ACCESS PROBLEMS

There have been quite a few problems accessing sites lately. With some blogspot blogs you get this notice: "Blog under maintenance. This blog is temporarily not viewable. Please try again after some time. For more information, click here". And when you click "here" you are told that the maintenance is complete!! Another problem with blogspot blogs is that you occasionally get the message: "You are not authorized to view this page". And you can also get a general "Site down" message.

A fix that works most of the time is simply to try again or to hit the refresh button. Hitting Ctrl+F5 (cache bypass) also sometimes helps.

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Brookes News Update

How the Fed's price rule triggers recessions: The thought that there is a connection between the manipulation of rates and the so-called boom-and-bust cycle is rarely given any consideration in the US media
The Commonwealth Games is a looming financial disaster for the Bracks' Government: The economics of state-sponsored sports, including the Commonwealth games and sports stadiums, are complete rubbish. Meanwhile, the Victorian Liberal Party finds itself unable to challenge Bracks' reckless spending program
Bush is a victim of America's political civil war: The Bush presidency has revealed the enormous ideological rift that has been developing for more than forty years in America, and yet the vast majority of Americans are still not fully aware of it
Bracks' energy policies are pricing families out of the housing market: Bracks' greenie policies are pricing thousands of families out of the housing market. (Similar policies have had the same disastrous effects in California). So why isn't the Liberal Party attacking him?
Catholic thinking backs labour market reform -- but the Liberal Party doesn't know it: It's time the Liberal Party learned that despite the chatter of leftwing clergymen Christian doctrine actually supports free labour markets
Simon Crean's Gosplan mentality: Crean is still wedded to the discredited and dangerous idea of industry policy
America is waking up to the Islamic menace: It's taken a few years, countless deaths and immeasurable suffering, but mainstream America finally seems to be waking up to the Islamic menace

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ELSEWHERE



A North Korean Musical! "As far as musicals go, seeing people break into song on subjects such as starvation and public executions in North Korea may be one of the most unlikely concepts for stage entertainment in several years. Producers held a preview in Seoul yesterday of the musical called Yoduk Story that features goose-stepping North Korean soldiers and deprived prisoners wondering if they can survive into the next day. The musical is about a North Korean woman's fall from a dancing revolutionary hero to a tortured inmate along with her family at Yoduk prison camp, where she bears a guard's child, and learns to forgive her brutal captors. The production is meant to be an irony-free look at life in a North Korean prison camp that could change the way the North is depicted in South Korean entertainment. Songs in the musical include You are just like germs and All I want is rice. The producers hope audiences can find beauty in the misery of life in the prison camps."

Equality for men sought: "Who controls human conception ... and when should that control be asserted? That's really the bottom-line question surrounding the abortion issue, and nothing makes that any clearer than the recent filing of a lawsuit by the National Center for Men, 'on behalf of a man's right to make reproductive choice to decline fatherhood in the event of an unintended pregnancy.' The case is a Michigan dispute, involving one Matt Dubay and his court-ordered levy for child support, for a child he had never intended to father; since he had been informed by his now ex-girlfriend that she was physically incapable of conceiving, he had not taken further precautions against such an event occurring. They even have a pet name for the case: 'Roe v. Wade for Men,' and they're asking the court to grant 'equal protection' for a man's right to decide about fatherhood. The specific issue has more to do with later (and long-term) liability for child support for unintended offspring, in the event the man in question had neither intended to impregnate his partner, nor had expected she was able to conceive (and thus failed to avail himself or her of precautionary devices)."

No free speech for churches? "The IRS wants to strike the fear of God into priests, ministers and rabbis who venture too far into politics and activism. In a Feb. 24 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson announced that nearly three-quarters of the 82 churches and charities that the IRS investigated recently for alleged political and electoral improprieties turned out, in the IRS' view, to be violators. Among the 'offenses': Allowing candidates to speak on church premises, preachers delivering remarks from the pulpit interpreted to endorse candidates and the posting of Web links to the Web sites of candidates for office. Interest is boiling over in Ohio: There, two ministers are accused of getting too close to Ken Blackwell, the Republican secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate, as well as letting their preaching get too political (the reverends deny the charges). At issue is whether the IRS should more actively sanction or even revoke the tax-exempt status of churches and charities it believes have gone too far."

Shelby Steele on the black problem: "By accepting the idea that government is somehow going to take over the responsibility that only we can take, we relinquished authority over ourselves. We became child-like, and our families began to fall to pieces. Welfare-which promised a subsistence living for the rest of your days for doing absolutely nothing-provided a perfect incentive to not get married, yet still have babies. Then the babies will be state wards, and their babies, and so forth. The incentive is just to stay in that rut. And so the goodwill of America finally did do to us what slavery and segregation failed to do. It destroyed our family, destroyed our character, and now black America is in a struggle. We struggle to stand up like men and women and take charge of our lives, and become competitive with other people in the modern world. If we don't do this, we'll always be behind. But if we do take charge of our own lives, we'll be men among men." [HT Peg Kaplan]

There is an excellent (and sarcastic) response here to the many Leftist critics of America's armed forces.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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

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

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