RECOVERING

Well my big surgical procedure seems to have gone OK. Many thanks for the good wishes I have received from many readers. I felt like shit when I came out of the anaesthetic but after a few hours of post-operative testing they let me go home, whereupon I fell straight into bed and have just woken up after a few hours of sleep, feeling fairly normal. There was some morphine in the cocktail that the anaesthetist poured into me however so I am not sure if that has worn off yet or not.

I went into one of Brisbane's many private hospitals where my treatment was faultless: lots of competent and attentive staff. Maybe I should give the hospital a free plug: It was North West Private hospital, a for-profit hospital. My lady-friend Ann is a nurse and her her loving presence during my recovery period helped a lot too. The procedure was a dermatological one and I have frequent more minor dermatological procedures so I was on first-name terms with the surgeon. We even had a few laughs before proceedings began. I had had a couple of small excisions (SCCs) done by him just six days before and he in fact took out the sutures resulting from them while I was on the table -- as they were already well-healed. It is lucky I am a good healer.

For those who take an interest in such details, the hospital staff that I encountered were all white and all spoke perfect Australian English -- which helps a lot as I am a bit deaf these days. I don't think I should sit up for long at this stage so I don't think I will post to all my blogs straight off but I may get more up during the day. It is just after midnight here in Eastern Australia at the time I am writing. I do however have a few things ready to put up on Australian Politics and there are also a few excerpts from my recent readings below.

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ELSEWHERE

Aristotle vs multiculturalism: "Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit. A state is not the growth of a day. Hence the reception of strangers, in colonies either at time of their foundation or afterwards has generally produced revolution." (Aristotle THE POLITICS, book V)

Back to the animal rights folly : "Some ideas just keep being paraded about, yet there is so little merit to them that they should never see the light of day in intellectually respectable forums. It's as if we gave Nazis a place at the table when discussing how societies should be organized -- they are beyond the pale. Here, once again, I find a very famous person, indeed, a Nobel Laureate in literature, voicing sentiments that look very much like denying the difference between humans and other animals."

The honest truth about Honest Abe : "If you want to believe Lincoln's goal was to free the slaves -- fine. If you think he had to suspend habeas corpus, imprison rival politicians, and shut down dissenting papers because, for freedom to live, it had to be killed -- great. Think whatever you want to think. I honestly don't care. Six-hundred thousand lives were wasted in that war, but hell, they're dead now, so there's no use crying over spilled milk. All I'm saying is, in war, there are always two sides to the story. Always. Even in our current war. And if you don't teach both sides to school kids, they'll never be able to critically pick one. That kind of lopsided thinking gets us precisely nowhere in this world. It's a great way to trick kids into staying on your side of a conflict. But it's also a driving force behind most conflicts to begin with."

That most painstaking of Australian historians, Keith Windschuttle, has just written a brief history of Maoism in Australia in which he describes the powerful influence such complete nonsense had among Australian intellectuals. See here.

Amazing: France supported Britain in the Falklands war "Investigations in the 1990s revealed that France provided Britain with a large amount of technical assistance. The most valuable information was on the Exocet's homing radar. Officials of Aerospatiale, the manufacturer, denied having direct dealings with the British; but Aerospatiale was run by Jacques Mitterrand, the president's brother, a fact that may have facilitated a quiet arrangement. Sir John Nott, defence minister during the Falklands war, revealed in his memoirs that the French also supplied aircraft similar to those sold to Argentina for British pilots to practise against. "In so many ways," wrote Nott, a diehard Eurosceptic like Thatcher, "Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies." Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that the French president was "absolutely staunch" in his support. "I was to have many disputes with President Mitterrand in later years," she wrote. "But I never forgot the debt we owed him for his personal support throughout the Falklands crisis."

Mike Adams on Muslims and Marxists: "For those who have never considered the similarities between radical Muslims and radical Marxists, it is time to take heed. While the attacks of the former have been well-documented over the last few years, insufficient attention has been paid to the attacks of the latter. Our college campuses have become the last safe haven of Marxists, largely because its adherents have never had to survive in the real world, much less in a communist dictatorship. Indeed, there are more communists teaching in the State of North Carolina than there are in the former Soviet Union. Look carefully at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Few campuses have more avowed Marxists within the ranks of the faculty. And few schools have done more to present a kinder, gentler version of Islam - one that omits every reference to the killing of "infidels."... The proponents of Marxism are also the greatest supporters of those who kill our troops in Iraq. For the most part, academics are silent about the blood-letting that inevitably ensues once a nation is governed by radical Islam or by the principles of Marxism. And if anyone dares to state the obvious, the subsequent willingness to distort the "atrocities" of this nation knows no bounds."

Ireland beats the Scandinavians hands down: "In his research into the causes of growth differences between OECD economies the American economist James Gwartney showed that there was a direct correlation between economic growth and tax burden. The higher the level of taxation, the lower the growth rate. The explanation for this phenomenon is as logical as it is simple. The higher the tax level, the lower the incentive for people to make a productive contribution to society. The higher the fiscal burden, the more resources flow from the productive sector to the ever more inefficient government apparatus. Ireland has proved that a substantial lowering of the taxation level can become the motor for launching even the most slackish economy into full gear. A drastic reduction of the Irish tax rate, from 53% in 1986 to its current 35% , has led to a continuous boom of wealth creation at an average rate of 5.6% during the past two decades, while the number of jobs has grown by over 50%. In barely 18 years Ireland jumped from the 22nd to the 4th place in the OECD prosperity ranking. Ireland did not reduce its social welfare benefits. On the contrary. The unprecedented growth led to an increase of fiscal revenue and social expenditure."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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