ELSEWHERE

Christopher Pearson has an article noting how young Australians are taking more of an interest in Australian traditions than ever before. I think we are seeing the first signs both in the USA and Australia of a youth reaction against all the Leftist propaganda that young people get from the schools and universities. Youth is rebellious and hates being preached to so the Leftist propagandists who infest the educational system are in fact shooting themselves in the foot and creating conservatives by their constant droning hate-speech. It is Leftism the youth are now starting to rebel against, not conservatism.

UCLA brain mappers track down IQ and find it is highly genetic: "UCLA brain mapping researchers have created the first images to show how an individual’s genes influence their brain structure and intelligence. The findings, published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, offer exciting new insight about how parents pass on personality traits and cognitive abilities, and how brain diseases run in families. The team found that the amount of gray matter in the frontal parts of the brain is determined by the genetic make-up of an individual’s parents, and strongly correlates with that individual’s cognitive ability, as measured by intelligence test scores. More importantly, these are the first images to uncover how normal genetic differences influence brain structure and intelligence. Brain regions controlling language and reading skills were virtually identical in identical twins, who share exactly the same genes, while siblings showed only 60 percent of the normal brain differences. This tight structural similarity in the brains of family members helps explain why brain diseases, including schizophrenia and some types of dementia, run in families. “We were stunned to see that the amount of gray matter in frontal brain regions was strongly inherited, and also predicted an individual’s IQ score,” said Paul Thompson, the study’s chief investigator and an assistant professor of neurology at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging."

Religiousness too, is highly hereditary: "A study published in the current issue of Journal of Personality studied adult male monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins to find that difference in religiousness are influenced by both genes and environment. But during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, genetic factors increase in importance while shared environmental factors decrease. Environmental factors (i.e. parenting and family life) influence a child's religiousness, but their effects decline with the transition into adulthood. An analysis of self-reported religiousness showed that MZ twins maintained their religious similarity over time, while the DZ twins became more dissimilar. "These correlations suggest low genetic and high environmental influences when the twins were young but a larger genetic influence as the twins age" the authors state"

Arizona Hispanic boycott fails: "An immigrant advocacy group asked Hispanics to boycott businesses and to stay home from work yesterday to protest legislation by Arizona lawmakers targeting illegal aliens, and said it was a trial run for a full-scale, three-day economic protest planned for July. "This is a test so people can see and feel the power we have and the actual stranglehold we have on the economy of this state," Elias Bermudez, executive director of Centro de Ayuda, an immigrant advocacy group in Phoenix, told reporters this week. Although advertised extensively on Spanish-language radio and television stations, most community and civic leaders agreed that yesterday's boycott was a failure because many potential participants could not afford to lose a workday or business income."

Nat Hentoff sets out the total misrepresentations being used in an attempt to discredit one of GWB's judicial nominees (Justice Brown). But misrepresentations are normal for Leftists. The truth is just too inconvenient for them.

There is a detailed article here on the destruction of U.S. immigration law by Congressional Leftists -- which resulted in the 9/11 terrorists entering the USA without the slightest difficulty.

Good news on the U.S. economy. It's surging ahead despite high oil prices.

Germany lurching back to the 1930s: "The unholy anti-free market alliance between labor unions, the SPD and large segments of the CDU fits well within the emotional state of affairs of contemporary Germany. With Germany's economy, its welfare programs and the job market in a serious crisis, people are beginning to loose their entrepreneurial spirit. Optimism about one's personal future is at a historic low point. The perceived and actual outlook for the country's economy is bleak. Depression as a mental issue has been rising steadily. To many, the current mood among the population in Germany resembles the late 1929-30 period. Now as back then, with overall conditions like these, it is not surprising that rosy, warm, get-something-for-nothing rhetoric of anti-capitalism rears its ugly head."

I have just put up on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS some comments about the supercilious and obnoxious Garrison Keillor. Taranto also skewers Keillor, as does Peg Kaplan.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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