EXISTENTIALISM

Excerpt from a novel about Africa

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another - not even for his wife - would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls - young existentialist girls - you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, non-existentialist people around one.

From p.76 of "Morality for beautiful girls" by Zimbabwe-born Scotsman, Prof. Alexander McCall Smith

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ELSEWHERE

Fun! A conservative New Zealand blogger started up a fake-Leftist site called Progressive Essays. The amusing part was that the content on the blog in fact consisted of recycled speeches by Hitler and various other Nazis and Fascists of history. Apparently no one spotted the difference. It was routinely linked as just another Leftist blog!

Bible OK after all: "A federal appeals court reinstated a California man's death sentence, ruling Thursday that jurors did not invalidate their deliberations by considering biblical arguments in favor of vengeance. The Los Angeles jurors in the 1979 case of Stevie Lamar Fields unanimously agreed that death was the appropriate punishment after their foreman circulated biblical and other religious passages - "an eye for an eye," for example - that seemed to require it.... A federal trial judge in Los Angeles reversed Fields' sentence five years ago, citing jury misconduct. The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate it appears to be the first of its kind and could make Fields, now 49, a candidate for execution in the near future".

Holocaust denial at Reuters: "Yesterday we noted that a Reuters dispatch, titled "Iran's President Questions Holocaust," included this sentence: "Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust." A later version of the dispatch, however, deleted the words "Historians say" and presented the Holocaust as fact: "The Nazis killed some 6 million Jews during their 1933-1945 rule." But today, Reuters has a new formulation: "Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Regarding this widely-accepted view, Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency IRNA . . .". Reuters, of course, famously forbade its "reporters" from referring to the Sept. 11 attacks as an act of terrorism. "We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field," said Stephen Jukes, the "global news editor," in September 2001. Apparently Reuters thinks Holocaust deniers are entitled to a "level playing field," even if that means downgrading a historical fact to a "widely accepted view."

European-born Muslims the most dangerous: "There was a real difference between those Muslims who had moved to Europe and those who were born there. Those who had moved here would say to me: "Things are much worse where I came from. Here I can sit and talk to you without worrying about the police." By contrast, the people born in Europe did not take that view -- they were much more likely to say: "Europe has made all these promises to us and hasn't kept them." They were much angrier, and scored much higher in all the alienation tests I used."

An acidic but accurate comment from Michael Graham : ""Americans have never been against sin in and of itself. Rather, we've always believed in sinning the right way. Racism, for example, is utterly evil, unless it involves denying slots at Ivy League schools to people who've made the tragic lifestyle decision of being white, Asian or Jewish-in which case, racism becomes the Lord's work."

Another French absurdity: "The notion of a notoriously bureaucratic French government stage-managing innovations in the high-tech sector -- typically known for fierce competition and a libertarian ethos -- seems paradoxical. But in France, business remains a risk-averse activity in which industry looks to the government for succor. Proponents say this is precisely what makes the initiative necessary: France has proven skilled at research but weak at transforming ideas into money -- a step requiring government orchestration"

California is another country: "Diplomats gathered in Montreal for the largest discussion of climate change since the Kyoto Protocol was signed eight years ago. The U.S. pulled out of Kyoto, but the state of California sent a delegation to Montreal to make its own deals".

A has-been on an ego trip: "Former US president Bill Clinton took to the podium at the UN climate talks Friday here to ram home a grim message about global warming and demand the United States move quickly away from the fossil fuels causing the problem. In a show-stealing appearance rumoured to have ired the US delegation, Clinton defended the UN's Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases that was ditched by his successor, President George W. Bush, and said the switch to cleaner energy would create millions of jobs for the American economy".



A sentimental loss: "Britain's capital bid a fond farewell yesterday to the Routemaster double-decker bus that for half a century has been as synonymous with London as Big Ben. Other more recent double-deckers will continue to run, but the revered red Routemasters are in a league of their own. Loved by tourists and locals alike, the distinctive vehicles have run since 1956. But they are seen as expensive antiques and have been gradually retired since the 1980s. The last Routemaster - the number 159 - travelled from Oxford St to Brixton bus garage in south London last night, ringing in the end of an era.... The buses will not completely disappear. A few will continue on two London heritage routes".

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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POSTMODERNISM DECONSTRUCTED

I rarely read philosophy these days. I went into the basic philosophical questions in my student days and shortly thereafter had published my conclusions about the nature of mind, the nature of ethics, the nature of cause and the nature of self. I have never seen any reason to alter my views about any of the questions concerned in the many years since but I have at times elaborated a little more fully my views about moral philosophy.

And for me any philosophy that fails to give an account of mind, ethics, cause and self is quite simply failed philosophy. And a philosophy that denies that any of those things are real is therefore fit only to be ignored. As it happens, however, there are lots of failed philosophers about and they have somehow conned the taxpayers into paying them a lot of money. They call themselves "postmoderninsts" and, as far as one can make any sense at all of what they say, their essential credo seems to be "nothing is real". When I come across such garbage I tend to be overcome by the wish that I could hit the so-called philosophers over the head with a baseball bat and then say to them: "Don't worry. Nothing is real so I didn't really hit you over the head with a baseball bat. Just carry on as before while I get ready to hit you again". I think reality would be rapidly rediscovered under those circumstances.

I was triggered off into this little tirade by a book I have just been having a look at. It is called Explaining postmodernism and is by Prof. Stephen R.C. Hicks, who undertakes the heroic task of trying to make some sense of postmodernism and trace its historical roots. As irrationality has always figured largely in human experience, it is no surprise that he finds the sources of postmodernism to be many and varied and to go back a long way. He traces postmodernism back to Kant but he could have gone back much further if he had wished to look at lesser-known writers.

His conclusions are in general also mine, though he is more polite than I would be. In my view postmodernism is simply a juvenile tantrum about how unco-operative reality is with socialist thought. Socialism has of course long had big appeal to intellectuals because it offers the simplifications that intellectuals tend to seek. The only trouble is that the simplifications don't work. From the French revolution on through Stalin and Hitler to Pol Pot we all now know of the horrors that it regularly leads to. So having had their childish simplifications taken away from them by reality, Leftist intellectuals stamp their foot and say that it is reality which is at fault. By denying reality they are in some insane way able to hang on to their faith in socialism.

My only quarrel with Prof. Hicks is that he uses the term "Right" in a peculiar way -- no doubt through political expediency. He seems to think you can be of the political Right and also be a socialist! That enables him to avoid upsetting the applecart with regard to Hitler. He admits that Hitler was a socialist who differed only in detail from the Communists but still calls Hitler a Rightist! Calling Hitler a Leftist would in academe cause Prof. Hicks to be consigned to outer darkness, of course. The only sense I can make of Prof Hick's usage is that he is using "Right" to be synonymous with "Nationalist" but that is pretty sloppy when one considers that, at least from Napoleon on, there have been plenty of Leftist nationalists. Perhaps he just has not read Friedrich Engels, who was as fervid a German nationalist and racial supremacist as Hitler was. (See, for instance, here and here and here and here). And, yes, the Engels I am talking about is the co-worker of Karl Marx. Or were Marx & Engels not Leftists? I think in this matter I have to say that Prof. Hicks gets himself into absurdities as big as those he ennumerates among the postmodernists. Or perhaps he just does not know his political history. He reads this blog, however, so I suspect that he knows it better than he can afford to admit, which is a bit sad. But he has to survive in academe after all and he is only a young man yet.

In most normal usage, Rightism would be identified with conservatism and if anybody wants to know what history shows about the nature of conservatism, I have just updated my account of the matter here.

Academic books and papers very commonly end with the conclusion: "More research is needed" and Prof Hicks is no exception. He feels that postmodernists have been allowed to flourish by the fact that realist and empiricist philosophers have not given final and uncontrovertible answers to the puzzles that they consider. He seems to think that if realists and empiricists had done a better job then postmodernists would not have flourished. I think however that such a conclusion runs counter to his own observation that postmodernism fulfils a psychological need rather than having any real intellectual function. I cannot see that a completed program of realist philosophy would have stopped the absurd tantrums of the postmodernists. And the day that there cease to be questions in philosophy, it will no longer be philosophy.

There is another review of the book here which claims that Hicks does not describe the thought of the philosophers he covers in enough depth. My own view of that is that Hicks is a hero to have waded as deeply as he did into such dog's vomit. My own essay on postmodernism is here

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Marxist pilgrims from China can't wait to get to the capitalist shops: Thousands of Chinese tourists are exploiting their new freedom to make pilgrimages to the German birthplace of Karl Marx - and squeeze in some shopping as well. This year more than 30,000 people from across China will have visited Trier, near the border with Luxembourg - an invasion jokingly attributed to the "Marx Factor".... The Chinese, who have been allowed to travel to Germany freely only in the past two years, are now the second biggest group of visitors after the Dutch. After a visit to the museum, most go shopping, spending an average of 135 pounds a day on items such as non-stick saucepans, steel cutlery, chocolate, designer suits and Swiss army knives".

The psychopathic John Kerry recently claimed that American soldiers go "into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children". Rush Limbaugh has lot of pictures of how the American military do that.

Jeff Jacoby says all that needs to be said about the Left's current infatuation with unrepentant and murderous Los Angeles gang-boss Stanley "Tookie" Williams. I personally would like to see done to Tookie just some of the things he has done to others.

Posts just up on Australian Politics include Australia's recent pro-Israel vote in the U.N. and Muslims trying to take control of Sydney beaches.

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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BrookesNews Update

US economy and Pollyanna analysts: Against signs of US tightening labour markets some analysts have adopted the Pollyanna approach to economics, arguing that greater competition and improving technology will fuel productivity growth
Labour market reform, the US experience and the productivity myth: It appears that proponents of labour market reform have sold the Liberal Government the myth that a free labour market would raise productivity
Labour market reform and the capital-productivity fallacy: Australia's self-appointed guardians of free market thought are not the only ones to preach fallacious ideas about labour markets and productivity. Kenneth Davidson is just as bad
Australian Marxist-Leninist David Bradbury slimes US Army: Lying comes naturally to leftists like Bradbury as does their support for sadistic leftwing thugs. In 1984 he produced 'Nicaragua: No Pasaran' a film dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas who had taken over Nicaragua
Workplace reform, Hugh Morgan's arrogance and executive pay: Hugh Morgan has neither the knowledge nor the intellectual capacity to argue the free market case. That he believes otherwise comes from a character defect that allows him to confuse the size of his ego with the size of his intellect
The media are "enemy" within: The ongoing American tragedy is the ability of Democrat-controlled media to hide truth from the American people
The sexy Jihad -- or how to get a bang out of your love life: Before the Arabs solve their problems with their governments or before their governments solve their problems with terrorism, they must first solve their problem with the other sex
Supply and demand fallacies: The orthodox supply and demand framework provides the rationale for government and central bank interference with businesses

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Who pays for farm subsidies? "The general public in rich countries bears much of the cost of agricultural protectionism. First, the public subsidizes the farming community through higher taxes. Second, the public pays food prices that are higher than they would be under a liberalized trade regime. In 2004, for example, agricultural support in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) came to about $280 billion. The EU's agricultural support amounted to about $133 billion, Japan's to $49 billion, America's to $47 billion, South Korea's to $20 billion and Canada's and Switzerland's to $6 billion each. Moreover, in 2003, the British think-tank Policy Exchange found that EU consumers 'pay 42 percent more for agricultural products than they would if the system were dismantled. Americans pay 10 percent extra, Japanese more than twice as much. For less well-off families, for whom food takes up a large proportion of household income, freer trade would mean a noticeably higher standard of living.'"

"Windfall" taxes bad for energy supply: "More fundamentally, all targeted tax hikes on energy-company profits are energy taxes no matter how they're labeled. As every policymaker should know from Economics 101, when government taxes something, the economy produces less of it, and when supply falls relative to demand, consumer prices go up. Thus, 'windfall profits' taxes or their accounting-gimmick equivalents are bound to make energy less affordable. Yet the leading proponents claim to be 'consumer advocates.' Are proponents confused, or is consumer protection a rhetorical cover for other agendas?"

Congress subsidises supporters of illegal immigration: "Thanks to a congressional earmark, an open-borders advocacy group that pushes for driver's licenses, free in-state tuition and healthcare for illegal aliens and bilingual requirements for state agencies and ballots is slated to get $4 million in new taxpayer money to add to the more than $30 million it has received from various federal agencies since 1996. The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), Spanish for "the race," will get its latest grant through an appropriations bill passed by Congress on November 18.

There is a very good article here spelling out how much the prewar KKK had in common with the "Progressives" of that era. Many of the things that the Left today brand as "Rightist" (including overt racism) were "progressive" in the first half of the 20th century. Excerpt: "In fact, the 1924 election indicates the extent to which the Klan was entangled with the progressives. For that was the year of the Democrats' infamous "klanbake" convention, when Klansmen participated heavily as delegates and blocked a platform plank that would have condemned their order. They also entered the presidential race ... they endorsed the Californian William McAdoo, son-in-law to the late President Wilson...... What were the man's most notable accomplishments? He had been one of the architects of Wilson's war collectivism, helping create the Council of National Defense and serving as head of the Railroad Administration. And as secretary of the treasury, he had been instrumental in creating one of the Progressive Era's most substantial new interventions in the economy: the Federal Reserve system".

Supreme Court considers recruitment case: "The Supreme Court appeared ready Tuesday to rule that Congress can withhold money from colleges that protest the Pentagon's ban on gay men and lesbians by denying military recruiters access to campuses. Most of the nine justices seemed skeptical of claims by a group of 30 law schools that said their First Amendment rights to speak out against discrimination are violated by a law that could allow the U.S. government to withhold billions of dollars from colleges that inhibit military recruiters."

Gift from Canada?: "Why does President Bush hope Christmas comes a little late this year? Because on Jan. 23, Canada may elect the most pro-American leader in the Western world. Free-market economist Stephen Harper, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, is pro-free trade, pro-Iraq war, anti-Kyoto, and socially conservative. Move over Tony Blair: If elected, Mr. Harper will quickly become Mr. Bush's new best friend internationally and the poster boy for his ideal foreign leader. Both north and south of the U.S.-Canada border, this vote matters."

Basic economics: "Economic ignorance, misconceptions and superstition drive us toward totalitarianism because they make us more willing to hand over greater control of our lives to politicians. That results in a diminution of our liberties. Think back to the gasoline price controls during the 1970s. The price controls caused shortages. To deal with the shortages, restrictions were imposed on purchases. Then national highway speed limits were enacted. Then there were more calls for smaller and less crashworthy cars. With the recent gasoline supply shocks, we didn't experience the shortages, long lines and closed gas stations seen during the 1970s. Why? Prices were allowed to perform their allocative function -- get people to use less gas and get suppliers to supply more."

Congratulations to all the Australian bloggers who got linked by the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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THE SPITEFUL LEFT

Taranto yesterday led off with some comments about the dubious motivations of the antiwar Left. Keith Burgess Jackson has taken that thinking one step further as follows (excerpt):

"James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal refers to the Left as "The Angry Left." I'm prone to calling it "The Hateful Left." But perhaps we're both wrong. I'm starting to think the best label is "The Spiteful Left." A spiteful person, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., is one who is "Full of, possessed or animated by, spite; malicious; malevolent." "Spite," in turn, is defined as "A strong feeling of contempt, hatred or ill-will; intense grudge or desire to injure; rancorous or envious malice."

Spite, along with envy, jealousy, and spleen, is one of the green emotions. A spiteful person is so bent on harming another that he or she is willing to pay a personal price to do it; hence the expression, "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Lawyers talk about "spite fences," which are fences built solely to prevent one's neighbor from seeing what's on the other side. Even the lowly expression "in spite of" incorporates this meaning. If I say that I like you in spite of your many defects, I'm saying that my liking for you has a personal cost to me, or that I like you grudgingly.

Having listened to leftists for the past five years, I'm convinced that many of the positions they take have less to do with the merits of those positions than with the fact that taking those positions harms President Bush....."

Keith also has another go at the contemptible Brian Leiter. Keith concludes: "The man is twisted. I am honored to be called "odd" by such a cretin. Now I know what Jules Coleman meant when he told me, in correspondence, that Leiter is "complicated." It's a polite (and plausibly deniable) way of saying he's nuts".

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Report: Last Five Years Highest Immigration in U.S. History

And Illegal Aliens Are Almost Half of New Arrivals

As the nation considers immigration proposals from Congress and the President, a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of new Census Bureau data shows that the immigrant population (legal and illegal) reached a new high in 2005. The data, which the Bureau has not yet analyzed, also show that 2000-2005 is the highest five-year period of new immigration (legal and illegal) in American history. Almost half of new arrivals are estimated to be illegal aliens.

The new report provides a detailed picture of the socio-economic status of immigrants, including estimates for illegal aliens. States with the largest increase in immigrants are California, Texas Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington, Virginia, Arizona, Tennessee, Minnesota, and Nevada. Embargoed copies of the report, ''Immigrants at Mid-Decade: A Snapshot of American's Foreign-Born Population in 2005,'' are available to the media. The study will be posted to the Center's site at http://www.cis.org on December 12.

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What Britain's new Conservative Party leader stands for is listed succinctly here. Like John Kerry he apears to want to be everything to everybody. It may even win him an election but whether it will do Britain much good is doubtful. I think Britain has a long hard road ahead.

Bruce Bartlett points out that cutting the top income-tax rate has always INCREASED the share of total tax paid by the rich. Yet the envy-driven Left still avocate HIGHER taxes on the rich -- just the opposite of what they need to do in order to get the rich to make a bigger contribution. Bartlett concludes: "At some point, those on the left must decide what really matters to them -- the appearance of soaking the rich by imposing high statutory tax rates that may cause actual tax payments by the wealthy to fall, or lower rates that may bring in more revenue that can pay for government programs to aid the poor? Sadly, the left nearly always votes for appearances over reality, favoring high rates that bring in little revenue even when lower rates would bring in more".

The death penalty saves lives: This is old news to economists. Papers of similar import have been coming out since the 70s. Excerpt: "The most dramatic finding comes from Joanna Shepherd and a team at Emory University in Atlanta. They have taken advantage of the fact that some parts of the US don't execute murderers, and only a handful of states execute them consistently. (One of those states, Texas, accounts for more than one-third of the executions in the US since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976.) After taking account of other regional variations thought likely to influence murder rates - among them the mix of races and the resources devoted to policing - they found that executions explained most of what was left. As they starkly report their central finding: each execution results in an average of 18 fewer murders. Or, to present the finding in an even more unsettling way: any state that refuses to impose the death penalty for murder is condemning 18 or so innocent people to death."

Lottery wins show that money doesn't solve the problems of the poor: "Mack and Virginia, if press accounts are to be believed, were textbook cases of how dysfunctional values cause problems of people. It is often believe that people like Mack and Virginia have problems because they are poor. This is the premise of the redistributive state. If money is taken from those who 'have too much' and given to those 'less fortunate' the increased wealth of the poor will eradicate the problems in living that they experience. The Left assumes that such problems are the result of poverty. But what if these problems did not result from poverty? What if poverty and these problems both were the result of the values they had embraced?"

Robert Hayes has just done a fisking of Barbara Streisand. She really is mind-bogglingly dumb.

The Carnival of Vanities is up again with much to read.

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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BISMARCK AND DISRAELI: A SMALL REFLECTION

I take a great interest in 19th century history. I think you have to know at least the late 19th century to understand all that has happened since. It was after all the era that produced Karl Marx, the most influential misanthrope of all times. But Marx was such an intellectual midget and such a depicable character (even his own father, the kindly Heinrich Marx, thought that Karl was not much of a human being) that it is no wonder his legacy has been so malign and, in the end, irrelevant.



By contrast, the two greatest political figures of the late 19th century, Disraeli and Bismarck, achieved an enormous amount for humanity, peace and civility. Bismarck is normally pictured wearing his Prussian Pikelhaube (spiked helmet) -- though he was only in the reserves of the Prussian military in his glory years -- and that does tend to mislead people into thinking of him as a brutal militarist -- but that is the sort of ignorance you have to expect of people who have been fed the highly selective pap that passes for history lessons these days. In fact, Bismarck gave Europe a long era of peace and rapidly increasing prosperity.

After his great victory over Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870, one might have expected Bismarck to go on to a Bonapartesque quest to dominate all Europe, but he did nothing of the sort. The entire military campaign had not in fact been aimed at conquest at all. Bismarck simply used the war to unite Germany under the Prussian crown. So when the war was over, all but a small (but controversial) slice of formerly French territory was evacuated and Bismarck concentrated on creating the German empire -- not by force but by diplomacy -- albeit by diplomacy of a rather dubious sort at times. And a united Germany of course soon became the economic powerhouse that it has been ever since. But note this: from 1871 on, Europe had no major wars until 1914 -- a 43 year period of peace -- pretty unusual for Europe up until that time. And that long peace was largely Bismarck's doing. The united Germany's formidable military was a much a hindrance as a help because it made the rest of the world fearful and could well have encouraged a grand alliance against Germany. But by a series of ever-shifting and totally Byzantine series of diplomatic manoeuvres, alliances and treaties, Bismarck kept everybody off-balance and both Germany and the rest of Europe were left free to prosper peacefully and to develop the full fruits of the industrial revolution -- which they did mightily.

Bismarck was not as successful at heading off unrest at home, however. As in most of Europe, the newly-created industrial working class was in a fairly ongoing ferment -- a ferment in which Marx played a small part. So there were some serious rebellions, uprisings and disturbances. As in foreign affairs, however, Bismarck's ever-shifting policies and alliances managed to keep the peace overall. Regrettably, however, it was a fragile peace and violent socialism still lurked just beneath the surface. So after Bismarck was gone it broke out again -- as the powerful Communist and Nazi movements of the post-1918 period.



Bismarck's great English contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, was far more successful at containing domestic unrest. Like Bismarck he saw the need for worker-welfare legislation as a means of buying social peace and both men were notable welfare innovators -- THE welfare innovators, it might be said. So what was the secret of Disraeli's success? Fundamentally, it was sentimentality. Although he was always vocal about his own Jewishness, Disraeli had a sort of love-affair with the English people that was only surpassed in more recent times by the love-affair that Ronald Reagan had with the American people. And the results Disraeli got were arguably as transformative as the results Reagan got. Disraeli had a great love and respect for English traditions and preached the virtues of Englishness incessantly. And he included in his embrace the ordinary English working people -- whom he saw as "angels in marble" -- people with great and good potential. He actually trusted the working-class -- an almost unheard-of idea among all the governing classes in Europe at that time. So he sponsored legislation that gave the workers the vote on a greatly increased scale. And they rewarded his trust by being far less susceptible to the political and social agitation that plagued their contemporaries in Europe. They developed a lasting trust in their national institutions that did far more for lasting peace and civility than anything else could have done.

At one of the great international political conferences of the time, Germany was represented by Bismarck and Britain by Disraeli. To Britain's considerable benefit, Disraeli ran rings around all of them -- causing Bismarck to make his famous admiring remark: "Der alte Jude. Das is der Mann" ("The old Jew. THAT is the man"). Coming from Bismarck, that was a compliment indeed. Disraeli himself attributed the greater social peace of 19th century England to Englishness but to a considerable extent it was in fact his own personal achievement.

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Minutewomen: "Across the rickety barbed-wire fence, about a metre high, is Mexico, dotted with walking trails along which tens of thousands of Mexicans, many of them dirt-poor and illiterate peasant farmers, have trekked on their way to America and a better life. This 50-kilometre stretch of the Mexico-US border - about 60 kilometres from Tucson, where President George Bush delivered a speech on illegal immigration last week - is a key unofficial entry point. It is along this forbidding stretch of country that Connie Foust and Carmen Mercer, known locally as the Granny Brigade, have spent many of their nights these past eight months patrolling the border. They are part of the Minutemen movement.... Ms Mercer favours a .45 Colt pistol holstered on a wide brown belt studded with bullets. Ms Foust prefers a more discreet Ladysmith .38, which she wears high up on her waist. Both women insist that Minutemen are sworn not to use their guns "except to shoot snakes or stuff like that" .. There are an estimated 13 million illegals in America and they arrive at the rate of about a million a year."

There is a good post here on the disgraceful pandering of the Chicago Presbyterian church to the terrorist Hezbollah organization.

Chris Brand's latest lot of posts are now up- dealing with immigration, IQ, sex differences etc. See here

Twilight of conservatism: "This year marks the 30th anniversary of [Robert] Nisbet's Twilight of Authority, long considered something of a minor classic, and it is from that book that most of Nisbet's words that follow have been taken. Most interesting are three things: Nisbet's warnings about the ongoing growth in executive power, his prescient critique of American conservatism, and his skepticism and caution about the growth of the warfare state that has long since vanished from establishment conservatism. Nisbet's 1953 classic The Quest for Community argues that for the most part, every major modern political philosopher in the West, from Hobbes to the present, has taken as his starting point the idea of a unitary, all-powerful central state ruling over an undifferentiated aggregate of individuals, and which is legally and temporally prior and superior to all subsidiary associations."

A small apology: I have in the past refrained from putting up many pictures on this blog as graphics greatly slow down loading times for people using dialup connections. Now that broadband has become very widespread, however, I see less need for such restraint

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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IVF CHILDREN

As the father of an IVF child, discussions of IVF are a bit emotional for me. My IVF son is now 18 years old, 6' tall, blond, blue-eyed and well-built. He has just finished the first year of a science degree specializing in mathematics at a major Australian university -- where he got maximum marks for all his mathematics subjects. I could spit on the feminists and "ethics" dictators who have condemned IVF. Below is a short excerpt from an article by an IVF mother about a meeting of some IVF parents and children

"As part of her trip to Australia, Linda Reed and her talented daughter agreed to take part in a forum with other IVF and ART (assisted reproductive technologies) children, who talked about how it felt to be among the first generation of children born through the new technology. The children were grateful that persistent efforts to derail IVF (by feminist groups and Treasury bean counters, among others) failed and they took the opportunity to say: "Mum and Dad, thanks for having me."

They put out a statement urging the Government not to place too many restrictions on IVF, even for patients who haven't got much chance of success, because cracking the tough cases will lead to more progress and joy.....

The children at the forum were inspiring for their talents, their wit, their joy at being alive, and the pride they felt in their parents for being medical pioneers and making it so much easier for parents like me, who came a decade or more later".

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Saturday Night Live Joins the Religious Right: "SNL's opening sketch last night derided corporate and public repressions of Christmas. Quick example: "How Ya' Doin'" substitutes for Handel's "Hallelujah!" Selections from the 12/03 episode will appear eventually at this website. When a culturally leftist show mocks the Supreme Court and public and corporate practice, a teaching moment is taking place. Cultural conservatives are generally too heavy-handed to take advantage of the situation"

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch Turns Tables on Media : "The American media is up in arms over reports that the Pentagon hired a public relations firm to write positive news stories about the Iraq war and get them printed in the Iraqi press. But Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad, isn't letting journalists get away with their phony display of outrage. After the New York Times front-paged the "fake news" story Thursday under the headline: "U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers," Gen. Lynch defended the practice. "We don't lie. We don't need to lie," he told reporters in Baghdad. "We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact, not based on fiction." Sounds to us like Gen. Lynch was taking a none too subtle jab at the mainstream media's penchant for reporting - not just planted stories - but its own faked news reports. Perhaps the next time he's questioned about "planting" stories, he'll get even more specific, by reminding the military's accusers of their own sorry history".



How a noted Australian Leftist sees us: "In his memoir, Latham is deeply troubled by what he thinks is a loss of community. He says our suburbs have become soulless wastelands utterly devoid of humanity. Our families and communities have become engulfed by apathy and disengagement. We are empty, apathetic and disengaged. We are losing self-esteem, discontented, suffering from stress and depression, broken and empty. We are locked in a gulag of consumerism, insular, artificial, unhappy and voyeuristic..... Latham fell into the trap of believing that the pursuit of something better is a wholly selfish character trait. Australians are an extraordinarily generous people with a long and distinguished record of financial support for those in need, together with an unparalled record of voluntarism. Self-preservation is the natural human order of things, the protection of life, limb, flesh and blood. So is self-advancement and that of those closest to you. These are not selfish notions to be ridiculed and derided as the gross obsessions of the newly moneyed. People are products of their environment, their daily challenges and triumphs, their fears and failings".



An Australian Methodist minister who respects Bible teachings: "The upper house Christian Democrat, the Reverend Gordon Moyes, is often criticised for his beliefs, even within his own church, but yesterday, just before his farewell, he did not hold back. Asked by the Herald what was his greatest failure as superintendent for 27 years of the Uniting Church's largest and richest parish, Wesley Mission, he said it was his inability to convince the hierarchy that homosexuality had no place in the church. "Ministers in particular must live a holy and respectable life. There should be no room within the life of ministers in the church for sex, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual. "I regard that as pretty much a failure but I'll keep working at it. It's not a losing battle because the church must always correct itself and always has over the years."... Dr Moyes said he had made a pact with himself to retire at 65. He will now concentrate on "helping the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, the prisoners, the aged, the sick, the disabled" by taking the fight to Parliament, he said".

The federal anti-cigarette lighter police : "The TSA's internal studies show that carry-on-item screeners spend half of their screening time searching for cigarette lighters, a recently banned item, and that they open 1 out of every 4 bags to remove a pair of scissors, according to sources briefed by the agency .."

Before we point the finger at Singapore, we should look at Australia's body count: "Life is cheap in Australia, for all our talk. While Australians have again indulged in preaching at an Asian neighbour because an Australian heroin-runner was executed on Friday, one might ask what, exactly, is our higher moral ground? Ask the parents of Kurt Smith about our legal system's attitude to the sanctity of human life. Their son was kicked to death by four strangers while walking to a party on New Year's Eve 2002. So light were the sentences that three of these four killers are already out of prison or on the way out and the ringleader will be eligible for parole next year. Kurt was dead at 19, his life treated as worthless by the law. It wasn't even unusual, just towards the grotesque end of the sentencing spectrum". (There is a good comment on the execution by the Singapore High Commissioner in Australia here)

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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LEFTIST HISTORIANS SKEWERED AGAIN

Excerpt from Christopher Pearson about the invented "terra nullius" legal doctrine that was used to give land rights to Australian blacks

"In June last year, I reported in this column on a seismic shift in Australian history-writing. One of its rising stars, Bain Attwood, had published an article calling into question the veracity and professional ethics of Henry Reynolds, the doyen of Aboriginal history. In particular he drew attention to the disingenuous uses that Reynolds had made of the obscure concept of terra nullius, which the High Court later relied on to justify the Mabo judgment and overturn two centuries' worth of settled land law. For his pains, Attwood was denounced by other historians, most notably Dirk Moses, who described it as a "patricidal attack".

By the time Attwood's new book, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, came out this year, terra nullius had vanished from the text, in one of those flagrant airbrushing exercises we've come to expect. So much for telling the truth. But Attwood was not the first to note the problems with terra nullius or the most trenchant critic of Reynolds's abuse of it. That honour belongs to Michael Connor, a Tasmanian historian.



Connor has written a book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, and I shall have the pleasure of launching it for the Macleay Press, Keith Windschuttle's publishing house, on Tuesday evening. Connor will prove hard to ignore, at least for lawyers and journalists, who need to know the facts, whatever use they make of them. Even in academe, Connor's skewering of so many self-important colleagues will be welcomed by the better teachers and the brighter students of Australian history.

Connor will be hard to ignore because his field work on the origins and applications of the term terra nullius is so thorough and his exposition so lucid. Reynolds pounced on it and gave it a number of sliding definitions. It became broad enough to encompass waste, uncultivated or uninhabited land, land with no owners or land with no sovereign. The conflation of land ownership and sovereignty, Reynolds's invention and unwarranted on any legal authority, was particularly helpful for impressionable High Court judges, who seldom seem to have done their homework and took Reynolds on trust.

Connor says: "For over 20 years Australian history has been written by a conformity of historians for whom terra nullius was the foundation for their telling of Australia's story. They taught us that this phrase had always been there and was the bloody basis on which the nation stands ... Never has a falser antique been palmed off on more unsuspecting buyers." "

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Roger Scruton: "I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy -- or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist". [Not much has changed!]

Animal rights inconsistent with LEFTISM!: "When I hear people argue against wearing leather, animal skins or furs, my response is that those are natural materials, unlike the plastic-based or petroleum-based products they offer as alternatives. Leather, skins and furs will biodegrade, not take up space in a landfill somewhere. Should we really, according to left-wing propaganda, be supporting and encouraging the huge conglomerate corporations that produce nylon and other synthetic substances? Giving the oil companies more sources of profit? Fostering our dependence on Saudi Arabia and other foreign countries that supply us with oil? Increasing our dependence on fossil fuels?.... Are those who are so concerned with the "rights" of rodents and chickens, as concerned with the rights of human unborn children? When anyone rails in favor of animal rights, I ask them, "Are you `pro-choice' on abortion?" Their startled response is usually, "Yes." "Well," I say, "there are people who are `pro-choice' about hunting, eating meat and wearing leather and fur." This inevitably ends the conversation"

Back to more business bashing : "Very sadly the human species has had too many thinkers who were idealists of the worst sort, placing before us impossible goals to strive for while demeaning the possible and desirable ones. Another case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. And it is really quite unjust, when you come to think of it -- with all those diligent people in business, breaking their necks to produce what millions of us want, working ceaselessly to help us all prosper, and they are routinely put down, lumped together with the relatively few crooks among them. No one does this with medicine or education or science, but somehow the members of the intelligentsia haven't managed to grasp that such lumping is unjust as well when it comes to business."

Death penalty opponents have blood on their hands: "Perhaps the most infamous case of a death penalty opponent directly causing the murder of an innocent is that of novelist Norman Mailer. In 1981, Mailer utilized his influence to obtain parole for a bank robber and murderer named Jack Abbott on the grounds that Abbott was a talented writer. Six weeks after being paroled, Abbott murdered Richard Adan, a 22-year-old newlywed, aspiring actor and playwright who was waiting tables at his father's restaurant. Mailer's reaction? "Culture is worth a little risk," he told the press. "I'm willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man's talent." That in a nutshell is the attitude of the abolitionists. They are "willing to gamble with a portion of society" -- such as the lives of additional innocent victims -- in order to save the life of every murderer".

The looming immigration war: "What was once Rep. Tom Tancredo's (R-Colo.) own personal hot-button issue is now a national immigration-reform movement. Fanned by talk-radio, not to mention Republican mania for some kind of wedge issue now that they've abandoned fiscal conservatism, immigration is shaping up as the Us vs. Them issue, certainly for next year's midterm election and perhaps 2008 as well. Tancredo is sniffing around Iowa and has the dreaded and dread-filled potential POTUS candidate's book -- In Mortal Danger -- on the way. His Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus now has 91 members and expects to get actual House floor votes on several of its reform bills when Congress returns. With the GOP leadership in disarray, there is no telling how many votes the proposal might get."

An Irish nun convicted of rape? Sounds fanciful but it happened. Strange Justice has the story.

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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RED CROSS DISGRACE

The Red Cross have never liked Jews much. They ARE European, after all

"The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have finally agreed to probably allow Magen David Adom (Israel's "Red Cross") into their club instead of being a simple observer.

For those of you unaware of the story, it basically goes as follows: The ICRC has never allowed Israel to be a full participating member because the Red Crescent states (Muslim states) were against it. They argued that not only was Israel a pariah state for Muslims, but that the red Star of David which Israel uses on their ambulances was offensive to Muslims. In fact, the former head of the ICRC a few years ago questioned the validity of ever allowing the Star of David into the ICRC as a symbol. As he put it, "If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?"

I leave it to the reader how offensive that is to Jews around the world. In fact, it did cause a storm, but as usual, nothing much was made of it in the end because here we are, years later, and it is only now coming up as something which should finally be negotiated.

Well, you might all be surprised to learn that it was in fact agreed upon, and the agreement is simple: Israel will drop the Star of David for a nondescript and non-offensive diamond shape. Something which has nothing to do with Israel as far as anyone can tell, nothing to do with Jews, and nothing to do with history in any offensive way possible".

Much more at Banagor

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ELSEWHERE

Why some Jews denounce Israel: "What remains constant is that, as in both pre- and post-Enlightenment Europe, today's European elite has its good Jews and its bad Jews. There are the Jews whom it embraces, encourages, and celebrates; and then there are the Jews whom it chastises and condemns. For the former, there will always be a place of honor in the European sun. On the latter, today's officially pluralist and tolerant Europe has turned its back. Is it any wonder, then, that some "good Jews" have chosen to live in the light, stopping only to burnish their qualifications by noisily joining the chorus that has consigned their fellow Jews to the dark?"

War, lies and media on the left: "Politics is politics and ratings are ratings. But at what point does the non-stop antiwar Iraq rhetoric by many Democrats and many in the media cross the line and morph into outright falsehoods, personal vendettas against the president, and become utterly demoralizing to our troops on the ground in Iraq? I would submit that that line was deliberately and gleefully crossed quite a while ago".

Melanie Morgan has a good article on the habitual lying of the antiwar movement -- including the facts about Congressman Murtha's "sudden" conversion to peacenik views: "And this wasn't the first time Murtha had advocated cut-and-run. Pay attention here, because you won't see this fact reported in any major newspaper or alphabet soup network: He gave the exact same advice to President Clinton after American troops were attacked and slaughtered by Al Qaida-backed terrorists in Somalia in 1993".

Why the left are supporting the Islamofascists: "The disintegration of the communist block was a painful setback for the Left's hopes and aspirations. Although its loathing of capitalism and the West continued unabated, there was no one - at least for the time being - capable of taking them on. This changed dramatically on September 11, 2001 when Islamic radicals burst on the scene in a spectacular fashion. Their attack and subsequent statements left no doubt about their goal - the annihilation of Western civilization. And like communists before them, they see capitalism as the source of our evil which is something their choice of target made painfully clear. September 11 electrified the Left. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was once again someone whose thinking about the West and capitalism agreed with its own. Most importantly, Islamists possessed the will and capability to destabilize or perhaps even bring down the object of their hate. Sensing the opportunity, the Left immediately sprang to action..."

British bureaucracy at its best: "Pressure on Tony Blair to reform or scrap the Child Support Agency intensified yesterday with the disclosure that its enforcement unit was costing more to run than it recovered from absent parents. The agency retrieved œ8 million last year but cost œ12 million to operate. The Department for Work and Pensions, which is responsible for the CSA, said that while the figures were accurate, they accounted only for money retrieved from initial contact with the parent and did not include future payments. Systems problems have plagued the CSA, with many lone parents not receiving payments they were due and hundreds of millions of pounds in non-collected maintenance written off. MPs on the Commons work and pensions committee said this year that the CSA was "teetering on total collapse" and reported that a quarter of a million child support cases still had not been processed".

California homicides dwarf Iraq deaths: "Recently released crime statistics show the homicide rate in California is 265 percent higher than the death rate suffered by U.S. and British military personnel in Iraq. According to the report "Crime in California 2004," compiled by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, there were 2,394 reported homicides in the Golden State last year. That compares with 905 deaths of coalition forces in Iraq, chiefly Americans and Brits, during the same time period".

Abortion: Capitalistic good sense from the Italian Left: "A proposal to pay women in Italy not to have abortions was rapidly gaining momentum yesterday as politicians of right and left alike gave it their endorsement.... Under the scheme women in straitened economic circumstances would get between 250 euros and 350 euros a month for up to six months before giving birth. The plan is outlined in a proposed amendment to next year's budget sponsored by a group of MPs that includes two former women ministers - one an ex-Communist and the other from the centre-left".

I have put up a post about a rather strange death-penalty poll on Australian Politics

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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RECENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

EU and Muslim countries fail the terror test
Letter from Lima
EU: Hamas must recognise Israel
Parliamentary speech on terrorism Bill
Charity for Palestinian poor siphoned to suicide bombers
Australian Muslim MP denies Muslims being targeted
Jews offer safety tips to Muslims
SBS Complaint upheld
How a Town Became a Terror Hub
Apologies to everyone for what we did
French official: time running out for Syrian President
SBS Greek "economic news"
What sort of Frenchmen are they?
Tyranny in Australia
Truth on Trial
ABC appeals FOI decision
Seeking asylum in Australia - draft program
Matter of Public Interest
Islamic Fascism and Satyagraha in Palestine
Fear and loathing in Senate estimates
Terrorism: The Root Causes
Allons Enfants de la Jihad
Show them who is the boss in France
Aunty's media botch
Hope in the shadow of Auschwitz
Who will raise the siege of Paris?
Our World: The Paris fall
The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris

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An outbreak of sanity: "Airport security screeners are reportedly going to let passengers bring sharp objects on board airplanes again. Today's Washington Post says the Transportation Security Administration plans to announce security changes Friday. Sources quoted by the paper say the new rules will allow things like scissors in carry-on bags. The reasoning is that such items are no longer regarded as the greatest threat to airline security. Homeland Security Department officials are said to be more concerned about preventing suicide bomb attacks at airports. Officials want screeners to focus more on finding things that can explode rather than things that are sharp. The Post reports the newly relaxed rules would allow scissors under four inches long tools shorter than seven inches.

FBI stupidity: "FBI agent Richard B. Marx spent a year atop 1.8 million tons of debris from the World Trade Center towers, searching for September 11 evidence at the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, N.Y. For his devotion to the grungy job, he earned the gratitude of victims' families, the respect of his peers, a nomination as the federal employee of the year -- and a 10-day suspension and letter of reprimand from his superiors. The reprimand bars him from a major part of his job -- collecting evidence for use in court. The FBI suspended Mr. Marx after the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General said he 'lacked candor' in answering questions during an investigation into whether agents took evidence from the Fresh Kills site as souvenirs. Evidence that the inspector general thought was missing, which led to the inquiry, turned out to have been sent to museums nationwide and to FBI headquarters in Washington, all on orders of Congress."

Destructive posturing undermining the war: "Listening to the media, the talking heads, and many in Congress, one gets the sense that the most important element in our war against jihadist terrorism is not victory but who can show that he cares more than the other guy about the comfort and "rights" of terrorist detainees. In other words, who can boast that he is more "ethical" than the rest of us. This is no way to win a war. Instead of determining what best can achieve immediate victory, our preoccupation has been more about feeding detainees the Islamic food of their choice; safeguarding the Koran more than our own Bible; trying them not in military courts where they should be tried but in civil courts so they can have the best lawyers and chance at acquittal; providing them with all the Constitutional rights reserved for those born here who wish not to destroy our Constitution; and instituting anti-torture standards whose definition judges can expand so that effective interrogation will be impossible. Better for a million Americans to be incinerated, avant garde thinking goes, than use on known terrorists procedures that might elicit dates, time and place of imminent bombings of U.S. cities and citizens. It is not that the country has gone moral, it has gone crazy".

Taranto often has fun pointing out what a turncoat Andrew Sullivan is but he has now gone one better -- catching Sullivan out in an egregious lie.

French PM backs Bush!: "French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, one of the sharpest critics of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, warned Washington on Tuesday against pulling out troops without regard to regional security. Villepin, interviewed in Paris by CNN, said a badly planned withdrawal could cause chaos in Iraq, "which of course would be disastrous for the whole region."

Senator Lieberman: "I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn".

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).

**************************

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)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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ANOTHER BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCE ON IQ

"Scientists have discovered why some shorter children do worse at school than taller youngsters. A team from the University of Bristol found that children with lower levels of a height controlling hormone also had lower IQs. The study is the first to make a link between the insulin-like growth hormone and intelligence. Professor David Gunnell and his colleagues measured levels of Insulin Growth Factor IGF-I in the blood of 547 children, who also took an intelligence test at the age of eight. When the researchers compared IGF-I levels in the youngsters in the study, they found a significant link between the growth hormone and intelligence. For every 100 nanograms per millilitre increase in IGF-I levels, the IQ increased by three points.

At the moment scientists do not know what happens in the body to link poor growth and impaired development in the brain. But one explanation could be that growth hormones also affect brain development. They said this effect seemed to be restricted to the verbal component of IQ, as the link was not seen in other tests.... The study, part of the long-running Children of the 90s project, is published in Pediatrics"

More here

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ELSEWHERE

That "cowboy" economy again: "The US economy powered higher in the third quarter at a 4.3 per cent annualised growth pace, the US Government said overnight, revising upward its previous estimate of 3.8 per cent growth. The Commerce Department estimate was stronger than the 4.0 percent pace expected by economists and showed the world's biggest economy was able to shrug off the impact of two powerful hurricanes and a surge in energy costs.

Chirac written off: "It was the kind of birthday present politicians have nightmares about. As he turned 73 yesterday, and after 10 years as President, Jacques Chirac awoke to perhaps the most devastating headline of his career. "Jacques Chirac - the difficult end of his reign" announced Le Monde, France's most influential daily, in an extraordinary media intervention that read more like an obituary than a birthday notice. As the front-page report noted, 72per cent of voters believe the head of state has hardly any influence over public affairs, either in France or the rest of the world. "It is the winter of his reign .."

Sarko gets it right: "The French Government is to tighten immigration controls to make it more difficult for foreign students and foreign-born family members of French residents to enter the country, in response to the worst civil unrest in four decades..... The moves come at a time of heightened anxiety over perceived threats at home and abroad. The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, told parliament on Tuesday that France does not want "those people that nobody else in the world wants. We want selective immigration".

Islamists abduct peaceniks and the USA gets blamed! "A peace group blamed the US and Britain yesterday for the abduction of four Western activists shown in an insurgent video, saying the kidnapping was the direct result of the occupation of Iraq... The abduction tape aired by al-Jazeera television shows four aid workers - two Canadians, a Briton and an American - three days after they were snatched. Their abductors, calling themselves the Swords of Truth Brigade, accused their captives of being "spies working for the occupying forces". The attack is believed to be part of a new wave of kidnappings that police fear is aimed at disrupting this month's national elections. A statement released by the Christian Peacemaker Team said: "We are angry because what has happened to our teammates is the result of the actions of the US and UK governments due to the illegal attack on Iraq and the continuing occupation and oppression of its people.""

Leftist double standards: "Many in my profession - journalism - were understandably outraged to discover that in a get-together with his partner in crime Tony Blair in April 2004, President Bush allegedly made a bad-taste gag about bombing the Qatar headquarters of the Arab TV channel al-Jazeera.... But I have a question. Why, right now, do some journalists seem more outraged by the alleged threats and slurs made by President Bush against a TV station than they were about an earlier president's actual bombing of a TV station? Why are they red-faced with rage and indignation over the Bush and al-Jazeera incident, yet they turned a blind eye - or even tried to justify - President Bill Clinton's outrageous bombing of Serbian TV during the Kosovo War in 1999, which left journalists dead and maimed?"

The poison of Islam: "Mireille, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad. In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalisation, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing. Belgian investigators, who arrested 14 people associated with her, are keeping the 38-year-old woman's true identity secret, but details have started to emerge. She was from the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, married to a Moroccan and converted to an extreme form of Islam".

U.K.: More Leftist hatred of their own country: "A Labour Party official caused outrage last night after suggesting sports fans who wave the England flag are racist. The outburst came from Terry White, of Labour's Communications Unit, in an email to a member of the public. It followed a row last week when ex-minister Gisela Stuart claimed the rise of Englishness is a threat to democracy.... Mr White, who is 65 and near retirement, wrote back: "England, as opposed to Britain, has an unfortunate history around the world and within the British Isles and please do not say that it is all past."

Good if he means it: "President Bush said Monday he wants to crack down on those who enter the country illegally but also give out more visas to foreigners with jobs, a dual plan he hopes will appease the social conservatives and business leaders who are his core supporters. 'The American people should not have to choose between a welcoming society and a lawful society,' Bush said from the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base about an hour from the Mexican border."

Michelle Malkin gives a good blast to Leftist "projection" -- where Leftists accuse conservatives of being hate-filled while being apparently unaware of how they are actually bubbling over with hatred and anger themselves. Michelle has of course also written a whole book which collects the unhinged utterances of the Left.

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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