Brookes News Update

US economy, market bubbles and Adventures in Paradise: No matter how many stock market bubbles there have been, or will be, investors and their advisers always treat the current one as permanent, sometimes even calling it a 'new era'
Australian economy and the wage-inflation myth: Regardless of what our economic commentators claim, wages are not the "key to inflation" any more than oil prices -- money supply is
Oil prices and the inflation myth: The media is once again feeding us myths about oil prices and the threat of oil-fuelled inflation, the latter tale being another pervasive economic fallacy
Inflation and economic growth: Mainstream economics sees inflation as general rises in commonly accepted price indices. Well, the mainstream is wrong -- again
Turkey, Israel and the Palestinians: why now? Turkey must take on a more direct political role and mediate between Israel and the Palestinians
The ACLU and CAIR -- liberals join with Muslim fanatics: Muslim fanatics are intimidating companies, threatening extortion, attacking free speech and generally carrying on as if they live in Saudi Arabia. So why is the ACLU helping them?
The Judge Roberts trap: It remains to be seen whether John Roberts is really the best man to fill the Constitutional shoes of the legendary William Rehnquist

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ELSEWHERE

Mobile homes, campers wait at FEMA sites: "More than 9,000 mobile homes and campers meant for the victims of Hurricane Katrina are sitting unused at government staging areas while displaced families continue to live out of tents and shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says the backlog was inevitable: The temporary housing is easier to acquire than distribute because of the limited number of accessible roads, cleared lots and trucks to haul housing to the storm-ravaged region."

MSM lies: A small excerpt: "Media might serve its purposes in a complex society, but the chief purpose, contrary to myth, is certainly not to expose, reveal, alert, or awaken the populace. For that you're better off relying on your God-given eyes and ears and suspending belief about anything you haven't personally witnessed. The purpose of media is to control, parse, and muffle truth, and to punish any rogue reporter who goes after a "truth" that might unsettle the collective media stomach or smash the china-set of cherished beliefs. If you trusted the stampeding herd of what Hunter Thompson called the "press wizards," over the past century, you'd find yourself ruefully misinformed about major events. To cite just a few examples, they'd have told you that the Titanic didn't sink, Hitler had given up on being a dictator and only wanted peace, there was no famine and no liquidations under Stalin in the 1930s Soviet Union and, to cite a more recent example, one quarter of the United States non-IV-drug using population would be dead from AIDS by 1990, i.e. roughly 60 million people"

I love it! Dumb terrorists again: "On Sep. 2, 1999, Israel went off of daylight savings time to make it easier for Orthodox Jews to attend Selichot, a pre-sunrise penitential prayer that runs from a week before Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur; but the Palestinian Authority refused to follow Israel, leading to a two-week period when the two were an hour apart. To try to undermine the Sharm el-Sheikh accords, signed on Sep. 4, 1999, two Palestinian terrorists a day later tried to attack Israelis. But the Islamists set the bomb timers to go off on one schedule and themselves kept another one. As a result, the bomb went off when they were still transporting it, leading to the deaths of both men but no Israelis".

Putin is fed up with the Islamists too: "Vladimir Putin declared in Brussels on Monday that radical Islamic groups are planning to systematically annihilate non-Moslems and to create a worldwide Caliphate. He added that western civilisation was at risk of being attacked by terrorists, these attacks being more than sporadic one-off attacks. Rather, they are, in the opinion of Vladimir Putin a "concerted effort and programme" by an organisation which has a global structure and which has the intention to commit murderous atrocities in the name of Islam".

Newsbusters has some good coverage of the media claim that the interview between GWB and the troops in Iraq was "staged"

Leftists will never understand this but GWB's tax cuts are financing his big spendning: The US budget deficit shrank to $319bn last year as better economic conditions boosted tax revenues. Despite falling from 2004's record $412bn figure, the federal deficit for the fiscal year ending last month was still the third highest on record. US Treasury Secretary John Snow hailed the fall, which was larger than had been projected, as "encouraging news".

The myth of the "Constitution-in-Exile" movement: "Last week, I wrote about the conspiracy-mongering regarding the existence and function of the Federalist Society that has become part of the judicial confirmation wars and has emerged as a major talking point against right-of-center judicial nominees. There is another conspiracy-mongering campaign that is designed to serve the same purpose and it has something to do with an alleged 'Constitution-in-exile' movement of conservatives and libertarians determined to bring about wholesale changes in the American legal and political structure."

There is a book just out called Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis. That should stir the religion-hating Lefties up.

There is a good and wide-ranging answer here to a lot of the rubbishy scare stories you hear about China.

There has been a very good email about the New Orleans problems going around. Nobody seems to know who actually wrote it but whoever did was pretty straight and down-to-earth. Snopes have reproduced it nicely because it has wrongly been attributed to George Carlin.

There is a good new blog called The liberal wrong -- with posts about Democrat elitism etc.

Message for Paul Engel: My emails to you are still getting bounced.

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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