LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE: THE NEW GESTAPO?

They are not quite the new Gestapo yet but they are a long way down the track. The immediate and savage execution of a Brazilian electrician just because he looked like a known terrorist and the lies the London police used in an attempt to exculpate themselves got worldwide publicity. That should have been a huge wake-up call for the British powers that be to bring their police back into civilization but the only difference now seems to be that they don't shoot you on mere suspicion. They can still be extraordinarily oppressive to innocent people if they are feeling a bit bored, however. Read this account of the ordeal that David Mery -- a totally innocent computer geek -- was put through just because he was wearing a backpack while quietly waiting for a London Underground train.

Like the Brazilian electrician incident, the Mery incident got heaps of publicity at the time it happened (in September) -- e.g. here -- but in spite of all the publicity. Mery still had to wait a long time and had huge difficulties getting all his possessions back from the police and heaps of data about him are still to this day held in police records. He was never charged with any offence in any court but he still effectively "has a record" that could seriously hamper him in the future. As Mery himself says:

"The Police eventually decided to take No Further Action (NFA): `a decision not to proceed with a prosecution'. In a democratic country such as the UK, one would be forgiven for naively thinking that this is the end of the matter. Under the current laws the Police are not only entitled to keep my fingerprints, palm prints and DNA samples, but apparently, according to my solicitor, they are also entitled to hold on to what they gathered during their investigation: notepads of the arresting officers, photographs, interviewing tapes and any other documents they collected and entered in the Police National Computer (PNC)....

Aren't the Police supposed to keep tabs only on convicted criminals and individuals under investigation? So even though the Police consider me innocent, otherwise they would have had a duty to prosecute me, there will remain some mention (what exactly?) in the PNC and, if they fully share their information with Europol and Interpol, in other Police databases around the world as well. Isn't a state that keeps files on innocent persons a police state? This gradual erosion of our fundamental liberties should be of concern to us all."

So how has a once highly-respected police-force degenerated so badly? After years of Leftist control, politically correct harassment and appointments of far-Leftists to leadership positions, the London police are now more a political police than a law enforcement body. Legal safeguards have been so eroded that they can now do almost anything they like without repercussions as long as their victims are white. The Left have destroyed the London police just as they destroy everything they get control over (education being another example of that).

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ELSEWHERE

A not very foxy Foxman: "Abraham Foxman has gone from nuisance to embarrassment to self-parody. The national leader of the Anti-Defamation League has declared war on conservative Christians. In doing so, he's not only attacking the best friends Israel and the Jewish people have, he's also repudiating Torah-based morality. At a New York meeting of the ADL's national leadership recently, Foxman experienced a near total meltdown. Groups like Focus on The Family and American Family Association are leading a full-scale assault on tolerance and diversity, Foxman foamed. As reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Foxman declared: "Today we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!""

Democrats Teach The World to Hate America: There is an old "joke" about a man who murders his parents and then pleads with the judge for leniency because he's an orphan. I think of this every time I hear a Democrat ask why the world so hates us. Could it be because, in places where people will never actually meet an American they can hear Bruce Springsteen, the Kerry flack, testifying over and over again that being "Born in the USA" is a horrible fate where people kick you when you're down and where you "end up like a dog that's been beat too much"? Could it be because, in places where the only Americans they'll ever see are in Hollywood movies made by leftists, the Democrat makes sure the villain is never an Islamic fascist terrorist and always an American, an American corporation or an American government agency? Could it be because when Michael Moore makes a movie that the Democrats know to be a lie-filled, hate-filled anti-American propaganda flick but those in other places might not, the Democratic Party leadership makes sure to smile for the cameras of al Jazeera and give the film a standing ovation and their endorsement of its message?

A good defence of Wal-Mart against the enviers: Just one excerpt: "Sam Walton's innovations created thousands of new jobs and allowed millions of Americans to save money. In earlier eras, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt were depicted as evil. But the condemnation rarely came from consumers. It was competing businessmen who complained. And newspapers lapped it up, calling them "robber barons." Vanderbilt got rich by making travel and shipping cheaper. Lots of people liked that. No one was forced to buy the oil on which Rockefeller got rich. He had to persuade people by offering it to them for less. He offered it so cheaply that poorer people, who used to go to bed when it got dark, could now afford fuel for their lanterns. These are "robber barons"? (Hat tip to Commonsense & Wonder)

"Faiths for Fairness is a project of the American Interfaith Institute, an organization with a long history of working to remove bigotry and hatred from the religions of Abraham. Most recently, we have been concerned by the decision of the Presbyterian Church USA to begin a divestment process of its multi- billion dollar portfolio from select companies that do business with Israel. Not only has this action threatened the bonds of friendship between Presbyterians and Jews, it is likely to have even greater consequences by giving encouragement to anarchist organizations"

The Fourth Rail is a very good blog if you want to know what is actually happening in Iraq: Detailed coverage of military movements etc.

Pleasing: My new Australian Politics blog got 300 hits in a recent 24 hour period. Pretty good for a brand-new blog. Some of that will be an initial surge of course so what the return visitor numbers will be like is anyone's guess. It is the only one of my blogs where I have a comments facility so anybody who has always wanted to comment at me now has their chance! I will delete any drongo comments, though. Australians will know what a drongo is.

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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Brookes News Update

US economy, Ben Bernanke and recession: Ben Bernanke, the new Fed Chairman, could be seriously misinterpreting economic data. If so, the consequences could be very severe
Is the Australian economy sinking into recession?: Economic indicators are looking bad for the Australian economy. Profits are being slashed and productivity is dropping
Liberal Government's labour market reforms looking shabbier -- so who's to blame?: The Government does not seem to understand that some of its claims are bogus -- unless it believes labour markets were freer in the 1960s than they are today?
Jobs and income security: another union myth: It is impossible for unions to bring about a permanent increase in real wages for everyone. Only by raising the amount of capital invested per head of the population can this be achieved
Economic growth, exports and falling currencies: Would a depreciation of the dollar promote exports and stimulate growth?
Why payroll taxes are really income taxes: Payroll taxes are not similar to so-called consumption taxes: and they can be no more passed on in the form of higher prices than can taxes on profits. They are part of the gross wage

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Further to my post yesterday about the poor reality-contact of the Left, I thought I might note how even when they do acknowledge reality, they are very selective about it. One of the more serious attempts from the Left to find parallels that would justify their constant "Bush=Hitler" mantra is by Thom Hartmann. As is usual with Leftist rhetoric, it's what Hartmann leaves out that is instructive, however. Just one example: GWB has been trying for years to get all US grade schools to use phonics in teaching kids how to read and write -- and still has not succeeded at it. So, at that rate, if he is a dictator he must be the most pissweak dictator of all time! And how long do you think Hitler allowed a press that was critical of him?

A detailed article here on how the NYT collaborates with antisemitism. Excerpt: "While the Times exerts its immense resources to protest what they see as ill-treatment of every minority group under the sun, it seems to have little will to use its prestige to help one of the smallest minorities, Jews. Why American Jews continue their allegiance to a paper that ignores them at best and maligns them at worst is unfathomable. However, maybe some Jews are beginning to wake up and smell the coffee when they unfold the paper in the morning. Readership and circulation figures are plunging in its home market, and it is no longer the most-read paper in New York City. As the internet continues its ascent to become the number one news source for Americans, the Times will now have to face stiff competition. The news will no longer be what they choose to print as the news, and they will face the toughest competition they have yet to face: the truth". (Hat tip to Commonsense & Wonder)

Apparently, the Muslim rioters (sorry: "youths") in France have burnt a lot of churches as well as cars. Astute Blogger comments: "That's one every other day over the last two weeks. Quite a clip. And during the same period, not a single mosque was torched by the rioters, (whose Muslim-ness has nothing to do with the riots - according to the MSM. And nothing about these targeted attacks against churches has appeared in the MSM, either)".

Why not fair-trade beer and cakes?: "I heard the story again just a few days ago. You know the basic plotline: Poor coffee growers in third world countries get paid $1 per bag of coffee, which Starbucks then turns around and sells for $10 a pound. The story always concludes with a discussion about the evil firms involved and how markets result in people at the top getting rich and people at the bottom getting ripped off. But, in the end, this story can only survive due to ignorance of how markets work.....A six-pack of beer, for example, uses perhaps 5-8 ounces of barley (i.e. a few cents worth), and may sell for $3 to $9. That beats Starbucks. Or take wedding cakes. While an inexpensive one might cost a few hundred dollars, you could easily pay thousands for a cake by a master chef whose wheat (flour) cost $10. If Starbucks is evil for the vast difference between what growers get paid and what Starbucks receives for its coffee, these other cases are worse. Difference between input price and output price doesn't inherently imply injustice, and the example of the cake case captures this best. The value doesn't come from the ingredients, but from the skill that went into the cake"

Welfare is the real opiate: "Marx called religion the opiate of the people, and as usual, got it wrong. It was Marx's contention that religion and religious inhibitions against violence kept the proletariat in a stupor that prevented them from overthrowing their capitalist masters. The analogy is false because religion has no addictive quality. Quite the opposite, people must struggle to maintain faith and adherence to God's law. Choosing between good and evil requires awareness, not a stupefied state. Socialism, whether you call it communism, liberalism or whatever, is the opiate dependent ideology.... American liberals haven't quite convinced the American public to abandon the capitalist system for rule by an oligarchy of socialist elites. To advance their cause, liberals employ opiates. The attack on capitalism using opiates to diminish free will and abandon moral responsibility is incessant and insidious.... The welfare state is an opiate. The recipients receive their fixes in exchange for political support. It may not be paradise, but it sure beats working, saving and having to struggle for a living, at least for those whose greatest aspiration is to not miss their favorite television talk-show host or win the lottery."

Bush as Truman: "Why President Bush waited so long to respond to the baseless "Bush lied" lie is a mystery. Perhaps he thought he had more to gain by remaining above the fray than by rolling up his sleeves and wading into it. Perhaps he imagined that because the slander was so brazen, -- so easily refuted, so self-evidently untrue -- it wouldn't deceive the majority of Americans who supported his re-election last year. As the president has finally started pointing out, after all, leading Democrats argued forcefully during the runup to the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein was a lethal menace who had to go. "The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as he is in power," Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said at the time. While Bush never described the danger from Iraqi WMDs as imminent, there were Democrats who did.... With public opinion of Bush's competence and honesty at record lows, it may be hard for many to imagine his ever being seen as anything but a failure. But in 1952, when Truman's approval rating was down to a miserable 22 percent, when he was so unpopular that he stood no chance of winning re-election, who would have guessed that millions of Americans 50 years later would look back on him with admiration as a man of character and a gutsy, plainspoken leader?"

According to my last look at Technorati my new "Australian Politics" blog already has 19 links, but as far as I can see only 2 of them are Australians. I have got a heap of Australian bloggers on my blogroll so a few people are being a bit slack.

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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DELUSIONS PLUS LIES: ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE STANDARD LEFTIST RECIPE

Below are just a few excerpts from a loony Left article that bears as little relationship to reality as possible. Reality just does not suit Leftists at all. That's why they so love censorship when they can get away with it. Note the way GWB is equated to the North Korean Communist dictator -- who is normally referred to as "The Dear Leader" in North Korean propaganda. And the poor sod writing the article seems to believe that the media are in bed with the Bush administration. Pinch Sulzberger and his "New York Times" staff would be amazed!

"Media giants have consistently concealed the Bush administration's attack on civil liberties, supported the expansion of executive power, and paved the way for global war.... Now, it is the media that crafts the storyline of American magnanimity while the US military carries out war crimes in Falluja and torture in Baghdad. It is the media that showers praise on the Dear Leader while thousands wallow in squalor in New Orleans or are bombed into submission in Tal Afar... It is fair to say that the media has assumed an adversarial role to the American people. It now functions exclusively as a weapon in the imperial arsenal...

The media refuses to provide news of the Iraq war and the devastation of Sunni heartland. Al Qaim, Husbaya, and Tel Afar have all been attacked with the same ferocity as Falluja; forcing the townspeople to flee and then destroying the water, electricity, sewage and other critical parts of the infrastructure. The Pentagon is now engaged in a scorched earth strategy knowing full well that its policy of killing journalists will keep the story from being reported."

One of my readers comments:

"I checked those "cities" and found that Al Qaim is a microscopic place on the Syrian border. Husbaya I could not identify anywhere (but there's certainly not anything sizeable in central Iraq of that name), and Tall Afar is a little place up in northern Kurdistan. Sorry but that looks like a serious conspiracy theory disproven by the facts (unless Microsoft had pre-fiddled my Encarta 2000 for this purpose)."

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The truth doesn't suit apologists for Islamofascism either: Since the end of August, the Holy See has had a new apostolic nuncio for Kuwait, Bahrain, Yemen, and Qatar. The new nuncio in these Gulf states is archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, 71, a Maronite from Lebanon... But one passage from his first public interview has provoked surprise and disappointment in the Vatican... In it, he restated the Church's opposition to the war in Iraq, which "can only deepen the gulf between the parties and increase fanaticism." He didn't say a word about the present phase of democratization in that country. But he dedicated many words to analyzing Islamist terrorism and expressing appreciation for its motives. To a question about the link between religion and terrorism, El-Hachem replied: ... "This reminds me of the distressing incident at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when young Palestinians massacred Israeli athletes... At that time I was in the Vatican. It was a sunny Sunday and pope Paul VI appeared at his window and addressed the faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square in these words: `We too reprove and denounce the massacre in Munich, but we ask the following question: why have young Palestinians committed this act? We reply: because the Palestinian people (it was the first time anyone had spoken of the Palestinian `people') have been the victims of the most dangerous of injustices in the history of humanity, an innocent and peaceable people turned out of their land, who have lost their roots and identity amid the indifference of the entire world. What impelled these young men to commit this act was to attract the attention of the world to their cause.'... But if you re-read the words Paul VI really spoke at the Angelus and at the Wednesday general audience before that, where he also commented on the massacre in Munich, you will find nothing of what El-Hachem puts into his mouth.

PETA summarized: "Penn & Teller, in their own inimitable style, have dished the dirt on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in a short video. Nothing is off-limits: they joke about the unhealthy appearance of vegans (skeletal and pasty), and are astonished that PeTA kills dogs and cats (apparently they killed two thirds of the 2,100 dogs and cats they "rescued" in 2002, see also petakillsanimals). Not least, they expose one of PeTA's leaders as an insulin dependent diabetic who seeks to prevent others benefiting from future medical advances, by trying to abolish animal research. PeTA would outlaw fishing, circuses, dog shows, horse riding, zoos, pets and guide dogs for the blind: their goal is "total animal liberation" says Ingrid Newkirk, PeTA's leader."

The wisdom to know the difference: "If there's an iron law in the universe, it is that you can not get the changes you want through force. You may get some encouraging immediate results, but in the long run the reaction to the use of force will never satisfy you. Prohibition, after all, did cut alcohol consumption, but that doesn't mean it was a success. When you persuade, people will willingly change; when you use force, people will do as little as possible to avoid harsh treatment, and then direct their energies as far away from you as they can. Even when they comply with the new laws, people do not behave the way those who forced the change intended. The people find loopholes, or are driven to even worse behaviors then the ones that were banned. The Law of Unintended Consequences can also be called the Law of Forced Change. All life reacts badly to force, to threats, to fear."

History of tax revolts: "More than a quarter century ago, Californians rebelled against an overbearing political establishment. Property assessments were climbing, state expenditures were rising, the budget surplus was expanding, and government officials were lying. Voters responded by passing Proposition 13, triggering tax revolts nationwide. The movement has waxed and waned over the years, but the stories rarely cease to inspire. Popular resistance to higher taxes almost always reprises David versus Goliath. Such is the tale spun by Phil Valentine, a Tennessee talk-radio personality who helped stop the bipartisan drive for a state income tax. Tax Revolt offers a delightful read, detailing betrayal and deceit, insider maneuvers and public protests, and big-bucks lobbying and horn-honking rallies. Particularly satisfying is the end: the people win."

Progressives, eugenics and the minimum wage: "American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on "Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work" (PDF). Leonard makes the point that Progressive support for exclusionary labor legislation for women, including the minimum wage, was based among other things on ensuring "that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as 'mothers of the race'". Though most know that eugenics had some sort of open popularity prior to the Nazis giving it a bad name, few know how thoroughly it was supported by all the "best and brightest". Here's a partial list from Leonard's paper: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and economist Irving Fisher. Progressives, in part for eugenic reasons, wanted to make women and other groups unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage".

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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MORAL VACUUM STARTS TO HURT

Excerpt from Dennis Prager

"Jordanians are shocked that Islamic terrorists would blow up families, including families celebrating a wedding. They are so shocked that for the first time in history, Muslims have taken to publicly demonstrating against Islamic terror. And why are they shocked? Because the terrorists blew up Jordanians. As long as Islamic terrorists blew up men, women and children who are Jewish, Christian, Hindu, American, Australian and black Sudanese, the Arab and larger Muslim worlds were not particularly disturbed. In fact, Palestinians, who comprise the majority of Jordan's population, celebrated when Jews were blown up at Passover seders and at weddings. And they took to the streets and cheered in the Palestinian fashion, handing out candy, when Americans were incinerated in office buildings.

For some reason, Palestinians, most other Arabs and many Muslims around the world thought that the credulity-straining evil of targeting the most innocent for death, paralysis, blindness and brain damage would be confined to non-Arabs and non-Muslims.... Now there is widespread condemnation of Zarqawi's terror in Jordan. There is even a fear that the name of Islam will suffer. Unfortunately, however, it is only because Zarqawi was foolish enough to massacre Jordanian civilians, and not confine his massacres to Iraqis and non-Arabs. What has aroused Arab voices against Zarqawi has nothing to do with the immorality of blowing up people celebrating at a wedding -- it has to do with the immorality of blowing up Muslims celebrating at a wedding.

Nevertheless, it is possible that a moral awakening of sorts may be taking place in parts of the Arab world. The London Telegraph reports that "Munder Moomeni, a 38-year-old former soldier who lives next to Zarqawi's house, 13 Ramzi Street, described his former neighbour as 'a bastard.' 'By killing Jordanians here in Jordan, civilian Jordanians going to a wedding, they did something that not even a Jew would do,' he said." That a neighbor and former supporter of Zarqawi publicly acknowledged that Jews would not engage in such terror may be a first step toward the moral awakening that the Arab world needs even more than oil revenues.

It may even come to realize the greatest truth regarding terror and evil: People who blow up Israeli weddings and cut Americans' throats are very bad people. And if you don't fight them, they will eventually blow you up, too."

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ELSEWHERE

There is a truly saddening report here of the sheer insensate hate that Leftists feel towards GWB and Israel. Just a couple of excerpts: "Craig J. Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan, asserted that the crimes committed by that country's rulers are "subsidized by the government of George W. Bush." Bush has done this, he said, for the benefit of Enron. The goal of Americans, he instructed the students, is to "get at the oil and gas so they can guzzle it." .... Yasser Arafat, he said, had been correct to reject the offer of Palestinian statehood made at Camp David in 2000 because it was "a pro-Zionist type of approach." It would have allowed the Jewish state to survive. He found that a distasteful prospect".

Sad that this bill was necessary: "Fears that overweight Americans will develop an appetite for litigation drove the House to pass a bill that would bar lawsuits by restaurant customers claiming burgers and French fries made them fat. "Trial lawyers have said they'd target restaurants the way they've targeted the tobacco industry," National Restaurant Assn. President Steven C. Anderson said".

Good Taiwan speech: "Taiwan has welcomed comments by US President George W. Bush praising the island's democracy and said it shares the same core values as its allies. "Democracy, freedom, and human rights have been the core values shared between Taiwan and its allies," the Presidential Office said in a statement.... The office said the remarks were especially significant since they were made in Kyodo, Japan, on the first stop of Bush's Asia visit. Mr Bush's unusually strong comments came during a tour in which he will visit Beijing for a brief summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao. "We encourage China to continue down the road of reform and openness because the freer China is at home, the greater the welcome it will receive abroad," Mr Bush said in what was billed as a keynote speech. "Modern Taiwan is free and democratic and prosperous. By embracing freedom at all levels, Taiwan has delivered prosperity to its people and created a free and democratic Chinese society.""

Some progress towards border control? "Concerned that the nation's borders are not properly protected against terrorists, illegal aliens and drug smugglers, a Senate committee warned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that if he fails to correct the situation promptly, they will. Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME], chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joe Lieberman [D-CT] want to know whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) should be merged to `enable them to operate more effectively.' In a report made public last week, the Homeland Security Department's Office of Inspector General recommended that the two agencies-with overlapping jurisdiction for border security and immigration enforcement-be merged, questioning whether they had the ability as separate organizations to carry out their homeland security missions. The report, requested by Collins and Lieberman, said a lack of effective coordination between the agencies had affected apprehension, detention and removal efforts."

The fallout from California's recent Special Election in which ballot initiatives for reforms of the inflexiblity of the state budget, compulsory union dues, and redistricting were all lost are now starting to emerge: Nissan Corporation is moving its headquarters out of California to Tennessee and A massive $50 billion bond is being contemplated by the Governor.

There is an article here that identifies the French welfare State as a key ingredient in causing the recent riots there.

Bill Cosby was right : Blacks do spend a lot more of their income on shoes!

I am having a lot of fun with my new Australian Politics blog. I have just put up what I think is a heap of interesting stuff there. The servers hosting the blog are sometimes a bit slow in responding so I have in my usual way done a mirror site for it that may be more convenient on occasions.

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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WAL-MART TAKES THE LEAD IN DEFENDING BUSINESS FROM LEGAL PARASITES

Give Wal-Mart Stores credit for one thing--the company certainly doesn't scare easily. The world's dominant retailer has been facing a tidal wave of negativity--from community activists trying to keep its stores out of their neighborhoods, to local governments mandating that Wal-Mart supply workers with health insurance, to opportunistic lawyers trying to strike it rich by bringing on endless lawsuits. Critics--many of whom are as financially motivated as Wal-Mart is--are accusing the company of everything from discriminating against women, to mistreating illegal aliens, to denying overtime pay. Thousands of customers who slip and fall in a store aisle are also trying to reach into the company's deep pockets....

Management experts say the company's strategy of confronting the charges head-on while not wavering from its low-price business model is the most effective formula over the long haul. "When you're just about the largest company in the world, it's tough to breathe without offending someone," said Kathryn Harrigan, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Indeed, suing Wal-Mart is now a cottage industry, with some 5,000 lawsuits filed against the company each year. After one of Wal-Mart's 1.2 million employees gets to work at 9 A.M., three lawsuits will be filed against the company by the time he or she takes a 10:30 A.M. coffee break. By lunchtime, the count is up to six. By the time the employee heads home at 5 P.M., no fewer than 17 people or groups have brought a complaint in court. The same pattern will repeat itself tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

The message is clear. To some, the American dream is no longer just about being successful, it's about not being too successful. Or it's about being successful enough for others to leech off of you.

The company is generally loath to settle all but the smallest suits, opting instead to take on plaintiffs' complaints while hammering home its message of "Everyday Low Prices" to the public. The more serious class-action complaints, each of which can potentially result in hundreds of millions of dollars in liability, are complaints the company has decided it won't take lying down.

Larry McQuillan, a director at the Pacific Resource Institute, a free-market think tank, said fighting the lawsuits makes the most long-term sense, based on building momentum for tort reform, and because winning some of these cases would deter more organizations from filing suits. The trial bar's strategy against corporate America up to now has been to file a suit, depress the stock price and bring the company to the table to get a settlement out of it, he said. "Wal-Mart has been a leader in not bowing to those pressures, unlike many companies that are afraid of bad publicity and want to settle," McQuillan said. "If you don't defend yourself early on, and be persistent, you will be steamrolled."

More here

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NEW OZ BLOG

I am a bit embarrassed to be reporting this but I have started yet another blog -- a blog devoted solely to Australian politics. There are of course already heaps of excellent Australian conservative blogs. You will find a list of just some of them towards the bottom of my blogroll. So the purpose of my new blog is very limited. I just want to put up there what in my view is the most interesting or striking bit of news or commentary to come out of Australia that I have encountered that day. Sometimes, I will also mention the item here on this blog -- if it seems likely to have international interest -- but on other occasions I will not.

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Hot air from Chirac: "French President Jacques Chirac said today the riots that have rocked France revealed an identity crisis to which the country would respond with firmness and justice. "This is a crisis of meaning, a crisis of reference points, a crisis of identity," Mr Chirac said in a televised address to the nation. "We will respond with firmness and justice. "These events are the sign of a deep malaise. Some people started fires in their own neighbourhoods, burned the cars of their neighbours, their friends, attacked their schools and sports centres." .... "Children, teenagers need values, points of reference. Parental authority is key. Families must take their full responsibilities." "Those who refuse to do so should be punished, according to the law. Those who are facing serous difficulties should, on the other hand, be actively supported.""

Thomas Sowell explains how both high Muslim unemployment in France and high black unemployment in the USA are the result of do-gooder labor legislation: "Many people are blaming the riots in France on the high unemployment rate among young Muslim men living in the ghettoes around Paris and elsewhere. Some are blaming both the unemployment and the ghettoization on discrimination by the French. Plausible as these explanations may sound, they ignore economics, among other things. Let us go back a few generations in the United States. We need not speculate about racial discrimination because it was openly spelled out in laws in the Southern states, where most blacks lived, and was not unknown in the North. Yet in the late 1940s, the unemployment rate among young black men was not only far lower than it is today but was not very different from unemployment rates among young whites the same ages..."

Blogger Mary K. Ham on the transition from NASCAR reporter to political reporter: "Some folks ask me what the transition was like from NASCAR reporter to political reporter. It's easy. In one, you try to explain to your readers the significance of grown-ups getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to go around in circles indefinitely, always turning left. In the other, you get to interview racecar drivers."

A good summary here of the methods used by the media generally and public broadcasters in particular to inject covert Leftist bias into their coverage of events. I am pleased to note that Senator Santoro from my home State of Queensland is doing his best to expose the biases at Australia's major public broadcaster.

Dick McDonald has just given a good fisking to the latest moan from Jimmy Carter.

China Hand has just put up a couple of big new posts about life in China and the rocketing modernization now going on there. [NOTE: As people in China cannot access blogspot sites, I have put up mirror sites for "China Hand" here and here that should be accessible in China]

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.

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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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MORE ON THE NON-EXISTENT "PRINCIPLES" OF THE LEFT

I mentioned last month the book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweizer but I think a few more details about what it says are in order:

"Staunch union supporter Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union. But the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop. The hypocrisy doesn't end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of Congress in recent election cycles. But the Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. But none of them are in a union, according to Schweizer, author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty" and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other periodicals. The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is - that's right, a non-union shop.

Ralph Nader is another liberal who claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights. But when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on the office door.

Self-described socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as "the most vile institution on the face of the earth" and lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich. But Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon over the last 40 years, and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.

Air America radio host Al Franken says conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action. But fewer than 1 percent of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-American.

Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters. But he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family's fortune from the IRS. One Kennedy family trust wasn't even set up in the U.S., but in Fiji. Another family member, environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr., has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources. But he receives an annual check from the family's large holdings in the oil industry.

Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessity of unions to protect a "living wage." But she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada, where she can pay less than American union wages.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have spoken in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill vetoed a bill seeking to end it. But the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die. Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, including having abortions without parental notification. But she barred 13-year-old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO.

Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates. But he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

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Old news to psychometricians: "Smarter children may enjoy longer lives, the results of a new study suggest. The study, which followed elderly adults deemed gifted by childhood IQ tests, found that the higher their early IQs were, the longer they lived -- up to a point, at least. The survival advantage began to plateau after a childhood IQ of 163, an intelligence level few people reach. Dr. Laurie T. Martin and Laura D. Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health report these findings in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Though the reasons for the link between IQ and longevity are not clear, it does not appear to be merely a reflection of income and social position. As children, the participants were from affluent families and most were white. Yet childhood IQ was still a factor in their lifespan. Similarly, in an earlier study of Americans with more varied childhood IQs and family incomes, Martin found that IQ was related to health problems independently of socioeconomics. This, she told Reuters Health, suggests that IQ affects longevity among lower-income people as well. As research has already linked IQ to mortality, the current study, according to Martin, was in part an attempt to see how far the IQ-health advantage extends. The researchers expected there to be a cutoff at which a high IQ no longer brought any extra health benefits." [High IQ is just one aspect of general physical good function. The brain is just another part of the body]

Unca Dave is in good form. He has put up a detailed argument to justify his view that those who oppose the Iraq war are "treasonous vermin".

Our friends, the Saudis: "The government of Saudi Arabia is distributing books and pamphlets across the United States in an effort to recruit American Muslims to an international struggle against Christians and Jews, the director of a religious freedom organization told the Senate Judiciary Committee Nov. 8. In one instance, a booklet distributed by the Saudi Embassy in Washington offers instructions on how to "build a wall of resentment" between Muslims and infidels, said Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom. Among the book's directives: "Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel," Shea quoted during a committee hearing."

Wal-Mart helps the poor: "Wal-Mart, by revolutionizing bulk purchasing, logistics and inventory, and thereby enabling lower prices on a huge array of goods, which pushed everyone else to follow their lead, has probably done more to improve the standard of living for Americans over the last several decade than any other institution. That is to say, Wal-Mart has directly and indirectly contributed to an increase in real wages for almost all consumers. The media is almost totally blind to this fact."

Ted Baiamonte points out that the problems of France run a lot deeper than rioting Muslims.

Wow! Keith Burgess Jackson is now putting up post after carefully-reasoned post about the thuggish Brian Leiter. Neutralizing Leiter would certainly be a great service to American scholarship.

As readers will no doubt have observed, I am more inclined to put up pictures now that I am on cable. So I have recently added a few pictures to my internet biography as well.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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MYTHS ABOUT VIETNAM

Since I was in the Australian Army during the Vietnam war and volunteered for service in Vietnam, I take some interest in righting the misconceptions that prevail about that war. Just some excerpts below from a very wide-ranging article.

"Burkett looked into the apparently high suicide rate among Vietnam veterans and found it was not even remotely true. "Vietnam veterans have one of the lowest suicide rates in America. The two years after the war there was a slightly elevated rate that was only modestly higher then our peers who never went into the military. It fell off dramatically after that," he said.

Widespread Vietnam Veteran homelessness is another myth. "Back, around the late 70's Teddy Kennedy had a $10 million government grant to have a building in Boston for all the homeless Vietnam veterans. Several of guys gave testimonies about how they ended up on the street after Vietnam, but I got the military records of those individuals and virtually none of them were Vietnam veterans," he said. Burkett said other investigations have shown that very few "homeless veterans" were in the military.

Another myth he dispelled was the incarceration rate of Vietnam veterans. The prisons are not full of criminal veterans, Burkett said. "I went to the bureau of prisons and got the statistics, the demographics. At the time there were 1 million men in prison. 55% of those in prison are black, only 10.5% Vietnam Veterans are black. 80% of the incarcerated do not have a high school degree. As I mentioned 90% of Vietnam Veterans do have a high school degree. You can't get in the military with a felony conviction and 80% of the incarcerated have a felony conviction as a youth offender. About 75% came from broken homes, but about 80% of Vietnam Veterans came from a 2-parent home," he said.....

Burkett said drug rates were also low among Vietnam veterans, partly due to surprise inspections. "You could buy marijuana very easily; they literally sold it in bags on the street. But when you're living in a bay with 40 guys and you may be going into combat, I can guarantee if you're doing drugs-marijuana or otherwise-the 39 other guys are going to report it because they're not going into combat with some pot-head," he said....

Burkett said race was another politically incorrect myth he tackled. At the time of the Vietnam War, 13.5% of the draft pool was black yet only 12.5% among this group were drafted. Because of less access to medical care and lower educational rates, blacks failed the physical and aptitude exams at a higher rate than whites. "Nobody's ever telling the real story of the black man in Vietnam. They are always focusing on "The black man; the victim". They weren't victims; they were patriotic Americans. 75 percent of the blacks that served in Vietnam were volunteers-exactly the same rate as whites. Twenty won the Medal of Honor, 100 won the Distinguished Service Cross and dozens upon dozens won the airforce cross and the Navy Cross. "Nobody knows that about 300 went on to become admirals or generals in the armed services of America," he said.

Burkett also refuted the idea that it was only the poor or middle class who served and died in Vietnam. Contrary to an explosive story that said rich kids stayed home, Burkett said high per-capita income communities like Beverly Hills, and Grosse Pointe, Mich. actually had significantly higher casualty rates than the norm...."

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Fun! Keith Burgess Jackson is still socking it to Brian Leiter with a new post titled "Leiter's Nietzschean Descent into Madness". Keith's consistent use of cool logic to pull apart what Leiter says seems to have got the abusive old blowhard a bit worried at least.

Riesman on Nazism: "My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.... When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei - in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party - Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism? Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed".

I thought I might make a brief mention of a book that has just recently come out in English called The Fabricated Luther. The book refutes the weird Leftist claim that Luther was responsible for the rise of Nazism! Since Hitler was a Catholic and had his main base of support in Germany's Catholic South, that always was a lulu but it is good to see the full story about Nazism and Lutheranism set out. The modern-day Left will blame Nazism on everything except what it should really be blamed on: Socialism.

End federal flood insurance: "Federal flood insurance transfers wealth from lower income earners to the more affluent, encourages people to build homes where they should not be built, and promotes disasters such as the one in New Orleans. Congress should not use our money in this way. One way to prevent future disasters such as New Orleans is to have fewer people living in flood plains. But federal policy takes the opposite approach - it pays people to live in flood prone areas through federally funded flood insurance. This has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to date, and the policy is made even worse by the fact that it transfers wealth from taxpayers who don't own property, to those who do. It is a form of welfare for the more affluent and politically powerful"

San Francisco irresponsibility: "Lost in the shuffle of post-election analysis this week was news that San Francisco voters approved a military recruiting ban on high school and college campuses.... In so doing, voters showed an astonishing disregard for the give and take of citizenship, and a deep disrespect for American military personnel. Such rash actions arise from a post-Vietnam anti-war activism that is no longer content with objecting to war on principled grounds, and is instead determined to eliminate the military all together. It is deliciously ironic then, that so many of these activists reside on the West Coast, a nice target for, and well within the range of, North Korean nuclear missiles. Who would the good people of San Francisco call upon for defense - the fire department? Or what happens when Islamic extremists take down the Golden Gate Bridge, who would hand down justice - the local library staff?"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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A Manifesto of Lies

A small excerpt from an excellent expose by David Limbaugh

The following is a non-exhaustive sampling of certain important precepts one must believe, pretend to believe, or advocate in order to be in the Democratic leadership fraternity, that bizarre cadre of partisan creatures dedicated to destroying President Bush personally as an alternative to devising a coherent, politically viable policy agenda:

Nazi and Communist propagandists were on to something in teaching that if you repeat a lie -- even an outrageous one -- often enough people will begin to believe it.

This principle holds true even if you are guilty of precisely the same thing as those you accuse (talking up Saddam's WMDs) and your complicity is conclusively demonstrated on audiotape and videotape.

When your obvious duplicity in this affair is illuminated by reference to the uncontroverted fact that when you made similar claims about Saddam's WMDs you had access to the same intelligence as the administration, you simply say the president pressured the intelligence community to doctor the data.

When this specious assertion is contradicted by unequivocal findings of bipartisan investigative commissions, you simply demand, with righteous indignation, more investigations.

In the meantime, you also charge that President Bush cherry-picked certain intelligence and deliberately relied on other discredited intelligence in order to bolster his case for war against Iraq. And you do that knowing that it is you who are retrospectively cherry-picking the evidence and presenting it as irrefutable proof that Bush lied.

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ELSEWHERE

Lying about lies: Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed. What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact"

There is a rather amazing article here (hat tip to Infinitely Prolonged) about the large number of men who lie about being military veterans or lie about what they did whilst in the military -- John Kerry and Jimmy Massey being particularly obnoxious examples of the latter. I myself do on relevant occasions mention that I was a Sergeant in the Austalian Army during the Vietnam war but you will find a copy of my certificate of discharge included in my internet biography so anyone can check up on me any day. I have of course blotted out my signature from the online copy. If anyone thinks I am going to put my signature online they can think again.

The genetics of race mentioned in the NYT!: "In a finding that is likely to sharpen discussion about the merits of race-based medicine, an Icelandic company says it has detected a version of a gene that raises the risk of heart attack in African-Americans by more than 250 percent. The company, DeCode Genetics, first found the variant gene among Icelanders and then looked for it in three American populations, in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta. Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent. The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics".

No hope for Germany: "Germany's two major political parties on Friday sealed an agreement to govern the country together under Angela Merkel, who would become the country's first female chancellor. But after six weeks of grueling negotiations, which exposed fissures on both sides and necessitated deep compromises, the new government faced a murky future, shorn of the reformist zeal that many here believed is necessary to fix Germany's stagnant economy and stem its soaring unemployment.... Mrs. Merkel has had to set aside many of her proposals for overhauling Germany's economy, including a simpler tax regimen; reform of health care and pensions; and a more flexible labor market. The Social Democrats objected to Mrs. Merkel's proposals to curb unions and to make it easier to dismiss workers. Plans to restructure the medical and pension systems were also either watered down or deferred. And the Social Democrats succeeded in nudging up the tax rate for people with high salaries."

If you have not yet read or heard GWB's excellent Veteran's Day speech, it is here. There is too much good stuff in it to attempt an excerpt.

Les Bates on the basic idea of Leftism: "It is to replace the society of social and economic consent that we live in with the social and economic primacy of the parasites over the productive"

China Hand has just put up an interesting post on China's linguistic muddle. One excerpt: "Riding the No.78 bus through the outskirts of Suzhou this morning I saw a big red banner urging on all the importance of speaking in putonghua, the so-called "common language" of China... In English is it known as Mandarin - or the language of the court officials. But in Hong Kong when they speak of Chinese - they mean Cantonese. When they mean the Beijing dialect they say mandarin or putonghua... The Beijing dialect is the standard the model for putonghua although it is a very formal version of Beijing dialect which is just as unintelligible as any other dialect to a Mandarin-only speaker". [NOTE: As people in China cannot access blogspot sites, I have put up mirror sites for "China Hand" here and here that should be accessible in China]

Blog Herald says there are now over 100 million blogs. A bit hard to believe. If you want to back up your blog, these utilities might come in handy. I do daily manual backups myself. It only takes me a couple of minutes.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE GOP

Bidinotto has a point: One excerpt: "Not a damned thing distinguishes the Republicans from the Democrats anymore...not a damned thing. "No Child Left Behind" in essence, and unconstitutionally, federalized education. The GOP-engineered federal prescription drug subsidy program for seniors was another huge and costly step toward total socialized medicine. The Administration's response to recent natural disasters -- here and abroad -- establishes the premise of federalizing all local emergencies globally, and reducing the U.S. military into becoming the logistics wing of the International Red Cross".

The Anchoress has got pretty disillusioned with the GOP too: "If your plan was to make people so disgusted with your cowardice, your disorganization and your political tone-deafness that they either stop contributing to the RNC, or they decide to just sit out the next election (because what’s the point), or they decide to vote out every stinking one of you in the next elections, because you freaking well deserve ouster for literally doing nothing constructive and squandering your majority…well…you have succeeded spectacularly! Beyond your wildest imaginings, I am sure. I can’t think of a single reason to vote to re-elect a any one of you".

The Plantation Right: "I write editorials for a conservative editorial page. After my newspaper editorialized that U.S. House Republicans should replace Majority Leader Tom DeLay with someone more concerned with ideology than partisanship, we were deluged with letters from angry Republicans. Almost all of the letters made the same argument: No real conservative would oppose Tom DeLay because of all the good he has done the GOP. Of course, 'Republican' and 'conservative' are not synonyms. Until more conservatives make clear that they understand this distinction, they are in for continued abuse from the Republican leadership."

The House of Reps backdown over drilling for oil in less than 1% of Alaska really got to me but there is an informative comment here on just how it happened.

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Brookes News Update

Why Al Gore could have been America's last gasp? : In Al Gore we did not see the triumph of American liberalism but of nihilism springing from the corpse of liberalism
Are Liberal Party blue bloods sinking the Government's workplace reforms?: Looks like the Hugh Morgan, Michael Kroger and John Calvert-Jones' axis has contributed significantly to the Government's labour market reform stuff up. But what can one expect from the 'Blueblood Society'
Business Council of Australia's quack cure for recessions: The Business Council of Australia has demonstrated a shocking ignorance of economic history and the real nature of the so-called boom-bust cycle
Who hates America in the Arab and Muslim world, and why: Arab journalist tells all on Anti-Americanism and hate in the Arab world. This is something that most Western journalists would never dream of doing
Black group calls on Democrats to stop using racial slurs against black Republicans: Racist Democrats vilify black Republican candidate
Why government was never the source of money: According to a popular view, which originated from Plato and Aristotle, people accept money because of government decree. Not so
Hollywood can't even spell "Israel": Palestinians are perpetrating on their own people with a fervour that increases in savagery each day, because they can't get over the fence and kill Jews so easily
What should we expect from Bernanke now that he is the Fed's chairman?: Why Bernanke'a policy of stabilizing prices will generate a boom-bust situation

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ELSEWHERE

A mindless bigot speaks. Brian Leiter calls Texans mindless bigots because they prefer a traditional definition of marriage. But since he gives no reasoning for his assertion, who is the mindless bigot? Both Keith Burgess-Jackson and Right Reason have given the poisonous old bigot more attention than he deserves -- and I guess I am too.

Blunt talk from a senior Australian conservative: "Federal Treasurer Peter Costello has again urged Islamic extremists to leave Australia, saying there is no point in living in a country with a system of government they oppose. "There are some things Australia stands for, has always stood for, always will stand for, which will never change," he told A Current Affair. "We will never be an Islamic state. We will never observe Sharia law ... We will always be a democracy. "To people who say `well, we've come to this country and we would like to turn it into something it isn't, I say you must understand that will never occur". Mr Costello said rather than try to change Australia, they should leave it".

An interesting research finding: "This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that government plays an unambiguously positive role for individuals' quality of life, and public choice theory, that was developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement and regulation, thereby harming voters' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a leftwing median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but only in countries where the state sector is already small."

The authoritarian Left at work again: "Massachusetts politicians last week rose to new heights of holier-than-thou arrogance. House members on Thursday-just three days after the 80-page bill was introduced-voted overwhelmingly to tax businesses that do not provide health insurance for their employees, and to require all residents who can afford it to buy health insurance... No doubt, buying health insurance is a good idea. But so is buying a car with a five-star safety rating, brushing after meals and not running with scissors. And yet government lets people decide whether to do these things... If the state can order people to buy health insurance, then where does that authority stop? Why can't it order people to exercise a half-hour a day, quit smoking, and floss regularly?"

Various people have mentioned it but in case you have not seen it, the disastrous way French "unfair dismissal" laws have made Muslims almost unemployable in France is summarized here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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SORRY! JUST FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE:

I imagine that regular readers here have by now seen enough of 1930s Nazi propaganda to be thoroughly persuaded of how Leftist it was. But there is one last poster that I think really rams the point home so I reproduce it below. The picture below is in fact a blow-up of an election banner that appeared in a larger photo that I presented on 12th. October.



It reads: "Mit Adolf Hitler "Ja" fuer Gleichberechtigung und Frieden" -- which translates as "With Adolf Hitler "Yes" for equal rights and peace" -- the same old standby slogans that the Left trot out to this day, of course.

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ELSEWHERE

I do occasionally get derisive emails from unwary Leftists who don't expect the sort of effective response that they get from me. One of the most amusing such Leftists lately has been Steve Getto (gettos@fdn.uq.edu.au) -- apparently an academic or student from my Alma Mater (the University of Queensland) in my home town of Brisbane. He initially emailed me to express great scorn for my demonstration that Nazism was Leftist. I gave him more to think about than he expected, however, and he has been in continual backdown mode since. His most recent email to me was most amusing. He was trying to defuse the trenchant criticisms of the Left by George Orwell and this is what he wrote: "Oh hehe ... so does this mean you are sincerely interested in a fairer and more equitable society? Gimme a break. Orwell *was* deeply incensed at the behaviour of elements of the Left, yes. And some of your criticisms of socialists and socialism are valid. But Orwell never gave up on the idea of the basic principles of socialism. Some socialists have no right to quote Orwell, agreed. But right wing champions of capitalism like you have even less. How about replacing the Orwell references to a more suitable one like Andrew Bolt. Trying to glorify your crap with literary citations is absurd and offensive to people's intellect. Ugh. Intellectual fascism. Give me Nazism any day. At least they had the guts to admit they were scumbags. Yours to the strains of the Internationale (by way of waving a red rag to the bull)". [Talk about being condemned out of your own mouth! He denies that Nazism was Leftist and then, as a Leftist, expresses a liking for it! What a laugh.] Update: In a subsequent email Getto described himself as being of a "general revolutionary Marxist political persuasion". How unsurprising!

There is a good post here on how the moral degeneracy of the French (and the French Left in particular) has got them into their present pickle.

There is a huge debunking here of this attention-seeker: "For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq. In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians... Massey was discharged in December 2003, shortly after returning from Iraq due to depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome." The media of course lapped it all up without doing any checks on the truth of his stories at all

Socialist envy thriving in Britain: "Having a nice view or living next door to a golf course are going to cost householders more in council tax under Labour plans. Taxpayers are set to be charged hundreds of pounds extra a year if they are in a conservation area, next to an open space, have a swimming pool or tennis court or enjoy full or partial views of the sea, hills, mountains, lakes or rivers. Extra charges are also expected to be levied on homes with more bedrooms than average, conservatories, large patios or gardens, roof terraces or balconies. Homes in "gated communities" will also face higher bills. Official documents show that ministers are going to extraordinary lengths to build a detailed database of properties across England, with the intention of placing them in a higher council tax band.... A whole range of details - from "equestrian facilities" to patio size - will be tabulated. No fewer than 10 "value-significant codes" detail a range of possible views that a property can offer".

Socialist stupidity in Scotland: "Last month must have seen an especially potent full moon, because several Scottish economic bigwigs started behaving distinctly out of character. First, Sir John Ward, the chairman of Scottish Enterprise, declared that, according to his agency's own calculations, the post-devolution public sector now accounted for no less than 55 per cent of the Scottish economy. Ward was rightly scathing of this development. In booming Ireland, the figure is around 34 per cent. He went further and claimed that in certain areas of Scotland three-quarters of the local economy is dominated by public spending."

Anti-Americanism is now the Left's only real ideology: "After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the Left everywhere stopped offering options for governance or serious theories about development and equity and sought refuge in protest. The enemies of globalization explain their ideas by stoning McDonald's to smithereens. Anticapitalists hurl pies at the president of the International Monetary Fund. Anti-Americanism has turned into ideology. The communists have exchanged Das Kapital for T-shirts with the image of Che Guevara and choruses of brief (and badly rhymed) slogans. The Left today is nothing but circus and street violence. But that strategy, along with the corruption and follies of many governments, has burrowed deeply, especially in Latin America, where a growing number of citizens despise democracy as a method to organize coexistence and reject the market economy as a way to create and assign wealth".

Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort". Officer's Club thinks some of the pro-Jihadi American Left have gone so far as to be guilty of treason by that definition.

China Hand has a new post up about how personal helpfulness overcomes bureacracy in Chinese banking.

Ovi Magazine is out again with its usual broad coverage of interesting topics.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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