ELSEWHERE

Entertainers seem to make a specialty of being dumb when they are not entertaining but this one spoke some VERY long overdue words recently: "American singer Lauryn Hill, from a stage used by the Pope, shocked Catholic officials at a concert by telling them to "repent" and alluding to sexual abuse of children by U.S. priests. The broadside came during the recording Saturday night of a Christmas concert attended by top Vatican cardinals, bishops and many elite of Italian society, witnesses said”

Another triumph of socialized medicine: "CANCER patient Rodney Plows believes he will die waiting for relief from his chronic back pain. He has been told he faces a delay of up to five years for treatment in Queensland's public hospitals. Mr Plows, 53, was shocked to learn there were 540 people ahead of him on the waiting list for an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital. The invalid pensioner spends his days mostly housebound as he fights a losing battle to manage the pain".

Australian Leftist teachers TEACH hate-speech and do so very publicly! Read Andrew Bolt for a heap of examples.

The Greenies will love this one: Refrigerators are bad for you. They could cause the terrible rotting-bowel disease called Crohn’s: “Researchers writing in this week's issue of The Lancet hypothesise that the emergence of Crohn's at the same time Kelvinators became fixtures in kitchens around the world is no mere coincidence. In fact, that's exactly how Dr Jean-Pierre Hugot, lead author of the paper, describes his theory”. Will we see a Kyoto treaty on refrigerators in the future? It would be as logical as the current Kyoto treaty.

Further to my mention yesterday of Michael Crichton's view that environmentalism has become a religion, Gerry Jackson of Brookes News writes: "Although I'm in broad agreement with Michael Crichton regarding the Greens' cult his view of religion is a very narrow one. One might even call it prejudiced. For example, any honest person who was even slightly acquainted with the intellectual history of the Catholic Church could never call it "totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view." Nor could they assert that it thinks it knows it all. To argue otherwise would be an insult to the scholastics whose works and thoughts refute Crichton's accusations. One only has to peruse their debates on the nature of law, economics and the state to see what I mean. Atheists do not help their cause by overstating their case".

Amazing! I have just squeaked into the the top 200 of "The most influential reporters and bloggers on the web". I have often noted that things I post seem to have been heard even though nobody has linked back to me over them too. As one possible such instance, a reader recently drew my attention to the fact that a misspelt headline I alluded to here has since been fixed.

I have just put up here Chris Brand's latest thoughts. He takes up the "Flynn" challenge to the meaning of IQ scores, among other things. He notes that although IQ test scores have been rising, the Black-white gap is not closing.

The latest upload of a chapter from my book looks at ways of having universal health care without socializing medicine. Details here or in chapter 24 here.

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