ELSEWHERE

Another historical insight into the Leftist mind: Opposite a car park that I sometimes use on those rare occasions when I go to the bank, there is a graffito up which says, "Stop GHOGM". Now what in the blue blazes is "CHOGM"? -- you might ask. It stands for "Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting" -- with the Commonwealth concerned being the British Commonwealth. It is purely a talk-shop with no powers whatsover, though its members do seem to hope (usually in vain) that their resolutions will have some moral force towards lessening human rights abuses. So what could be more innocuous and worthy? Yet to the Left it should be "stopped". Why? There is no rational reason. It is just that the Left like disrupting the normal activities of other people. That is it, pure and simple. There is no other rhyme or reason to it. Trying to please or placate the Left is pointless. They will always find SOMETHING to condemn, no matter how brainless the condemnation may be.

The bureaucratized British: "In his book, Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs, Page deconstructs many of the most cherished beliefs of the men and women who run our military. Most spend their careers defending the indefensible, Page says, largely because it is the only way to keep their jobs and inflation-proof pensions. The number of officers is way out of proportion to the number of service units that actually need commanders. "The army's two combat divisions - one of which is at least partly fictional - might call for 10 or 15 brigadiers, two or three major-generals and a single lieutenant-general to run them," Page said. "Maybe we should also have some extra generals - say two or three times this number. What we actually have is more than 10 times as many." There are 180 brigadiers and 60 generals. And, as Page points out, the military hierarchy is even more distorted in the Royal Navy, where there are 41 admirals with only 40 major warships or submarines to look after. The RAF has 40 air marshals for 36 squadrons. Little has improved since C Northcote Parkinson of "Parkinson's law" fame first identified the problem 50 years ago".

The lying Castro: "The longest-ruling despot in the world is Fidel Castro, who seized power in Cuba 47 years ago this week. Like most dictators, Castro is a brazen liar, especially about his own regime. This, for example, is what he told an international conference in Havana in April 2001: "There have never been death squads in our country, nor a single missing person, nor a single political assassination, nor a single victim of torture. . . . You may travel around the country, ask the people, look for a single piece of evidence, try to find a single case where the Revolutionary government has ordered or tolerated such an action. And if you find them, then I will never speak in public again." ,,, Castro's mocking challenge -- "try to find a single case" -- is not going unanswered. The Cuba Archive project (www.CubaArchive.org) is working to document the cost, in human life, of more than five decades of Cuban dictatorship... It is heartbreaking work.... So far the archive has catalogued the deaths of 9,240 victims of the Castro regime"

I have just put up a new recipe on my recipe blog. (Mirror site here). It is a convenient recipe for that yummy Hungarian creation -- Liptauer Cheese spread. Great for parties and canapes.

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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