ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald is blogging up a storm about John Kerry. Lots of good stuff.

The system's working! "U.S. Sen. Edward M. 'Ted' Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government's secret 'no-fly' list."

This is an amusing Leftist article to read. Take a look at the angry face of its author first. The core assertion of the article is that: "In fact, liberal bias in the academy is a fiction". And, in good Leftist fashion, that is just given as an assertion without proof or evidence. No mention is made of the fact that something like 9 out of 10 professors in the humanities and social sciences are registered Democrats. I guess Democrats are not liberals! Pathetic! But since when did Leftists ever care about the evidence? The one half-way reasonable point the author makes is that there are some academic disciplines -- e.g. accountancy, engineering etc -- that do tend towards the Right. But a careful academic study of just how far they tend to the Right is instructive. Nakhaie & Brym found that professors of accounting, finance and mechanical engineeering are indeed to the Right of centre but only marginally so. They are in fact centrists rather than Rightists. Disciplines such as sociology of course were way to the Left. More details of just how far Left academe is in general can be found here.

A fascinating piece of new research by some economists here confirms the Lynn & Vanhanen finding that national average IQ is an important predictor of national economic prosperity: "we show that national average IQ has a robust positive relationship with economic growth". So brains matter and not all human groups are equally brainy. In general, the countries with the brainiest people are not only the ones who are already richest (which is what Lynn & Vanhanen showed) but are also the ones who are getting even richer.

Arnold Kling hits back at the latest bout of drug-company bashing. One excerpt: "Marcia Angell is outraged that pharmaceutical companies earn profits and use advertising to encourage people to use their products. To her, these are evil forms of incentives. However, the alternative to using profits and advertising is to use taxes and regulation. Those are even more coercive forms of incentives. I can choose not to buy pharmaceuticals, but taxes are unavoidable. I can ignore drug company advertising, but I cannot ignore government regulation."

The drug bureaucracy at work: "On February 1, 2002, Cecil Knox was seeing patients in his Roanoke, Virginia, clinic when more than a dozen federal agents burst through the doors with guns drawn. Helmeted, shielded, and wearing bullet-proof vests, they terrified waiting patients and employees. ... Knox, a pain management specialist who had been practicing medicine in Roanoke for seven years, was dragged out in handcuffs and leg irons."

In case anybody is interested, I have just put up here some photos from my recent vacation in Far North Queensland.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH and GUN WATCH. Mirror sites here, here and here

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Leftists acclaim "diversity" yet say "All men are equal". Figure that one out.

Why can those who claim to understand the dangers of meddling with a complex ecosystem like the natural environment, not understand that government interference with a complex system like the economy is perilous too?

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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