unions, such as Unite Here, the apparel and housekeeping workers' union, often lobby to impose working standards for developing countries similar to San Francisco's proposed ordinance. Though these efforts are intended to help poor workers in the third world, they actually hurt them."

Huge savings by cutting out the government middle-man: "Extracting taxes and administering their redistribution is also very expensive and inefficient. Imagine the army of bureaucrats servicing that perpetual round-robin. His first modest proposal is that as much as possible of the money churned out via tax and then back via transfers and services to the self-same individuals should be left in their pockets. About $85 billion is churned in this way every year. If left with taxpayers, it would represent vast tax cuts. If all churning could be stripped out of the system, it would allow personal income tax to be reduced to a flat rate of 10 per cent, with a tax-free threshold of $20,000. That would enable a great many people to self-fund their health and welfare needs, to save, to buy income insurance during their working lives and buy annuities or otherwise provide for retirement".

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/09/2005 09:02:00 PM

Monday, August 08, 2005

 
HOW TO IMPROVE MAJORITY RIGHTS

We live in an era where it is a reliable source of acclaim to campaign for minority rights. I think however that there is a case for arguing that majority rights have become neglected in the process. I have a whole separate blog -- Political Correctness Watch -- where I document the favouritism that is extended to minorities of all sorts. It is of course a matter of mere logic that to extend favouritism to one group is to discriminate against other groups.

In my moderate, tolerant Anglo-Saxon way, I am not greatly disturbed by some degree of favouritism towards disadvantaged groups -- though I think that any help should be aimed at the individual with problems rather than at any group that he or she might belong to. The situation today, however, has got very much out of hand. Discrimination against some groups who are conceived of as the majority has become almost as brutal in its effects as the discrimination that was once aimed at blacks and Jews. Far from being defeated, racism of one sort has been replaced by racism of another sort.

And the target of most racism today is in fact itself a rather small minority -- straight white middle-class males. There are special favours for women, special help for the poor and all sorts of favoured treatment for sexual and racial minorities. The target for all hate, blame and discrimination are straight white middle-class males. This is enormously unjust in almost any morality and would be regarded as thoroughly obnoxious were any other group so targeted.

But again in my tolerant, balanced way I don't see that group -- one to which I belong -- as suffering greatly from most of the measures aimed against it so am inclined to write most of the discrimination off as just another one of the many follies of the world.

There is however one way in which the pervasive racism of the modern world DOES badly effect my minority group and it is also something that this time really does affect the majority -- the fact that group favouritism greatly impedes law enforcement and has led to considerable danger and suffering for many innocent and decent people. Some of the especially privileged groups -- blacks and illegal immigrants in particular -- have a very high propensity to crime and are yet allowed to rampage more or less unchecked in many instances. So I think every effort should be made towards eliminating this form of discrimination. Whether a gang is black, Latino, Asian or white should not matter a hoot. It should be cracked down on with all the force that the law can muster. And regardless of what the population of a particular neighbourhood might be, if there is a lot of crime there then there should also be a heavy police presence there. If the "zero tolerance" policies of Giuliani and Bratton drastically reduced crime in NYC, tough policing procedures can work anywhere.

There are of course many other ways in which the racism of the current era is offensive and I sympathize with the offence that many people feel in that connection but if we REALLY want to make a difference it is no good just sitting down and praying for utopia: We have to concentrate on the one most urgent problem -- crime. And only when we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement does it make sense to start pursuing less urgent goals. And it is my personal belief that once we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement, other forms of discrimination will be much weakened and other problems will be much reduced.

So how do we go about removing the handcuffs from our police and other law-enforcement officials? It will not be easy. The publicity that the Minutemen give to the silly games that go on at the U.S./Mexico border is an excellent start but ultimately the solution has to be political. And I can see no way in which what I have advocated is at odds with the claimed ideology of either of the major political parties. So people who share my concern should join whichever of the major political parties they feel most comfortable with and become single-issue campaigners within that party. There really is no other way.

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

ELSEWHERE

I must confess to being enormously relieved at the rescue of the Russian submariners. They were facing an awful death from suffocation. I am so glad that sanity prevailed and Western help was immediately requested -- and, of course, given. The Brits must be cock-a-hoop.

What the envious Wal-Mart haters ignore: "Wal-Mart hasn't just sliced up the economic pie in a way that favors one group over another. Rather, it has made the total pie bigger. Consider, for example, the conclusions of the McKinsey Global Institute's study of United States labor productivity growth from 1995 to 2000. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics and an adviser on the study, noted that the most important factor in the growth of productivity was Wal-Mart. And because the study measured productivity per man hour rather than per payroll dollar, low hourly wages cannot explain the increase. Second, most of the value created by the company is actually pocketed by its customers in the form of lower prices. According to one recent academic study, when Wal-Mart enters a market, prices decrease by 8 percent in rural areas and 5 percent in urban areas. With two-thirds of Wal-Mart stores in rural areas, this means that Wal-Mart saves its consumers something like $16 billion a year. And because Wal-Mart's presence forces the store's competitors to charge lower prices as well, this $16 billion figure understates the company's real impact by at least half".

Islamic perverts: "Last Sunday, an American journalist, Steven Vincent, had an opinion piece published in The New York Times, written from Basra, in southern Iraq. He warned that the British Army was allowing the power vacuum in Basra to be filled by Shiite religious groups engaging in a campaign of religious assassinations and constraining the freedoms of women: "At the city's university, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women's attire and make-up are properly Islamic." Retribution was swift. Vincent was still in Basra and he was abducted within 48 hours. His body was found on Wednesday. To call him a casualty of a war or the victim of terrorists would be a mistake. He was murdered by perverts. "Pervert" does not remotely confer the same aura and power of "terrorist". This murder was committed in the name of religion but, at its deepest level, was another manifestation of envy, impotence and sexual repression.

Brian Micklethwait seems to be getting more and more eccentric as time goes by. I always suspected that there was a crusty old Tory underneath his libertarianism.

There is a petition on Strange Justice that desperately needs more signatures. Please read it. It is the first online petition I have ever signed.

I have just put up on a Leftists as Elitists an article that rather blows the pretensions of the Art world out of the water.

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

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/08/2005 08:55:00 PM

Sunday, August 07, 2005

 
THE MISERABLE LEFTIST MINDSET

From an interview with media veteran Bernard Goldberg about his book "The 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America"

One of those essays in those first fifty-four pages quotes a piece that James Piereson wrote for The Weekly Standard.com on the occasion of President Reagan's death last year. Called "Punitive Liberalism", it's a great touchstone connecting the patriotic liberals of the FDR through LBJ era with those who came afterwards in the wake of George McGovern's failed 1972 presidential campaign.

Goldberg says, logically, that most liberals have never heard of Piereson's phrase. But its symptoms resonate with them nonetheless, "because they see themselves as more sensitive, and more concerned about their fellow man. They say, 'well, this is a country that polluted our air and water', which it did. 'This is a country which had racist policies towards blacks', which it did. 'This is a country that treated women as second-class citizens', which it did."

Goldberg is quick to add, "All these things were wrong", repeating the phrase slowly for added emphasis. "But most of us say, 'let's fix it. Let's make sure we don't do that anymore, and move on.'" In contrast, he says, the modern left dwells on these past transgressions. "It doesn't occur to them somehow that people are literally killing themselves to get to this country. That poor people all over the world want to come to America, because this is a land of great opportunity.

Despite that, Goldberg notes that many, but not all of America's cultural elites are uncomfortable with America's power (and possibly with the idea of power itself). "I think it stems from the fact that we do have a history where we did things wrong in this country. But for them it's always yesterday-they can't look forward. They enjoy that. They enjoy the fact that America isn't the perfect place. And it isn't."

"But you know what?", Goldberg asks rhetorically, "It's a lot more perfect than most other places."

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ELSEWHERE

Poor old Michael Totten! He seems to be a pretty reasonable guy in general but, like most products of a modern-day American education, he knows bupkis about history. His recent claim that Fascists are not Leftists is ludicrously ill-informed, as you can see here and here but his key problem is one that he shares with most people alive today -- a total unawareness about how different politics were before World War 2. Most people assume that the Left then were just like the Left of today. They were and they weren't. The big difference is that the prewar Left were as nationalist and racist as they are today anti-patriotic and anti-racist. More precisely, a prewar Leftist could be either a nationalist or an internationalist but it was the nationalist stream that predominated. Hitler was in fact part of the prewar Leftist mainstream. See here for a detailed description of what that mainstream was like. Even Marx and Engels were frantic racists. Marx mainly hated the Jews and Engels thought Germans were the greatest. Put them together and you get: Adolf! Marx died in 1883. Hitler was born in 1889. So Marx's ideas were very current in Hitler's day. The old patriotic prewar Left did carry over into postwar politics for a short while -- which is why Presidents Truman and JFK did and said the sort of thing that GWB is doing and saying today.

Forgive me while I laugh, but some historians have just discovered not one, but TWO new "Hitler Diaries". The only historian who immediately spotted the fakery in the last bogus "Hitler Diaries" was the much decried David Irving so I will wait to hear what he says before I take any further interest in the matter.

South Africa following the Zimbabwean road to disaster: "South Africa's 50,000 white farmers are threatened with forced land expropriation after a government land summit called for a 'fast-track' programme of redistribution. The weekend summit was convened by the government to review the slow pace of land reform in South Africa. Significantly, it rejected the market-based willing buyer/willing seller policy as the basis on which redistribution must proceed.The South African government has set a target of voluntarily transferring 30 per cent of productive farmland from whites to previously disadvantaged blacks by 2014. But President Thabo Mbeki's government is worried the target will not be met, at the very slow rate at which white farmers are offering land for sale. It also claims farmers are asking for unjustifiably high prices."

The Dallas Morning News gets it right: "Today, this editorial board resolves to sacrifice another word -- 'insurgent' -- on the altar of precise language. No longer will we refer to suicide bombers or anyone else in Iraq who targets and kills children and other innocent civilians as 'insurgents.' The notion that these murderers in any way are nobly rising up against a sitting government in a principled fight for freedom has become, on its face, absurd. They drove that point home with chilling clarity Wednesday in a poor Shiite neighborhood. As children crowded around U.S. soldiers handing out candy and toys in a gesture of good will, a bomb-laden SUV rolled up and exploded. These children were not collateral damage. They were targets. The SUV driver was no insurgent. He was a terrorist. People who set off bombs on London trains are not insurgents. We would never think of calling them anything other than what they are -- terrorists. Words have meanings. Whether too timid, sensitive or 'open-minded,' we've resisted drawing a direct line between homicidal bombers everywhere else in the world and the ones who blow up Iraqi civilians or behead aid workers. No more. To call them 'insurgents' insults every legitimate insurgency in modern history. They are terrorists."

The brainless Leftist chant about poverty: ""Though evidence shows that the terrorists are interested in acquiring nuclear weapons to use against our cities, a learned writer for the New York Review of Books insists that the real weapons of mass destruction are world poverty and environmental abuse. Of course, world poverty is rarely mentioned by terrorists, and those known to be involved have almost all been well fed and are well to do."

There is rather a good article here about Australian slang. I use it a lot in everyday speech because I find it far more vivid and expressive than standard English but on this blog I have to stick to what will be most widely understood. Though I know that I do occasionally let bits of academic jargon slip out.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/07/2005 07:46:00 PM

Saturday, August 06, 2005

 
"Racist": A few thoughts about one of our most serious terms of abuse

I particularly like Indians. And if we are going to use the term at all, Indians are clearly a race. I also like the Han (majority) Chinese. And almost any member of the Han will assure you that the Han are a race apart. I also admire the Japanese and regard Israel as one of the great adventures of the human spirit. So I am clearly a racist, am I not? If not, why not? Just using the word "race" is pretty close to taboo in much of the modern world. The fact that I DO use it probably keeps this blog much more marginal than it otherwise would be.

How has that come about? It's no mystery is it? The deeds of Hitler showed the world what colossal evil can be done in the name of race and, in their usual way, the Left hopped onto that bandwagon and pushed the idea to simplistic extremes. Not only unreasonable uses of ideas about race were condemned but ALL ideas about race were condemned. So the Left absolutely shriek and go ballistic about any mention of race. Which tends to make people think that there really is something wrong with even using the term. It's rather like the woman who has bad experiences with one or two men and who then concludes that ALL men are "no good". Her response just puts a roadblock in front of her finding out WHICH men are good or bad and probably denies her much happiness that she could have. Similarly, talk about race can be good or bad. The intelligent thing is to discuss and look into the matter. Up until 1945 the whole world did just that. So all our ancestors were "racists"?

Don't get me wrong: As both a conservative and a libertarian, I think that the individual comes first and that each case (or each person) must be judged on its (his/her) individual merits. So while I like most Indians and Chinese I don't like them all. And I don't like all Jews either. Jews who hate Israel I find particularly contemptible. The United Nations charter says that each case must be judged on its individual merits and that is one of the few things about the United Nations that I agree with. That must have been the bit that the conservatives put in.

Because the Left DO judge people in terms of race. The entire Leftist mentality is group-oriented. The individual hardly exists to Leftists. Individuals are too complicated and messy. Leftists can think only in terms of vast groups of people -- such as "blacks", "Hispanics" and "Native Americans" (and "gays", "women", "the workers" etc.). So you can talk about races after all -- just as long as you don't CALL them races.

What utter stupidity! The only way to combat such stupidity is to defy it and talk about race in sensible ways and just ignore all the hypocritical Leftist shrieking. I do. For example, I make no apology for saying that people of Northwestern European origin (principally the Anglo-Celts and the Germans) are the ones who have made the modern world what it is and I am delighted to be myself of that ilk. I have pictures of my Australian pioneer ancestors on my walls and I am forever grateful to them for what they have bequeathed me.

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ELSEWHERE

Gutless Australian response to jihadist: "A Melbourne radical Islamic teacher last night described Osama bin Laden as "a great man" and declared he would be betraying his religion if he told students not to train in terrorist camps. Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakr, said: "My religion doesn't tolerate other religion . . . Jihad is a part of my religion." ASIO revoked Mr Benbrika's passport earlier this year, the ABC reported, and it recently raided and questioned him. But although it took papers, charges had not been laid".

Hooray for Hitchens! "Islamo-fascists gave us no peace and we shouldn't give them any. We can't live on the same planet as them and I'm glad because I don't want to. I don't want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murders and rapists and torturers and child abusers. Its them or me. I'm very happy about this because I know it will be them. It's a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure. I don't regard it as a grim task at all".

Utah: PETA protest brings more customers to KFC: "A protest against the manner in which chickens are slaughtered for fast-food chain KFC drew additional customers rather than drive them away from the local outlet in this northern Utah city. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protest against KFC drew 10 sympathetic people, including someone dressed in a chicken costume, on Monday. But at one point, around lunchtime, more than 30 people stood in line to order chicken to eat. ... Jacqueline Newbold, a supervisor at KFC, said an uncommon rush of customers required the store to call extra employees into work. 'We had a line going out the door and through the lobby,' she said."

America Coming Together falls apart : "A year ago, the liberal group America Coming Together was on the cutting edge of national politics, spending tens of millions of dollars on a massive voter-mobilization project in every presidential battleground state. The dream was that ACT -- heavily funded by billionaire George Soros -- would play a decisive role in getting Democratic nominee John F. Kerry elected president and then remain in business as a permanent force in liberal politics. Instead, the group this week began sending e-mails to most of the 28 people who make up the remaining ACT staff warning that their paychecks would stop at the end of August. All the state offices have been, or are soon to be, closed."

This is a good warning for the mad Mullahs: "In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option".

Like Leftists generally, the New York Times would not know the meaning of the word "ethics" -- as their outrageous attempt to break into confidential adoption records shows. After all, "There's no such thing as right and wrong" is there? But you can rely on them for "All the news that's fit to slant".

I have just put up here a summary of a new book: Top 10 Politically Correct Myths About Islam and the Crusades by Robert Spencer. It sounds good. Available from Human Events.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/06/2005 08:40:00 PM

Friday, August 05, 2005

 
SWEDEN: FASCISM IN SLOW MOTION

I have previously pointed out that modern-day Sweden is rather fun for conservatives to know about but what about the Sweden of the past? I argue below that the old Swedish model -- the "folkhemmet" (people's home) -- gradually became a version of the Fascist "corporate State" with government, business and labor all intertwined to the detriment of the economy

Although it is a commonplace that Hitler got good co-operation from Sweden both before and during the war, the idea that Sweden was itself in any sense Fascist must seem like one of the most absurd suggestions ever made. Has not Sweden been the great icon of the Democratic Left in the postwar period? It has indeed, though these days conservatives have better reasons for mentioning the Swedish experience than Leftists do. Nonetheless, little-recognized though it might be, there are substantial reasons for seeing interwar Sweden as Fascist. Like all Fascisms, however, Swedish Fascism had its own unique national characteristics and its most unusual characteristic was how slowly it developed, with much of its development taking place AFTER WW2 rather than before.

I have set out at considerable length elsewhere the historical details which show that Fascism was nothing more than a particularly authoritarian and nationalist form of Leftism so we only have to ask here whether Sweden in the interwar years was nationalist, authoritarian and Leftist. And the answer to all three questions is undoubtedly: Yes.

And that answer does not depend on the various small explicitly Fascist and pro-Nazi movements that arose in Sweden in the 1930s. It flows from a look at the dominant political party in Sweden from 1932 on: The Social Democratic Party. The program and policy of the Social Democrats centred around transforming Sweden into a folkhemmet (Volksheimat in German). This became the dominant Swedish concept of Sweden in 1932 with the accession to power of the Social Democrats but was well in evidence before that. The concept is usually traced to a book, The State as a Live Form ( Staten som livsform ), written by Rudolf Kjellen in 1910. Like all versions of the word Volk it is not exactly translatable into English as Volk means both "people" and "race" even though there are separate words for people (Leute) and race (Rasse). So folkhemmet is probably best translated as "a home for the Swedish people". And this idea of what Sweden should be was what the Swedish Social Democratic Party preached. The concept is the core of the "Swedish model" and what it brought about was essentially just another version of the characteristic Fascist "corporate" or "collectivist" State. So, like Fascism generally, the Swedish model was seen as a Third Way between Communism and Capitalism.

The Swedish corporate State really got going only in 1938, however, with the Saltsjobaden Agreement between the unions and the employers. This agreement outlawed strikes and created a central wage-fixing system for the whole country.

And the ideology of the Social Democrats did originally include racial elements. The folkhemmet was seen as including only a racially defined folkgemenskap (Volksgemeinschaft, people's community) with members being only people belonging to den Svenska folkstammen (Volkstum, Swedish racial group) with minorities such as the Tornedal Finns being excluded.

And Sweden did have a charismatic leader, in the form of Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson from 1932 to 1946 -- which rather neatly brackets Hitler's years in power (1933 to 1945).

And it was at the initiative of the Social Democrats that Sweden's eugenic laws were set up, with "undesirables" being forcibly sterilized. Does that remind you of anyone?

And Sweden has been essentially a one-party State since 1932, with only a very brief interlude in the 1990s. But what exactly the folkhemmet should consist of evolved and developed only very slowly and gradually. Change in Sweden is glacial even in the hands of Leftists so the fundamentally paternalist folkhemmet took many years to develop a sweeping dominance of Swedish life. Bit by bit taxes were raised, business was regulated and taken over and welfare programs were expanded. It was not in fact until the early 1990s that the whole edifice came crashing down. So the concept of a fatherly government was there from the beginning, the one-party State was there and a quiet conviction of Swedish superiority and unique wisdom was also there.

Like all Fascist ideologies, however, folkhemmet had its own unique national character. Sweden experienced nothing remotely like the huge interwar disruptions that took place in Germany and Italy -- for the excellent reason that Sweden stayed out of WW1. So Swedish nationalism was much calmer and less excitable. Which led to it being neither strident nor expansionist. Swedes felt perfectly comfortable with the burgeoning wealth being produced by their own country and so felt no need for foreign adventures or huge and sudden changes. It should perhaps be noted, however, that there is nothing intrinsic to the Swedish character that is opposed to foreign adventures. That should be obvious both from the Viking age and the perambulations around Europe of Gustavus Adolphus in the 17th century.

One thing that was NOT greatly different, however, was that the power of the Swedish Social Democratic party was founded on its popularity and was achieved by constitutional rather than revolutionary means. Mussolini and Hitler too were very popular and achieved power legally rather than via revolution. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, however, the Swedish party had no hesitation in renewing its mandate by way of regular and properly conducted elections. And, like the Franco regime in Spain, it kept out of WW2 and thus stayed in power much longer than the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

So the Swedish folkhemmet State was welfarist, nationalist, paternalist and essentially all-powerful. Because it used its power very sparingly and cautiously, however, and respected civil liberties, it was undoubtedly the mildest of the Fascist States. Fascism varied greatly from country to country (to take a rather striking example, Sir Oswald Mosley initially used to expel from the British Union of Fascists anyone who made antisemitic remarks!) and the distinguishing feature of the Swedish version was undoubtedly that it was the least authoritarian. And after the war the Swedish Social Democrats did as all Leftists did and abandoned overt nationalism -- though a sense of Swedish superiority undoubtedly continued and discreetly made itself apparent from time to time.

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ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald silences the Left: "Yesterday I got a call from the host whose radio drive-time talk show I have appeared on three times. Kyal informed me that prior to my appearance people from the left would call the show on Social Security matters and scream and call him names. Strangely after my three appearances, the left has left the building. He gets no calls from the left whatsoever. Almost all his calls are positive and his ratings have shot up. All of which proves the point, the left is barren of and unable to discuss issues. We need to confront them. When we do, we win. If you want to tune in, you can listen over the internet at http://www.k-talk.com/ns/Hosts.asp at 4:20 PDT, Thursday August 4, 2005 to my fourth appearance.

Ed Morrissey of "Captain's Quarters" points out how strange is the silence of the mainstream media about the Air America scandal. If it had been a conservative radio network stealing money from the poor it would have been continuous headlines across America for days on end.

Why "Made in China" is good news for the US: "Today, China makes about 8 percent of the world's chips; by 2010, that number may be up to 20 percent. From nowhere to world domination has been the story of China and globalization for the past decade. Textiles, toys, televisions and cellphones -- one global industry after another has succumbed to Chinese competition. Why should chips be any different? Because the chip industry can be an example where globalization works right."

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

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/05/2005 09:42:00 PM

Thursday, August 04, 2005

 
Brookes News Update

Liberal Party, labour market reform and the unions' minimum wage myth: Union officials are using economic quackery to defend the minimum wage and Liberal Party adviser are letting them get away with it
US deficits and government spending - more fallacies: What Democrats and their media supporters' make a point of downplaying is that deficits occur because spending exceeds revenue
The Murdoch journalist who whitewashed treason: Journalists like Wynhausen have got the gall to slime our society while turning a blind eye to atrocities carried out by the socialist likes of Fidel Castro
G-d save me from the politically correct : The Jews were the canary in the coalmine. Now the terrorists are coming after the 'Sunday People'
America is "Grateful to Almighty God" : Why America truly is a Christian nation
The Liberal Party and social contract nonsense: The striking thing about Australia's Liberal Party is the extent to which many of its supporters, including some in Parliament, are divorced from genuine liberal principles

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ELSEWHERE

More airport madness: "The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has won another victory over the terrorists lurking among American airline passengers. Last Wednesday, it secured a conviction for assault against Phyllis Dintenfass, a 62-year-old schoolteacher who gave as good as she got to a TSA screener. When the screener molested her at a regional airport last September, Mrs. Dintenfass molested her right back, asking, "'How would you like it if I did that to you?'" We ordinary folks might mistake Mrs. Dintenfass for a mild-mannered, neatly coiffed instructor at Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisconsin. The clairvoyants at the TSA know better. They perceived she's really a terrorist plotting to blow up a plane"

A good article here about the Islamic menace from German publisher Doepfner. Excerpt: "Today we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in The Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere in Europe? By suggesting - wait for it - that the proper response to such barbarism is to initiate a Muslim holiday in Germany. I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of Germany's Government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people -- actually believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists. One cannot help but recall Britain's Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, waving that laughable treaty signed by Hitler, and declaring the advent of peace in our time. What atrocity must occur before the European public and its political leadership understands what is really happening in the world?"

Blacks don't want to fight: "The Iraq war is drying up at least part of a pool of recruits the Army has relied upon for decades: black Americans. The Army has long enjoyed a special relationship with black Americans, who have filled its ranks at rates far beyond their share of the population since the draft was abolished in 1973. But in a trend compounding the Army's recruiting woes, those days may be over.... "We saw the most precipitous drop immediately after Sept. 11," Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said at the Pentagon this year. In fiscal 2001, which ended 19 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, nearly 23 percent of all new Army recruits were black - as in each of the previous five years. So far in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30, only about 14 percent are.... The Army exceeded its total recruiting goal for June, enlisting 507 more soldiers than its target of 5,650. But that followed four months in which it badly missed its goals, leaving it more than 7,800 short for the fiscal year."

Mad-cow "threat": "For one who would like to see more Democrats in Washington, I spend a disturbing amount of time trying to save the party from itself. Polls show Democrats on the popular side of many big issues: healthcare, Social Security, the environment. But then they go out and lose it on the small stuff. Case in point is their recent tango with the mad-cow 'threat.' Mad-cow disease is a nonissue in the US. As far as we know, not one person has ever died from eating an American cow infected with mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). And it's not as if Americans haven't been testing beef safety. How many millions of burgers go down every day?"

Some progress in France: "Two months on, Mr de Villepin has, by and large, steered clear of his caricature. He has made employment his priority, dropping in on a job-centre for his first official visit. He is creating a new two-year job contract for companies with fewer than 20 employees, with much-needed easy-dismissal rules, which will come into effect as soon as September. He has promised to tighten controls on welfare benefits. And he has accelerated privatisation, selling a first stake in Gaz de France in July, and announcing a controversial plan to sell three motorway-toll companies this summer."

The insanity of Indian socialism: "When I once went to visit a public sector electricity-generation plant in New Delhi, one of their top officers told me this: I dump the ash (the residue from burning coal) in the river, I do not pay the railways for delivery of the coal, I do not pay the coal company, and I will keep running it this way. Forget about the so-called charitable thoughts of public servants, I could not believe that I was talking to a human being. He was corrupt and irresponsible to the core. Why is someone in such a high position like that? Is it a special racial trait of Indians? Or is it a result of the irresponsible system that socialism, and collectivist cultures create?"

Now 14 million blogs!: "The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati. In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March. It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months" [In that context, the current NZ Bear ranking of this blog (no. 527) looks pretty good]

Lots of good articles about Israel from a Christian perspective here

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/04/2005 07:35:00 PM

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

 
SOME ECONOMICS

Death tax abolished in Russia: "President Vladimir Putin will in the next few days sign off on a law newly approved by both chambers of parliament that does away with inheritance tax, as well as canceling payment of gift tax by close relatives and spouses. Other transactions will remain subject to real-estate, vehicle, stock, equity and participatory interest gift tax of 13%, the same as Russia's unified income tax rate. The law, due to come into force on January 1, 2006, was drafted by the government with record speed after Putin stated in his April state of the nation address that he thought that it would be a good decision to abolish the inheritance tax".

Death tax boneheads: "Florida Governor Jeb Bush ought to send his counterpart in Connecticut, Republican Jodi Rell, a thank-you note with a box of chocolates and a ribbon tied around it. Last month Ms. Rell marked her first anniversary as Governor by signing into law a tax bill that might as well be called the "Palm Beach Economic Development Act." The law requires that any resident of the Nutmeg State with an estate of more than $2 million pay a death tax of up to 16%--merely for the privilege of dying in Connecticut. The legislators in Hartford hope that the tax will raise $150 million in revenue each year--money that will come in only if the legislators in Hartford are also planning to build a Berlin Wall around the state. Otherwise, expect a stampede of retirees and family businesses out of Connecticut into the many states without a death tax, such as Florida, which has a constitutional prohibition against estate taxes. Thanks to the Connecticut death levy, a successful small business owner with a $10 million estate can save about $1 million by packing up and heading south".

Hear here!: "In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole. In that congeries of absurdities known as U.S. farm policy, sugar's sweet deal stands out as perhaps the most damaging and least defensible program. Now, more than ever, it needs to be scrapped".

Dumb CAFTA opponents: "Here's what a leading Democrat opponent said in opposition to CAFTA: "I don't see any benefits for workers, for sugar people," said Democratic Rep. Charlie Melancon, who said his family owed everything to 225 years of sugar production in his home state of Louisiana. "We've given away textiles. We've given away steel. We've given away fruits and vegetables," Melancon said. "Now let's just go ahead and give away everything and be dependent on every other country for our food and our defense." The Democrat Melencon forgot his kindergarten economics. If each American were free to trade with Central America for sugar, instead of being forced to buy high priced American sugar, each American would be richer by the amount saved on sugar. The extra money that had been spent on sugar, could then be spent on other things to raise their standard of living. Yes, American sugar workers would lose their jobs but employment would be stimulated in others industries where the extra money was being spent. This is the nature of economic progress. There is no net lose in jobs. We have had growing free trade, despite Democratic insanity, for 200 years. Unemployment is now at 4.9%, a 30 year low. Homeownership is at an all time peak, average home size is bigger than ever, $3000 TV sets are now common, there are now more cars than drivers"

New Zealand expert highlights inferiority of European social model: In a recent speech, Roger Kerr of the New Zealand Business Roundtable compares the robust performance of Anglo-American economies with the stagnant - and statist - economies of Japan and continental Europe. Kerr cites the work of Olaf Gersemann's Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Realities to dispel myths that American success is associated with social costs: "The big world story of the last two decades of the twentieth century was the demise of communism as an economic system and power bloc, and with it the end of the cold war between East and West. At the same time, another story has been unfolding, not as dramatic as the ending of an entire political and economic system but still of great long-term significance. That story is about the pre-eminent success of the Anglo-American economies (which include not just the United States but also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the United Kingdom) and the relative failure of the various versions of the so-called social market economy or managed capitalism in Continental Europe and Japan. In the last dozen years or so, economies based on free trade, private ownership, light regulation and moderate taxation have opened up what looks increasingly like a decisive lead over economies characterised by active state partnership with business and trade unions in steering the economy, high levels of taxation and social spending, a greater role for banks than for stock markets in corporate ownership and control, and intrusive regulation of business. ...I fully expect American ideas and practices to continue to exert in the twenty-first century the all-pervasive influence they did in the twentieth century and to set the standards by which all societies are judged, however much they may also be resented and subject to bogus criticism. It seems unlikely that hard-working Chinese, Indians and other Asians will be attracted to the European model"

Japan is privatizing its postal system. If it gets through the Japanese parliament it will set a great precedent. Private enterprise has worked miracles for Japan so one hopes that other countries take note. I think Westerners should be a bit embarrassed that Japan has to show the way.

There is an interesting interview with Ghanaian economist George Ayittey here. He says that both democracy and markets were originally part of the African tradition and that abandoning them in favour of socialist ideas is what keeps Africa poor. I am sure that there is a lot of truth in that.

Wal-Mart enemies are no friends of the poor: "If a capitalist corporation gets to be a big success, it inevitably finds itself in the cross-hairs of leftist political activists who don't much like capitalism, and especially don't like large corporations. In the 1980s, General Motors found itself in this position when Michael Moore made the movie "Roger and Me." More recently McDonald's has been a target, attacked by (among other people) film maker Morgan Spurlock in "Super Size Me." Wal-Mart, now the largest business corporation in the world, could hardly escape the activists' ire. The huge retailer has been charged with underpaying and mistreating its employees, destroying communities, and oppressing workers in the Third World.... When economist Emek Basker of the University of Missouri looked at the employment effects of having a Wal-Mart move into a community, he found it actually increases employment. Nostalgia can be gratifying, but it's not a good basis for preferring fewer jobs rather than more. I suspect what the critics really dislike about Wal-Mart is not economic, it's cultural. Wal-Mart is very "red state." It's headquartered in Arkansas. It's mentioned in country songs. The crowd that likes to say it's on the side of poor Americans ought to appreciate a place whose prices make a modest paycheck go a long way. But they prefer to fight the culture wars, and Wal-Mart is their bugaboo".

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/03/2005 06:48:00 PM

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

 
LEFTISTS ARE ACTUALLY DUMBER

An age-old technique for deflecting blame and criticism from oneself is to accuse others of what are in fact your own faults. If done unconsciously, psychologists call it "projection". But whether conscious or not, it tends to confuse the issue and makes people think that there is blame on both sides. So it is a very effective strategy in general. And since Leftists have a very great need to hide the hate and destructivesness that are their real motivations, they have used such a stratgey to the full. So much so that you just have to see what they say about conservatives to know what is true of them. They for instance call conservatives closed-minded, simplistic-thinkers, dogmatic and hate-filled when it is they themselves who in fact are spectacularly charaterized by all those attributes (See e.g. here).

And one of their routine accusations is that conservatives are dumb. They get away with that because it is true that most intellectuals tend Left (see here for why). But intellectuals are only a very small part of the population. What about Leftists in general? Are they more or less intelligent than conservatives? As far as I know, I am the only person who has ever had survey data published in an academic journal that answers that. And I found that, by the standards of what one generally observes in the social science literature, the relationship between core Leftist beliefs and LOW intelligence was quite strong. Leftists in general are dumb. See here.

And the emails I get from Leftists certainly confirm that. Usually their only real content is abuse and they usually cannot even do that without making frequent errors in spelling and grammar. I reproduce below one of the briefer such examples of towering intellect that I have received:

OH ! so now we know , your a Nazi .Then fuck off to Washington and join your buddies ( do they even know you exist), you nasty little hate filled jerk. And when you go do fly Al quieda only their pilot was trained by the yanks too !!

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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I dissect the latest nonsense claims about racism

On Political Correctness Watch I note Methodists putting homosexuality ahead of the Bible

On Greenie Watch I note the controversy about the Maldives -- where sea levels are actually FALLING

On Education Watch I show how the Left use schools to create racial tensions

On Socialized Medicine I note that there is often no dignity for patients in public hospital systems

On Gun Watch I note a would-be rapist who got shot by his victim

On Leftists as Elitists I reproduce a savage critique of the Hollywood elite

On Majority Rights I manouvre some white nationalists into saying that fair skin does not matter!

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ELSEWHERE

Capitalism is healthier: "A new study shows that heart disease in Poland has dropped dramatically, probably due to economic and political transformation. A recently published report by the British Medical Journal aimed to explain a dramatic drop in ischemic heart disease (i.e. heart disease resulting from localized tissue anemia due to obstruction of the inflow of arterial blood) in Poland since 1991. By 2002, deaths from coronary heart disease had dropped by 38 percent for men and 42 percent for women aged 45-64 years old. "The fall in death certification rates for ischemic heart disease seems to have been larger than that previously observed in any country in peacetime," the report says. The results were surprising. The report found that: "Reporting biases are unlikely to have exaggerated the true fall in ischemic heart disease; neither is it likely to be mainly due to changes in smoking, drinking, stress, or medical care. Changes in type of dietary fat and increased supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables seem to be the best candidate." And the study links those changes in diet directly with the political and economic changes Poland experienced during the early 1990s".

The British as "useful idiots": "Elements within the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West's apologists for the Soviet Union - useful idiots. Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam, Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same".

The Democrats do not have philosophies, they have constituencies: "The Democratic "platform" has several odious components. Primarily, the Democrats are totally lacking on ideas on governance. They are unwilling or incapable of stating the simplest political position. Of the many important problems facing the nation, the Republicans are left to carry on alone: Social Security, foreign affairs, War for Democracy, reform of the UN. You name it, and try to find a coherent Democratic position on any of these matters. No such position can be found; no such position exists. In place of considered policies on governance, the Democrats have adopted an unrelieved negative position on all political questions. For example, Social Security is a known problem area, and has been for years; President Clinton was warning about the need to address SS problems a decade ago. Today, Democrats largely deny that any problem exists, and if they are willing to talk about Social Security at all, they want to raise taxes (of course!)"

Chris Brand is blogging up a storm about Australia's "racist" professor -- who had the temerity to say that blacks have a high crime-rate and are therefore undesirable as immigrants.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/02/2005 08:28:00 PM

Monday, August 01, 2005

 
SOME RECENT POSTS ON ICJS

The myth of moderate Islam
ABC / Willacy complaint
Beware of Islamics bearing rocket launchers
Beards and scarves aren't Muslim
Letter about PM
Blair takes on 'obscenity' of terrorism
What do Islamist terrorists want?
Democratic Universality and Its Adversaries
Academic Freedom - a continued response
Abbas `condemns' attack on Israelis
When Denial Can Kill
In London, one may seek the Truth under the ground
Discussion of two anti-terrorism Fatwas.
ISRAEL, THE MEDIA AND THE DISENGAGEMENT FROM GAZA
No alternative
Terrorists don't listen to reason
The war within the west
Useful idiots have always apologised for terrorists
A betrayal of trust
Europe's culture clash

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ELSEWHERE

Good one!: "On December 10th 2004 , inner-city minister, Rev Wayne Perryman, - filed a class action Reparation lawsuit (in the United States District Court in Seattle Case No. CV04-2442), alleging "that because of their racist past practices the Democratic Party should be required to pay African Americans Reparations." Perryman said "he based his case on the research that he gathered during the past five years while writing the three editions of his latest book... In his 100-page brief, Perryman concludes that the past racist policies and practices that were initiated against African Americans by the Democratic Party - were no different than the policies and practices that were initiated by the Nazi Party against the Jews. In both situations millions of lives were destroyed (physically, mentally and economically)."

Christian v communist in China: "Richard Spencer reports today from Beijing that there may now be more practising Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party. The precise figures cannot be known, in a country in which Christians are still persecuted. But the evidence suggests that there may be as many as 80 million or even 100 million members of underground Christian churches in China, unapproved by the state. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, has only 70 million members. If those figures for worshippers are even roughly accurate, then we are looking at a very remarkable development in the history not only of Asia but of all mankind.... Xun Jinzhen, a Christian convert who runs a beauty salon in Beijing, put it eloquently when he said: "We have very few people who believe in communism as a faith. So there's an emptiness in their hearts."

Bush Bashing Fizzles: "This summer, one big story is replaced by another--the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media--the New York Times, etc., etc.--to delegitimize yet another Republican administration..."

When Castro took over Cuba: "In fact, a high proportion of Batista's army was black and mulatto, especially the officer corps. Castro and Che murdered 600 of them without trial in the first three months of 1959. Even the New York Times admits it. Had these massacres taken place anyplace else, they'd be called lynchings and the United Nations, NAACP, etc., would raise holy hell. Imagine, in any other setting, a lily white regime (like Castro's) lynching several hundred blacks, dumping them in mass graves, then getting a standing ovation by the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and Hollywood! Tom, compared to what Cuban-Americans see in the news every day, what Alice found on the other side of the looking glass seems perfectly logical".

Resistance is not futile, it is highly effective: "Recently the Florida State University department of Criminology released a study indicating that people who employed self protection strategies reduced their likelihood of injury when compared to nonresistance. Old research seemed to indicate that resistance to confrontational crime contributed to victim injury. New information reveals the old assumptions were found to be largely attributable to confusion concerning the sequence of self protective actions and injury. In crimes where both occurred, injury followed self protection in only 10 percent of the incidents. Combined with the fact that injuries following resistance are almost always relatively minor, victim resistance appears to be generally a wise course of action."

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 8/01/2005 06:15:00 PM

Sunday, July 31, 2005

 
THE LATEST NONSENSE ABOUT RACE

I am not sure that this summary of a commentary by Arne Ohman, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden is really worth mentioning but the final sentence in the extract below could mislead:

"By treating men and women like Pavlov's dogs, and giving them electric shocks while they looked at pictures of black and white men, researchers have unravelled our innate and learnt reactions to race. We have evolved to fear people from a different group to our own, in the same way they we fear spiders and snakes, it was found. But close contact can help counter this inherent fear."

Both the things found were rather like proving that grass is green. 1). That people still have some tribal tendencies and tend to be most at ease with people similar to themselves is uncontroversial. 2). The actual second finding about "close contact" was simply that New Yorkers who had dated someone from another race were less fearful of other races. How surprising! Asserting that the dating influenced the attitude rather than the other way around is is absurd.

The original research referred to by Ohman is here. There is a better summary of the work here

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ELSEWHERE

An Australian example of the "professionalism" of mainstream journalism: "Few journalists resort to fantasy, but the issue has aired publicly after The Sunday Telegraph's property writer, Cindy Martin, was accused of journalistic imaginings by the ABC's Media Watch program. The program exposed instances when Martin linked celebrities with properties on the market. Checks with the rich and famous found they had not evinced interest in homes and apartments. The Martin affair has rocked The Sunday Telegraph and starkly exposed the increasingly blurred line between fact and fantasy in some publications".

Burgess gets another Leftist scalp: "News just in: The Daily Ablution can claim its second scalp for Burgess's work the on Sassygate scandal. The Guardian's executive editor for news, Albert Scardino, has just resigned according to Burgess. Burgess reports that his source at The Guardian said Scardino's position had become "untenable" due to the split between Aslam's supporters and those who wanted him gone. Editor Alan Rushbridger has conceded that this affair and its internal repercussions constitute "a significant crisis for the paper".

As in Marxism, it is the privileged who are the vanguards of jihad: "When you read reports that the Muslim terrorists who bombed the London Underground may have gotten together for a pre-attack whitewater rafting trip in Wales, you realize that this is a very particular enemy -- and one that is recognizable to students of history. This is the revolt of the privileged, Islamic version. They have risen so far, so fast in the dizzying culture of the West that they have become enraged, disoriented and vulnerable to manipulation. Their spiritual leader is a Saudi billionaire's son who grew up with big ideas and too much money".

Muslim against Muslim: "The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago. Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down. Palestine is on fire, too, with Palestinian armed groups fighting one another - Hamas against Fatah and all against the Palestinian Authority. All have rendered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas impotent and have diminished the world's respect and sympathy for Palestinian sufferings."

The Leftist chickens come home to roost on us all: "Being a rational thinker, it is often impossible to understand how Democrats can be so stupid. What exactly do the Democrats think is going to happen when they Balkanize America and invent categories for people so that no one is an American any longer but rather an "African-American" or an "Hispanic-American" or a woman or a homosexual whose allegiance shouldn't be to America but rather to the "cultural heritage" or the unique behavior that "defines" him or her? What do the Democrats think is going to happen when English is not the language of everyone but everyone is to speak his own language (even made up slang like "ebonics") so that communities become isolated and antagonistic and incapable of communicating with one another to solve differences and problems?... What's going to happen is exactly what has happened in London where native-born children blow the skulls off their "fellow countrymen." After all, thanks to the liberals there, what did these murderers have in common with the people they destroyed?"

European impotence fuels anti-Americanism: "Bush-hating has also given Europeans a marvelous distraction from their own failures; their failure in the Balkans, their failure to come up with a constitution for the European Union, their failure to build an independent military force, their failure to put together a single, coherent European foreign policy. In so many ways, Europeans who once ran the world now feel impotent to affect international events or even get their own house in order. They float like a lovely but rudderless old yacht in the surging wake of an American aircraft carrier. So, Europeans do the one thing that makes them feel superior: revile Bush, the lunatic cowboy, and all those gun-toting, overweight, money-obsessed, religion-crazed Americans who chose him as their president.

All Gods are not the same: "The atheist, when confronted with two distinct religious illusions does not jump to the conclusion that they are both aimed at invoking the same supreme being. Instead of looking up toward the transcendent object of the illusion, he is able to look at the quality of the illusion itself, and to the practical and concrete consequences of this illusion on the lives of those who subscribe to it. Religious illusions, when approached from this direction, clearly reveal themselves as distinctive as different forms of social organization -- as distinctive as feudalism and capitalism, communism and meritocracy. Indeed, the atheist will quickly see that few things can differ more profoundly than the diverse ways in which human beings have imagined the nature of the Divine".

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/31/2005 07:14:00 PM

Saturday, July 30, 2005

 
Brookes News Update

US interest rates, growth and China : It's the Fed's monetary policy that has been driving the trade deficit and interest rates and not Chinese exports. If there is ever a run on the dollar, blame Greenspan - not Beijing
US Immigration: The Wall Street Journal gets it wrong - again: Stephen Moore, a member of 'The Wall Street Journal's' editorial board, boldly and proudly supports the pro-immigrant side - and gets it badly wrong
How useful is macro-economic data?: Macro-economic indicators are fictitious devices used by governments to justify intervention with businesses. They tell us very little about wealth formation and thus individuals' well-being
The day after terrorists bombed London G8 gave Palestinian terrorists $9 billion: What a 'wonderful' gift! I wonder how many more Jews will have to die more from bombs purchased using the money from Israel's "friends"?
Separation of church and state: myth and reality: Liberals have been indoctrinating American children with lies about the First Amendment. Separation of church and state does not appear anywhere in the Constitution

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

ELSEWHERE

I am rather bemused at the way an official "line" about the 7/7 London bombings seems to have taken hold. Everybody now seems to chant that they were suicide bombers whereas there are much better reasons for thinking that they were duped: They knew what they were doing but thought they would get away before the bombs went off -- as the earlier bombers in Spain did. An early version of the "duped" theory is here and I have also re-posted the story here. Recent findings that the car they left behind still had lots of unused bombs in it tend to reinforce they idea that the bombers thought they were coming back and going on to plant more bombs. Whether they thought they were coming back or not does not reduce the evil of the deed as far as I can see. British blogger Snowball thinks there is some sort of official coverup going on.

God, Leftists are thick at times! The BBC has just reported with great amazement that identical twins got identical marks in their university examinations. You'd think they had never heard of genetics! But I guess that 100 years of evidence about the huge role of genetics in what we are and do must be treated as if it did not exist.

There is an amusing explanation here of what the Dems believe in. Excerpt: "They are for a New Holocaust in Israel, a Final Solution de novo, since they are for the Palestinians, whose cultural cause, obsession, raison d'etre, is the annihilation of Israel, and they are not for Israel doing anything in self-defense. They are for a government monopoly of education, even though they are opposed to all other monopolies, except, of course, the fantasy of a Democratic monopoly on political power. They are for the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs to any and all other countries, because they have been against all efforts to build ugly new factories in America for decades - Not In My Backyard!"

Shut down official feminism: "If Republicans are looking for a way to return to their principles of limited government and reduced federal spending, a good place to start would be rejection of the coming reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. It's a mystery why Republicans continue to put a billion dollars a year of taxpayers' money into the hands of radical feminists who use it to preach their anti-marriage and anti-male ideology, promote divorce, corrupt the family court system, and engage in liberal political advocacy. Accountability is supposed to be the watchword of the Bush administration, but there's been no accountability or oversight for the act's spending of many billions of dollars. There is no evidence that the Violence Against Women Act has benefited anyone except the radical feminists on its payroll".

What The World Owes Palestinians and The Left: "In the last few weeks, innocent men, women and children have been blown up, paralyzed, brain damaged and otherwise had their lives ruined by Muslim suicide bombers in Britain, Egypt and Iraq. Who can we thank for this man-made plague? Palestinians and the Left. We need to thank Palestinians for their major contribution to humanity -- religiously sanctioned mass murder of innocents through suicide. Prior to the Palestinians, this did not exist.... If blowing up Jewish children is OK, so is blowing up Egyptian, Moroccan, Iraqi, British, Spanish and Russian children. And that is where the Left comes in. They have provided the secular and universal justification for Palestinian Islamic terror against Jews. According to the world's Left, it's OK for Palestinians to put bombs in an Israeli student cafeteria.. But, alas, the anti-Israel Left (an almost redundant description), too, did not understand the genie it had helped unleash onto the world. Why is it all right for Muslims to blow up Israeli children, but not Russian children? Israeli buses, but not British buses? Jews in Israel, but not Muslims in Iraq?.. Like London's mayor, the Left around the world blames Israel for the Palestinian suicide bombers, and blames America for those in Iraq. Without the Left around the world, the Palestinian God-based mass murder through suicide would have been an isolated phenomenon, universally condemned as the evil it is.

Failures of intelligence: "Three weeks before the London bombings of July 7, Britain's Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that 'at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.' ... Less than a month later, 52 people were murdered and 700 wounded when three subway trains and a bus were blown up in the worst act of terrorism the United Kingdom has experienced since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. Obviously this was a serious intelligence failure. ... But the botched terror assessment raises a question for us, too: Which kind of intelligence failure is better -- the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction?"

NASA is so hopeless that it needs to be abolished: "NASA grounded future shuttle flights Wednesday because a big chunk of insulating foam flew off Discovery's fuel tank during liftoff -- as it did in Columbia's doomed mission -- but this time apparently missed the spacecraft. 'Until we're ready, we won't go fly again. I don't know when that might be,' shuttle program manager Bill Parsons told reporters in a briefing Wednesday evening. He and other managers do not believe the flying debris that snapped off the external fuel tank harmed Discovery, threatening a safe return of its seven astronauts."

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/30/2005 06:31:00 PM

Friday, July 29, 2005

 
LIMITS ON MULTICULTURALISM COMING

Excerpts from an article by Australian conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen

The 1960s, the decade that became a state of mind, is finally over. With each new terrorist horror in London, as we learn more and more about British homeboy terrorists, it seems safe to declare that age of innocence is dead. It was an age where wide-eyed all-you-need-is-love romanticism inevitably spawned moral and cultural relativism. But when boys, born in British hospitals, develop allegiances that demand death to their countrymen, you know that the utopian vision of multiculturalism, urged on us with the best of intentions, has not gone as planned.

Three years ago, to suggest that multiculturalism was slowly killing us, or at least killing some of us, brought down a heavy rain of criticism. Back in September 2002, to mark the approaching first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, I wrote on this page that the West's multiculturalism created conditions that encouraged the West's fanatical enemies. We were so busy being inclusive, denigrating our own culture, that we were not noticing what was happening. I suggested that Multicultural Man and his lazy cultural relativist thinking needed to be dismantled. A few others were saying the same thing. But not many.....

How times have changed. When four young British Muslims set off from Luton, detonating four bomb blasts in London, most people were shaken out of their reverie. Eventually, it seems, reality bites. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes cruelly. Now, more than a few people are saying that tolerance is not as safe as it seems. That too much of the stuff can be a problem because it suggests to those who detest our values and our societies that we will not make judgments about what is right and what is wrong....

Now, even long-time supporters of multiculturalism, such as The Age's Pamela Bone, wonder aloud whether it is time for us to lay down some ground rules for those from different cultures who wish to live side by side with our culture. "Couscous yes, child marriage no?" she asked....

Advocating multiculturalism for people from cultures with similar values was never going to be problematic. But when cultures differ sharply, multicultural policies that promote all cultures as equal lead us in all sorts of wrong directions. A young Aboriginal woman points to tribal law to excuse her for killing her philandering husband. An educated man, the father of a group of Pakistani gang rapists, claims they did not understand our culture.

Finally, more of us are saying "Hang on, some values are non-negotiable." Perhaps we can draw a shade on the '60s view that all cultures are equal.

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ELSEWHERE

There is an article in Harpers that is getting a lot of links. It claims to show that Americans call themselves Christians but don't behave in Christian ways. They imply the rather ludicrous claim that Harpers has a better understanding of what Christianity is than America's Christian pastors do. In some cases that would not be hard of course. Almost anybody would have a better idea of what Christianity implies than Bishop John Shelby Spong does, for instance. I could go on to pick apart all the erroneous ideas about Christianity that Harpers promulgates but they are mostly just old Leftist standbys that I have already demolished on my Scripture Blog so I think I will leave it to Christian bloggers to put up a more systematic reply.

Phew! That was close. CAFTA just squeaked past the House. There is now "free trade" between the USA and Central America. It is in fact still far from free but it is freer than it was, which will be good for all the countries concerned.

Arlene Peck has some very interesting figures on the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. (See bottom of post).

I have just put up a book review from a centre-Left source on Leftists as Elitists which savages the Stalinist Hollywood elite and defends Joe McCarthy! The concluding paragraph: "So what has all this to do with the fate of the American left or American liberalism? Any movement that does not own up to its past hobbles its future. These flanks are still enchanted with the suicidal heroism of the self-deluded Hollywood communists. This twisted syndrome did not stop with apologetics and excuses for Stalinism. It continues with the tortured explanations and barely disguised extenuations for the Muslim terror war against democratic and civil society. The Radoshes have written a wise, honest, and perceptive book."

Newsweek: Truth is the First Civilian Casualty in Iraq: "But civilian killings by U.S. troops are not nearly as common as the critics of the war in Iraq would like us to believe. It has become an article of faith among them that American troops have been slaughtering Iraqi civilians indiscriminately, and that one of the consequences of the war has been an unconscionable loss of life among the civilian population. It just isn't true. The most recent entry in this campaign is a report released on July 19 by Iraq Body Count. This Web-based group (www.iraqbodycount.org) compiles news accounts of casualties in Iraq and tabulates them... The text of the report is decorated with pull quotes from news accounts of checkpoint killings and aerial bombardments. Even if U.S. troops didn't kill all these people, they're telling us, these civilians would not have died were it not for the U.S. presence. Is it the policeman's fault when the hostage taker kills his hostage? In fact, a fair reading of the report's own data could support a completely contrary conclusion. Were it not for the insurgents, there would scarcely be much of a civilian death toll in Iraq now. A few isolated cases, yes, but nothing like the 8,000 civilians the Iraqi government says have died so far in 2005 from insurgent attacks.

Military recruitment going fine: "Buried in all the mainstream media coverage this week over new terrorist bombings in London, space shuttles that didn't launch, the trashing of Karl Rove and the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice was a little-noted item about re-enlistments in the U.S. armed forces exceeding expectations. USA Today offered some prominence to the story, but it was widely ignored by most of the Fourth Estate. Perhaps that's because it's a 'good news story.'"

I am pleased to say that a few readers commented on my "woolly hat" post. One reader sent me a pic of a guy in Costa Rica (in the tropics) wearing a beanie in the middle of summer so the only thing I am reasonably sure of after that is that they are all a bit missing somewhere. And there is a picture of a well-known Australian Leftist blogger here which does not change my mind. I have even got him on my blogroll, I am rather mortified to say. I think I will delete all Lefty links soon.

Chris Brand is in fine form with another lot of posts up about British and Australian news.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 7/29/2005 06:52:00 PM

Thursday, July 28, 2005

 
THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF WOOLLY HATS

Just to take our minds off more serious concerns for once, I thought I might point out something I have noticed that other people might or might not be able to confirm from their own experience. I have noticed that people whom Australians would call "drongoes" (foolish and stupid people) are very prone to wearing woollen hats -- beanies etc. Australians very rarely wear hats of any sort even when they should (given our high incidence of skin cancer) so people wearing warm head-coverings do tend to stand out. And from listening to such people and observing them for many years I am much struck by the low-grade intelligence that seems to prevail among such wearers. No doubt that would not apply in really cold countries such as Russia where furry hats significantly enhance survival but Australia is a generally warm country where few people feel the need for top-deck insulation. So when I see a beanie-clad head in the streets, I immediately identify the person concerned as one best kept away from: as someone with a probably significant tendency to crime and violence. Having been for some years a boarding-house proprietor in a down-market suburb, I am well aware of the fact that crime and violence is a common way for drongoes to cope with life.

So why the association between social pathology and a desire to keep the head warm? I think it is no mystery at all. The brain uses up about 20% of the body's energy. It is a huge consumer of calories in relation to its mass. So the head is normally the last part of the body that feels cold. Having the brain inside the head working is like having a radiator inside it. And as far as I am aware, active brains use up more calories than less active ones. So the people with the relatively inert brains put out less heat from the head and thus feel the cold in their heads more than others do. So an unusual need for warm head-coverings suggests an unusually inactive brain. That's my theory anyway.

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ELSEWHERE

An amazing spasm of sanity from the Democratic Leadership Council: "Here's a novel idea: The war on terror should be, above all, a liberal's war. Think about it: The jihadist campaign is not some generic explosion of terrorism, but rather a calculated attack on all that liberals hold dear: tolerance, diversity, women's rights, the fundamental freedoms and protections of democracy, even trade unionism. In short, liberal values. That's why the liberal left makes a profound mistake if it concedes this war to George W. Bush and the right"

White House may sidestep Democrats on Bolton: "Frustrated by Senate Democrats, the White House hinted Monday that President Bush may act soon to sidestep Congress and install embattled nominee John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations on a temporary basis. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush has used his power for temporary appointments when 'he has to get people in place that have waited far too long to get about doing their business.' He said that 'sometimes there's come a point' when Bush has decided he needs to act."

Archaeologists are now beginning to see evidence of human social inequalities stretching back to the Stone Age. I am only amazed that they ever thought cavemen were equalitarian. There are dominance hierarchies in ALL social animals, including all the primates, so why should man be different? Only a raving Leftist would suggest otherwise.

Genes cause autism too: "While debate still rages over the 'cause' of autism, mounting evidence suggests that genetic factors play a major role in the disease. Two recent studies led by James Sutcliffe, Ph.D., and Randy Blakely, Ph.D., investigators with the Vanderbilt Center for Molecular Neuroscience and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, suggest that multiple rare mutations within a single gene may increase risk for autism.... "Autism has such a high genetic risk, but these new findings suggest that there may be many variants of individual genes at work," Blakely said. With such genetic testing, said Sutcliffe, "you might be able to predict which kids would respond positively to particular SSRI medications." "We now have concrete evidence in our families that the SERT gene is a risk factor in autism," Blakely said."

Racist judge: "A judge's comments in recent months that she would refuse to seat an all-white jury have raised eyebrows at Cook County Criminal Court and questions about whether the judge acted inappropriately. "Folks, you all know I have a rule; I don't seat all white jurors," Circuit Judge Evelyn Clay said as a jury was being picked to hear a murder trial last month, according to court transcripts.... Clay, who is African-American, made the remarks in chambers before three separate trials, according to transcripts reviewed by the Tribune.... Ronald Allen, a law professor at Northwestern University, called the judge's comments extraordinary. "I've never heard of a judge making such a statement, and I think it was ill-advised to do so publicly," he said. "It injects an unfortunate racial element into the matter, and quite frankly it raises very serious questions about whether [the judge] is discriminating against whites."... In a 1986 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Batson vs. Kentucky that it was a violation of the constitution to keep blacks off juries solely because of their race. The court found that the public's confidence in the fairness of the system would be damaged.

Leftist Kristof says Christians shame the Left: " But these days liberals should be embarrassed that it's the Christian Right that is taking the lead in spotlighting repression in North Korea. Perhaps no country in human history has ever been as successful at totalitarianism as North Korea. Koreans sent back from China have been herded like beasts, with wires forced through their palms or under their collarbones. People who steal food have been burned at the stake, with their relatives recruited to light the match. Then there was the woman who was a true believer and suggested that the Dear Leader should stop womanizing: after she was ordered executed, her own husband volunteered to pull the trigger. "The biggest scandal in progressive politics," Tony Blair told The New Yorker this year, "is that you do not have people with placards out in the street on North Korea. I mean, that is a disgusting regime. The people are kept in a form of slavery, 23 million of them, and no one protests!" Actually, some people do protest. Conservative Christians have aggressively taken up the cause of North Korean human rights in the last few years, and the movement is gathering steam. A U.S.-government-financed conference on North Korean human rights convened in Washington last week, and President Bush is expected shortly to appoint Jay Lefkowitz to the new position of special envoy for North Korean human rights.

Top ten reasons to privatize public broadcasting : "Republicans in Congress are debating whether to make small cuts in the funding for public broadcasting. They're not thinking big enough. Here are the top ten reasons to cut off the taxpayer dollars flowing to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System: 10.) We live in a 500-channel world. Back in 1967, when the Public Broadcasting Act was passed, most Americans only had three television channels -- ABC, NBC and CBS. But today we have six over-the-air networks and hundreds of cable channels offering everything from news to soap operas to classic movies to history and opera. 9.) Sesame Street isn't so special any more. ..."

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

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 7/28/2005 05:35:00 PM

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

 
KIN PREFERENCE, FRANK SALTER AND EMMANUEL TODD

Frank Salter is a very popular guy in white nationalist circles. He has written a book (On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration) that has been widely acclaimed in those circles as giving a rational argument in favour of preferring your own race and stopping immigration. As it happens, I know Frank personally but that is not what I want to talk about here. I want to outline his ideas very briefly and then point to an alternative view. Frank rightly notes that we tend to prefer being with and helping people who are genetically similar to ourselves and that members of our own racial group are more similar to us genetically than are members of other racial groups. From my reading of the scientific literature in psychology and genetics, both those statements are clearly true and racial preference therefore probably is indeed an extension of kin preference.

Frank however extends his reasoning to say that we SHOULD prefer people who are genetically closer to us -- but I am agnostic about that. I cannot say SHOULD NOT because that would be telling most of the human population not to behave in the way that they do and I cannot say SHOULD because I see it as a basic civil liberty that people should be allowed to make their own choices about whom they should or should not associate with and prefer. I don't remotely understand bondage freaks but if their interactions with one-another help them get their rocks off, good luck to them. Similarly I think that most white women who take black lovers will regret it (ask Nicole Brown Simpson about that -- Whoops! You can't) but if it turns them on that is their business. We all take our risks in one way or another and if our bedrooms are not private where is privacy to be found?

So I will confine myself to the DO rather than the SHOULD. I want to look more closely at exactly how kin preference works. And the first thing to note is of course that kin is only one of the critieria we use in deciding whom we wish to be with and help. There are many instances where opposites attract and there are many sorts of similarity that we like other than genetic similarity. I think that is too obvious for me to bother with examples -- though I cannot help noting that most Westerners who spend time in India do come away saying that they "loved India" -- despite India's deprivations and dissimilarities.

And I owe what I think is the key fact in this matter to a French Leftist intellectual -- Emmanuel Todd. Now I know that that statement will immediately have brought on acid reflux in some readers here so let me assure you that I am in general as contemptuous of what passes for philosophy in France as I am admiring of Wittgenstein (Yes: I know that Wittgenstein was so far Left that he emigrated to Russia but it is also true that he lasted only three weeks in Russia. Nobody is wise about everything! It is not his politics but his cautious and anti-theoretical arguments about the nature of knowledge that I like -- arguments that fall squarely within the tradition of Anglo-Saxon conservatism as far as I can see).

But if even a stopped clock is right twice a day, a French intellectual can occasionally be right too. And Todd is half English anyway. And in his 1985 book The explanation of ideology Todd's approach is thoroughly empirical -- combining history and anthropology. And what he points out is that the English family has always been weird by world standards. Nobody values kin as little as the English do and they have been that way for as far back as we can follow it. I myself noted that in my Australian survey research. In one of my doorknock surveys, one of the questions I asked was: "How often do you visit relatives?" If the household was a Mediterranean one (usually Greek or Italian) the normal and immediate answer was "every weekend". In Anglo-Australian households however most people had to think hard about that and a common answer was "Never". Anglo-Saxons tend to choose their company with little or no regard to relatedness whereas family is all to most of the rest of the world.

But as it happens, those weird Anglo-Saxons seem to have got it right. It is their culture that dominates the world and it is they (together with their close relatives in North-Western Europe) who have largely created the modern world. So I think that all Anglo-Saxon ways come with some presumption in their favour. And it could be the reduced kin preference among Anglo-Saxons that is the key to their success. On Salter's reasoning, their minimal kin orientation would be part and parcel of their greater devotion to individualism, their greater racial tolerance, their greater devotion to abstract justice and their lesser tendency to corruption. That sounds like a pretty good brew to me!

And since practically every personality trait the geneticists look at turns out to have a large genetic component, it seems likely that degree of kin preference is genetically encoded too. So others may not be able to emulate the Anglo-Saxons just by trying. Though they may have advantages in other ways, of course. So it is surely some irony that the people to whom Frank primarily addresses his arguments (his fellow Anglo-Saxons) are the ones least likely to be moved by them. But it does explain why Frank needed to write his book: The desirability of people to whom one is related is instinctively obvious to most of the world. Only the Anglo-Saxons need a book to tell them that!

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ELSEWHERE

In a convincing demonstration of the Leftist disconnect from reality, that Prince of exaggeration and made-up "facts" -- John Pilger -- still seems to be respected on the Left. He has the current cover-story on the New Statesman -- alleging of course that the fault for the London bombing lies at Tony Blair's door. It is just standard Leftist "blame the West" stuff, of course, but I suppose someone has to debunk it occasionally and Spartac.us is one of those who have waded in to clean up the mess. I think Pilger's stock in trade is that he really seems to believe the crap. Leftists in general are such phonies that they badly need someone like that.

Under the heading "Evil must be fought" Rabbi Steinsaltz has an excellent brief response to the terror attack in London on July 7. Excerpt: "What happened in London recently should bring about a fundamental change in our way of seeing the world. There really is evil in the world. It has its own ideology and own organizations, and it exists not only somewhere far away, but here".

There are some amusing comments on Powerline about the rumoured takeover of Danone -- a French yoghurt-maker -- by Pepsi. Apparently the French government has been going ballistic over it. I liked this comment: "You know a country is in the throes of a deep identity crisis when its elites unanimously decide that dairy products are of the highest strategic importance, calling for nationalist wagons to circle around a firm selling such high-technology products as chocolate cookies, mineral water and fruit yogurt..."

Concerned Women for America has some good mockery of all the various Leftist objections to GWB's SCOTUS pick.

CATS: There are some absolutely amazing thoughts about domestic cats here. All cat-lovers should read it. It certainly opened my eyes and I am more a dog person. I was once a registered dog breeder, in fact -- of English Bull-terriers.

Bluto has fired back at The Guardian for treating his satire about headchopping as serious.

Chris Brand has a new lot of posts up on British and Australian issues.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/27/2005 07:26:00 PM

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I question whether Australia's immigration policy is selective enough

On Political Correctness Watch I note that homosexuality seems to trump Islam in political correctness

On Greenie Watch I note that the evidence is now in that Michael Mann committed scientific fraud in his famous "hockeystick" claims about global warming

On Education Watch I note that some Leftist teachers are so reluctant to administer any discipline that they are now calling the police to deal with 5-year-olds

On Socialized Medicine I note that lives are being put at risk as British public hospitals ignore medical alerts

On Gun Watch I note that a gun club is being sued for committing lead pollution!

On Leftists as Elitists I note that a left-leaning Australian High Court judge admitted that he was consumed by anger when he considered some cases

On Majority Rights I note opposition to black immigration in Australia

On Blogger News I note that Sweden has useful lessons for conservatives. (Post also below)

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ELSEWHERE

As the Plame/Wilson/Rove beatup continues: "As the seemingly endless spiderweb of lies spun by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV unravels, the media has gone out of its way to question the credibility of.Karl Rove. Despite Rove's demonstrable non-leak of Valerie Plame's non-secret identity, the dogs continue to gather, hungry for a second term scandal, while the Wilsons' blatant self-promotion erodes whatever basis they had for a story in the first place. Perhaps Joe Wilson's two biggest whoppers were his claim to have spoken out because of his deep, non-partisan commitment to "truth," and his inconsolable remorse that his wife's closely guarded anonymity had become "collateral damage" in the Bush administration's war against him. What is at risk of being lost in the media hype of Karl Rove's "leak" is that Plame and Wilson had deep-seated ideological opposition to the Niger trip they set up, Plame apparently spiked that trip in advance, and she had long ago blown her status as a "secret" CIA agent."

PETA are just haters: They care neither for people nor animals: Here's what PETA didn't want you to see: two PETA employees attending a court hearing Tuesday in North Carolina on charges they killed and dumped 31 cats and dogs in a shopping center's trash bins. While the court case is pending, the controversy swirling around PETA and associated animal rights extremists, is again Page One news. Veterinarian clinics and animal shelters turned the pets over to PETA in hopes they could be adopted. Instead, they were killed by an organization dedicated to "ethical" treatment of animals. It's just another example of the misguided agenda, and hypocrisy, of the animal rights movement. It's a campaign that affects not only PETA and its supporters, but hurts each and every one of us.... These folks believe there can never be any justification for animal testing. If achieving their goal means humans must suffer, then inflicting needless pain, trauma, grief and death on people is merely a necessary means to a worthwhile end. And, a report by the Anti-Defamation League -- hardly a bastion of extreme conservatism -- says radical environmental and animal-rights groups have wreaked more than $100 million in damage over the past two decades... After bombing the offices of a California company in 2003, animal rights extremists sent an e-mail claiming responsibility. Among other things, it said, "You never know when your house, your car even, might go boom ... or maybe it will be a shot in the dark." Terroristic threats don't come any clearer".

Leftist twisting about "activist" judges: "Those who want to see judges who will apply the law instead of imposing their own policies face not only political obstruction to the appointment of such judges but also calculated confusion about the very words used in discussing what is at issue. Judges who impose their own preferences, instead of following the law as it is written, have long been known as "judicial activists" while those who carry out the law, instead of rewriting it to suit themselves, have been said to be following the "original intent" of the law. But now a massive effort to muddy the waters has been launched by those who want judges who will continue to impose the liberal agenda from the bench. Words like "activists" and "intent" are being twisted beyond recognition. Senator Patrick Leahy has redefined "activist" judges to make the least activist Justices on the Supreme Court -- Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- suddenly activists by his new definition. Senator Leahy has said: "The two most activist judges we have right now are Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia, who have struck down and thus written laws of their own in place of congressional laws more than anybody else on the current Supreme Court." One of the major functions of the Supreme Court for more than two centuries has been to strike down acts of Congress, the President, or the lower courts when any of these exceed the authority granted to them by the Constitution. Calling this "judicial activism" is playing games with words and befogging the real issues. When Justices Scalia and Thomas enforce the limits set by the Constitution, that is not writing "their own new laws," no matter what Senator Leahy claims"

A good bit of satire about the British Muslim journalist who supports jihad, posted by 'dreadpundit', a right-wing New Yorker using the name 'Bluto'. He wrote: "Okay, Dilpazier, I've decided to bow to your 'logic' - sauce for the goose and all that. That's why I'm issuing a secular fatwah and asking for some loyal Briton to saw off your head and ship it to me (use Fed-Ex, please, so I can get a morning delivery, and do remember the dry ice, also, a videotape of the 'execution')."

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/26/2005 07:31:00 PM

Monday, July 25, 2005

 
SWEDEN: AN EXAMPLE FOR CONSERVATIVES

American conservatives should be shouting the Swedish experience from the rooftops

What would American conservatives say of a country that NOT ONLY has an extensive system of government-paid vouchers for private schooling but also has an extensive system of government-paid vouchers for private hospitalization? And what if the same country had ALREADY made big cutbacks in the size of government? A dream for the distant future? Not quite. That country does already exist. It is Sweden. Probably because the mainstream media turn a blind eye to it, most people seem totally unaware that Sweden is moving steadily AWAY FROM the "Swedish model". In the early 90s, the Swedish government was spending nearly three quarters of the national income. That is now down to about half.

Sweden still has a long way to go of course. After their big economic meltdown in the early 90's (huge unemployment and welfare benefits that could no longer be paid for) they undertook an exemplary program of privatizations and made big cuts to both taxes and welfare benefits but there are still huge disincentives to work in Sweden. Incomes are kept pretty uniform regardless of what you do -- meaning that there is little incentive either to improve one's skills or to work hard -- and the sickness benefit side of the welfare system is still a huge racket. People on sickness benefits no longer get a higher income than they would by working but the benefits are still close to wages and access to the system is very easy. So huge numbers of Swedes have declared themselves too ill to work.

As a consequence, average Swedish incomes have fallen well behind American standards -- as indexed by the most objective criterion we have: GDP per capita. When purchasing power is taken into account, the picture is even worse. A cup of coffee, for instance, is likely to cost you three times as much in Sweden as in the USA. Individual Swedes do however manage their money well so there is little visible sign in Sweden of their lower incomes. Visible poverty in any modern society mainly reflects bad decisions rather than lack of income. Money now buys options rather than survival.

So Leftists who advocate high taxes and pervasive welfare need to be told that the country that went furthest in that direction hit a rock years ago and has been paddling in reverse ever since.

More here (PDF)

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ELSEWHERE

Britain's proposed new terrorism laws sound like a form of terrorism themselves. The UK: Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has called for new terrorism measures which include: "create a new offence of "inappropriate internet usage" and "have powers to "attack identified websites""

London bombing a product of British self-hate: "No, the real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag. Britain's self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it's all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over `the other', but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London's internationalism - in other words, that there is little British left about it... But self-loathing in a nation, like self-loathing in an individual, is alienating. Someone who despises himself inspires greater contempt than affection, and a country that hates itself cannot expect its newcomers to want to belong".

Terrorism about values: "Recent terrorist attacks were part of a war against western values rather than a response to the military operation in Iraq, Defence Minister Robert Hill said today. After a second wave of bombings in London overnight, Senator Hill said there had been terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists before the operations in Iraq began. Senator Hill was speaking a day after Australian bomb casualty Louise Barry asked Prime Minister John Howard, who visited her in a London hospital, if the terror attacks were linked to the Iraq war. "I can understand why someone would ask that question, but this is a war against the values we hold rather than any specific operations we're involved in," the minister told ABC radio".

Islamic ignorance prevents polio eradication: "A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate the polio infection was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has single-handedly returned polio to epidemic proportions. The theory's source seems to be a physician and the president of Nigeria's Supreme Council for Shari'a Law, Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, 68. Dr. Ahmed, an Islamist, accuses Americans of lacing the vaccine with an anti-fertility agent that sterilizes children (or, in an alternate theory, it infects them with AIDS) and considers them, according to John Murphy of the Baltimore Sun, "the worst criminals on Earth . Even Hitler was not as evil as that." This fear of polio vaccines caught on because of the war in Iraq, explained a doctor with the World Health Organization. "If America is fighting people in the Middle East," goes the Islamist logic, "the conclusion is that they are fighting Muslims." Local imams repeated and spread the sterilization theory, which won wide acceptance despite vocal assurances to the contrary from the WHO, the Nigerian government, and many Nigerian doctors and scientists.... The common element, the New York Times notes, is that incidents of polio are now located "almost exclusively in Muslim countries or regions."

There is a marvellously Anglophilic speech here from Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India. Excerpt: "Our Constitution remains a testimony to the enduring interplay between what is essentially Indian and what is very British in our intellectual heritage. The idea of India as an inclusive and plural society, draws on both these traditions. The success of our experiment of building a democracy within the framework of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious society will encourage all societies to walk the path we have trodden. In this journey, both Britain and India have learnt from each other and have much to teach the world. This is perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Indo-British encounter.... But, if there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set, it is the world of the English speaking people, in which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component. Of all the legacies of the Raj, none is more important than the English language and the modern school system. That is, if you leave out cricket!

The Jamestown Foundation website is a good source of info on terrorism that endeavours to avoid bias, filter, or agenda. The Foundation has a new book out Unmasking Terror (2004) that is qualitatively ahead of all the pop and academic books on the subject as it depends on primary and indigenous sources in each country around the world. The Jamestown Foundation is leading source of info on totalitarian societies.

I have just put up here an interesting email from a reader which says that Leftists romanticise collectives because they are so bad at them: Their big egos are a serious barrier to real-life collective effort.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that 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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 7/25/2005 06:12:00 PM

Sunday, July 24, 2005

 
TAX MATTERS

Taxachusetts to cut tax?: "With state tax revenues soaring, lawmakers on Beacon Hill are advancing a proposal to lower the Massachusetts income tax rate, if state spending is restored to levels last seen before the fiscal crisis began three years ago. The Senate unanimously approved a Republican measure Thursday that would trigger a series of income tax rate reductions to lower the rate to 5 percent from 5.3 percent, but only if state spending on education and municipal services reaches 2002 levels. The fiscal crisis prompted lawmakers to slash funding that year. Passage of the bill by the Senate, where the Democrats have a large majority, is the first sign that Democrats may be warming to the idea of an income tax cut."

Globotaxes: "Most Americans have come -- correctly, if reluctantly -- to the conclusion the United Nations has been a failure. Sixty years ago, the U.N.'s founders envisioned it as an engine of freedom, an international mechanism in which sovereign nations would come together to protect liberty and to facilitate its spread throughout the world. Instead, for most of its life, the 'world body' has been dominated by the unfree. Under their influence, the U.N. has morphed into a protection racket for the world's despots and, effectively, an abettor of those who would supplant liberty with corrupt authoritarianism, or worse. In recent months, evidence of how far the United Nations has strayed from its original purpose has steadily leached into plain sight."

The Ohio lesson: "In 1970, Ohio had one of the lowest tax burdens in the Union--it now has one of the highest. As of 2005, the state's tax burden, as estimated by the Tax Foundation, is 35.8% higher than it was in 1970, the largest increase in the nation over this period. The next largest, 26.5% in Arkansas, was far smaller, and the average increase in the U.S. tax burden was just 3.1%. Over the past decade alone, Ohio's state and local government direct spending per $1,000 of personal income has risen 19.6%, by far the highest such spending growth in the region and light years beyond the 6.8% figure for all states. To finance this expansion, higher taxes have come along hand-in-hand. The consequences have been harsh. Since 1970, Ohio's share of the nation's personal income has declined from roughly 5.3% to under 3.8% today. In the first quarter of 2005, Ohio had the fifth highest unemployment rate in the U.S. at 6.2% versus the overall unemployment rate of 5.3%. Meager Ohio employment growth of 0.3% through the first quarter placed the state third-to-last nationally, far behind the U.S. overall rate of 1.7%. With falling relative incomes, high unemployment and poor job growth, it is no wonder that people are voting against Ohio with their feet. State-to-state migration shows Ohio losing residents, while total population growth of 0.2% ranks it a dismal 47th in the nation".

Panel suggests repealing alternative minimum tax : "A federal tax-reform panel advising President Bush called Wednesday for repeal of the alternative minimum tax, which has mushroomed from a law targeted on the rich to one that threatens more than 20 million taxpayers with higher taxes next year. The panel's chairman, former senator Connie Mack of Florida, cited the AMT's 'extremely negative effect' on middle-income taxpayers as the nine-member panel reached its first conclusion."

"Death tax" in final throes? "Final repeal of the estate tax is high on the agenda of the White House and congressional Republicans. It has already passed the House, but vote counters are not sure they have 60 votes needed in the Senate to avoid a filibuster. This has emboldened estate tax supporters, who want to keep it alive any way possible. There is a lot of pressure to resolve the issue one way or another this year. Under current law, the estate tax is repealed for one year, 2010, but comes back again in 2011. This nonsensical law is the result of Senate budget rules that prohibited enactment of permanent repeal in 2001. But the result makes estate planning almost impossible, since no one has any idea what the tax regime will be after 2010."

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ELSEWHERE

We all know how Communist Parties always enforced ideological uniformity on their members. It should therefore be no surprise that the Left side of the blogosphere has similar conformist impulses. The top Lefty bloggers have got together to form something called Blogpac which will ensure that they all march in lockstep with one-another -- thus defeating the chief attraction of blogs -- which is their individuality. I wish them success. It will just make people turn to conservative blogs for genuine originality, creativity and independent thought. Wizbang has more.

The stupid wing of the Presbyterian church is digging its own grave: "The Presbyterian Church (USA), the nation's leading Presbyterian congregation, is helping to advance the absurd agenda of the slave reparations movement which demands that whites compensate African Americans for the suffering of their slave ancestors.... the Presbyterian Church (USA) is rapidly losing members. Church leaders are committed to pursuing reparations, as well as other left-wing fads, while everyday church-goers just want to worship the orthodox faith. In 2003, the Presbyterian Church (USA) reported that membership totaled 2.4 million, a sharp decline from 4.2 million in 1983. Church leaders argue that they aren't losing members to other churches but to "the secular society." Not true. Presbyterian Churches that remain true to Christian orthodoxy, such as the Presbyterian Church in America and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, are growing, due in part to disillusioned exiles from the Presbyterian Church (USA). This is what happens when a "mainline" Protestant denomination abandons the traditional faith and embraces liberal causes such as the ordination of homosexuals and same-sex marriage."

Still some restraint on police powers in Britain: "A key part of the Government's policy for cracking down on antisocial behaviour was ruled unlawful in a judgment that stops police officers using indiscriminate power to detain children. Two judges, sitting at the High Court in London yesterday, upheld the right of a 15-year-old boy to be out on the streets at night unless the police suspected him of criminal or anti-social behaviour. The boy, who comes from Richmond, south-west London, and can only be identified as W, was challenging the new police powers to detain and forcibly return home any child who ventures into a designated curfew zone after 9pm. Lawyers for W, who has never been in trouble with the police, told the court that in a democracy, only those suspected of wrongdoing should be subject to curfews and police arrest."

Property decision galvanizes the right: "Property rights have become -- quietly and suddenly -- the battle cry for conservatives in the brewing fight over replacing retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Conservatives say last month's Supreme Court ruling that expanded the government's power of eminent domain is now Exhibit A for their case that the high court has abandoned the original meaning of the Constitution and is in desperate need of more conservative jurists. 'It's so bad, it's good,' said Sean Rushton, executive director of the conservative Committee for Justice, which is dedicated to getting President Bush's judicial nominees confirmed. 'Property rights is now the number one issue.' In Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the government can seize private property from its lawful owner and give it to a private developer who promises to generate more tax revenue with it."

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 7/24/2005 09:54:00 PM

Saturday, July 23, 2005

 
THE WAR WITH ISLAM

Leftists as battered wives: "The aftermath of the London terrorist bombings has demonstrated that the antiwar Left is severely afflicted by the political equivalent of battered-wife syndrome. With each new beating, the scarred and bruised victims of spousal abuse tend to excuse and rationalize the actions of their tormentors. A stubborn unwillingness to accept the proposition that their partners are violent louts plunges these woeful women into a morass of self-deception that spawns only further violence. The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both real and imagined.. The streets of Britain's capital city were still damp with innocent blood when the same obscene dance of political self-flagellation began... In the world according to radical Islam it's the jihadist way or the highway, and these 7th-century dogmas represent the only acceptable outcome to al Qaeda... Fixated by a knee-jerk hostility towards all things American, the likes of Ali, Fisk, and Galloway refuse to recognize the existence of this conflict, much less the stakes that are involved. Their primal instinct is to appease bin Laden and his cohorts rather than oppose them. But Winston Churchill defined an appeaser as "someone who feeds the crocodile in the hopes of being eaten last." The sooner we accept the fact that this is a war; then the sooner we can get about the task of winning it".

The Marx-Muslim pact: "In 1939, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact cleared the way for Hitler to start World War II. The Pact caught the world by surprise, because it was an alliance between two bitter enemies, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Similarly, what made possible the recent bombings in London, and the many more that will follow in Europe and the U.S., is the Marx-Mohammed Pact. Once again, two sworn enemies, Marxism -- specifically the cultural Marxism commonly known as Political Correctness -- and Islam, have made a Devil's bargain whereby each assists the other against a common enemy, the remnants of the Christian West. From a Fourth Generation war perspective, the most important fact about the London bombings is that they were carried out by legal residents of the British Isles.... This fact in turn points to what may be the West's biggest strategic blunder, namely its immigration policies. European and American immigration policies have imported, and continue to import, millions of immigrants who are deeply hostile to the traditional cultures of their new homelands... Obviously, these immigrant Moslem communities pose a clear and present danger to the Western countries they now inhabit. Equally obviously, given its history and what its adherents are doing around the world, Islam itself is a threat. Europe, and the United States, need to stop more Islamics (and, in the U.S., Hispanics) from coming, and at least some of the Islamics now in residence must go".

Seems reasonable: "The home secretary, Charles Clarke, yesterday widened the worldwide net that will allow him to exclude or deport from Britain Islamist militants whose inflammatory language or behaviour is judged to foment or provoke terrorism. He told MPs that intelligence, foreign and home office staff would compile a database of individuals which may lead to them being refused entry to the UK, or even being removed. Civil liberties groups last night said that they were alarmed by the list's catch-all nature. Under the plan, a systematic index will be drawn up of what the home secretary called 'unacceptable behaviours.' Included on it will be anyone preaching, running a website or writing articles which are 'intended to foment or provoke terrorism.'"

There is a rather idiotic article here (PDF) by some State Department hack, arguing that peace in Europe depends on Europe making (unspecified) accomodations to its Muslim population. Since Europe has already bent over backwards to accomodate the Muslims and got only aggression in response, I cannot even imagine what more the dolt thinks Europe could and should do. I think it is time for the Muslims to be making some changes, not the other way around. If they don't like European ways, they should be given a one-way ticket back to their ancestral homelands.

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I normally read Brian Leiter only for laughs but I found this post oddly reassuring. There have been quite a few doubts expressed about whether John Roberts really will be conservative if he is elevated to SCOTUS. His whole career could be interpreted as aimed at sliding himself into a seat on SCOTUS by not revealing anything much about what he really thinks. But Leiter actually mounts some reasonable arguments for believing that Roberts IS conservative -- though almost anybody would be to the Right of Leiter, of course. I also liked this flash of honesty from Leiter: "on a range of issues the U.S. Supreme Court is unavoidably a super-legislature". I have a feeling that I will be quoting that again sometime. Kudlow and Manuel Miranda of the WSJ are also reassuring about Roberts.

A disturbing record: "Seven of the nine current Justices were appointed by Republican Presidents. ... Earl Warren, the father of modern judicial activism, was an Eisenhower appointee. So was William Brennan, who inherited Warren's mantle as the Court's liberal giant. Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, was a Nixon appointee. The most liberal member of the current court, John Paul Stevens, was a Gerald Ford selection. David Souter, a George H. W. Bush and Warren Rudman choice, told the Senate he saw himself in the tradition of the great Justice John Harlan, who revered precedent. But on the court he's arguably been more of a liberal activist than either of Bill Clinton's two justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer). Anthony Kennedy, selected by Reagan after Robert Bork was defeated, was said at the time to share 80% of Mr. Bork's philosophy. But Mr. Kennedy's jurisprudence has proven to be nearly as malleable as Justice Souter's, especially on the cultural and church-state issues where the Court has become the de facto national legislature. ... Our objection to Roe and to Lawrence, the Texas sodomy case, isn't on the underlying policy. It is that the Court has hijacked those social disputes from democratic debate, preventing the kind of legislative compromises that would allow a social and political consensus to form. ... But there are many other issues on which the post-Warren justices have arrogated to themselves an almost legislative authority: overturning voter-passed Congressional term limits by 5-4, dictating racial and gender preferences in law, extending the Commerce Clause to encompass virtually any federal authority as in last term's Raich medical-marijuana decision, or expanding eminent domain in Kelo. ... But the larger goal should be to...restore the High Court to its more restrained historical role. In a phrase, this means putting an end at last to the judicial legislating that was unleashed in the Warren era and that has slowed only on occasion ever since."

GIs criticize Dems: "Soldiers from Massachusetts and Hawaii who work at the U.S. military detention facility at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave visiting home-state senators a piece of their mind last week. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and Daniel K. Akaka, Hawaii Democrat, met with several soldiers during a visit led by Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican. Pentagon officials said soldiers criticized the harsh comments made recently by Senate Democrats... "They got stiff reactions from those home-state soldiers," one official told us. "The troops down there expressed their disdain for that kind of commentary, especially comparisons to the gulag".

Logical Meme has a horror-story about an out-of-control welfare system in Hartford, Ct.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 7/23/2005 07:40:00 PM

Friday, July 22, 2005

 
PATRIOTISM, IMMIGRATION AND THE SUDANESE

After having lived for various periods of time in the USA, the UK and India, I am firmly convinced that Australia is the best place in the world in which to live. I imagine that 99% of Australians would agree with that. But I have never been patriotic. I have always seen faults as well as advantages. I am pleased to be an Australian but not proud to be Australian. If I identify with any group at all, it is with the Anglo-Saxon population worldwide. The Anglos versus the non-Anglos seems to me the differentiation that is most useful in identifying locations of civility and moderation.

But I don't see even the Anglos as a whole as being the pinnacle of anything. Most things in this life could be improved (with the exception of J.S. Bach) and I think that applies to populations as well. But how? I see some role for eugenics as long as it is voluntary and the success of the NYC Ashkenazim in almost eliminating Tay-Sachs disease from their community is a shining example of that. And human genetic engineering will undoubtedly in the future be a great boon too.

One thing I would particularly like to see is the minimization of the "Yobbo" or "Chav" component of Anglo-Saxon communities. And I think that SELECTIVE immigration is the only way of doing that which is currently feasible on a large scale. Just because the percentage of "good" genes (however defined) in one population is slightly higher than the average does not mean that there are no similarly "good" genes elsewhere. So a rational immigration program would aim to bring in the bearers of those good genes from wherever they are found and thus dilute the percentage of "bad" genes in the immigration-receiving country. And that I think is broadly what Australia's past immigration policy has done. We have very civilized Asian minorities which greatly enhance the amenity of our country.

The "refugee" component of our immigration program is however a worry. There appears to be some degree of selectivity even in that component of our program but only time will tell if it is sufficient. The disastrous situation in Sudan has led the Australian government into allowing into Australia a considerable number of Sudanese and I see them even in the streets of suburban Brisbane. Given the social pathologies that are uncontrovertibly associated with populations of African origin worldwide, I think it is most likely that the quality of life in Australia will be diminished by the Sudanese presence. I make no apology for predicting that Australian kind-heartedness will have been to our detriment in this instance.

So I am glad Prof. Fraser has raised the issue for debate here in Australia.

In case anybody thinks that I get it wrong above by attributing to genes what should be attributed to culture, I can only say that studies come out almost daily which show that more and more human attributes are genetically determined. Read here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here just for starters.

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ELSEWHERE

The latest example of genetic differences at work: "The belief that chronic fatigue syndrome is "all in the mind" may finally have been laid to rest with the discovery that sufferers have biological abnormalities, researchers claim today. There are between 120,000 and 250,000 sufferers in Britain. The syndrome has been designated a neurological condition by the World Health Organisation. Also known as ME, it has confused scientists for years, with some clinicians dismissing it as a figment of the patients' imagination. Dr Kerr and his team now intend to examine a larger sample of sufferers. He said: "The involvement of such genes does seem to fit with the fact that these patients lack energy and suffer fatigue. This research will open the door to development of pharmacological interventions.".... Dr John Gow, a senior lecturer in clinical neuroscience at the University of Glasgow, is carrying out similar work, using DNA micro-analysis to examine differences in active and inactive genes in sufferers. His preliminary findings support those of Dr Kerr's group."

Five myths about Gitmo: "If the only news you had read about the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, (Gitmo) came to you the past month, you might believe detainees were being brutalized at best, killed at worst. The chorus of critics peaked with the ridiculous: Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., noted a "historic parallel" between American treatment of detainees with the way Soviets in their gulags treated prisoners..... A Pentagon investigation presented to the Senate last week found no link between alleged misconduct and Defense Department policy. Although investigators identified the tactics as "creative" and "aggressive," they concluded that they did not constitute "torture." Cooperating with his U.S. captors, one detainee drew diagrams of bombs he designed and built. He provided critiques of the design of "improvised explosive devices" used by insurgents in Iraq. Based on his critique, U.S. forces have a tool to combat these increasingly sophisticated devices, according to the Gitmo task force. The bottom line: A small amount of physical abuse emerges from individual behavior more than official policy, and the intelligence from interrogations is valuable in the war against terrorism.

Thomas Friedman gets it pretty right: "On the question of whether China's Cnooc oil company should be permitted by the U.S. government to purchase the U.S. oil and gas company Unocal, my view is very simple: let the market rule. Oil is fungible. It is all one global market. And if China wants to overpay for a second-tier U.S. energy company, that's China's business.... You know that cheap mortgage you just got? Well, who do you think subsidized it? In many ways it was China. Americans don't save anymore, and import more than they export. Normally, a nation that did that as long and lavishly as the U.S. has would have to raise interest rates to get other countries to hold its currency. But America has not had to do that, in part because China has been willing to hold most of the dollars it has been accumulating - gained from all the goods it is selling America - despite the low interest paid on those dollars and the fact that they have been depreciating against other major currencies."

Pius XII, a truly holy Pope: On Monday, July 25th, Rabbi David Dalin's book entitled The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis will be released and will surely start some controversy. The book examines the myth that has been generated by a handful of "liberal" journalists who have taken the liberty to rewrite the history of WWII, smearing the name of one of the most influential leaders of the early half of the 20th century, while using this controversy to attack the Catholic Church as a whole. David Dalin sets the record straight on who Pope Pius XII really was - a man who risked everything to help shelter and save thousands of Jews from Hitler's Final Solution.

Raise your right hand and swear to tell the truth ... on the Koran?: "As Muslim-Christian relations are under the spotlight around the world,US judges sometimes face a vexing question: Can witnesses raise their right hand and swear to tell the truth ... on the Koran? The recent refusal by a Guilford County, N.C., judge to allow a Muslim woman to swear upon Islam's holy text before testifying is, in part, a new First Amendment challenge. And here in the Tar Heel state, the idea of swearing on books other than the Bible has reinvigorated a debate on the relationship between faith and truth that goes back to the founding documents of both the Carolinas and the country."

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/22/2005 09:49:00 PM

Thursday, July 21, 2005

 
Brookes News Update

US economy, production and jobs : Explains why America's unemployment rate remained very low in late 2000 even as manufacturing employment continued to fall
Liberal Party labour market reform founders on ineptitude: Liberal Party advisers have clearly failed to grasp the fact that significant and lasting labour market reform is unlikely to be implemented unless the union myth of raising real wages for everyone is demolished in the public mind
Liberal Party won't defend labour market reform against ignorant priests: Economic growth is the only real safety net the poor have, not unions, clerics or political hacks. So why can't the Liberal Party get this fundamental fact out among the public?
The Anniversary of Fidel Castro's Massacre of the Innocent: On 13 July 1994 the sadistic Castro ordered the massacre of a group of children. And to think this monster is the hero of Western intellectuals
The London bombings and the reaction to jihad: At least there are some in the media who are not afraid to speak out against those who excuse Islamofascist barbarism
Human slavery and pornography, at home and abroad: As pornography moves into the mainstream trafficking in women and children for purposes of sex is increasing

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ELSEWHERE

It looks like GWB's nomination of John Roberts to SCOTUS is sound. There seems a good chance that he will be more conservative than previous GOP nominess such as O'Connor and Souter. I thought it would be good for the GOP if a black or Hispanic were nominated but that could have been seen by white voters as unacceptably politically correct. So GWB has looked after his base. There is an interesting analysis of why past GOP nominees have drifted Left here. Michelle Malkin has links galore on the Roberts nomination. Robert Koons has an excellent suggestion about what GWB could do if this appointment is filibustered.

A teethgrinder for Leftists: "Despite early predictions that the religious book market was just a flash-in-the-pan literary phenomenon, the growth of Christian books outpaced the adult trade category in 2004, with sales expected to soar in coming years. "People kept asking themselves, 'Is this a bubble? A temporary trend?"' said Albert Greco, a consultant with the Book Industry Study Group who has tracked the book business for 20 years. "No, it is a significant trend in the marketplace.""

Private airport screeners outperform government counterparts: "Privately employed airport screeners do a better job than government airport screeners, according to a recent U.S. government report, prompting a key lawmaker to call for a return to private airport screeners and other changes to the nation's aviation security system. 'Over the last three-and-a-half years we have spent billions of dollars creating a Soviet-style, centralized bureaucracy that has resulted in great inefficiencies and inflexibility with little improvement in screener effectiveness,' said Rep. John Mica (R-FL), chairman of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Aviation. Mica was a lead author of the aviation security legislation approved by Congress after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks."

Wanted: More choices for consumers: "It is sad but not surprising that cable companies across the country are marshaling all their political resources and lobbying might to halt the advance of cutting-edge technology that would offer consumers an alternative way to receive video and Internet service in their homes. IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) is the next generation of technology that can provide video and Internet service to consumers through upgraded fiber optic telephone lines. Verizon, SBC and other telephone companies -- big and small -- are now preparing to spend billions to make these necessary upgrades and improvements to their lines to bring their IPTV services to local residents in the coming months. ... If this technology is allowed to progress, tens of millions of residents in communities across the country could benefit from the first phase rollout of these new high-speed, ultra high-tech video services."

Moral illiteracy on the Left: "The bombings in London on July 7, which killed 53 people and injured many more, were a powerful reminder that terrorism remains a clear and present threat in our cities. But they were also, to me, a reminder of something else... the response to terrorism even on the moderate left remains an egregious moral muddle. Perhaps the starkest illustration of this mindset is the fact that, only a couple of days after the bombings, the British Broadcasting Corporation reverted to its policy of avoiding the use of the word ''terrorist." According to BBC guidelines, the T-word ''can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding," and ''careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments" ought to be avoided.... Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a leading left-of-center commentator on the Middle East, argues on his website and in an article at Salon.com that the London bombings are ''blowback" from the US and its allies' misguided policies. Cole pooh-poohs the idea that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is a product of hatred for the West's democratic values. In his view, it is a response to specific Western policies that are perceived as a war against Muslims, from Israeli oppression of the Palestinians to the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, took place before the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan..."

What we mean by individualism: "Brad Stone recently delivered a lecture at the Mises Institute concerning the relevance of the work of Robert Nisbet to the libertarian movement (audio | video). He argued that it is important for libertarians to also be "communitarians," defending traditional social institutions from the state. He cautioned against the valorization of the individual and any position that acknowledges only individual rights as ideas that lend themselves to a growth in state power."

UK: New terror laws by December: "Charles Clarke said today that the Government has cross-party support for its anti-terrorism legislation and expects to have a range of new powers signed into law in December. The Home Secretary made the announcement after a meeting with David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, and Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman, this afternoon.Mr Clarke said there were 'no main outstanding issues of difference' on the Government's proposed Counter-Terrorism Bill which would criminalise the acts of planning or training for terrorist attacks, as well as 'indirectly inciting' terrorist acts."

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/21/2005 09:23:00 PM

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

 
SOME MORE ECONOMICS

Laffer must be laughing: "So the deficit-the federal budget deficit-is declining sharply, more sharply than just about anyone in mainstream media anticipated. According to figures from the Office of Management and Budget, the deficit is projected to decline from $412 billion in 2004 to $333 billion in 2005, a 19 percent decline. OMB further projects, obviously with less certitude, that it will decline to $162 billion in 2008. If so, that will mean that George W. Bush will have more than kept his promise to cut the deficit in half in his second term. Back in February, OMB projected a 2005 deficit of $427 billion".

The primitive roots of Leftism: "Two years ago, economist Paul Rubin published a paper called Folk Economics. As this description points out, Rubin suggests that in a hunter-gatherer tribe, goods are exchanged mostly through sharing and reciprocal altruism. There were no visible gains from impersonal trade or economic growth. In this zero-sum environment, people evolved an instinct to resent and punish those who took too much. Rubin's thesis is that the instincts that evolved in prehistoric tribes account for the misguided "folk economics" that many people believe today. Anti-globalization and opposition to free trade reflect the fear of strangers that was inherent in tribal society. Resentment of the rich and a belief in redistribution reflect the hunter-gatherer's zero-sum thinking."

The tax-eaters are powerful: "Steven Malanga shows how coalitions of public employee unions, workers at government-funded social service organizations, and recipients of government benefits have seized control of the politics of the big cities that make up the heart of Blue America. In New York City, this coalition has helped roll back some of the reforms of the Giuliani years. In California cities and towns, it is thwarting the expansion of private businesses. In nearly 100 municipalities, it has imposed higher costs on tens of thousands of firms by passing "living-wage" laws. Whereas the New Left of the 1960s believed-idealistically, if somewhat naively-that government could solve the biggest problems of our times, this New New Left is much more narrowly and cynically focused on expanding government programs to increase its own power, pay, and perks. And, as Malanga shows, the New New Left is emerging as the most powerful element of the national Democratic Party coalition."

Egypt gives the GOP a lesson in tax cuts: "Egypt is introducing sharply lower rates of corporate and personal taxation from 1st July. Under the new code, which has been working its way through the debate and drafting process since September, most companies will pay 20% tax on their profits. Under the previous tax system, industrial and export firms paid 22%, while most other companies paid 40%. The new tax code preserves tax exemptions for profits from stock exchange investments, on dividends paid to shareholders and on interest payments from banks and bonds. Current exemptions given to companies in free trade zones and industrial zones will be abolished, however, at least for new entrants. For individuals, the maximum tax rate is now 20% instead of 40% and the thresholds for each tax bracket have been raised. Individuals will pay 10% tax on income between 5,000 and 20,000 Egyptian pounds ($862 and $3,448) a year, 15% on income between 20,000 and 40,000 pounds a year and 20% on any income above 40,000 pounds. Under the previous system, the maximum rate of 40% kicked in at a threshold of 16,000 pounds."

Realism about child labour creeping in: "When he started working on child labor issues six years ago, Professor Edmonds said in an interview, "the conventional view was that child labor really wasn't about poverty." Children's work, many policy makers believed, "reflected perhaps parental callousness or a lack of education for parents about the benefits of educating your child." So policies to curb child labor focused on educating parents about why their children should not work and banning children's employment to remove the temptation. Recent research, however, casts doubt on the cultural explanation. "In every context that I've looked at things, child labor seems to be almost entirely about poverty. I wouldn't say it's only about poverty, but it's got a lot to do with poverty," Professor Edmonds said. As families' incomes increase, children tend to stop working and, where schools are available, they go to school. If family incomes drop, children are more likely to return to work... "Child labor does not appear to vary with per capita expenditure until households can meet their food needs, and it then declines dramatically," Professor Edmonds wrote"

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

ELSEWHERE

A lot of people have got their knickers in a knot about Rep. Tom Tancredo saying that a nuclear attack on the USA by Islamics could be responded to by the USA nuking Mecca. But that threat seems to me to be just the sort of thing that kept the peace during the cold war. "Mutual Assured Destruction" they used to call it.

An email from Ralph Zwier of ICJS: "Over the past few weeks I have been reading article after article on the London bombings. None of them have really fired me up. But today there are two articles which I found interesting: Lipstick lesbian daring to confront radical imams and Transcript of BBC4 interview. One is an unequivocal condemnation by a Muslim Canadian, Irshad Manji. The other is a waffle of semi condemnation by an English Muslim leader in a BBC4 interview. You need to read them both to contrast (a) the unequivocal condemnation (and a fun read on a serious theme) and (b) the more typical equivocation by the peak bodies in the British Muslim world. You'll probably find the BBC4 interview quite uninteresting, but I think it's necessary to persevere with it for an understanding of the magnitude of the problem facing UK".

Immigration law irrelevant in Britain: "More than a quarter of a million failed asylum-seekers are still living in Britain, despite the Government's drive to increase the number of removals. A highly critical report by the National Audit Office exposes the chaos of the asylum system, with a catalogue of failings including financial mismanagement and near-shambolic record keeping. The report states that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate is struggling to meet the Government's latest target that by the end of the year the number of monthly removals should exceed applicants rejected. The number of failed applicants removed from the country fell last year."

UK: Six arrested under anti-terror act: "Ten days after Islamic radicals carried out deadly attacks on the London transport system, Britain's largest Sunni Muslim group today issued a binding religious edict, a fatwa, condemning the July 7 suicide bombings as the work of a 'perverted ideology.' In the northern city of Leeds, which has been a focus of the investigation into the bombings, six men were arrested under Britain's anti-terror law. West Yorkshire police said the men are not believed to be involved in the bombings, but offered no further details on why the six were arrested."

The Guardian, Britain's top Leftist paper, has come under a lot of fire over the fact that it employs a Muslim extremist as a journalist. Scott Burgess has the lowdown. Tim Blair comments too.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/20/2005 07:33:00 PM

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

 
TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I note that conservatives foresaw the Islamic menace from within British society

On Political Correctness Watch I note that journalists are being penalized for wanting to mention blackness

On Greenie Watch I note that bird droppings are the mnajor cause of chemical contamination in the Arctic. Ban those polluting birds!

On Education Watch I submit that "white guilt" education in British schools was a major cause of the London bombings

On Socialized Medicine I note that those wonderful regulators whose job it is to protect you are allowing mentally ill doctors to practice

On Gun Watch I note that George Soros wants your gun

On Leftists as Elitists I note that the Leftist British elite are still protecting terrorism

On Majority Rights I note evidence of genetic determinism for social behaviour

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ELSEWHERE

More evidence that happiness is a stable trait: "In a boost for exam-flunkers everywhere, a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal found the levels of satisfaction with life recorded by 550 Scottish men and women aged 84-85 were unaffected by their mental abilities, either when they were young or much later.... The study group, all born in Lothian, Scotland, in 1921, were remarkable for the fact they had all undergone tests of mental ability when they were about 11 years old, and the records had been preserved. The tests were repeated a few years ago, when they were about 79. They each ranked their happiness on a scientifically validated satisfaction scale."

Police enforce the law! "One day in April, Jorge Mora Ramirez stopped his car on the side of a road in the small southern New Hampshire town of New Ipswich and was making a cell phone call when a New Ipswich police officer approached him. The officer questioned Ramirez, 21, a Mexican who acknowledged he was in the country illegally, and the New Ipswich police tried to get federal immigration authorities to arrest him. But when immigration officials demurred, not considering Ramirez enough of a priority for their scarce enforcement resources, the New Ipswich police took the highly unusual step of charging Ramirez with criminal trespassing. 'I wanted the federal government to understand that I was going to take some type of action,' said New Ipswich Police Chief W. Garrett Chamberlain. 'If I can discourage illegal aliens from coming to or passing through my community, then I think I've succeeded.' At minimum, Chamberlain has succeeded in creating a storm of controversy, as well as interest in his idea. Hudson, NH, Police Chief Richard Gendron has charged 10 illegal immigrants with criminal trespassing in recent weeks."

Judges should judge, not legislate: "Like killer bees they will swarm in droves. No nominee will be safe. Ultra-Conservative. Stealth Liberal. Anti-(insert special interest here) Ideologue. Extreme Judicial Activist. The labels ascribed to whomever President Bush nominates to the United States Supreme Court will be legion. And they will be entirely useless in assessing whether that man or woman is fit for the Court. This is no postmodernist-gibberish screed on how words don't mean anything. Indeed, the usual carping about labels in the law and in politics is considerably overwrought. Justice Rehnquist is generally conservative, and Justice Stevens is generally liberal. Labels often fit. But such generalizations are detriments to the impending debate because they obscure what really matters. Fidelity to the original intent of the Constitution must be the sole ideological criterion used to evaluate any nominee. Everything else is noise."

Black Muslims a danger too: "The FBI had reportedly arrested last week four American Muslims who were planning an attack on the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, Channel 2 News reported Friday evening. According to the report, the four - all African-Americans who had converted to Islam - admitted to attaining a map of the consulate, as well as address of synagogues in the Los Angeles area. Cell members also gathered information on El Al flights to and from LA".

The Vast Left-wing conspiracy: "Byron York was in Washington covering an anti-war rally for the conservative National Review, and the protesters were members of International ANSWER, a far-left fringe group whose acronym stands for "Act Now to Stop War and End Racism." "There were actually communists there," York recalls. "It was kind of amazing. They were calling each other `comrade.' In 2003, it was almost like `Jurassic Park,' seeing real, living, breathing communists walking around." And it occurred to the Vestavia Hills native that International ANSWER wasn't the only organization opposed to the war in Iraq in general and George W. Bush in particular. Rather, it was just one cog in a well-financed political machine that included such groups as MoveOn.org and America Coming Together and activists like billionaire George Soros, humorist Al Franken and filmmaker Michael Moore. Their mission: Dump Bush and jump-start the Democratic Party. So York began to connect the dots and put the pieces together for his recent book, "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy"".

A downhill slide: "Is the American tradition of self-reliance disappearing? That's a painful question for conservatives to ponder. After all, we're dedicated to reducing the role of government and promoting individual freedom and opportunity. But the facts, while sad, are clear: More Americans today depend more heavily on government than ever before. We've long sensed that was true, but now we have proof. Recently, The Heritage Foundation created an objective measure called the Index of Dependency, and it paints a frightening picture. Since 1980 -- the year that Ronald Reagan's election seemed to signal a coming shift in public policy -- our reliance on government has doubled."

There is a new lot of postings up from Chris Brand with more on the IQ and PC scene, particularly in Britain.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/19/2005 07:31:00 PM

Monday, July 18, 2005

 
THE ISLAMIC MENACE

Nobody else seems to be saying it so I will: Do not the London bombings prove for once and for all that Enoch Powell was right?

British multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism: "That old racist notion of identity has thankfully crumbled. But nothing new has come to replace it. The very notion of creating common values has been abandoned except at a most minimal level. Britishness has come to be defined simply as a toleration of difference. The politics of ideology has given way to the politics of identity, creating a more fragmented Britain, and one where many groups assert their identity through a sense of victimhood and grievance. This has been particularly true of Muslim communities. Muslims have certainly suffered from racism and discrimination. But many Muslim leaders have nurtured an exaggerated sense of victimhood for their own political purposes. The result has been to stoke up anger and resentment, creating a siege mentality that makes Muslim communities more inward-looking and more open to religious extremism - and that has helped to transform a small number of young men into savage terrorists".

Conservatives foresaw the British problem: "The discovery that the four London bombers were British Muslims has ensured that one of the great social debates of the next few years will be on the sensitive issues of racial ghettos, integration in schools and multiculturalism. Fear of being labelled racist has helped to ensure that few have dared to put their heads above the parapet and challenge the orthodoxy that Britain is a multicultural nation and must behave like one. Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, was one of the first and most significant critics to challenge publicly multiculturalism's central tenet that all cultures in Britain are equally valid and no single tradition should be dominant... In a series of articles published in the Right-wing Salisbury Review in the early 1980s, he criticised Bradford city council's policy of educating ethnic minority children according to their own culture, predicting that the move would create divisions between white and Asian communities.... His views provoked an outcry among the anti-racism lobby. Some picketed the school and Mr Honeyford was subjected to personal abuse and accused of racial prejudice - leading to his early retirement in December 1985 to save his family from further harassment".

Appeasement in WW2 and today: "Appeasement did not end with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Even afterward, many in Britain (and even more in the U.S.) opposed active resistance. Conservative worthies like Lord Halifax sought a negotiated settlement. Fascists like Sir Oswald Mosley sought to bring Nazism to Britain. And communists and their fellow travelers opposed fighting Stalin's ally until Hitler invaded Russia. Even in January 1942, when German armies were at the gates of Moscow, George Orwell wrote in Partisan Review that "the greater part of the very young intelligentsia are anti-war . don't believe in any 'defense of democracy,' are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel." ... The problem was that Hitler's stated demands were a pretext for his maniacal ambitions. He was unappeasable. So is Osama bin Laden, who wants to avenge centuries of humiliation supposedly suffered by Muslims at Christian hands and who dreams of establishing a Taliban-style caliphate over all the lands once dominated by Muslims, from western China to southern Spain. Pulling out of Iraq would only whet his insatiable appetite for destruction, just as giving up the Sudetenland encouraged Hitler to seek more"

Deportation: "The average American knows the so-called war on terror is not really a war on terror. He knows in his gut that what's happening is that we are fighting another war with Islam. That's what it is, no matter what the politicians say. This war against Islam is the flaring up again of a conflict that has been going on for 1,500 years... The West against Islam is nothing new. What's new is that because of oil, the conflict has now expanded to the New World. There are no radical Muslims, nor Islamo-Fascists, there are just Muslims doing what they have always done--spreading Islam by force and terror. Compare the spread of Islam with that of Buddhism, and the truth of this history becomes obvious.... Deportation of Muslims from Western societies is not a picture the liberal press wants to see, but it may be necessary to do this. With their reluctance to assimilate, more so in Europe than in the United States, Muslim ghettos are breeding grounds for terrorists. Given the threat the practice of Islam poses to the West, it is not wrong to see it as a dangerous faction. Today, the Federal Republic of Germany sees nothing wrong with making the practice of Nazism illegal, so, someday the same may be the case for Islam in some Western societies."

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

ELSEWHERE

I have just paid the fees for my son's first year at a major Australian university. They totalled $4,000 in U.S. dollar terms. That seems very modest to me. Most costs must be borne by the taxpayer. Middle-class welfare again. I would be interested to hear how that compares with good U.S. and U.K. universities.

The Plame/Rove "scandal": "Mr. Wilson presented himself as a courageous truth-teller who was being attacked by lying partisans, but he himself became a Democratic partisan (working with the John Kerry presidential campaign) who had a problem with facts. He denied that his wife had anything to do with his assignment in Niger, but Senate investigators found a memo in which she recommended him. Karl Rove's version of events now looks less like a smear and more like the truth: Mr. Wilson's investigation, far from being requested and then suppressed by a White House afraid of its contents, was a low-level report of not much interest to anyone outside the Wilson household... For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it".

Today's installment of Leftist hysteria: "Young liberals this week flocked to the nation's capital to hear, among other things, liberal television pundit and Democrat political strategist Paul Begala accuse Republicans of wanting to kill him and his children to preserve tax cuts for the rich." [Such a burst of absurdity rather leaves one at a loss for words but Six Meat and Aldaynet have some appropriate comments.]

Michael Darby is online again with a variety of posts of Australian and international interest. Michael's past posts can be accessed here and here.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

********************************
posted by JR 7/18/2005 06:51:00 PM

Sunday, July 17, 2005

 
SOME ECONOMICS

High minimum wages create unemployment: "For the past decade, some of the least-skilled and lowest-paid workers in America have benefited from controversial programs known as living wage ordinances. Under these laws, companies with city contracts are forced to pay workers enough to live in that city, often $2 to $3 more than traditional minimum wage. But a new study shows the initiative as having mixed results in combating poverty. ... A 6 percent employment decline in cities that require a living wage, according to the study. Critics say it's no surprise that making companies pay higher wages results in their hiring fewer employees. 'They [the laws] don't work. They don't help the people that they are intended to help,' said Anthony Archie of the Pacific Research Institute. 'They're supposed to help low-skilled workers and they actually crowd them out from getting jobs.'"

Death tax bad for economy: "Permanently repealing the estate tax would save the government money in the long term and could produce 200,000 new jobs a year, according to a study released today that challenges the official congressional estimate that says the government would lose money. The study by the American Family Business Institute (AFBI) contends that congressional actuaries have continually underestimated how a cut in taxes increases economic activity and results in an increase in revenues collected by the government. The study says the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) wrongly claims repealing the estate tax would cost $140 billion in federal revenues. "The JCT is grossly overestimating the cost of repealing the death tax," said Dick Patten, executive director of the AFBI".

Finns doing well: "Fifteen years ago, Finland faced a full-scale depression, brought on by the loss of the country's most important markets as the Soviet Union disintegrated. Unemployment soared to 20 percent. But the Finns took control of their future, made painful adjustments and came out of the crisis with an economy that the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ranks as the most competitive in the world.... A relatively backward agricultural country became a high-tech powerhouse with labor productivity as good or better than that in the United States, but also a welfare state as generous as any in Europe. Perhaps the most revealing statistic behind this transformation is Finland's commitment to research and development. The Finns put 3.5 percent of their domestic product into R&D last year, second in the world to Sweden (about 4.3 percent) and far ahead of the United States (about 2.6 percent) or the E.U. as a whole (less than 2 percent).... Finland steadily increased government spending on R&D throughout the 1990s, when all other spending was either cut or frozen... Funding from public institutions constitutes only about a third of R&D expenditures; the rest comes from businesses"

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ELSEWHERE

A California Latino conservative says: "Much has been said about the Hispanic�s contribution to this great nation and to the state of California. Many came to this great country of ours to create a better life not only for themselves but for their children. Unfortunately, the Democrats� message has been misleading and has taken the Hispanic vote for granted.... Seems like the depressed Democrats will sink to any level to stir the pot creating discontent and hatred. What the liberals do not understand is that while they view us as needy, poverty stricken or social service seekers, we as a people are in reality, entrepreneurs, and hard workers in pursuit of the American dream. Sure many of us started by working in the fields, picking, pruning, cultivating the crops. But many have pulled ourselves out of poverty by acquiring education or skilled trades that have helped us be successful... In 2004 there were over two million Hispanic owned businesses that generated $247 Billion dollars in the United States. A testament that the Republican philosophy of giving a �hand up� and opportunity, is far better than any �handout� the Democrats can contrive. We are basically entrepreneurs by nature and are not afraid of hard work."

Islamic totalitarians: "Seeing Islam as the basis of a political system touching every aspect of life, fundamentalists are totalitarian. Whatever the problem, "Islam is the solution." In their hands, Islam is transformed from a personal faith into a ruling system that knows no constraints. They scrutinize the Qur'an and other texts for hints about Islamic medicine, Islamic economics, and Islamic statecraft, all with an eye to creating a total system for adherents and corresponding total power for leaders. Fundamentalists are revolutionary in outlook, extremist in behavior, totalitarian in ambition. Revealingly, they vaunt Islam as the best ideology, not the best religion-thereby exposing their focus on power. Whereas a traditional Muslim would say something like, "We are not Jewish, we are not Christian, we are Muslim," the Malaysian Islamist leader Anwar Ibrahim made a very different comparison: "We are not socialist, we are not capitalist, we are Islamic." While fundamentalist Islam differs in its details from other utopian ideologies, it closely resembles them in scope and ambition. Like communism and fascism, it offers a vanguard ideology; a complete program to improve man and create a new society; complete control over that society; and cadres ready, even eager, to spill blood".

Leftist hatreds distort their response to terrorism: "In my estimation, the Left can't get past its overwhelming "Bush hatred" and "blame America first" attitude that predisposes it to have sympathy for America 's enemies. Unfortunately, the political Left is rife with terrorist sympathizers who can't fully fathom the heinous nature of evildoers that target innocent civilians for death. Denial, in my opinion, is an element when considering the Leftist mentality. In the wake of the London terrorist attacks, Bill O'Reilly's comments to a Leftist journalist were spot-on. The journalist thought that we needed to understand the perspective of terrorists: O'Reilly replied, "Serial killers have perspectives, too! We don't take their point of view!" Exactly. Arab grievances? Why should we make any excuses for murderers?"

Public broadcasting is socialist nonsense: "Congress is once again debating the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which partially funds the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). Public broadcasting doesn't require fine-tuning. Like most other remnants of the Great Society, it needs to be killed. Much of the discussion centers on the question of public broadcasting's bias. That question was settled long ago. PBS' and NPR's programming has had an obvious leftist tilt since their inception."

Leftist blogosphere bad for Democrats: "While Moulitsas recognizes that the left-wing blogosphere is a world unto itself, if establishment Democrats have any awareness of that fact they have yet to betray it. Where Trudeau feels bloggers are a bunch of shut-in half-wits, the Democratic party seems to be under the impression that bloggers are an enormous, important constituency--and that it must go to whatever lengths necessary to win the hearts and minds of this virtual community. This seems like a major miscalculation, because the politics of the left-wing blogs are far out of the American mainstream. Where most of the 120 million Americans who voted in the last election bear a benign indifference to political matters, the left half of the blogosphere seethes with hatred for George W. Bush and his supporters. What's more, the blogs take numerous positions that would strike all but the most passionate Democratic partisans as patently preposterous. For example, several of the left-wing blogs recently ran an advertisement that referred to West Virginia Senator and former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd as an "American Hero.""

Chris Brand has just put up a VERY incorrect proposal for how to deal with suicide bombers on buses and trains.

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. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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.

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posted by JR 7/17/2005 09:10:00 PM