ELSEWHERE

Poor old Binning. He sent me quite a handsome apology for his abuse of me so I think he is a pretty decent sort, basically. I forwarded him the link to one of my recent posts on Majority Rights -- in which I outline the enormously unscientific way in which Leftists have "researched" the psychology of conservatism. The research concerned was summarized in 2003 by Jost et al and the summary was as unscientific as what it summarized (they only included findings they agreed with!). Binning, however, is still trying to defend the indefensible and has put up a comment on my post which summarized Jost et al as saying that “the best predictor of political conservatism is fear (death anxiety)”. Since I have done some very high-quality research (using random community sampling and proper psychometric methods) in conjunction with a very Left-leaning sociologist which showed that death anxiety is totally uncorrelated with current political attitudes, however, Binning might have to face the fact that the entire field he works in is one big con. I also sent him this link to ponder over.

More evidence that severe anti-social behaviour is caused by genes, not by "society": "Psychopaths are born anti-social, not corrupted by bad parenting, scientists reveal today. A study of twins showed that anti-social behaviour was strongly inherited in children with psychopathic tendencies. In children without psychopathic traits, being anti-social was chiefly the result of environmental factors. The findings support previous research indicating that children with psychopathic tendencies often remain an anti-social problem. Psychopaths are generally recognised by a lack of empathy and weak conscience. If a psychopath does something that hurts another person, he or she is less likely to feel remorse than other people. These tendencies are a recognised warning sign of anti-social behaviour in young children. To help identify the genetic components of anti-social behaviour, a team of British psychiatrists studied 3,687 pairs of seven-year-old twins.... The chief investigator, Dr Essi Viding, from the Medical Research Council's Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, said: "The discovery that psychopathic tendencies are strongly heritable suggests we need to get help for these youngsters early on." The research is published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry."

Education matters little: "One puzzle about the U.S. economy is why it doesn't do worse when there are so many reasons that it should. Our students do fare poorly on international comparisons. In a recent study of math skills of 15-year-olds in 29 countries, done by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans ranked 24th. We do depend heavily on immigrants to fill science and engineering jobs. In 2000, immigrants accounted for 17 percent of U.S. scientists and engineers with bachelor's degrees, 29 percent with master's degrees and 38 percent with doctorates. And our savings and investment rates are low. In 2001, the U.S. savings rate ranked 22nd out of 25 OECD countries. The explanation is this: every complex economy is more (or less) than the sum of its parts. What matters is not just how much we save-but how well we invest. The Japanese have squandered much of their higher savings on unproductive investments. Similarly, many work skills are learned on the job... America's economic strengths lie in qualities that are hard to distill into simple statistics or trends. We've maintained beliefs and practices that compensate for our weaknesses, including: ambitiousness; openness to change (even unpleasant change); competition; hard work, and a willingness to take and reward risks. [And most education is little more than propaganda anyway. Read this]

Estate tax: "The tax cut law of 2001 included a slow phase out of the estate tax by 2010, but the tax is supposed to be reinstated in 2011 when the entire 2001 law expires. This strange political compromise on estate taxes presumably will not last, so it is a good time to consider what should be done about this tax. I believe taxes on estates should be permanently abolished since they do little to reduce income or wealth inequality, benefit a vast army of lawyers and accountants whose role is to find ways to cut taxes on the estates of the wealthy, create problems for some families with smaller businesses, and do not raise a lot of tax revenue. In April the House of Representatives rather strongly voted to repeal permanently the tax on estates, so the issue now goes to the Senate"

The therapeutic society: "Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, ran nursery schools in London during the Blitz of World War II. Very few of her charges needed psychiatric help. As Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel relate in their new book, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance (St. Martin's Press), Freud found that even children who remained with their parents and were bombed repeatedly showed "no signs of traumatic shock.little excitement and no undue disturbance." What a long way we've come. Today, grief counselors rush in at the first sign of a "tragedy"-as when they comforted librarians upset over ruined books when the Boston Public Library was flooded in 1998. Sommers and Satel detail this and many other excesses of therapy in their well-researched and provoking book. They even coined a word for these immoderations: "therapism." "

Neville Chamberlain lives! "Officials negotiating Iran's nuclear future left the table in an upbeat mood Wednesday, with Tehran renewing its vow to refrain from developing nuclear weapons and signaling it will pursue talks with Europe toward a final agreement on its atomic program. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and other key European ministers met for three hours with Iranian negotiators under an implied threat that Tehran could be brought before the U.N. Security Council to face possible international sanctions over its suspected nuclear activities."

The Google cache is an amazing phenomenon. If you look here, you will find an entire blog that I deleted over a year ago. It's a bit like everlasting life! That reminds me: I wonder who posted this? The words are mine but I did not put them there.

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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