ELSEWHERE

The anti-democratic judiciary again: "Only one in five Americans approve of the federal court order under which workers removed the Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of Alabama's state judicial building Wednesday, according to a new poll."

More abandonment of standards in the Left-dominated schools: "An independent panel appointed to look into why an alarming number of high school kids bombed out on the June Math A Regents Exam has found the statewide test was too hard. So the scores will be bumped up so that many of those who failed will get passing grades."

There is a rather fun post here about one of the fruitier candidates in the California Recall election.

Natural selection at work: Millions of hard-working Americans are migrating out of high-taxing Democrat-controlled States (such as California) into lower taxing American States -- and gaining huge advantages in purchasing power out of it. We saw a related process in my home State of Queensland some time back. A conservative Queensland government abolished death-duties (inheritance taxes) -- causing so many retirees to move to Queensland that all other Australian States had to abolish death-duties too.

Where are the monuments to communism's victims? There are many monuments to the victims of the National Socialist Hitler but both Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler did.

New site: ecoNOT is a newly launched site dedicated to the debunking of "environmentalism" (which its author defines as excluding normal "conservationism"). There is an associated blog here with some good entries on crime etc.

My latest academic upload here (or here) is a review of a book on racial attitudes by British and Indian social scientists which concludes: "The prejudice manifested by the majority of the population is an essentially normal process".

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A NEGLECTED PROBLEM OF HOMOSEXUALITY

Interested Participant notes that, despite cutbacks elsewhere, the University of Michigan can still offer a course that teaches initiation into homosexuality! Lots of people object to that, of course but Interested Participant mentions one big reason why they should object to encouragement of homsexuality: “the median age at death of male homosexuals is 40 compared to 75 for married men. For female homosexuals, median age at death is 45 compared to 79 for married women. The differences are explained by 1) very high homicide and suicide rates, 2) high death rates from motor vehicle accidents, and 3) high death rates from sexually transmitted diseases (especially AIDS).”

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MARTIN LUTHER KING’S “DREAM”

An acerbic and very accurate comment from Thomas Sowell: "There is nothing new about organizations and movements beginning with idealism and ending up as cynical rackets. Nevertheless, it was painful to listen to speakers who addressed a scattering of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech. ... the speakers on the 40th anniversary of that occasion clearly rejected the idea of a color- blind society. These were no longer demands for equal treatment but for special benefits, based on the color of their skin. Speakers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson certainly can't afford to be judged by the content of their character."

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ELSEWHERE

Fun! One of my correspondents has noted the Berkeley claim that Stalin was conservative because he resisted change once he was in power. He comments: “Have you considered pointing out to the Leftist College Prof crowd that *they* are presently in power in the university?” And they certainly monopolize that power. So are THEY conservative? I am sure that they would really LOVE that suggestion!

Houston school officials appear to have put forth glowing data on students' college plans that bear small relation to the hard reality most students face. That Leftist teachers might put out false statistics that look like nothing so much as the percentage of votes that the leaders of Communist countries used to get at “election” time is hardly a coincidence. Leftists are so hooked on lies that they are not even clever about it.

Jeff Jacoby is having a bit of fun with the Leftists who cannot understand why U.S. crime keeps dropping. What a puzzle!! But, as he says: “[The] downward trend ... first appeared in the 1980s, not long after the nationwide crackdown on crime got underway. The dramatic drop in criminal activity followed an equally dramatic boom in prison construction and a sharp surge in incarceration rates. The conclusion is obvious: Stricter punishment has led to lower crime.” Only a Leftist would find that puzzling.

I have referred to Galileo a couple of times recently. This reference covers some of the complexities of his relationship with the Church. Although his treatment was unjust, there was some sympathy for his views among the clergy.

For decades, “wind power” has been THE Greenie answer as an alternative to coal, oil and nuclear power. Now that technology is beginning to make wind-power look like a more viable proposition, however, the Greenies are saying that they do not want it because of its “visual pollution”. When will people realize that the Greenies are just irrational wreckers whom NOTHING will satisfy?

"While most of official Washington was captivated with the fight on the Senate floor to pass an energy bill before Congress left town for its August vacation, a vicious campaign was under way behind the scenes to smear two leading scientists for pointing out serious flaws in the science behind the theory of human-caused climate change."

There has been a recent claim that birth-order determines whether or not you are conservative or liberal. The evidence on birth-order effects has always shown them to be very slight however. The big influence on political orientation is genetic. The twin studies show that your politics are even more strongly inherited than how tall you are. You are either born with the personality needs that make you a Leftist or you are not. That is why arguing with Leftists is generally so futile. Only aging makes them more conservative, usually.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again.

The Tugboat Potemkin has once again emitted a few angry sparks from its aging Leftist chimney in the form of a great huff over the fact that Andrew Bolt mentioned the psychiatric problems of a children’s book author. Frankly, if I had a child that was being given books to read that were written by a mentally disturbed person, I would want to know about it. Impressionable minds and all that. The Tugboat may stand for censorship of relevant information in the name of political correctness but I think the right to know trumps that every time. As a libertarian, I am against ALL censorship.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at attitudes to Aborigines (blacks) in Australia. The main finding was that no one type of person was much more likely to be critical of blacks than any other. There was however a 5% overlap between conservative voting and attitude to blacks. This means that nearly as many Leftists as Rightists were critical of blacks. Since Australian blacks are a pretty sorry lot by most objective criteria, the slight preponderance of conservatives among their critics probably reflects greater conservative realism.

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“FRONT PAGE” ARTICLE UP

I had five articles published in “Front Page Magazine” last year (here, here, here, here and here) but I have been a bit lazy this year. But my first article for this year has now appeared. It is here. It deals with the Berkeley nonsense about the psychology of conservatism. “Front Page” seems to have nearly a million readers these days so out of that I am hopeful of getting a few more regular readers of this blog.

I have given the links to other posts on this blog about the Berkeley nonsense a little further down this page.

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LESSONS FROM VIETNAM FOR IRAQ?

The Left are always telling us that we should have learned from Vietnam to stay out of Iraq. This military writer has a rather different view. Some excerpts:

Iraq is no Vietnam, but there is a lesson from Vietnam that our commanders in Iraq will ignore at their peril: To win, we must think and act differently than our training and military education prepare us to do.

During the Vietnam War, some of the fiercest fighters the war ever saw were soldiers who were known as combat bums and as troops who had gone native.

What they had in common was an obsession with winning, even at the cost of career advancement within the U.S. military.

they began to adopt the lifestyle of the locals in Saigon and elsewhere, and they began to think "out of the box." Ultimately what emerged was an extremely unique style of counterinsurgency warfare - one that may save us both in Iraq and in our current war against terrorism.

It is worth our while today to learn from the Vietnam-era "combat bums" who went native to fight their war. Of all the combat bums, few left us a more worthwhile legacy than John Paul Vann, who fought in Vietnam first in uniform and then later returned to Vietnam as a civilian advisor.

Typically the counterinsurgency leader leaves the familiarity and safety of U.S. institutions and begins to live among the local population - the same people who are recruited by an adversary such as Osama bin Laden and the like. Sometimes this type of mission will include overseeing civilian projects that will improve the lives of the locals. But in all cases, the leader cuts as many ties as possible with the U.S. government and, by primarily relying on his intuition, learns to move among the people like "a fish through water."

A successful counterinsurgent will begin to build trust with the local population...

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ELSEWHERE

Yawn! “Yasser Arafat on Wednesday asked militant groups to halt attacks on Israelis”. He has done so many times before. The Palestinians know he has his fingers crossed (or should that be “crescented”?) when he says such things.

The Australian foreign minister has given the churches a well-deserved blast for politicking instead of concentrating on pastoral matters. He particularly referred to the obnoxious behaviour of the Anglican Primate of Australia, who “had blamed the Bali bomb attack on Australia's close alliance with the US.”

Good to see that Australia has succeeded after a long chase in arresting another ship poaching in its fisheries. Because we manage our fisheries in a responsible way, there are always pirates from other nations trying to steal the fish that we protect.

Ordinary Americans have still got what it takes: “According to a recent poll for the Associated Press, nearly three out of four Americans favor manned spaceflight”

More Canadian absurdity: Canadians are now not allowed to smile for their passport photos.

The second part of this article is most amusing. Leftists are always saying that governments are in the pockets of “the multinationals”. It seems however that the labor unions have sold their souls to Coca Cola! The first part of the article is good too: Having a laugh at the Europeans who condemn Americans as warmongers and then want America to intervene in Liberia and such places.

Hooray! Blimps are back. I have always thought that it was irrational that the crash of the Hindenburg discredited airships. Far more people die in modern airliner crashes.

The Wicked one has some more jokes up: An Irish joke, a New Zealand joke and a Schwarzenegger joke.

I have a post on PC Watch about FAT!

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at who gets heart disease. Lots of things lead to heart disease but the type of personality you are is one of them. I show that dominant, aggressive people are at higher risk but that being ambitious or always rushing about frantically are not dangerous at all.

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THE BERKELEY NONSENSE ABOUT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSERVATISM

Below are posts on this blog over the last month that give more details of how dishonest and distorted the study by Jost et al. was:


The research that the Berkeley group ignored

Their ignorance of history

Conservatives are happy, not angry and fearful

They are seeing their own faults in conservatives

Their way of measuring “dogmatism” is self-contradictory

Another strange belief by one of the Berkeley authors

The folly of using students as your source of information

There is no such thing as a general tendency towards intolerance of ambiguity

Their “Right Wing Authoritarianism” questionnaire is in fact agreed to by lots of Leftists too.

There is no such thing as a general tendency to accept any authority. It depends on the authority.

There was no such thing as a single Nazi “type” and the Berkeley group did not study real Nazis in any case.

The Berkeley theory was in fact borrowed from the Nazis.

SMOKING AND LIBERTARIANISM

The Rev. Brian of American Realpolitik runs a great site for humour which I enjoy visiting. He is a serious humorist (!), however, so I was pleased to get his response to my post on the Bloomberg anti-smoking laws. He writes:

Actually John, the problem with the Bloomberg policies is that people aren't really allowed to segregate. A true libertarian solution would be to let it up to the business to decide. Smokers would gravitate to places where they were welcome, and non-smokers would gravitate to places that catered to them.

Bloomberg has simply banned smoking in publicly accessible buildings. If a bar or restaurant wanted to offer a well-ventilated smoking section they would not be allowed to.

I agree entirely that banning the provision of areas set aside for smokers is unacceptably authoritarian and totally unnecessary. But I have lived through too many years of smokers polluting up all public places to agree that controlling their incursions on other people’s liberties can be left to voluntarism.

Sam Ward also has an interesting comment on the issue.

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EDUCATED ARROGANCE

Bernhardt Varenius of Anti-Socialist Tendencies has drawn my attention to this article. I have yet to find an article written by a Leftist that I find worth fisking but this one tempts me. There is so much about it that is wrong-headed and self-congratulatory. I hope one of my fellow bloggers does a real job on it. I will content myself with taking up his initial point about Leftists being more likely to be highly educated. He thinks that shows that conservatives are stupid. He is right that there is a tendency for Leftists to have more formal education but he fails to ask WHY that connection exists. It would not be because of the heavy Leftist indoctrination that people almost always get in the universities and colleges these days would it?

But WHY are university and college teachers so Leftist? Too easy! They know that they are smart so therefore think that they should be the ones running everything. So they HATE it that people want to run their own lives! And that’s what makes a Leftist. We know what’s good for you is the Leftist credo.

OK. There is one more point that I cannot resist fisking: He says that conservatives were the ones way back who supported the flat earth theory. How he knows that he does not say. What I CAN tell him was that the people who most vigorously resisted Galileo and his ilk were the clergy of the day. And who were the highly educated people at that time? The clergy! So much for the wisdom gained from a higher education!

Parting shot: And it’s not so long ago that the leading intellectuals of both Britain and America were supporting Hitler’s eugenic ideas. Such wisdom!

Reference:
Pickens, D. (1968) Eugenics and the Progressives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press

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ELSEWHERE

I commented recently on the absurd intrusiveness of the Federal Boxing Administration proposed for the USA. I am afraid Australia looks even more infatuated with government intervention. The State government of Western Australia is well on the way to setting up a Department of Fashion! (PDF). As one of our newspaper columnists commented yesterday (no longer online): “Not that juvenile crime, hospital waiting lists or crowded classrooms should take priority.”

I have said very little about Iraq’s “missing” WMDs because I see it as irrelevant. We went to war because Iraq gave strong indications of having them and that was a good piece of conservative caution. Those who wanted to trust Saddam were the incredible ones. For those who think the issue does now matter, however, a member of Australia’s major Leftist party has written a good short refutation of the whiners here.

Crime Keeps Falling: “Violent and property crimes dipped in 2002 to their lowest levels since records started being compiled 30 years ago, and have dropped more than 50 percent in the past decade, the Justice Department reported” Tougher policing and sentencing deserves SOME of the credit for that but so does the private sector. Bruce Benson explains.

Sensible: “Prime Minister John Howard has stepped up his campaign to keep older workers in the job market by asking for reform plans from a panel of top business advisers.”

A worry for New Zealanders!: A GHANAIAN man was jailed for two years for having sex with a sheep. (via Chris Brand) For my U.S. readers: The relationship between New Zealanders and their sheep is an old joke in this part of the world.

Arlene Peck is pretty scathing about the masculinity of Arab men. Her last sentence is amusing.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I report a survey of what jail terms people in the community see as appropriate for various crimes. Needless to say, I found that people generally wanted sentences that were many times longer than what the courts actually hand out. I concluded that the judiciary is a major antidemocratic force in the community.

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“RIGHT TO SMOKE” NONSENSE

A lot of libertarians seem to get their knickers in a knot over the ban on most smoking in public by New York Mayor Bloomberg. They seem to think that the policy violates some “right” to smoke. But if person X has a “right” to smoke, then person Y has a “right” to breathe clean air. But the two “rights” are obviously in conflict. The only way to give the maximum freedom to both parties is then to segregate them -- which is what Bloomberg is doing -- perfectly libertarian in my view. Smokers see it all as unfair only because (being addicts) they are so used to trampling over the liberties of non-smokers who would like to breathe unpolluted air.

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GREENIE WATCH

"It has long been clear that the anti-sprawl movement is anti- minority. That racism is not purposeful or mindful on their part, but rather naive and mindless. Like the socialist planners who thought they could do better than the market, but wound up impoverishing millions, these anti-economists would prefer to restrict land use without raising prices. But it is an unavoidable fact that whatever is made more scarce costs more ..."

“Myths and lies spread by the green movement about the consequences of genetic modification (GM) are preventing the use of new crops that could alleviate third-world famine, an international conference has been told in Melbourne. "Genetic engineering has been turned into this Frankenstein technology and a lot of it is due to ignorance," last year's Nobel Prize winner, South African scientist Professor Sydney Brenner told the conference. Kenyan scientist Dr Florence Wambagu said anti-GM campaigners "play around with the anxiety of the public and make them more anxious with myths and lies". Wambagu said poverty, and not development or genetic modification, were causing the loss of bio-diversity in Africa and the continent faced a food deficit without new technologies.” More here

This review of a history of the last 200 years by Mokyr points out how technological innovation is the main influence that has been responsible for our enormous material progress in that time and foresees further huge advances if the political system does not stifle it -- a very real possibility given the influence of the anti-progress Greens and the power of vested interests that would tend to lose out by people being given more choices.

The Bush administration has decided to allow thousands of the nation's coal-fired power plants to upgrade their facilities without installing costly anti-pollution equipment, as they now must do. Industry and EPA officials said recently that the new rule would encourage plant improvements, provide greater regulatory certainty and reduce dangerous emissions. The decision will save billions for consumers and encourage the badly need installation of new capacity. Needless to say, the Greenies and the Democrats are against it.

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ELSEWHERE

The ever-meddlesome U.S. Congress is now in the process of setting up a Federal Boxing Administration! As Forbes says: “With all the big problems facing the nation these days-- like a power grid that has trouble delivering power-- you might think that politicians in Washington would be focusing on basic issues.”

Sheer insanity: “Military involvement by the United States and its NATO allies may be necessary to create stability between Israel and the Palestinians, a key senator has said in the US.” Now THAT really would be a quagmire!

French tax cuts! “French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will this week announce tax cuts to revive an economy that is nearing recession... With unemployment at a 3-year high and gross domestic product down 0.3 per cent in the second quarter, Raffarin is under pressure to lower taxes further to boost consumer spending. The government reduced income taxes by 5 per cent in 2002 and 1 per cent this year.”

Sieg Hillary? "Until Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781, it was considered a matter of certainty that there were six planets. But the fact that everyone knew this to be true did not make it so. In like manner, college students and other insufferable connoisseurs of all human wisdom "know" that the historical Nazi Party epitomizes the extreme right-wing.... These supposedly right-wing extremists were calling for national health care, social security, state-run schools, communal land development and centralized government control.

Apostate Ibn Warraq campaigns for the right not to be a Muslim: "But what has been virtually ignored is that there are Muslims, both in the Muslim world and outside it, who want nothing to do with Islam, moderate or otherwise. Most keep their feelings to themselves. Those Muslims who disown or even criticize their faith publicly are likely to be accused of apostasy, a crime punishable by death under Islamic law."

"Every week we read that something we believe is bad for us actually has beneficial health effects. One week it's coffee, the next is pizza -- and every other day it's red wine. But can these stories really be true? That depends how you interpret the facts."

The Wicked one says that interlinked electricity grids are more efficient and provide cheaper power but that more interlinking may nonetheless be quite reasonably opposed.

In my latest academic upload -- of an article published over 20 years ago -- here (or here) I discreetly mock the conceptual confusion of my fellow psychologists when they talk about authoritarianism, dominance and assertiveness. I tried to get them to think more clearly and rigorously but it was a losing battle from the start.

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AN INTERESTING COMPARISON

Japan has a population of over 120 million. Australia has a population of about 20 million. So .....

Japan's asylum seeker policy: "In 2002, some 250 foreigners applied for asylum in Japan. Fourteen, or six percent, were recognized as refugees, and several dozen more were given the right to stay, but not awarded refugee status. The government is considering allowing foreigners to apply for asylum up to six months after arrival (the current limit is 60 days after arrival); however, they would receive only temporary protected status in Japan."

The Australian program in comparison: "On 7 May 2002, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs announced that the overall size of the 2002-03 Humanitarian Program would remain at 12,000 new places, the same number as in 2001-02."

What racists we Australians are!

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THE AUSTRALIAN SUCCESS-STORY

Under conservative (market oriented) management from both major political parties, the Australian economy has been one of the world's big economic success stories in the last 10 years -- averaging 4% growth year after year despite world upheavals. How come? A recent economics research paper found 3 main reasons:

"Strengthening competition from domestic and overseas sources; Opening the economy to trade, investment, technologies and know-how developed overseas; By providing greater flexibility (for example, less regulatory restriction and a more flexible labour market) to adjust production processes and firm organisation."

Classic free-marketeer recommendations, in other words -- in plain English: Cutting government protection for local industries, allowing in that dreaded foreign investment, reducing government regulation and not letting the unions rule.

AILING GERMANY

The failure of the "social market" economy: Wilhelm Roepke is often credited as the theoretical architect of Germany's postwar economic 'miracle.' Few know that he was actually quite critical of Germany's attempt to fuse a huge welfare State with a free market economy. He thought that the system would fail in the long run. The present big economic problems in Germany suggest that he was right.

Newspapers in Germany have just listed things people on state benefits can get free. They include football boots, Jogging suits, swimming trunks, bras, slippers, wedding rings -- and Viagra. (According to the Brisbane Sunday Mail of August 24, 2003, p. 57). No wonder Germany has 11% unemployment. Why work?

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ELSEWHERE

Another great column from Andrew Bolt: "IF you want to wipe the smile off your child's face, make the poor thing read the books that last weekend won the Children's Book Council awards. It's true this year's winners at least aren't as horrific as the books of huge-selling John Marsden... Marsden, who had psychiatric care at 19, has written a score of novels that seem to confront his child readers with his personal demons, yet for some sick reason are critically praised instead of getting the treatment they deserve -- deep burial at the local tip."

Justice at last! "Defrocked priest John Geoghan, a central figure in the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, was killed on Saturday by a fellow-inmate in the prison where he was serving a sentence for child rape"

Arlene Peck thinks that the Palestinians have the IQ of eggplants and that it is impossible to negotiate with them. I think that everything that has happened over there in the last few years justifies that conclusion.

My top post yesterday noted that the Australian middle-class has moved Leftward over the years. In response, Gerry Jackson of Brookes News emailed me: “For what it's worth, it seems to me that what moved our middle class to the left was the spread of tertiary education, which in many cases is nothing less than leftwing indocrination. Listening to some graduates as they try to talk about economics, history or politics drives me to distraction and makes me realise just how far standards have fallen in some of our faculties.”

Great! American universities are cutting back on the number of classes they offer. Hopefully that will discourage some students from wasting their time with the so-called education that such universities offer. With the exception of economics, the Humanities and Social Sciences have become so unscholarly that scrapping ALL of their courses would be of net benefit to the world.

The Devil’s Christianity: "With the upcoming execution of Paul Hill -- who killed an abortion doctor and a clinic escort -- abortion providers and police are grimly aware that clinics could be the target of further violence and are on higher alert than usual. While facilities that provide abortions say they face threats all the time and already have a number of security measures in place, some abortion rights activists are worried about swirling threats from anti-abortion extremists. Police also are on alert. ... State and federal authorities continued an investigation Friday into four letters sent this week to three state officials and a judge warning about the impending execution and threatening the officials.

The Wicked one highlights the enormously wasteful and neglectful way the U.S. Government uses its taxpayer-funded assets.

My latest academic upload here (or here) looks at attitude to shoplifting among Australians. It finds that Australian skepticism about authority does NOT extend to being permissive about crime.

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CONSERVATIVE STRENGTHS

There are reviews here and here of an interesting new history of Australian politics that points out how the middle class have tended over the years to move from conservative to Leftist and that conservative politics now has gained great strength from the working class. I think much the same is true in the USA.

It does remind me of the man who gave the British Conservative Party its name back in the 19th century -- Benjamin Disraeli. He too saw the working class as “angels in marble” (i.e. potential voters) for the Conservatives. And he did something about it by championing working-class causes too.

Another point I liked was that the conservatives in Australia have always stood for the nation as a whole rather than looking after sectional interests. That is extremely relevant today with the identity politics now being so heavily fostered by the Left. Now that they have lost a lot of their old labor union supporters, the Left have tried to make themselves patrons of homosexuals, blacks, immigrants and anyone else they can portray as “victims”. So the old Leftist disregard for the best interests of the whole persists.

Another good bit of history concerns Alfred Deakin, one of Australia’s founding conservatives (note that the major conservative party in Australia is called the Liberal Party):

Deakin's historic 1909 decision to accept a fusion of the non-Labor parties (Deakin's Liberals and George Reid's Free Traders) was not primarily driven by class conflict but by Deakin's view of political freedom and his repudiation of Labor's collective control of its MPs. For Deakin this was a violation of what defines a man: "his judgment and his conscience". As a result, Liberal politics rested in individual freedom, not organised economic interests.

Not much has changed.

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GEOFFREY BLAINEY

Rafe Champion has a discussion here about noted Australian conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey which points out that Blainey had to spend most of his working life outside academe. Only now after many years are the universities beginning to give him the hearing he deserves. Rafe has this pungent comment about Blainey’s opponents:

“As for the Marxists and other labour historians who are upset that Blainey became a fellow traveller with the [conservative] H R Nicholls Society! They need to understand that the real exploiters of the poor and the weak over the last two centuries have not been the factory owners or the capitalist system but the better paid and more organised members of the trade union movement, using the threat of violence on the picket line (and beyond) to maintain their own benefits at the expense of everyone else.

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ELSEWHERE

Hernando de Soto from Peru argues that the creation and enforcement of clear private property rights is the first step in alleviating Third World poverty

A former East Timorese resistance leader defends the various U.S. military interventions of recent years and mocks “peace” campaigners by asking how any decent person would like what would probably have happened otherwise

Another example of leftist compassion at work? Foundling homes were the most heavily used form of public charity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.... Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the man whose writings to this day underpin much Leftist thinking about the innate “goodness” of man, consigned all five of his offspring to foundling homes. He tried to find them later, but couldn't.

This article shows how irrational is the Left’s hatred of GWB by pointing out that he is in fact a moderate centrist in most things.

This Canadian says that the Greens are always telling us how much we need nature but he thinks that even nature can be improved upon by human imitations. Given Canada’s climate, I sympathize.

Did anyone say Italians are not practical? “An Italian mayor has assumed the civic responsibility of sponsoring his town folk's access to the anti-impotence drug Viagra. The mayor of the northern town of Varallo, Gianluca Buonanno, persuaded town councillors that in the interests of citizens' sexual health they should give up some of their perks to cover the cost of supplying the renowned erection pill.”

Chris Brand has been posting up a storm lately -- in his usual provocative style -- so I have transferred his latest posts here for convenience.

The Wicked one thinks that even some conservative writers use criticism of the neocons as a covert way of saying “Blame the Jews!”

I have just put up here a brief discussion of the question: “Are all Leftists the same?”

I have put up two different academic postings today. Both are too technical to be of general interest but both thoroughly undermine large swathes of political psychology research and writing. See here and here. Not that anybody took any notice, of course. As a non-science, psychology is immune to disproof of its claims.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

How Mexican immigrants are driving down US wage rates. The verdict is in. Unrestricted immigrations reduces real wages rates and lowers general living standards, according to a study by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Not that there is anything new here.
Is Beijing successfully sabotaging the US economy? Representatives of American industry claim that China is undercutting US manufacturing by manipulating the exchange rate. Is it true?
Are ideas dead? It has been said that ideas have consequences. But it is also the lack of ideas that is having consequences. Until the ideas of the anti-capitalists are challenged with rebuttals grounded in ideas and not empty insults, and are complemented with positive arguments for the free market, the left will always have the advantage.
Australian journalist maligns Reagan's record. The malice of the left is boundless. In her vicious attack on Prime Minister Howard (“The sad times do suit him; he made them”, Sydney Morning Herald 18/8/03) Anne Summers took a vindictive swipe at the Reagan presidency.
Hillary Clinton's crime record. Hillary Clinton's viciously dishonest attack on Bush regarding the recent power failure is another demonstration of her brutal contempt for the truth. Whichever way one looks at her record, no honest person cannot help but be appalled.
China's little emperors: another tragedy in the making? China is still paying a heavy price because of the old men who imposed on a magnificent culture the tyrannical ideas of a disgruntled Western intellectual who couldn't cut it in his own society, even when left a healthy inheritance.
Senate Dems exposed the rotten heart of the Party. Watching hardcore Democrats trying to tear down Bush by whatever means possible, even at the expense of encouraging our enemies to attack US troops makes one realize how morally depraved their party has become.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

There is an article here that outlines vividly the depravity of Arab terrorism against Israel. It should also make clear for once and for all that Reuters is a pro-terrorist organization.

The Independent Review is a good site for anybody with an interest in practical economics. Their article on Ireland is an interesting one but it is in that accursed PDF format so I have posted some extracts here. The economic progress of Ireland has been amazing over the last 20 years. The main driver has been a continuing program of tax cuts that make the Reagan tax cuts look trifling but the article points out other important free-market reforms as well.

Who said this? "America? I love America. I am on whatever side America is on, even before I know what it is." The Prime Minister of Italy! Very refreshing in this miserable jealousy-filled world.

I must try Danish pizza one day: "A court in Denmark has upheld a sentence against a Danish pizzeria owner who had refused to serve French and German tourists because their governments opposed the US-led war in Iraq. Denmark's Western High Court upheld a lower court ruling issued two months ago that ordered Aage Bjerre to pay a £500 fine or serve an eight-day prison sentence. 'I will not pay the fine, but I'll do the time instead,' Bjerre said. 'It's a matter of principle.'"

Under the title “The Ecological Gospel”, this article spells out in detail how strong are the parallels between Environmentalism and fundamentalist Christianity

"Paul Krugman began his Tuesday column for the New York Times -- inevitably, about the blackout -- with one of the few truthful statements I can ever recall him uttering: 'We still don't know what started the chain reaction on Thursday.' But after that admission, he proceeded to spend the next 649 words of his column telling us exactly what caused the blackout. Can you guess? ... I knew the Department of Homeland Potholes was facing a funding crisis, but I never realized that 'tax breaks for the rich' caused the blackout!"

Planning the electricity supply: "Central economic planning was discredited in the old Soviet Union and every other country that attempted it. What the great economist Ludwig von Mises showed in theory in the 1920s was then demonstrated in practice in subsequent decades: central economic planning is impossible."

An expert on trends among American youth says that more and more of them are becoming conservative.

Philosopher Mary Midgley warns against trusting big ideas -- a classic conservative view: “Beware big ideas. They may beguile by seeming to explain a whole bunch of stuff from a single, simple standpoint. But they will mislead you in the end, and make it harder, not easier, to understand what is really important.”

"What is the answer to this crisis in education? One of the answers is tougher standards, such as those imposed by NCLBA, with credible consequences to back those standards up. But this is merely a first step. A more important and far-reaching response would be to initiate comprehensive parental choice in education."

The Wicked one thinks that Christian moralists need more Christian humility.

I have a post on PC Watch about the latest bout of insanity in the Australian courts.

My latest academic upload here (or here) looks at the common Leftist claim that patriotism is allied to racism. In a British general population sample I found that there was no connection. I also found no correlation between basic conservative attitudes and attitude to blacks -- though Conservative voters were slightly more likely than others to be anti-black.

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DO CHRISTIANS “JUST KNOW”?

I expected that my new formula at the head of this page (“Leftists just KNOW... “) would soon attract a “What about the Christians?” response and Randian blogger Chip Gibbons has obliged.

I do of course have great respect for Ayn Rand and her followers so I will be a little bit kinder than I would have been if a Leftist had challenged my formula. Even so, I have to say that it shows very little knowledge of Christians to think that they “just know” the truth of their beliefs. I am an atheist myself (in good Randian fashion) but I have yet to meet a Christian who had not thought long and hard about his/her beliefs. Christians normally think that there is COMPELLING evidence for the existence of a God and all the other reasoning that flows from that. I personally think that they are mistaken but to say that they do not weigh the evidence either way with great care is just plain wrong.

Leftists on the other hand just ignore any evidence that does not suit them. They just know that the rest of the world is stupid and that they have the answers. It is what the ancient Greeks called “hubris”

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IMMIGRATION CONTROL

Immigration control is often portrayed by the extreme end of the Australian Left as supported only by ignorant xenophobes -- though the major Leftist (Labor) party in Australia heartily supports such controls. A reader comments:

“Modern folklore has it that the advocates and administrators of the 'White Australia Policy' were all narrow minded xenophobes. The usual 'example' repeated over and over in the literature and on the web is the former post-war Labor Party immigration minister Arthur Calwell who is quoted as opposing Asian immigration in 1952 with the quip "two Wongs don't make a white." Calwell did say that, but he was also a Mandarin speaker, closely associated with Melbourne's Chinese community and pioneered the postwar immigration policy lauded by the multiculturalists. His policy was picked up and followed by the succeeding Menzies government. And when a motion to drop the White Australia policy was actually put to the vote at Labor's policy conference, it was seconded by Calwell . Few of today's politically correct multiculturalists can speak any non-English language.”

This article states the libertarian position on immigration in a fairly reasonable way. Libertarians are generally the only people in politics who oppose all immigration controls. There is however a lot of disagreement among libertarians on many issues and in this case I like the householder analogy: Shouldn’t a home-owner be free to decide whom he will have in his own house? Every libertarian and conservative would say “Yes” in answer to that. So why should not nations be free to decide whom they will allow into their country? As it happens, I am a fairly hospitable soul and I both have Asians living in my house and am glad that we have so many Asians living in Australia generally. But I am also glad that I have the right to say “No” when I wish and I am glad that the government of my country has also said a very effective “No” to a lot of middle-Eastern Muslim “refugees” who tried to force their way in here.

Although Australia’s conservative government has taken a strong and very effective line against illegal immigration, that does not mean that it is xenophobic. In fact overall immigration to Australia has grown greatly under the present government.

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ELSEWHERE

Even though he does not go along with the Christian morals campaigners, it looks like big Arnie might be a good conservative after all. He has just called for a constitutional cap on state spending and made clear his distaste for new taxes. I think he may simply be a modern conservative. Being a Christian moralist in California these days would not be so much conservative as backwoodsy. As a libertarian I don’t support Christian attempts to impose Christian values on non-Christians either -- any more than I support Muslim attempts to impose Muslim values on non-Muslims.

One of my U.S. readers informs me that: “The term "wowser" is old American slang for busybodies from the early and mid 20th century, featured heavily in such writers as H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippman.” In Australia it is said to have originated as the acronym of a prohibition campaign that called itself: “We Only Want Social Evils Removed”

Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknoll Catholic missionary organization is an old China hand and he is therefore well aware of how Hong Kong Chinese tend to look down on mainland Chinese. Hong Kongers have also been much interested in the Pauline Hanson case in Australia, where Hanson -- Australia’s most outspoken opponent of Asian immigration -- was recently jailed. Australia has heaps of ex-Hong Kongers living here so Hanson is a bit of a devil to them. Father Walsh has advised me with some amusement therefore that the following two headlines recently appeared one after the other in the (Hong Kong) South China Morning Post: “Pauline Hanson jailed for three years by Australian court” and “Survey: people concerned about influx of mainland tourists”. As Father Walsh commented: It depends on whose ox is gored.

There is a good attempt here by a Leftist (the head of the British charity Oxfam) to sell the World Trade Organization to fellow Leftists: A worthy effort to put free-trade rationality into Leftist language. He manages to portray the USA as a villain in the matter but he has to do that to get his fellow Leftists to listen -- sadly.

I have just blogrolled this “funny but serious” site. If you read it you will see why it would be nice if lots of other people permanently linked to it as well -- to push it up the Google rankings and thus help prevent people being misled.

Rocket Man has a good post about the inadequacy of describing politics as a simple Right/Left divide and looks at the alternative two-dimensional description of politics that is popular among libertarians. He points out that the placement of Hitler on the Right is alone enough to make the two-dimensional description problematical. I have pointed out long ago that, pesky though it may be, the survey data do reveal only a single Left/Right dimension in most people’s political attitudes.

The Wicked one has some rather pointed comments about the role of hip-hop music in black culture.

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“WOWSERS”

“Wowser” is another piece of untranslatable Australian slang. Its nearest translation into standard English is probably “killjoy” but that does not fully convey the air of self-righteousness that the wowser always has. Australian columnist Miranda Devine has some good comments on the wowsers in Australia today. Wowsers used to be religious people who wanted to stop people drinking, dancing and watching sport on Sundays but no more. Excerpt:

Now that the churches are empty and their moral restraints cast aside, today's wowsers have had to find fresh fun to eradicate, like alcohol, cigarettes, Big Macs, vanilla Coke, cars and air-conditioning.

The neo-wowsers are obsessed with health and eco-concerns in just as mean and censorious a way as their forebears were fixated on sex and nudity. They are on a sacred mission to save the decadent self-indulgent masses from destroying themselves with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and global warming. They seize every opportunity to wag a finger and tut a tongue at people's remaining pleasures.

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THE REAL MARRIAGE ISSUES

A reader has been inspired to deeper thoughts by the current controversy over homosexual “marriage”. He writes:

“I have been thinking about this contract marriage argument. My guess is that any move towards it would be opposed mainly by Christian churches and the feminists. Both groups would be keen to impose their viewpoint on everyone. The Christians I can have some sympathy with, but I think that C.S. Lewis's argument is the answer to their objections. Also I'd wager that privately negotiated marriage contracts may indeed be tougher than our current system of legal roulette.

The feminists probably would be happy to weaken the traditional institution, based on their misguided view that marriage is inherently anti-woman. My guess is that they would then seek to interfere in privately negotiated marriage contracts too, just as they have with state sanctioned marriage, perhaps under the banner of 'consumer protection'.

Wendy McElroy argues that liberal and feminist intervention has undermined traditional marriage, leading to a "marriage strike" by men. The unintended consequences of these apparently well meaning changes have landed heavily on women and, even more so on children. In fact the growing trend to single parent families is probably the major cause of poverty in western capitalist societies. William F Buckley says: "..We know that the composite impact of single-parent homes on children is huge. The poverty rate in single-parent homes is 400 percent of that for two-parent homes. Among long-term prison inmates, 70 percent grew up without a father in residence. There are comparable figures for illiteracy and drug use." Buckley, writes from the perspective of a conservative defender of traditional marriage.

Another concern: Martin Daly and Margot Wilson, are evolutionary psychologists. Their work has highlighted the risks to children of being raised by people other than their biological parents. This 'socio-biological' issue lies at the heart of many media grabbing stories of institutional child abuse, the "stolen generation" etc. In their "THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF HOMICIDE" (PDF), they report: "...studies in Canada, Britain and the United States indicate that (for step children) their risk of being fatally abused is on the order of 50 to 100 times higher than risk at the hands of a genetic parent. Having a stepparent has turned out to be the single most powerful predictor of severe child maltreatment yet discovered."

There are certainly more important issues at stake here than whether or not homosexuals can get State-recognized weddings.”

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ELSEWHERE

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'. -- Michael McClary

The multicultural extremists of the Australian Left have just had a big victory. Australia’s most prominent critic of multicultual fantasies has just been jailed for 3 years over a technicality in the way she organized the funding for her political party. There was a technical breach but if her views had not made her so many powerful enemies it would never even have been prosecuted.

This is just amazing. “Farm insurance”. What other business can get the government to insure it against failure? As economists often say: All the world loves a farmer and hates a landlord. Both are of course irrational.

Home-grown terrorism: "A top San Francisco chef has become the target of radical animal rights activists in a series of attacks that police are calling domestic terrorism. Aqua chef Laurent Manrique has been the victim of vandals who spray-painted his home and splashed his car with acid, and he has received threatening letters and videotapes. It's part of what police say may be a national campaign aimed at those who produce a signature ingredient of French haute cuisine -- foie gras -- and the chefs who use it."

The Carnival of the Vanities is up again. 76 posts!

Arlene Peck asks why GWB keeps putting extra demands on Israel while the Arabs do nothing.

The Wicked one has a good lawyer joke and knows why GWB supports a lot of socialist policies.

My latest academic upload here (or here) looks at the causes of heart disease and who is most prone to it. It is the first of several articles that debunk the theory that “A-type” personalities are prone to heart disease.

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CONSPIRACY MANIA

A reader writes:

“This report from Germany shows that the use of 9-11 conspiracy theories (similar to Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men") by the legal defence teams of captured terrorists is not confined to Indonesia. But then again, in Germany polls show as many as 1/3rd of Germans actually believe the US government was secretly behind the attack. Germany has of course seen waves of public paranoia before and the results weren't very pretty. This time the paranoia is not confined to Germany. One American Leftist has called on his fellow leftists to cool it for the sake of reason -- and for the sake of winning elections.

Keith Windschuttle detailed the 9-11 reactions of numerous Leftist factions back in 2001 but even he underestimated the extent of sheer paranoia and the industry that feeds it. What is new today , of course, is what looks like a symbiotic relationship emerging between the conspiracy mongers and the terrorist killers themselves.”

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ELSEWHERE

I am sorry to say that my first reaction on hearing that the United Nations headquarters in Iraq has just been blown up was: “Good riddance”. But the people who died were just as innocent as the people who died in 9/11. We must not blame the employees for the corruption of their political masters.

Australia’s strict gun control laws at work: “Amal Youssef sits in her garage with her two little girls playing on their bikes, her priest by her side, grappling with the news that a 13-year-old boy has been charged with murdering her husband. "He's 13. I cannot understand. How could he have a gun?””

Way to go! “A New Zealander who sent millions of junk emails out every day has shut his business under a barrage of email abuse after his personal details were posted on the web.”

"As many as six historically black colleges (HBCUs) have recently been given warnings or been placed on probation by accreditation agencies. Many others are struggling with budget shortfalls, ill-prepared students and inadequate facilities. Financial mismanagement notwithstanding, what other significant factor has contributed to the bleak future of HBCUs? The answer lies at the feet of an initiative whose intent was to redress past racial and sexual discrimination: affirmative action."

The mystery of the world wide extinction of frogs, variously blamed by Greenies on global warming, pesticides, etc has now been narrowed down to a fungus. See here and here. The next question is how did the fungus impact so many frog species in so many countries? The answer that the ecology establishment does not want to hear is that amateur conservationists (and perhaps some professional scientists too) are “croaking” the frogs. The findings suggests that researchers have inadvertently been spreading the deadly fungus.

An Iranian philosopher of science claims here that in the “golden age” of Islam there was greater freedom of thought than in Iran today because the leaders in the “golden age” (more of a brass age in my view) were despotic but not totalitarian -- unlike today.

Genetically-modified crops: “Literally thousands of laboratory, greenhouse, and field studies show the risks of GM plants and foods to be minimal, while their benefits — in terms of increased yields and reduced pesticide use — are legion” So any rational person would jump for joy, one would think. But the EU is not rational. It is bureaucratic. They want ZERO risk before they do anything. It’s a wonder that they do not ban boats, aircraft, cars and trains. They REGULARLY kill more people than GM crops ever will. But bureaucracy does have its own rationality and there is no doubt what their REAL reason for banning GM is: They already have huge agricultural surpluses created by their manic subsidization of their farmers. If their farmers got hold of GM seed and ended up producing twice as much as they do now, that would REALLY break the bank.

Excessive and badly designed regulations tend to reinforce the market position of the largest established players at the expense of smaller innovators. So the activists' nightmare of massive biotech monopolies dominating the globe is to an extent a Frankenstein’s monster of their own creation. But Big Business has always been comfortable with a regulated world.

"Even technologically challenged music fans who could no more download an illegal MP3 file than pilot a space shuttle owe a debt of gratitude to the Napster generation. For years record buyers have complained that CDs are overpriced and the music industry has responded by saying, as politely as possible, put up or shut up. Now, panicked by the pirates, they've finally been compelled to slash prices to a reasonable level and sales have reached an all-time high." I don’t often agree with the Guardian but I agree with that. I buy only classical Cds and a lot of them cost me $10 or less. That record-company monopolies of various kinds have made the poor old pop music fans pay three times that for their fix has always seemed one big rip-off to me. But monopolies almost always come unstuck eventually and it is good to see that one going. No free-trader likes monopolies and conservatives have been attacking monopolies since Elizabeth I.

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THE ORIGINS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

Many people see environmentalism as a recent phenomenon. It is not. Read the typically Greenie quote following and guess the one word that I have deleted from it:

"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of Socialist thought."

How many people would have picked that I missed out the word “National” before “Socialist”? Yes. It was a leading Nazi who wrote that. Environmentalism was a part of Nazism just as it is a part of modern-day Leftism. Like the Greenies of today, the Nazis wanted to take us all back to some imaginary and romanticised rural past. And of course the Communist Pol Pot in Cambodia actually tried it! -- with the appalling results we all know. For more on ecofascism see here. Hitler and Pol Pot reveal how dangerous the Greens could be if ever they got real power. History can be most inconvenient! Though you don’t need history to tell you that Greenies are people-haters.

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ELSEWHERE

Australia’s Andrew Bolt gives an excellent summary of why so many of the world’s “intellectuals” hate the USA with a passion that transcends all reason: “Intellectuals resent a superpower that ignores them and their ideas. And the capitalist US has insulted them even more by making poor people richer and freer than the Marxism of the intellectuals ever could or will.” I guess it must be awful for them to see that conservative pragmatism beats their simplistic theories hands-down, time and time again.

Jeff Jacoby has a good article on whether or not men are “naturally” more promiscuous than women. As he points out, there is nothing in evolutionary theory that clearly leads to that conclusion. And once again the “evidence” psychologists have produced for the natural-promiscuity theory was obtained by asking college students their views! If it is like most such evidence it is highly misleading as an account of what actually happens out there in the real world. The various DNA studies showing that up to a third of the children of a marriage are not in fact the children of the alleged father suggests to me that women are highly promiscuous too -- though they may well be slower to acknowledge it -- even to themselves. I trust the DNA evidence a lot more than I trust what college students say.

An Australian reader noted my brief comments on the recent definition of neoconservatism by Irving Kristol and wrote to suggest that the dominant faction of Australia’s major Leftist party are neoconservatives too! I have posted the email here.

Further to my recent note about the “Communist Manifesto”, Gerry Jackson of Brookes News writes: “The piece on Marx and socialism was interesting. However, the author is apparently unaware of the fact that the Marx's labour theory of value came from David Ricardo who in turn got it from Adam Smith. Until the Wealth of Nations appeared on the scene it was generally accepted among philosophers that utility and not labour was the sole source of value. The Abbe Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787), for instance, eloquently explained why there can be no value without utility. He then went on to explain how scarcity and utility combine to produce prices. I'm afraid Smith sent economics into a blind alley”

According to the NYT: “The Bush administration, while preparing for talks soon with North Korea, is also stepping up military pressure with plans for a joint naval exercise” And where will the exercise be held? Off Eastern Australia about half the globe away from Korea! That’s “pressure”??

Good news that the Tasmanian tiger may not be extinct after all.

No wonder Israel is getting huge pressure over its security fence. It is the only thing that actually has much chance of protecting Israelis.

An inspiring story about how well the Indians have done who were expelled from Uganda to Britain by the butcher Idi Amin. Non-Muslims from the Indian subcontinent who live in England shame the English by their work habits.

China Hand has drawn our attention to the announcement that China is deregulating its media to make it more market-oriented. Lots of former government outlets are even expected to go broke. It’s not exactly a free press but it’s a start.

Patriotism and nationalism generally have a bad name among Leftists -- though Leftists always have to compromise with it and do sometimes make good use of it -- as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung did. Given the horrors that have been inflicted on the world by nationalism in conjunction with Leftism, one might be inclined to suspect that nationalism is indeed a bad thing. Such a conclusion would be however to blame the accomplice rather than the perpetrator -- as the 1977 survey that I have just uploaded (here or here) shows: I studied supporters of the Scottish National Party -- who basically want independence from England for Scotland. I found that they were centrists in practically every respect -- a far cry from any form of political extremism. And, as we now all know, they have attained a large part of their aims -- their own Scottish parliament -- through purely democratic means and with no violence at all. It is only in conjunction with Leftism that nationalism is pernicious.

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THE BERKELEY VALUE JUDGMENTS

There is an interesting post at Power Line (Via King of Fools) about the Berkeley study of conservatism that does what the Leftists themselves long ago did -- take a phenomenon and simply reverse the value judgements. Like many other conservative commentators, the blogger concerned sees some truth in the Berkeley study’s characterization of the Left/Right divide but just cannot see that it shows conservatives in a bad light.

He may not be aware that the Leftist “authoritarianism” theory underlying the Berkeley claims was itself originally borrowed from Nazi psychology (I kid you not) by the Marxist Adorno and his group (another example of Nazis and Communists being simply rival Leftist sects). Adorno agreed with the Nazi psychologist Jaensch about how people differed but what Jaensch said was a good thing, Adorno said was a bad thing. So reversing the value judgements is a very old trick in this field. Both camps are wrong however. They are mistaken in ascribing Left/Right orientation to childhood experience. The geneticists (Martin and others) have long ago shown that Left/Right orientation is MOSTLY hereditary. Leftists are born arrogant know-alls. Reality sometimes gets to them however and they turn conservative in later life (see e.g. here). See also here on the biological origins of human values generally.

REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N.
(1950) The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Martin, N. & Jardine, R. (1986) Eysenck's contribution to behaviour genetics. In: S & C. Modgil (Eds.) Hans Eysenck: Consensus and controversy. Lewes, E. Sussex: Falmer
Eaves, L.J., Martin, N.G., Meyer, J.M. & Corey, L.A. (1999) Biological and cultural inheritance of stature and attitudes. In: Cloninger, C.R., Personality and psychopathology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.
Jaensch, E.R. (1938) Der Gegentypus. Leipzig: Barth.

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ELSEWHERE

Because it has already been so heavily covered elsewhere, I was not going to mention the N.E. American blackout but one of my readers has come up with an interesting observation. In this record of recent solar activity he notes that the graphs for 14 August, especially the one for proton volume, show a very interesting AC spike. He suggests that this spike could have caused a power surge in an extensive grid already carrying high levels of energy and thus burnt something out. It seems feasible in my very non-expert view. The other causes so far put forward seem pretty vague. A solar flare burned out a large part of Canada's electricity grid in 1989.

Irving Kristol has just defined what he sees neoconservatism as consisting of today. He should know. My definition of a couple of days ago -- “Neocons are reformed Leftists who still have an interventionist streak in them” -- stands up pretty well in the light of what he says. They are too interventionist for my libertarian tastes.

An interesting article here on what the Communist Manifesto actually says.

A good comment by Piers Akerman here on the Leftist rubbish that Australians get from their public broadcaster.

Writing in Australia’s mass-circulation Sunday Telegraph, well known economics commentator Terry McCrann yesterday gave global warming a big raspberry. He summarized a recent article by Alan Oxley, who specializes in these matters. An earlier Oxley article is online here but neither McCrann’s summary nor the the latest Oxley article seem to be online anywhere so I have put McCrann’s summary up here.

A reader writes: “Dissecting Leftism readers should go out and have a look at Mars over the next couple of weeks. It is now closer to the Earth than at anytime in the last 58,000 years. Last time it was this close there were probably no humans in either Australia or the Americas”.

A new Australian blog has just started up with some charming quotes from a group of Australian “musicians” apparently favoured by our Leftist public broadcaster. He also points out how our wonderful close-to-nature native people were responsible for enormous extinctions of animal species in Australia.

The Wicked one celebrates the death of Idi Amin and concludes: “On all the evidence so far there is no hope for anything like a civil society in Africa”.

Writing on his other blog, China Hand is mystified to note that superannuation funds run by the labor unions in Australia have done better than commercially-run retirement funds. I myself am no fan of the big funds. Allowing a pimply 20 year old to make your investment decisions for you is hilarious in my view and I put my money where my mouth is by getting far better growth than the big funds do by managing my share portfolio myself. Nonetheless, the main reason why the union-run funds do better is clear. They are less obsessed with safety and so can afford to make some higher-yielding investments. And why are they so unworried? Because they know that with their “industrial muscle” and big membership of voters they will always be able to get the taxpayer to bail them out if they go bad! Nice one!

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MORE ON THINK-TANKS

A reader writes:

“These outfits were established as a reaction to leftist domination of public sector academia. Conservative and market oriented thinkers found the leftist monopoly of state subsidied tertiary education corrupt, narrow and intellectually oppressive. Behind the facade of a progressive, social reformist academia and intelligentsia is the reality of careerism, vested interest and power politics played at public expense.

The social science arms of our universities these days are in many ways not much more than the marketing department of big government. I think it is appropriate to examine closely whether recommendations from private think tanks represent the special interests of their largest corporate donors. However the same skeptical eye also needs to be cast at the output of government financed universities and agencies. Just because someone works in the public sector, there is no reason to assume that they magically become an economic eunuch.

The left is always warning us about the cynical vested interests of the military industrial complex allegedly maniupulating public policy for their sectional gain. But is this risk mysteriously confined to those in uniform? what about the academic-big government complex? Few government-paid academics are prepared to bite the hand that feeds them. In fact this common sense observation underlies much of the work of the think tanks and is still resisted in State academia.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

The brutal tragedy of Beijing's one-child policy. The number of self-professed Western liberals who support and publicly rationalise Beijing's brutal population control polices depresses rather than amazes me.
Compulsory Statism. It is really not that surprising that the likes of the Greens, the Australian Democrats and Labor support compulsory voting. What excuse a so-called conservative party like the Liberals have for also supporting it beats me.
How Clinton's Beijing deal endangered America. Seeing as so many democrats and their allies in the media have been screaming about intelligence failures and the President Bush's foreign policy, I think it's time to once again turn to the Clinton administration and its dangerous dealings with Beijing.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

HEATWAVE: IS GLOBAL WARMING TO BLAME? A professor of biogeography pours cold water on myths about the hot Northern summer. I must say that the very word “heatwave” amuses me. What the English call a heatwave is a normal summer where I come from.

Libya has formally accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland. When Ronald Reagan had him bombed that really caused Gaddafi to pull up short but now that he has seen what has happened to other terrorist-supporting regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq he is backpedalling furiously. Does anybody believe that U.N. resolutions would have made him do that?

Greenie opposition to budget airlines is elitist: “All this cheap-and-easy flying is supposed to be Another Bad Thing. As the budget airlines' profits soar, the cries of NIMBY campaigners grow ever more shrill. Cheap flights are blamed for global warming, noise pollution, the need for more airports and their ability to give working-class oiks the ability to use Europe as their playground on a regular basis”.

What a slipup for the NYT. They described a female company head thus: “She is simultaneously warm and controlled, a gracefully aggressive entrepreneur who favors scarves and pearls.” The feminists will castrate them for that -- if they can find anything to castrate.

I must say I agree with the $20,000 fine some trigger-happy moron got for killing a condor -- though I would have sent the big hero to jail as well.

“The essence of Mr. Bush's big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he's willing to broaden programs and increase spending.” I think that’s wishful thinking. Bush has a slight conservative lean -- no more. A U.S. President has to be a centrist to win and retain office and even Ronald Reagan failed to cut back overall government spending. But GWB’s conservative leanings do make him a lot more realistic than Left-leaning centrists like Clinton.

V.D. Hanson is at his inimitable best here. He calls for some long overdue realism about America’s so-called “allies”

Real men don’t do quilting and feminist refusal to recognize that is cruel to boys in the educational system.

China Hand has given us a little of the story of his earlier years in China. When I met him around 1970 he was a conservative but he later went to university and veered to the far Left. Various people then told him that if he thought Mao was so great he should go to China. Leftists were of course regularly told to “go to Russia” in the old days but China Hand is the only one I know of who really did put his money where his mouth was.

The Wicked one thinks that the death penalty kills too many innocent people,

My latest academic upload here (or here) addresses an old chestnut (Can you address a chestnut?): How different are the Scots and the English?

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