ELSEWHERE

There is a pretty hard-hitting article here -- by someone who should know -- about what a creampuff army the U.S. Army has become under the influence of political correctness. One must have extreme doubts that it could ever achieve what the Wehrmacht achieved under Von Manstein at the battle of Crimea: The Germans mounted a frontal assault against superior forces who had nearly every advantage: a fortified position, command of the sea, the air, and tanks, while the Germans had not one tank. But the Germans were the ones with the fighting spirit and they won! There is are two more stories here and here about how the leadership of the U.S. military is a big problem.

“Make love not war” was a big slogan for the hippies of the 60s. It looks like some Ukrainians are actually doing it -- and at a rocket factory too.

I liked the FEE response to this report in the NYT: “The number of hungry people worldwide swelled in recent years, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to war, drought, AIDS and trade barriers, according to a report released today by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.” FEE commented: “What the have-nots have not is capitalism” (Post of 25th).

A Grand Ayatollah talks sense at last! Maybe there’s hope yet.

For those who think that there is any point in it Johann Hari does a pretty good job of demolishing the arguments of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

“Judicial activism has no more ferocious a critic than Robert Bork. As a federal judge, a professor at Yale Law School, and a famously mau-maued Supreme Court nominee, he has tirelessly exhorted courts to stay true to the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution, and to leave policy-making to legislators. In Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, Bork returns to his favorite topic, tracing the continued rise of judicial activism in the United States and describing its contagion internationally.

The good old US taxpayer is funding quack medicine -- so-called "alternative" medicine that has no scientific standing at all -- and some of which is clearly fraudulent. This at a time when real medical advances are held up for years or totally blocked by FDA red-tape. What crazy priorities!

Because it is my field of special expertise, I spend a lot of time debunking what psychologists say about politically relevant matters. I show that their data is shoddy and their reasoning naive and simplistic. There is however another social science that is often invoked for its political "lessons" -- Anthropology. Unsurprisingly, the Leftism of most anthropologists has made anthropology rotten to the core (i.e. fraudulent) as well. The falsity of the once-influential claims by Margaret Mead is, I think, now well-known. What has only recently come to light, however, is that modern anthropology actually started out on the basis of deliberately fraudulent work designed to prop up Leftist beliefs. Franz Boas was the fraudster concerned.

In my latest upload of a published academic journal article I compare religious prejudice with ethnic prejudice. I show that the two are only weakly correlated -- which fits in with other findings about prejudice generally. So there is a tendency for some people to be wary of anybody who is not like themselves but most prejudice is specific to particular groups. So if you do not like blacks (for instance) it does not mean that you will automatically dislike Jews (for instance). In my own case, I find Arabs (for instance) pretty disgusting but I quite like Indians and Chinese -- which is probably rather a good thing seeing that there are so many of them! Details here or here.

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