ELSEWHERE

Oliver Kamm is in good form -- in such good form that some people have not tumbled to the fact that the Tony Blair "apology" he has put up is a spoof. Kamm is however absolutely right in setting out what Blair SHOULD have said about the old Marxist heckler Walter Wolfgang.

Ya gotta laugh: Some group of fruitcake intellectuals has noted that there has been a lot more peace in the world since the fall of the Soviet Union. And who gets the credit for that? The United Nations! The words that occur to my mind (such as "Ronald Reagan", "globalization" etc) do NOT of course get a mention. What a simple soul I must be!

Greenie barriers to oil exploration knocked over: "In an aggressive push by the Bush administration to open more public land to oil and gas production, the Interior Department has quit conducting environmental reviews and seeking comments from local residents every time drilling companies propose new wells. Field officials have been told to begin looking at issuing permits based on past studies of an entire project, even though some of those assessments may be outdated".

There is a BIG article in New York Magazine about the Harpending & Cochran paper on Jewish intelligence. The Harpending & Cochran work does seem to have opened up some public awareness of the academic data about racial differences in IQ so one hopes that the discussion continues to open up. For the sake of respectability, all the old bromides that pretend to offer alternative explanations for the findings are of course trotted out -- saying that we don't really know what IQ is etc. A hundred years of evidence that there is such a thing as general problem-solving ability and that IQ measures it are conveniently overlooked. But some progress towards getting the truth about IQ differences out is better than none.

Dalrymple wisdom: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to"

The vampire economy: Italy, Germany, and the US : "What is the link between fascism and socialism? They are stages on a continuum of economic control, one that begins in intervention in the free market, moves toward regimentation and greater rigidity, marches toward socialism as failures increase, and ends in dictatorship. The fascist system, wrote Mises, 'clung first to the same principles of economic policies which all not outright socialist governments have adopted in our day, interventionism. Then later it turned step by step toward the German system of socialism, i.e., all-round state control of economic activities.'"

One Cosmos has an interesting psychoanalytic-style post which concludes that the Islamists NEED us as their enemy.

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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