ETTY BAY

Thanks to my trusty IBM Thinkpad, I am writing this whilst leaning up against a rock and sitting on the beach at tropical Etty Bay. Overhead is a tangle of jungle trees giving me shade. Ahead of me is an expanse of fine white sand with tree-covered hills in the background that come right down to the beach. Although it is midwinter here, the temperature is balmy and I am wearing only a shirt and shorts. There's only about eight other people in sight. It is the beach to which I used to come for outings when I was a child. I know of no other beach where the jungle comes right down to the sand -- though I guess there must be others. It is of course well off the tourist map and long may it remain so. There is a small caravan park here but not much else. It is rimmed in by hills so there is really no scope for any building here. Just a tiny patch of paradise. And everybody here speaks English! To me it the most beautiful place in all the world. The whole point of my coming North on this vacation was that I just had to sit on the beach at Etty Bay once again.

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ELSEWHERE

This must be giving a lot of Democrats heartburn: "Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said Monday that he would have voted to give the president authorization to go to war in Iraq even knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction. 'Yes, I would have voted for that authority, but I would have used that authority to do things very differently,' Kerry said"

Leftists instinctively unpatriotic: "After the Sept. 11 attacks, I put a small American flag in my front window. Some of my most liberal friends were appalled. The flag conjured up visions of jingoistic, Fox-watching rednecks, they said. Displaying it tagged me as a guns, guts, and God kind of gal, a vengeful Rambo in heels. At the very least, it meant that I was for bombing the daylights out of Afghanistan. No, I protested. The flag is merely a symbol. It can celebrate any aspect of America we choose: freedom of speech, community, separation of church and state. Or just solidarity with the fallen."

Elitist arrogance: "It is no secret that our president is wildly unpopular among Britain's chattering classes, as distinct from its far wiser cab drivers and John, my haircutter. With the notable exception of a few newspapers, the press and the BBC pour out anti-American vitriol that often makes Al Jazeera seem a paragon of objective reporting. The situation is so bad that the joke at No. 10 Downing Street -- 'joke,' as in 'you will laugh so hard that you will cry' -- is that George W. Bush is less popular in certain British circles than Osama bin Laden."

Belmont club on Iraq: "The death of public discourse over the War on Terror was at least partly the result of the self-lobotomization of the Leftist mind. That operation was necessary to prevent an admission of the obvious: the basic Leftist tenets were bankrupt and sustained only by ever more tedious extensions to the original discredited theory; a latter day replay of the downfall of geocentrism which held back the Copernican revolution only by introducing artificial and complicated epicycles."

What a disgrace! "Millions of illegal aliens in the United States would be free from arrest and deportation, have access to tax-deferred savings accounts and Social Security credits, and get unrestricted travel to and from their home countries under President Bush's guest-worker program. According to previously undisclosed details of the president's plan, which some critics have described as a limited amnesty, the proposal offers numerous 'incentives' for the 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens to come 'out of the shadows,' Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson, the nation's border and transportation security czar, told a Senate panel."

Buchanan on immigration: "An invasion that Congress and the president refuse to repel, in dereliction of their constitutional duty, has put America at risk. And while the GOP, following the Karl Rove script, remains silent, Kerry Democrats try to out-pander Bush Republicans with even more generous offers of amnesty to illegal aliens."

Dick McDonald has recently put up most of a Wall St Journal article about the amusing decline of German socialism. Excerpt: "During May and June of 1984, bumper stickers picturing a smiling sun advocating a 35-hour workweek were everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in the name of shorter working hours.... The mandatory reduction in working hours was supposed to miraculously combine the "humanization of the working environment" with a giant job-sharing program. As people worked shorter hours, the theory went, employers would just have to hire more people to pick up the slack.... This summer, the German unions' springtime -- along with the 35-hour workweek -- has come to an abrupt end. But instead of calling for a general strike, the unions gave the expanded working hours their blessing -- and then denied that anything had really changed... It all began when electronics giant Siemens AG reached an agreement with union workers to extend the working time at two of its plants to 40 hours a week"

And France may not be far behind: "Barely 100 days into his tenure at the Finance Ministry, Sarkozy has focused on the most controversial pocketbook issue in French politics: the nation's 35-hour workweek. This revolutionary labor law, passed by the previous Socialist government, went into effect in 2000. It was supposed to be a panacea for the jobless, founded on the peculiarly European notion that if more people work less (but keep the same salaries as when they worked more) lots of good jobs will be created. "Time for me, work for others," was the slogan for this French version of voodoo economics. Of course the measure didn't lower the unemployment rate, now around 10 percent; it just pleased those already on the job. It also hung an economic millstone around the neck of the French state, which has compensated businesses with huge tax breaks to help them adjust. "France will soon dedicate 16 billion euro per year to prevent people from working," Sarkozy told the French financial newspaper Les Echos last month"

Catholic dinosaurs: They still have not caught up with the triumph of capitalism. "Diotallevi and Cipriani interviewed a selection of persons largely representative of the Italian Catholic intelligentsia.... When questioned on politics and economics, a great number of them demonstrated an orientation markedly in favor of state intervention: 44 percent of those interviewed held that the state should provide jobs for everyone; 48 percent held that the labor market should be made more rigid and less flexible; a very great number of them want the state to have control of the most important businesses. And the closer those interviewed are to the heart of Church organizations, the greater is their opposition to economic liberalism. It is the same in the field of health care. Here as well, opposition to the free market increases with the level of education and religious participation of those interviewed..... The political battles for which Italian progressivist Catholics fight also have little or nothing distinctively religious about them. This is true both for interventionism and for the pacifism that opposed the war in Iraq.

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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