CONSERVATIVE STATISTS GET NO THANKS

Ed Mick saw my post of 5th in which I pointed out that Richard Nixon had in fact just about turned himself inside out in order to be pro-black but that Republicans still get no credit for that. As Ed now rightly blogs, Nixon's pro-black measures were of a thoroughly Statist kind that were anathema to basic conservative principles.

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LEFTIST "COMPASSION"

I owe this report of how "antiwar" Leftists explain themselves to Tim Blair:

It was probably an amazing coincidence, but twice in the past week when the argument was being made for a "hands off" policy regarding Saddam Hussein, I got the exact same answer to a question.

The question: Does it make any difference to you that Saddam Hussein has murdered more than 180,000 Iraqis? The answer both times: "Well, they're his people, aren't they?"

.........

Were the Jews "Hitler's people"? This particular follow-up question elicited no response.

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GLOBAL WARMING GETTING MORE RIDICULOUS DAILY

Aaron Oakley has another good laugh at global warming here. He mentions this choice snippet from recent news:

China's capital city has been blanketed by falling snow for six days in a row -- its longest consecutive snowfall for the last 128 years."

Those pesky Chinese! A Communist plot, no doubt. Or as they would lay the blame in China itself: "The Gang of Four"!

And then there is this. Excerpt:

Cold weather in northern India has killed another 44 people in the past 24 hours, bringing the total death toll to 232, officials have said. Northern India has been shivering under a cold front that has seen temperatures drop to 5 and 6 degrees celsius.

Between India and China that's two billion people who probably do not believe in global warming right now.

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NORTH KOREA REJECTS MULTILATERALISM

In case you have missed it, there is an amusing article in the National Review that contrasts the attitudes of Iraq and North Korea. North Korea is having none of the multilateral/UN nonsense that Saddam has played along with. The Koreans want to deal with the USA only. So what is President Bush doing? Being nicely multilateral!

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HUMAN CLONING IS ETHICAL

A Cambridge university ethicist and Protestant clergyman agrees with me on cloning!

Meanwhile, as it says here:

The appointment of a freelance journalist to head a scientific panel to determine if a human has been cloned has raised eyebrows in both the journalistic and the scientific communities. The journalist, Michael Guillen, formerly of ABC-TV News, once won an award for his "indiscriminate promotion of pseudo-science and quackery."

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CHOMSKY???!!!!

"It's interesting to read the archives of Nazi Germany, fascist Japan, the Soviet Union. The leaders are acting from the highest imaginable motives, and probably believed it. It is remarkably easy to come to believe what it is convenient to believe."

Noam Chomsky in an interview with Alternet.

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ELSEWHERE

China Hand has a quite charming posting up about being a "Gweilo" (foreigner) in China. The Chinese are not at all politically correct about it but what they lack in glibness they more than make up for in genuine decency.

Michael Darby has an amazingly good-humoured report from a farmer in a drought-stricken region of Australia. He's a libertarian farmer too. What a rarity! He will make bureaucracy-haters out of every animal-lover, that's for sure.

The Wicked one Looks at whether religion and racism are both inborn and whether one therefore goes with the other.

Chris Brand explores at length the vexed question of whether there is any alternative to the conventional Left/Right division of politics. I have argued elsewhere that there is not (See towards the very end of the article).

Hooray! Bob Park reports that the crooks running Los Alamos laboratory have resigned. Marvellous what a bit of publicity will do. Background here.

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