YOUNG AUSTRALIANS BECOMING MORE CONSERVATIVE

An "Absolutely Fabulous" generation of ageing hipsters with straitlaced children is emerging across Australia, as flower-power parents grow old dis-gracefully and are viewed with amazement by their offspring. New research has found that 50-somethings have clung to baby boomer ideals of the 1960s and '70s, with a relaxed attitude towards such matters as prostitution, premarital sex and divorce. However, like Eddy's bespectacled daughter Saffy in the sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous", typical 20-somethings are more conservative than their parents and are happy to settle down with partners, mortgages and steady jobs....

Attitudes prevalent among the middle-aged include an impatience with fussy food, an appetite for the good life and a positive outlook. Their children, however, are more into spirituality than the Sex Pistols. They worry about healthy food, feel that religion plays a strong part in their lives and are believers in marriage and the family unit....

The study finds that spirituality has enjoyed a renaissance: in 1978 only 26 per cent of young people viewed religion as important to their lives. Among today's parents, it is 36 per cent while their children are holier, at 40 per cent. On moral issues, young people are far less liberal than their forebears. Just 22 per cent agree with legalised prostitution, compared with 60 per cent in 1978. The proportion backing legalised marijuana has fallen from 39 per cent to 27 per cent. Even support for pre-marital sex has taken a knock, from 84 per cent of 20-somethings in 1978 to 69 per cent today.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Democrat politics in Louisiana: "Sen. Bill Frist rode to the rescue in more ways than one last week, with his call for a comprehensive congressional investigation into the failings of planning and execution of preparing for Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing relief effort. Frist's efforts weren't intended as a slam at President Bush, who has taken a pummeling in the media from Democrats in Congress, their operatives, and cooperative journalists who were willing to set facts aside for the opportunity to create a political fire storm around the Republican president. Instead, Frist's call for an investigation sent many Democrats running for cover.... "In the end, if the Democrats want to place blame, they know the behavior of their party members, for a generation really the only party in power in New Orleans and Louisiana, is damning, and they don't want to draw any more attention to the issue than the media wants to." Senate Appropriations Committee staff late last week were drawing up statistics on just where the hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for New Orleans went over the years.... If I were a local politician or a state or local bureaucrat down there, I'd be nervous about now."

See here for how the Levee Board in New Orleans mis-spent its budget

See here for how the Levee Board was under investigation for corruption prior to Katrina

Local corruption: There is an interesting parallel to the recent failure of State and local authorities in New Orleans in the matter of Multi-Drug-Resistant-TB (MDRTB). Note this excerpt: "In the United States, a very effective national TB control program was decimated when the government, in their "wisdom" chose to give discretion on the spending of public health funds to state governments. In 1972 when this change was first contemplated, informed observers testified to the US Congress, predicting that giving discretion on TB public health funding to state governments would lead to a public health disaster: a resounding resurgence of TB! These experts were roundly ignored, yet this "block grant" exercise of the 1970s directly led to the 20% resurgence of TB in the United States (35% in children) in the 1980s and 1990s, which required a huge outlay of new funds to return to control. Not having learned their lesson, high officials in the US government continue to try to reintroduce this concept". [As a good Federalist, my view is that both State and Federal governments have their place and I think that in cases where the need is uncontroversial and strong leadership is required (which it certainly is in the difficult case of MDRTB) the Feds are usually the right place to look. After New Orleans, I suspect that the Feds will now be given full authority to override immediately the local and State bodies in managing the initial reaction to major disasters]

Canadians back down on Sharia law: "Ontario has reversed course on plans to let Islamic sharia law to be used in settling family disputes and will ban religious-based arbitration altogether, to the dismay of other groups that had used the system. A spokesman for Premier Dalton McGuinty said that the Canadian province will dispense with all types of religious-based dispute settlements on issues such as child custody and divorce, allowed under its 1991 Arbitration Act. The decision comes after months of controversy and debate over the use of sharia - a code of law based primarily on the Koran as well as the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad - to settle family issues. Critics had said it strips women and children of their rights and had rallied to have Ontario prohibit it. There were protests in Toronto and other Canadian cities, as well as in Europe."

Gaza: "But as inhabitants celebrated the end of Israeli military occupation, there were fears that Palestinians have traded one form of control for another. While there may no longer be any visible signs of an Israeli presence, Gaza's economy, security, transport and basic utilities like water and electricity, will remain in Israeli hands for the foreseeable future, leaving some Palestinians to complain that they are now inmates of a "giant prison"... Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Information Minister, said that the priority must be to give Palestinians freedom of movement, to allow the Gazan economy to export goods and attract investment. "Without freedom of passage and mobility, Gaza will be doomed to be a prison - rather than the beginning of a peace process," he said. Israelis insist that only when the Palestinians have demonstrated the ability to control militant groups and maintain security will Israel consider making further concessions."

The latest post on Strange Justice concerns my home State of Queensland and the case deserves a lot more publicity than it is getting, in my opinion.

There is a new conservative blog that you might like to have a look at here. He calls himself "The Right-Wing Warmonger Who Is Always Right". He's got a sense of humour anyway.

There have been recent objections from British Muslims about official Holocaust remembrance. I have a couple of recent posts on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH that comment on the matter.

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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