POLITICS, HAPPINESS AND GENES

The fact that political stance is highly hereditary ties the two reports below together:

Even the Left-leaning Pew Research Center is still finding that conservatives are happier than Leftists. Such results are hardly surprising. Leftist politics are the politics of grievance, complaint and whining. But I also liked the comment about Democrats by Statguy: "Anyone who consistently looks to the government for help is in for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness".

Depression: Those pesky genes at work yet again: "In a world first, researchers from NSW have discovered the gene responsible for depression. After 25 years' research, scientists have found that people who carry a particular gene are more likely to suffer depression regardless of their life experiences. The medical breakthrough will have major ramifications for diagnosis and treatment of the disease which affects one in four Australians. The study, to be published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry this week, shows that people who carry a short serotonin transporter gene are predisposed to depression. Conversely, those who carry a long version of the serotonin transporter gene would be more resilient to whatever life throws at them. Around 43per cent of the population is believed to carry the short version of the gene".

So we should perhaps feel sorry for Leftists. They are born miserable. The trouble is that they want to take all the rest of us down with them too. They hate other people being happy. That is why their policies are good at tearing down the rich but hopeless at lifting up the poor. The results of their policies uncover what their real priorities are -- hurting rather than helping. Stalin and his ilk were no accident.

Update:

There is another report on the genetics of depression here.

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Well-deserved: "The sharp drop in the price of Google's shares may portend a long-awaited pullback in the broader stock market, technical analysts said. Google closed on Nasdaq at $US362.62 ($488.11), down $US27.76 ($37.36) for the day, after earlier falling as low as $US338.51 ($455.56). Google's 7.1 percent drop didn't come out of the blue. The stock is down 23.7 percent since January 11, when it hit its lifetime high of $US475.11 ($639.50)."

I guess the media will try to ignore this but a manifesto against Islamofascism has just been signed by some notable campaigners -- Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bernard-Henri Levy etc. Excerpt: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats...."

Leftists blame the victim: "There's a certain consistent pattern regarding the worldwide Left's assessment of culpability for Muslim terror. It is the fault of the murdered.... For a decade or more, it has been a given on the Left that Israel is to blame for terror committed against Israelis by Palestinian Muslims (Palestinian Christians don't engage in suicide terror). What else are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they had Apache helicopters, the argument goes, they would use them. But they don't, so they use the poor man's nuclear weapon -- suicide terror. The same argument is given to explain 9-11. Three thousand innocent Americans were incinerated by Islamic terrorists because America has been meddling in the Middle East so long. This was bound to happen. And, anyway, don't we support Israel? And when Muslim terrorists blew up Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others, the Left in Spain and elsewhere blamed Spanish foreign policy. After all, the Spanish government had sent troops into Iraq. When largely Muslim rioters burned and looted for a month in France, who was blamed? France, of course -- France doesn't know how to assimilate immigrants... During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, black mobs murdered innocent Korean shopkeepers and burned sections of the city. The liberal response in America was virtually universal: We must understand the anger of these people..."

Abortions getting easier: "Women who are less than nine weeks pregnant can safely have medical abortions at home, according to the head of a government-backed pilot project. Abortion services for the 20,000 women who seek a chemically induced abortion every year could be transformed should the Department of Health's official evaluation of the pilot confirm initial findings. But it is also likely to provoke controversy from anti-abortion campaigners who will claim that home abortions would make the procedure easier and therefore lead to more women having terminations. Shirley Butler, the project manager of one pilot which has tested the abortions with 172 women patients since 2004, told the Guardian: "We haven't had any significant problems apart from one woman who had a slightly heavy bleed. In my opinion medical abortions outside of acute hospitals seem to be safe.""

Why foreign aid to Africa does not work: "Economic development in Africa will depend -- as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world -- on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders. Development everywhere is homegrown. As G-8 ministers and rock stars fussed about a few billion dollars here or there for African governments, the citizens of India and China (where foreign aid is a microscopic share of income) were busy increasing their own incomes by $715 billion in 2005."

Leftist scam in Britain: "A 2 million pound bid for funds made to Walsall Council has been turned down as officials have never heard of the organisation and were staggered that its plea was for nearly twice as much cash as 53 others put together. The Anti Abuse Of Minorities group request was to help fund investigations into racial abuse and institutionalised racism. The application was nearly twice as much as the total 1.2 million pounds requested by 53 other groups across the borough. Councillor Zahid Ali, communities and partnership cabinet membership, said he had never heard of the group, which cannot be found on the internet. The application was one of the least researched he had ever seen he added. "It was the first time I had heard of them. We just don't know much about them. It was their first application and many of the forms were incomplete. There was no way we could give this kind of money." Efforts to contact AAOM were unsuccessful."

Tim Blair has an interesting look back in time to when British cartoons about the Nazis were causing official palpitations similar to what we now see in response to the Mohammed cartoons.

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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