BRAZIL

I have noticed that in recent months my blog has been getting links from several foreign language blogs. Which language? German? French? No -- Portuguese! They are of course Brazilian blogs. So why should I be popular in just one non-English-speaking country? A Brazilian blogger who speaks English has just emailed me and I now begin to understand. Apparently Brazil is monolithically Leftist. He refers to the January election that put Lula da Silva in power and comments:

“The last election in Brazil was a joke: all the parties were left-wing! We didn’t have one single liberal representative party in the race. All the parties just exist to preserve themselves in power, making agreements with the government of the day. It’s what we call "phisiologism": the parties here don´t represent anybody but themselves. So Mr. Lula is putting all the parties into his government. The media is submerged by a huge leftish wave too. We have very few alternatives to it. The government’s present agenda is Gun Control (banishing all guns from the public) and Tax Reform (raising the avarage tax rate in Brazil to 40%!). And Mr. Lula supports terrorists like the Colombian FARC and regimes such as Chavez and that old-favourite -- Castro.

So in an environment like that, Leftism obviously needs to be dissected!

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Ann Coulter points out that the NYT and other Leftists are back to their old moral equivalence game. Once it was the awful Soviet regime and the USA that were supposedly equivalent. Now it is the USA and the Islamic terrorists that are supposedly morally equivalent. Obviously the word “moral” is meaningless to Leftists. They are “moral imbeciles” -- which is an old term for a psychopath -- someone who has no idea of right and wrong.

A hard-hitting editorial in Quadrant. Excerpt: “"There is a great tension between the policy makers and the academics concerned with foreign policy in Australia, such that while the former have to deal with actual issues of national security and our place in a dangerous world, the latter are obsessed with ideology and pharisaical moralism as if national security were not the primary issue.”

Terence Corcoran is not mourning the collapse of the WTO. He says it had virtually nothing to do with free trade anyway.

Bjorn Lomborg pours cold water on the idea that global warming produces extreme weather. He also pours cold water on those who contend that failing to follow Kyoto is some sort of insult to the poor of the Third World: "The major problems of global warming will occur in the Third World. Yet these countries have many other and much more serious problems to contend with. For the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the single year of 2010, we could permanently satisfy the world's greatest need: we could provide clean drinking water and sanitation for everybody. It would surely be better to deal with those most pressing problems first."

Lefties and Greenies are always moaning about the possible health hazards of mobile phones but how often do they mention how life-saving they are? As in This story.

Hooray! Texas voters trump the lawyers "Voters amended the state constitution Saturday by a narrow margin to permit new limits on lawsuit damages, ending an expensive and heated campaign that pitted doctors against trial lawyers.”

Jeff Jacoby is stirring the pot. He makes a good case that Taiwan deserves a seat in the United Nations. Taiwan has certainly done nothing to deserve being the only nation excluded.

Sowell says California has its own brand of fundamentaliasm -- liberal fundamentalism.

“Slings and Arrows” has some excellent posts at the moment. This one is really amazing: Apparently the Germans are setting up a eugenics program again -- though at least it is voluntary this time.

My latest academic upload here (or here) is a deceptively simple paper but what it reveals totally discredits academic psychology and shows it to be nothing more than a fraud on the taxpayer. Psychology pretends to be scientific but is not. In a true science, knowledge is cumulative. Each researcher builds on what other researchers before him have found. In my paper I show that this is not remotely the case in psychology. The example I give is from an important area of psychology but shows that each year some psychologist somewhere publishes the same “new” idea over and over again -- and nobody notices. For decades psychologists have been rediscovering the wheel each year. There is no accumulation of understanding at all. Nobody KNOWS of what has gone before, let alone being able to build on it.

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GOVERNMENT DENIES DRUGS TO THE POOR

Defending drug companies must be one of the world's least popular activities but I have to say that this story from "Forbes" is another example of blaming the victim. In this case the alleged villain is the drug companies but the real culprit is government. The story tells how a non-profit group is getting funding from Bill Gates to "develop" drugs to treat third-world diseases. The story is that the drug companies will not develop these drugs because there is no profit in it for them. So our heroic altruists step into the breach to give the poor what the heartless capitalistic drug companies deny them.

What is nowhere pointed out explicitly is that these drugs already exist and that the cost of producing them is trivial. The "development" of these drugs consists solely of going through the hoops of getting bureaucratic approval to use them! If you had a law that anybody who needed a drug could get it from a qualified doctor just by signing a waiver to show that he knew that the drug had not been formally approved, all these drugs would rapidly become universally available! No do-gooders would be needed. It is the huge costs of bureacracy that prevent the drug companies from releasing these drugs, nothing else. As usual, government is the problem, not the solution.

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LOVE AND POLITICS

Leftists make loud claims about their being more oriented toward love and kindness than those heartless conservatives. But the truth seems to be the opposite. In my latest academic upoload here (or here), I report the results of a survey that shows that it is the moral conservatives rather than the advocates of permissiveness who believe more in the power of love and who are more idealistic about love. Conservatives are the happy people and the nice guys according to the survey data. Leftists are bitter and cynical.

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ELSEWHERE

More on the politics of research: After 26 years of trying to prove mobile phones weren't safe Mays Swicord has had enough. "It comes down to having a public conscience. The public wants to know whether there is a health issue. If there isn't one, then we should stop wasting money looking for it." Asked about why he now works for Motorola and if there is a conflict of interest, he says: "Academic researchers also have a conflict of interest in that they want to promote their own research. So one has to look at what makes sense in terms of science"

There is a good reply by Alan Caruba here to the "Blame America" brigade. How Muslims can be constantly doing the most horrific deeds worldwide and America is still the one in the wrong certainly does seem pretty deranged.

Amusing: On the “Oldie” message board someone has posted a message pointing out how similar Communism and Nazism were. By way of disagreement, a Leftist replied “Give me an example of Communism having a defined aim of genocide”. In other words, both murdered millions but being less frank about it makes a big difference! Only a Leftist would think so.

Interesting idea in the WSJ: That “the Democrats were the "mommy party" and the Republicans the "daddy party." That is, the Democrats were "nurturers," concerned with health policy and day care. The Republicans were "protectors," taking care of national security and other manly matters.” Since roughly equal numbers of men and women vote for both parties, the idea is a rather large stretch, though.

Democrats have been saying from the outset that Iraq would be "another Vietnam". The Vietnam war, however was initiated and supported by Democrats. Shouldn't that mean that Democrats SUPPORT the Iraq intervention? But I guess that they really hate how much more successful Bush has been in Iraq than they were in Vietnam. It was actually a Republican (Nixon) who got America OUT of Vietnam.

Ian Buruma on anti-Americanism and foreign policy: Buruma notes the backing for Bush received from Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and especially Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner from East Timor. These are men, who, unlike most commentators in London or New York, know what it is like to live under the cosh.

The Adam Smith Institute has just launched a new blog. Looks good. One titbit: “A new Heritage Foundation survey has found that four times as many Members of Congress use private schools as the American public” How odd! But This might give you an idea why: "Faced with a federal deadline to define a "highly qualified" teacher, Washington state recently decided middle school teachers could continue to teach any subject -- even if they never mastered the topic in college or proved they are knowledgeable about it"

Details about the job of a baggage screener Not very encouraging.

"Rabbit Proof Fence": This film has long been known in Australia as Leftist propaganda with a typically Leftist total disregard for the truth but it might not be so well-known for what it is elsewhere.

The Carnival of the Vanities is up again. Bigwig, who has just put it up comments: "Tired, very tired. Bloody productive Blogosphere."

The Wicked one points out some of the irrational outcomes of the recent halt in in moves toward freer trade. But Milton Friedman puts it better than anyone (of course) -- even though he is now in his 90s.

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COWED CONSERVATIVE PROFESSORS

As a former academic myself I can tell you that the average Professor really hates it that he has to sit in a crowded office churning out great ideas for only an average salary while someone else in business with little education and just one good idea can make a million dollars. In other words our average academic thinks that the existing system cheats him of the money and recognition that he deserves -- and that makes him want to change that system: It makes him a Leftist. And that is the big reason why academics with no alternative market for their skills and “wisdom” -- i.e. professors in the humanities and social sciences -- are so overwhelmingly Leftist. A small number of academics however -- including me -- are so constitutionally conservative that they defy the Leftist consensus all around them. Mostly, however, they have to do it very cautiously in case they lose their job over it.

A good example of such caution seems to be “Conservativenet” -- an online discussion group for conservative academics. I get the impression that the moderator, Richard Jensen, is very careful to screen out any posts that might upset the Leftists. He defines his censorship guidelines with the following bromide: “Conservativenet refuses to publish lies, hate speech and incoherent arguments”. Any Leftist Political Correctness advocate would defend HIS policies in the same way. Because the list seems to be so censored, I myself have never bothered with it but readers of this blog do occasionally send me stuff off it (plus news of posts that have been rejected).

Recently a reader noted that the list had posted on it the NYT article on Facism that I mentioned on this blog here. The NYT article did of course have that paper’s characteristic Leftist bias so my reader suggested that I post a reply on Conservativenet to set the record straight. I therefore submitted my “Front Page” article on Fascism for posting on the list. My article points out the most inconvenient truth that Fascism originated on the Left, not the Right. In a fit of rashness, moderator Jensen did in fact post it on his list.

He soon seemed to regret his rashness, however. When another contributor to the list posted some points of disagreement with my article and I endeavoured to reply, Jensen refused to post my reply on very superficial grounds. Fear reasserted itself.
I have however posted here the censored reply (plus Jensen’s feeble excuse) for the benefit of those who have less to fear. If anyone thinks my reply contained “lies, hate speech and incoherent arguments”, please let me know.

THE POLITICS OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH

My latest upload of one of my published academic journal articles here (or here) is another example of my awkward tendency to speak the truth at all costs. I look at the claim that certain personality types predispose you to heart disease and confirm that they do -- but then I go on to point out that the correlations are so weak as to be of no practical importance. Needless to say, all the psychologists and cardiologists who were getting massive funding to investigate the connection between heart disease and personality managed to overlook my article! I in effect threatened to kill the goose that was laying their golden eggs! For similar reasons only a minority of climatologists today are willing to blow the whistle on the nonsensical “global warming” theory. Their funding depends on treating it seriously!

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Nicholas Farrell in the UK Spectator tells us more about the way Mussolini differed from Hitler and Stalin and also reflects on the recent controversial interview with Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi. He thinks that one reason why Berlusconi is so much attacked is this: “Berlusconi’s ...opponents on the Left are desperate to deflect attention from a scandal of immense proportions which threatens to engulf them. The scandal is this: in 1997, when the EU commissioner, Romano Prodi, was Italian prime minister, the state-owned Italian telecommunications company — Stet — bought 29 per cent of Telekom Serbia from Slobodan Milosevic for roughly £300 million; then, in 2002, Telecom Italia (by then Stet had been privatised) sold back the share for about £100 million. The scandal involves all the usual allegations of massive bribes, not to mention the chucking of so much public money down the drain. Worse, Milosevic used the money, according to a CIA report, to finance his ethnic cleansing in Kosovo."

Paddy McGuinness compares the treatment dished out to conservative Australian historians Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle with the treatment received by 'the skeptical environmentalist' Bjorn Lomberg. “Letters to the Editor” in The Australian of 16th (See here) show that some people seem amazed at the personal attacks on Windschuttle but since Windschuttle has shown what liars the Leftist historians are I am not surprised at all. It is in the nature of Leftists to be vicious rather than repentant. What did Stalin ever repent of? Millions of deaths seemed to sit easily on HIS conscience. And note that at the end of the letters page Windschuttle himself catches the Leftists out in even more lies.

Now that the voters of Sweden have given the Eurocrats a black eye, it is worth looking at this classic FEE paper -- in which UK economist Norman Barry examines the case against euro-centralism and urges a return to the liberal free trading principles of the original "Treaty Of Rome" -- which differs considerably from the bureaucracy of Brussels today.

"There is a serious irony to left wing schemes like Fair Trade: The Fair Trade scheme is capitalist at heart. These lefties and hippies, the tree huggers who want change the planet and pay burros a living wage are using the free market to do it. Fair Trade is just an advertising scheme to convince people to buy a certain brand of coffee.”

Gerald Henderson points out that "mandatory detention for unlawful entrants was introduced by the Labor government in 1992" so blaming Australia’s tough illegal immigrant policy on “uncaring” conservatives is a bit rich.

You’ve heard of optical illusions? Well, The Wicked one has a verbal illusion.

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THE CORE CONSERVATIVE VALUES

A recent book on the history of American conservatism lists the following as the ten most important conservative beliefs:

1. Continuity: Order and the Rate of Change. "Tradition, continuity, and order in society . . . must not be disregarded, however carefully reasoned or attractive an untested reform may be."
2. Authority: Power and the Limits of Government. "The state's primary function is to protect against foreign threats and to keep order at home . . . . The foundation of military strength is the belief that the American social order is unique and worthy of protection and respect."
3. Community: Decentralization of Social Institutions. "The proper function of government . . . is not to concentrate power but to diffuse it to the institutions of organic society . . . [which] serve as checks on the power of the central authority."
4. Deity: Man and Morality. "The conservative generally has a strong belief in God and holds to traditional moral values."
5. Duty: Responsibilities over Rights. " 'Rights are something to be earned rather than given . . . The duties of man - service, effort, obedience, cultivation of virtue, and self-restraint - are the price of rights.'"
6. Democracy: Limited Government and the Constitution. "If law changes with the circumstances of the time, it becomes uncertain and unstable. In such circumstances, Americans live under a government of men, not of laws."
7. Property: The Role of Economics. "Capitalism is built on the assumption of private property . . .Government should interfere in the economy as little as possible, allowing the law of supply and demand to guide men in making profitable decisions."
8. Liberty: Equality's Big Brother. "Individuals have an infinite variety of talents and are entitled to find economic, political, and social rewards without fear of government license or redistribution."
9. Meritocracy: The Leadership Class. "America was founded as a society opposed to titles of nobility . . . John Adams spoke of a 'natural aristocracy,' which anyone could join by virtue of merit and ability."
10. Antipathy: The Anticommunist Impulse. "The chief crime of communism is not that it takes away property, but that it removes freedom upon which property is based."

That sounds pretty right but note that most of them boil down to limiting government and maximizing individual liberty.

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GOOD STUFF FROM THE U.K. “SPECTATOR”

Interesting: Although it is common for Leftists to ascribe the origin of Al Qa'eda to Ronald Reagan's support of the Afghan Mujahadeen in the 1980s, a more realistic hypothesis seems to be that Clinton's support of the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s was instrumental. As the Yugoslav interventions are seen as a “Good Thing” by the Left this connection is rarely raised.

German anti-Americanism really is childish: “Ever since the war there has been a strong vein of anti-American feeling in Germany. To have your country defeated, occupied and then defended by a foreign power is humiliating”

Mark Steyn says that 9/11 did a lot more psychological damage to the Europeans than it did to the USA: “I seriously underestimated the degree to which much of Europe would be unhinged by 11 September”

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Mark Steyn notes that there were lots of people around when the Swedish foreign minister was stabbed but that these people -- who are descendants of Vikings! -- did nothing to stop the crime or grab the criminal. He links it to the passivity induced by Sweden's welfare State.

Jozef Imrich makes a good point with reference to Iraq: "There are few flawless victories. The Second World War in Europe began in defense of Poland's freedom against Nazi tyranny. It ended in a tremendous Allied victory, but left Poland subject to an alternate despotism."

A hero! "Incensed at the volume of junk e-mail he got, a determined Redmond man last week won a record $250,000 judgment against two Ohio residents who broke a Washington law by deluging him with spam.

"All that stands between us and the abyss is George W. Bush." How’s that for an extreme statement? But read the rationale and see what you think.

I have no idea what this article is saying. It SEEMS to be saying that women who spend a whole lot of money on high-priced crap in the name of fashion are behaving reasonably! Maybe someone should explain it to me.

Mangled Thoughts has a rather derogatory description of the EU.

The Wicked one has an impassioned argument against farm subsidies -- saying that they are destructive, impoverishing and amount to rural socialism.

My latest academic upload here (or here) is one of only four articles on IQ that I have had published in the academic journals. That is, however four more than 99% of my critics. The present upload reports evidence to show that highly intelligent people are much less likely to smoke than are others.

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MORE PROBLEMS FOR THE GREENIES (NOT THAT THEY WILL CARE)

I saw this story on “Marginal Revolution” and thought that I had mentioned it months ago. I cannot however see where I did so let me summarize: Mars has icecaps too and they appear to have been receding in recent years. So why don’t the Martians sign the Kyoto treaty? Because there are no Martians. The only explanation for warming on Mars is fluctuating output from the Sun. And that same Sun shines on US too. So if our icecaps are melting the obvious cause is the Sun, not human activity. Sunspots were discovered by Galileo so that is how long we have known that the Sun is not perfectly stable.

"One must also wonder about the agendas of many of the rich country environmental groups .... They apparently fear that economic growth and prosperity for the poor will destroy the natural world they are anxious to preserve. Consequently, they devise schemes aimed at persuading the poor to continue low-tech communal farming and small scale production; they want the poor to stay out of the world trading system. These schemes fly in the face of the clear evidence that shows that it is precisely in the richest countries that the natural environment is improving .... Economic growth and environmental improvement are not opposites; they go hand in hand."

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EUGENICS

Eugenics as another evil of big government: "President Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey’s sterilization law, and one of his deputies descended to greater fame as a Nazi collaborator at Buchenwald. Pennsylvania’s legislature passed an 'Act for the Prevention of Idiocy,' but the governor vetoed it .... Other states, however, joined the crusade. ... Eventually, the eugenicist virus found a hospitable host in Germany. There, Black concludes, it led to the death chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized."

I have also just put up here a brief history of the Leftist origins of Hitler’s eugenics.

And a very useful article by Mike Richmond on the history of American eugenics seems to have vanished recently from a number of internet sites where it was previously found so I have reproduced it here.

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ELSEWHERE

The New York Times has just produced an article that purports to tell us what Fascism is. It is however a very evasive article. There are some scholarly comments and the usual bromides about Fascism being used as just a term of abuse etc. but there is one glaring omission: No mention that the economic policies of all the historical Fascist regimes -- but particularly the Hitler, Mussolini and Peron regimes -- were of the extreme LEFT for their day. And they even defend Saddam's Baath Socialist party against the claim that it was Fascist -- how? They say Iraq was not Fascist because Fascist regimes arise in “failed democracies” and Iraq has had no appreciable history of democracy. But that is just to confuse definition with explanation. And at any event I would have thought that the very first Fascist regime of all -- Napoleon’s French police State -- hardly arose from a failed democracy. Neither the French revolution nor the absolutist monarchy that preceded it had much democracy about them. But I am sure that the NYT would tell us that Napoleon was not a Fascist either -- the cult of the leader, the devotion to national glory -- none of that applied to Napoleonic France did it? . I give a detailed account of what historical Fascism was here.

A Leftist blogger has criticized me for saying things that I did not in fact say: The desperation-fueled disregard for truth and accuracy that one expects of Leftists. I endorsed the Italian Prime Minister’s claim that Mussolini was nowhere nearly as bad as Hitler or Stalin but I did NOT endorse his obviously hyperbolic comment that Mussolini “never killed anyone”. And our Lefty blogger must have a very strange dictionary if he thinks that “standard” means “sole”. I notice that the blogger concerned has removed the very Stalinist-looking iconography that used to adorn his site but there still seems to be a Molotov cocktail there to show how “caring” he is. Lovely!

Much celebration in Britain over the rejection of the Euro by Sweden’s voters. Rightly so. For the thriving British economy to be tied to the sclerotic EU economy would be madness.

The Press looks the other way with Leftist race issues: "The mainstream press has been doing a miserable job covering Cruz Bustamante's ties to the creepy Chicano secessionist group “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan” (MEChA). This may not be the biggest story of the California recall election, but voters have a right for information about the leading Democratic candidate's views of a group that is certainly racialist, if not racist. A MEChA slogan translates as 'For the race everything. For those outside the race, nothing.' El Plan de Aztlan, the group's founding document, talks about the 'call of our blood' and the need to reclaim the Southwest, Aztlan, from 'the occupying forces of the oppressor.'"

The (antisemitic) “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” nonsense again? “Neo-cons have hijacked US foreign policy: The council on Foreign Relations is the epicenter of the American Establishment. ... So it was startling to pick up the September- October issue and read article after article expressing well-documented alarm at the hijacking of American foreign policy"

I have just transferred Chris Brand’s latest postings here for convenience. As usual he covers intelligence and political correctness but this time he has links to some nice pictures of Brigitte Bardot too!

The Wicked one reports a case where the police NEED to be sued.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at attiudes to authority. Conservatives tend to accept the types of authority that are usual in democratic societies more than Leftists do but Leftists claim that this is a very bad thing and that it shows how “sick” conservatives are. My survey showed the contrary -- that acceptance of conventional authorities correlated with BETTER social adjustment.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

The Bush-hating media and cocaine. Journalistic hatred of Bush has once again raised its ugly head with more accusations of cocaine use.
Greens wage war on Africans. It seems that our green humanitarians have decided that denying poor people in poor countries the right to defend themselves against malaria is more effective and cheaper than gas chambers, death camps and firing squads.
Our rotten media is a menace to liberty? Is the media situation cause for alarm? A 2-year-old poll found that 57 per cent of Australians are satisfied with the quality of Australian journalism; 52 per cent think the media, meaning journalists, use power responsibly; 70 per cent think ABC news reports are more balanced than those produced by commercial stations. Now this is alarming.
Legalised plunder of the seabed & foreshore. Proposed legislation would allow the State to sequester vast amounts of property currently accessible to all New Zealanders and place the ownership firmly in its own hands, or within the hastily concocted and rather ambiguous 'public domain'.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

You are probably not familiar with Project Censored, an annual list of the Top 25 (supposedly) censored media articles. Their latest report has just been released, and it's getting some attention amongst Lefty bloggers. The articles haven't been censored at all, however - in fact most of them have been widely published. It's really just a laundry list of left-leaning articles that, in the opinion of the organizers, haven't received enough attention. So, as a counterpoint, The Vigilant Zem has put together HIS list: It includes, to pick a few examples, the jailing of pro-democracy journalists in Cuba, China and Vietnam; closures of newspapers and television stations in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Tonga and Iran; and the arrest and mistreatment of journalists in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Iraq and Jordan. An interesting contrast. Zem documents REAL abuses.

Anti-democratic Democrats defeated: "The band of dissenting Democratic senators who ran off to New Mexico rather than allow a vote on a controversial redistricting bill will arrive back in Texas today -- their boycott over and apparently a losing effort.

What A fine fellow Iain Murray is -- quoting H.M. The Queen. I myself think the Queen's speeches are generally excellent and take us back to basic truths.

Whoops! The Left are FINALLY beginning to realize that they have been hurting the poor nations by opposing the work of the WTO and that they need to press for MORE free trade, not less, if they really want to help the poor. Not that the "protestors" really give a flying damn about the poor of course. Self-publicity is THEIR top agenda item.

Reuters doesn't interpret the news. Oh No! How about this story: "The gaping, man-made hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has hit record proportions for this time of year". A theory -- "man-made" -- is portrayed as fact. The fact that the "hole" has also shrunk considerably at times in recent years would suggest to any unbiased observer that it is simply a natural fluctuation -- like any other part of the weather.

The poor old British Tories. They think their electoral failure is all a matter of image. How about some conservative policies? Policies to bring back standards to schools and kick out the illegal immigrants would alone probably win the election for them.

Greece sends back 99 per cent of asylum-seekers. It can be done.

Jeff Jacoby points out that the USA for many years tolerated attacks on its citizens and representatives by Islamic terrorists -- emboldening them to undertake the 9/11 attack. He says that being soft on Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran is equally dangerous.

Shell (the oil company) does a better job of preserving biodiversity than national parks do.

"The story of America's heroes, accomplishments and ideals is getting surprisingly short shrift in a place of great influence: the nation's public schools. That's the theme of a provocative report about U.S. civics and history education"

There is a very interesting report here about a study by economists that took seriously the Greenie claim that freeing up world trade leads to more pollution. They took into account all the Greenie arguments and still found evidence that freer world trade IMPROVES the environment.

What fun! Interested Participant notes that even the Belgians are having second thoughts about the Kyoto "Greenhouse" treaty now that they see how big its costs are and how mythical its benefits are.

Joe Lieberman is the maverick this time around: "It is, sad to say, really risky in today's Democratic Party, which is tethered to teachers unions, for Lieberman to say that he will soon vote for legislation to establish an experimental voucher program for the poor children caught in the District of Columbia's disastrous schools."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again. Apologies for the late notice but the current host did not send me the link.

Arlene Peck thinks that the Palestinians will never come to their senses until Israel kicks them out altogether.

Michael Darby has an article about the delightful Muslim population of France (scroll down).

The Wicked one welcomes the suicide of someone who defended Janet Reno's Waco holocaust.

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SMARTER PEOPLE ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE RICH

A reader writes: "After reading the posts on IQ, I would like to put forth an idea of mine to you. Seeing we live in a capitalist society, it is fair to say that we use money to keep track of success. It is also fair to say that success is a result of hard work and the correct decisions, not of "luck". Therefore, as a quick and dirty method of measuring IQ would be to look at a persons assets. Or a group's assets, or a nation's assets. Wealthy people will continue making decisions that will keep them wealthy, poor people will continue making decisions to keep them poor. I realize this is highly simplistic, but as far as I can tell, applied with a broad brush, across the globe it appears to hold true"

The reader concerned has worked out for himself something that IS broadly true. There are exceptions, of course. SOME smart people are poor -- but some smart people do foolish things too. Emotional reasons can trump logical reasons and lead to bad life decisions -- in the area of marriage, for instance. Nonetheless, it has always been true that high IQ predicts well a whole host of desirable life outcomes (educational success, income, occupational status etc). Looking at nations rather than individuals as the unit of analysis, the most systematic evidence is Lynn & Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations -- which shows that, looking at all the countries of the world, national average IQ is a strong predictor of national average income.

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OH WHAT A LOVELY MOON!

Gareth Parker, one of my fellow conservative Australian bloggers has described me as too “lunar” for him. I wonder would he like to point out one claim I have made that is not backed up with good scientific and historical evidence? But I guess that the facts can be pretty “lunar” at times. They certainly conflict with a lot of popular notions.

The good Gareth should perhaps note that almost all of my “lunar” pronouncements have in fact been previously published in widely-circulated academic journals -- e.g. here and here -- and getting anything past the basilisk eyes of academic journal editors is no mean feat for anyone. They of course have access to the world’s best expertise on the subject concerned and the fact that my conclusions are ones that they would not generally find congenial means that my evidence and reasoning has to have been exceptionally watertight.

This is not of course remotely to say that everything published in academic journals is correct -- but it is to say that anything published there would have a very hard time being “lunar”.

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ELSEWHERE

The Italian Prime minister has just come under fire for pointing out that Mussolini -- the Italian dictator and founder of Fascism whom FDR called “that admirable Italian gentleman” -- was nowhere nearly as vicious as Hitler and Stalin. He is perfectly correct. Mussolini was a Marxist and did impoverish Italy with stupid socialist policies but he was also an Italian family man. The standard Italian Fascist treatment of political opponents was not the firing squad, the Gulag or the concentration camp but a forced dose of castor-oil!

The recent stabbing to death of the Swedish Foreign minister while she was out shopping has been repeatedly linked in most media to the fact that she supported Sweden’s conversion to using the common European currency. I THOUGHT it was pretty odd that anybody would be murdered over such an unexciting issue. Now the WSJ has blown the whistle -- revealing that she was also a Leftist critic of America and a vigorous defender of terrorists. Now why on earth would somebody want to murder a terrorist-lover just before the 9/11 anniversary?

Some things never change: Another Anglican archbiship siding with terrorists.

"Activists marched in the streets and stripped on the beaches in an attempt to derail a meeting of the World Trade Organization, at which representatives of 146 countries will try to increase global commerce... Away from the hotel zone, thousands of anti-globalization activists from around the world set up camp, renting hammocks and swatting mosquitoes, and vowed to derail the meetings with protests and marches, as they did in Seattle in 1999." And they did all that to stop poorer countries getting a better deal from richer countries -- which is what is on the agenda of the WTO! That good old Leftist "compassion" again.

According to Amir Taheri, there are huge positive effects being felt throughout the Islamic world as a result of the American presence in Iraq.

“I just got off the phone with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm a Republican. I want to vote for him. I want to believe. Schwarzenegger doesn't quite convince me. That little extra something that tells me he's one of us -- a Republican who is willing to cut spending and gut bad regulations -- is missing.”

Mike Tremoglie disputes a Leftist claim that Iraq is a “mess” -- using some historical comparisons.

The Wicked one notes some very unsurprising events which would nonetheless be a great puzzle for Leftists with their alleged belief in human goodness and the wonders of bureaucracy.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at the confusion surrounding academic theories about conservatism and suggest that the best generalization one can extract from them is that there is only one single Left/Right dimension underlying people’s social and political attitudes. I also report some survey research that supports that conclusion.

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THEORY TRUMPS FACTS

I have recently had a brief correspondence with a fellow psychologist as a result of the critique I wrote for "Front Page" of the "Berkeley study". He wrote to say that in his view some of his findings supported the conclusions of the Berkeley study. Although left-leaning, he seems a decent guy so I will not disclose his name but here is what he wrote:

We found in a telephone survey (not just college students) that experiences of harsh punishment in childhood predict support in adulthood for punitive public policies like the death penalty, opposition to abortion, and support for the use of military force (all of these results are controlling for respondents' education and their parents educational level).

I wrote back:

I would be interested to know how strong the correlations were. Unless they are very strong I think it is highly likely that you will find childhood trauma not to be predictive of adult Republican voting. There is a bit of survey evidence to show that Republican voters in the general population had happier childhoods than Democrat voters.

He replied

Our research also found that conservatives reported happier childhoods than did liberals. The issue, I think, becomes one of denial of the emotional pain associated with childhood punishment, as we discuss in the paper. I don't know if you have seen Alice Miller's book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelties in Childhood and the Roots of Violence. We draw on her work and on Lasswell's Psychopathology and Politics ... for our theoretical foundation.

So if the facts don't suit there is always a theory to explain them away! Those silly conservatives just don't realize when they are unhappy!

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ELSEWHERE

America's academic elite lead in racism, intolerance: "Many of America's colleges and universities have become the modern leaders of racism and intolerance. Recently, we were treated to information about racism at the University of Michigan, where its academic elite gave students 20 extra points toward admission based solely on race. The U.S. Supreme Court found this explicit racism unconstitutional but did allow continuance of a more hidden form, where universities can consider race as 'a plus' in admission decisions. But this is the tip of the iceberg."

This "global warming" article on creating a market in carbon credits has some interesting implications. The idea is to have tradeable permits to pollute. Instead of enforced bans and prohibitions, authorised polluters would trade and swap carbon quotas among themselves, similar to the trade in taxi licenses or dairy quotas. It would be ironic if in an attempt to solve the dubious environmental problem of global warming, that environmentalists effectively turned pollution into a right, effectively institutionalising and creating a vested interest in protecting "polluter rights". It is not unknown for government interventions to boomerang creating situations worse than the original problem. Is this another example in the making?

It's not vouchers but it seems that Arizona does have one way of making it easier for parents to choose the schools they send their kids to. The Australian system is another way -- I send my son to a private school and pay only low fees (equivalent to the cost of the average smoking habit) because the fees are heavily subsidized by the Australian Federal government. American private schools are also often relatively inexpensive, however, contrary to the image.

Rocket Man has some choice comments about Germany's present socialist policies -- where Kanzler Schroeder is threatening punitive action against firms that do not hire enough workers. More National Socialism? Kanzler Hitler had similar ideas.

Mike Tremoglie is pretty steamed up about some gross journalistic bias he found in his local Philadelphia newspaper. He delivers a good fisking and asks people to email protests pointing out that the “Comments” concerned are sheer Democrat propaganda that show no regard for the truth.

China Hand has a rather amusing account of the confused censorship situation in China at the moment. And the headline he notes from the Beijing People’s Daily seems to say more than it intends!

Michael Darby is back on the net. He has a very good post for Sept. 11 plus a previous post about Edward Teller (a great bogeyman for the Left). Michael describes Teller as: “The man who helped end the Cold War without bloodshed”

The Wicked one has a link to a site claiming that the Confederacy was a more genuine republic than the Union.

I have just put up a quiz question for Christians on PC Watch. If you know any keen Bible students ask them to have a look at it.

I appear to be seen by many as the bad boy of the blogosphere because I keep mentioning the last remaining obscenity of the 21st century -- the word "race". I would not be surprised if the word got banned altogether in the not too distant future. I actually rather sympathize with the reaction that the word evokes. Race is so obviously real and apparently such an intractable problem that I can well understand that people do not want to be made to think about it any more than they have to. In my latest upload of a published academic journal article here (or here), however, I use the example of the Australian situation to show that the problem is NOT intractable and that much of the problem is the result of government meddling.

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THE SEVEN DEADLY POLITICAL SINS

One of my conservative academic colleagues saw the "Berkeley study" of conservative psychology too. This was his rather jocular response at the time:

"Studies that purport to show that conservatives have some sort of mental problem are legion (double entendre intended). I saw one reported some years ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education that claimed to show that liberals were more morally sophisticated than conservatives by the way they answered a test designed to show moral awareness. The article didn't say if the test measured, say, belief in moral absolutes, but if I were to venture a wild stab in the dark, I'd guess no. I wrote the ChHEd saying I wasn't aware they were publishing comedy pieces now, since the whole project was such a blatant exercise in circular reasoning, but for some reason they didn't publish my comment.

Biased tests are bad when they favor those who value math and verbal skills, but good when they advance liberal ideology. This, of course, is mental health, Gulag Archipelago style, reminiscent of the way the USSR used to put dissidents in mental institutions on the premise that if they didn't accept the prevailing ideology, they had to be crazy. The best example is the term "homophobia." I have never met a homophobe. I have met lots of people who reject homosexuality on moral or esthetic grounds, but that is hardly a phobia.

Still the studies are right. There are conservatives who have all the negative attributes listed. One person might reject change because it's unwise or immoral, another will resist because of cowardice or laziness, and they will both come to the same position, one for good reasons, the other for bad.

I find some solace in this study appearing now. The more panicky and shrill liberals get, the more threatened they must be. Columnists like Mollie Ivins and Tom Teepen and filmmakers like Michael Moore are my moral compasses; if they're going totally ballistic I know the universe must be headed in the right direction.

Still, if conservatives have characteristic mental issues, so must liberals. Rather than get angry over studies identifying conservative mental problems, it's a lot more useful to try listing the mental problems of liberals. What are they? I think an approach based on the seven deadly sins is useful. For conservatives, the deadly sins are obvious: sloth and greed. There are people who call themselves conservatives simply because opposing change is less work and less threatening than accepting it. And there are those who call themselves conservatives solely because they want lower taxes and easier regulations, but whose personal ethics are as liberal as they get.

Now what are the deadly sins of liberals? If there's one pervasive characteristic I see in liberals, it's mindless revolt against authority. We can say with some justice that liberals as a group suffer from Oppositional Defiant Disorder. So I'd say their first deadly sin is Pride. Second is Envy. There's even a name for it: the Politics of Envy. If you have something, then you must have stolen it from others, goes the thinking. And the third would be Lust. Listen to any ostensibly intellectual discussion of religion by non-believers and watch just how quickly sex pops to the surface. I suspect that objections to religious belief boil down to about 85 percent resentment over Christian sexual morality, 10 percent concern about war, oppression and social injustice in the name of religion, and 5 percent serious intellectual issues.

[I suspect a lot of liberals have unresolved adolescent guilt issues over sex. Scratch a militant atheist and you'll find someone who was scolded for masturbating as a teenager and never got over it.]"

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ELSEWHERE

I love it! According to Reuters, Communists are now conservatives! The utterly nonsensical Leftist claim that all evil regimes are conservative has now spread beyond the "Berkeley study". Note this quote: "A 17-year-old Vietnamese boy was sentenced to three years in jail for organizing a luxury car race along a city street in a case that exposed reckless, free-spending youth in the conservative communist country." And Reuters are always excusing their refusal to call a spade a spade by saying that journalists should not "interpret" the news! All those conservatives who opposed Communism for 70 years would certainly marvel at that interpretation!

The poor old Tugboat!. He has written at great length to show that I assume what I have to prove when I pointed out recently that taking a group of people with fairly uniformly low-IQ and examining them alone must show that IQ has weak correlations of all sorts among that group. He seems unfamiliar with simple "if.. then" reasoning. I showed that IF IQ is generally hereditary and related to race and class, you would still get the survey results reported -- so therefore the survey results reported do not upset the claim that IQ is generally hereditary and related to race and class! Too simple for an archaic tugboat, obviously.

Arlene Peck says that the Muslim countries have kicked out all the Jews who used to live there so why should Israel not kick out the Arabs who live in Israel and thus give themselves some peace and security at last?

If you are having a heart attack, cough! I have to thank my fellow Brisbane blogger Kev Gillett for drawing my attention to that life-saving hint. Kev can't spell "Dissecting", though.

The Wicked one is irate that meddling politicians are trying to stop cheap phone calls.

Most psychologists take the cautious approach of asking people a whole group of questions before classifying them in any way. In my latest academic upload here (or here) I ask whether there are some occasions on which a single question can be used. I conclude that single questions can yield some useful data but should be used only when better data is not available.

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FROM "INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATIVE"

intellectualconservative.com is a good site that many readers of this blog might like. Excerpts from a couple of recent articles:

"Liberal proponents of identity politics oppose the Racial Privacy Initiative in California because it would deprive the self-styled diversity industry of its power to break citizens down into convenient racial categories and dole out spoils based on the number of boxes checked off for each group on government forms."

With reference to the "Berkeley study" of conservative psychology, Steve Laib makes the point that what Leftists accuse conservatives of is precisely what they themselves are most guilty of: "Now, I believe, is the time for certain academics to break the chains of Leftist freedom to do and say the party line and discover real freedom of thought. Otherwise else they will end up looking in the mirror and finding exactly what they described conservatives as looking like."

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MORAL EQUIVALENCE

The Left are always claiming that all comparisons between different political and value systems are arbitrary and meaningless. I wonder about this one:

The WSJ has this excerpt from the “Boston Globe”:

To tag Hamas, for example, as a terrorist organization is to ignore its far more complex role in the Middle East drama. The word reflects not only a simplification, but a bias that runs counter to good journalism. To label any group in the Middle East as terrorist is to take sides, or at least appear to, and that is not acceptable. The same holds true in covering other far-flung conflicts. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter; it's not for journalists to judge.

And comments:

The only "freedom" Hamas is pursuing, however, is freedom from Jews, whom it seeks to exterminate. By the Globe's lights, we suppose this would make Hitler a "freedom fighter" too. Hey, who's to judge?

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IMMIGRATION

I posted yesterday some extracts from a recent report on immigration into the U.S.A. which showed millions of Hispanics as having arrived in recent years. One of my correspondents thinks that history shows that they will all be assimilated without trouble in due course. I have posted his email here. I must say that Catholic immigrants sound a 1,000% better proposition than Muslim ones. But Phyllis Schlafly points to “the cost imposed by illegal aliens on the state budget, hospitals, schools and prisons” so I still prefer our Australian solution of keeping the illegals out in the first place.

“At the Democratic presidential candidates' debate in New Mexico last week, the Democratic Party publicly rejected the motto of our country, e pluribus unum, "out of many, one." The Democratic Party has declared war on the centuries-long revolution of coalescing people of every ethnic, linguistic, racial and religious background into a new, non-ethnic entity known as American..” More here

Paul Sheehan takes on Australia's carping Leftist intellectuals to show that Australians both strongly support prevention of illegal immigration and also support a high level of LEGAL immigration: "The AES divided the electorate into nine occupational groups and found that in all but one group, a significant majority - three to one - not only agreed with the bipartisan political position on asylum seekers but agreed strongly. In only one group, "social professionals", was there a majority which strongly opposed the policy, by a margin of 50 per cent to 32 per cent. This left Betts to observe: "Attitudes to asylum seekers by occupation show how unrepresentative the vocal social professionals are of most other voters; it is not just that they do not speak for the working class, they also do not speak for a majority of other occupational groups."

Rather amusing: Taiwan has problems with illegal immigrants from China.

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ELSEWHERE

An interesting report here from a U.S. Army officer stationed in Iraq. He looks at the comparison between post-war Iraq and post-war Germany and says that the Iraq situation is more difficult but is progressing nonetheless.

Iraq as flypaper seems to becoming a widely accepted idea now. The Islamic nutcases of the world are flocking to Iraq to attack U.S. forces there. One hell of a lot better than having them attacking skyscrapers in America itself. As the top U.S. commander in Iraq summed it up: "The only way we will fail in this country is if we decide to walk away in Iraq and fight the next battle in the war on terrorism in America."

China Hand has the story of his experiences during the recent typhoon in coastal China.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at the way Leftists use the language of morality. They deny any meaning to moral values but are very quick to use moralistic language when it suits them. I show through careful survey research that they do genuinely disbelieve in any kind of morality but use moral language because they see it as effective propaganda.

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THE HISPANIC FLOOD

A recent report on immigration into the U.S.A. notes that, during the 1990s, the nation's immigrant population grew by 11.3 million, faster than at any time in history. And Hispanics (mostly Mexicans) dominate more than ever before. In 1990, immigrants from the top sending country - Mexico - accounted for 22 percent of the total foreign born. By 2000, Mexican immigrants accounted for 30 percent of the total -- meaning reduced "diversity" -- Horrors!

The report noted the obvious -- that "the most serious potential problem associated with a larger and less diverse immigrant population is that it may hinder the assimilation and integration of immigrants by creating the critical mass necessary to foster linguistic and spatial isolation". In plain language: Permanent Hispanic ghettoes are being created. It does seem to be time to close the floodgates.

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FROM "TOWNHALL"

One distinctive feature of Islamist terrorists is that they repeatedly attempt to explain and justify their atrocities, complete with extensive Koranic citations. One distinctive feature of western analysts is that terrorists' explicit goals are often ignored, and instead their actions are misread as reactions to Israel, third world poverty, or supposed American unilateralism.... Islamist terrorists are not fighting for third world liberation. As they announce repeatedly, they are messianic organizations explicitly fighting to restore a pan Islamic Caliphate governed by Islamic law. Throughout the world, they methodically kill people opposed to the Caliphate, whether UN or non-UN, Muslim or non-Muslim, left or right, American, British, Israeli, French or Australian."

Arming U.S. airline pilots: "Pilots and passengers won the congressional battle over authorizing pilot self-defense. But the agency charged with the implementation isn't implementing. The TSA is actively deterring pilots from applying for arms training... So today, two years after 911, less than 150 pilots are qualified to bear arms in the cockpit. It's as if the terrorists have found a way to infiltrate the Transportation Security Administration. Thousands of pilots could be trained in short order if the agency simply farmed out the job to private training academies. There are over 66,000 members of the Air Pilots Association. On any particular day there may be anywhere from 4,500 to 7,500 commercial planes in the air at any one moment"

Over the past several decades, no one has been victimized more by so-called experts than parents and children. And no one has done more to expose the frauds of "experts" in child-raising and education than Kay Hymowitz. Her recently published book, "Liberation's Children," is a devastating debunking of fashionable ideas that have brought much frustration and heartache to parents and children alike. As in her previous book, "Ready or Not," Ms. Hymowitz shows what personal and social disasters have followed from treating children as if they were already adults.

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ELSEWHERE

Americans get their sociology wrong (but their science right): "A sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Brechin presented his findings to the American Sociological Association meeting in August...... Not only are Americans "more or less equally misinformed" as people elsewhere about the causes of global warming, but they also are "among the most misinformed of the developed nations surveyed. Only the Japanese and the French are more so," Brechin wrote... A 2001 poll, for example, found that only 15 percent of the U.S. citizens surveyed correctly identified burning fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming." (Via poor old Acidman. He sounds in a bad way these days. Pay him a visit. Hits cheer up all bloggers.)

HERE is a great reason not to send druggies to jail -- because drugs are so readily available in prison! I like it!

The tragedy of the suicide of UK MoD adviser David Kelly has been used to portray Kelly as a martyr for peace. But as it says here: "Dr David Kelly supported military action against Iraq even though he believed the threat posed by its weapons of mass destruction was "modest", he wrote in a report that came to light yesterday" He merely disliked the way Blair's spin doctors sold the war to the press. And it may be noted that Blair's PR team does have a lot to answer for in other fields. Their "selling" of global warming and even their own education policies has been a disgrace.

Typical government confusion: "New Zealand's two-facedness regarding the growth of science-based industries continues to perplex simple folk like me. On the one hand the taxpayer giveth in the form of increased spending on industrial and pure research. On the other hand, health and safety bureaucrats are devoted to punishing science-based businesses with excessive costs and controls"

A fellow Arab takes on Edward Said and his claim that Western scholars of Islam are just biased propagandists.

Taking remains of primitive people out of museums for reburial is destroying irreplacable scientific and historical data.

The Wicked one has just put up a crazy joke plus some irreverent pictures.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I again look at the view that conservatives are motivated by a cynical view of human nature. I found that there is a slight tendency for conservatives to be more likely to have such a view but that it is only a small part of the story. I have argued elsewhere that the main motor of conservative thought is a belief in individual liberty.

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LEFTIST RACISTS OF THE PAST

One of the great things that Leftists have going for them is that most people know little history so can be easily hoodwinked into believing what Leftists say about themselves and their motives. That Leftists are inherently “anti-racist” is a classic example of a lie that no-one knowing history would accept.

A bit of British history relevant to Australia is the role of Sir James Stephen, one of the Clapham House group in Britain and the man who drafted William Wilberforce's Emancipation Act that freed the slaves under British control. It seems that he was also the first to advocate what ultimately became the “White Australia” policy -- a policy that excluded non-Caucasians from immigrating to Australia up until relatively recently-- when it was abolished by a conservative government under Prime Minister Harold Holt. Sir James Stephen's role is discussed briefly by Phil Griffiths under the heading “Towards White Australia” -- as is the influence of J.S.Mill on the late 19th century advocates of White Australia in Australia itself.

These men were the progressives and social reformers of their day. Their achievments in abolishing slavery, democratic reform etc make the current generation of social reformers seem like slackers. Yet their policies were unashamedly founded on a belief in racial inequality.

Their policies were, however, more honest than the policies of Leftists today. The psychological evidence shows that everyone is racist to some degree. The difference is that the Leftists of the past did not hide it. The Leftists of today, however, think that there is kudos and votes in hiding it so hide it they do -- involving themselves in much irrationality and injustice (e.g. “affirmative action”) in the process.

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FROM “TOWNHALL”

David Limbaugh tries to talk some sense into the conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right. He shows that GWB is events-driven -- not a conspirator or imperialist.

“Gerald Ford had it right decades ago when he insisted that a "government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have"... The government can't put people to work. A strong, stable and unshackled economy can and will. It's not up to Uncle Sam to fend for our interests. It's up to us. Keep him out”

Bureaucrats always come first: The university bureaucrats are doing fine even while universities cut back on teaching expenditure.

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ELSEWHERE

Good to see that the California government’s generosity with other people’s money is coming home to roost -- as businesses move out of the State to escape the high insurance costs that the “generosity” of its worker’s compensation rules have created. Hence California’s high unemployment. Ability to move to another State is one of the glories of Federalism. California could learn from the left-leaning government in Australia’s largest State (New South Wales) -- where all legal liability claims for personal injury have been capped at $300,000!

Another triumph of socialized medicine: Patients who have major operations on the [U.K.] National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. “Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."“

A hopeful first step: "The Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday approved a $13 million school voucher plan for the District, as Republicans easily advanced President Bush's initiative with support from Democrats who said the time had come to experiment with taxpayer-financed alternatives to public schools."

McDonald's obesity suit thrown out again "A federal judge Thursday threw out a class-action lawsuit by two Bronx teenagers claiming McDonald's used false advertising and that the chain's food made them fat and contributed to their health problems. The plaintiffs' lawyers claimed unknown ingredients and processing made foods such as french fries, Chicken McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches damaging to consumers' health."

Definitely the right approach in Iraq: "American officials want to speed up training for Iraqi security forces, including former members of Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence services, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. Making Iraq safe is a job for Iraqis, and no more U.S. troops are needed in the country, Rumsfeld said after meeting in the capital with top military and civilian officials of the American-led occupation."

I must say I feel a bit sorry for U.K. Home Secretary David Blunkett. He has responded fairly reasonably to public concern about the large number of unassimilated immigrants -- often hostile Muslims -- now living in Britain. He has proposed that immigrants pass a test of awareness about Britain and its institutions before being given citizenship. But the Right think he would not know what Britishness was if he fell over it and the Left think that there is no such thing!

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I cast a critical eye on the methods used by the public opinion polls. There are many ways in which most polls can be misleading and better methods of assessing people’s attitudes do exist. Even university researchers, however, often do not use those better methods so the polls offer data as good as or better than what many academics dish up.

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MORE SUSPECT SOCIAL SCIENCE

The latest upload of one of my published academic articles is here (or here). It again concerns the lack of science in contemporary psychology and sociology. One of the most basic axioms of science is that a finding must be replicable (repeatable) before it is generally accepted. This can mean that other researchers repeating an experiment must get the same result or that other analyses of the same body of data must get the same result. In this case, the survey results reported in a large and well-reviewed book about racial problems in South Africa seemed suspect to me so I wrote to the book's author asking for a copy of the raw data so that I could re-analyse it. If made within a reasonable space of time after the original publication of findings, such requests are normally complied with promptly and compliance is in fact normally seen as ethically required.

In the case concerned, however, my repeated requests for the raw data were totally ignored (though it later was admitted that my letters had been received). Even when, as a last resort, I threatened exposure of their non-response, I continued to be ignored. One can only speculate, therefore, on what the data did really say. Once again the Leftist domination of the social sciences -- and the attendant carelessness about evidence -- made its mark.

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ELSEWHERE

Michael Tremoglie says that labor unions have brought their problems on themselves.

More Leftist eugenics: Australia's (Left of centre) Leader of the Opposition is always reminding us of (some of) the thoughts of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but when Holmes wasn't telling us that 'taxes are the basis of civilization' he was ordering compulsory sterilizations of the mentally ill: Yet another forgotten American inspiration for Adolf.

Trust Leftists not to be able to see the difference between a voluntary program and one enforced by the State: "To its critics, Project Prevention or Crack -- an American organisation which pays drug addicts and alcoholics to be sterilised - - is a terrifying throwback to the neutering of 'defectives' during the 20th Century. But the woman who runs this not-for-profit programme believes she is offering a service to everyone: the drug addict, the taxpayer, the child who has not yet been born, and if she has her way -- will never be born."

Former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia and a critic of the NATO and Canadian intervention there, has pointed out some of the contradictions of the opponents of the Iraq war, who supported 'humanitarian intervention' in Kosovo. Apparently if there is a national security concern intervention is bad. Only do-gooder interventionism is ok!

This map shows something I have been nagging people about for years -- the way English-speakers customarily misname other countries (Scroll down to "Other Follies" here). Pity the Hellenes (Greeks) most of all, though. Other people have been calling their country "Greece" (which they themselves call "Hellas") for over 2,000 years.

I like the Sikhs so this is a very sad story for me: "A[n Arizona] man accused of fatally shooting an Indian immigrant four days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was acting out of a rage fueled by prejudice... [Frank Silva] Roque is accused of killing gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, a 49-year-old who wore a beard and turban as part of his Sikh faith. Sodhi was neither Muslim nor from the Middle East, as the terrorist hijackers had been."

The Supreme Court again has institutionalized the second-class citizenship of African Americans with a strange twist on the old segregationist policy of reserving some privileges for "whites only." Only, this time around, the court seems to be saying that high standards in education are permissible only for white people.

If the old Leninist Left was buried politically in the rubble of the Berlin wall, the literary-academic intelligentsia disappeared morally in the ashes of the 9/11 ground zero.

"A science fiction author. A cashier at Wal-Mart. A pair of libertarian writers. All decry what they see as an increasing trend: appeasement of the less worthy; a pandering to the 'weaknesses and vices of others;' appealing to the self-righteously dependent and unproductive. And for what? Where is the 'profit' involved in this degradation?" More here

Good if it happens: GWB says that his new education law aims at raising the bar for student achievement "The law sets a clear goal for American education: Every child, in every school, must perform at grade level in reading and math, which are the keys to all learning." The initiative "seeks to improve achievement, particularly among poor students, through expanded testing, tougher quality requirements for teachers, yearly monitoring of student progress and sanctions for schools that fail to improve."

Bruce Bartlett says Bush isn't controlling domestic spending, Reagan did a better job of it under much tougher circumstances -- reducing Federal spending from 4.7% of national income to 3.1%. -- "Ronald Reagan had his faults, but he never conceded the principle that government should be as small as possible to do what it has to do".

Some things are so obvious that even the blind can see them: "European Union foreign ministers on Saturday denounced the political wing of Hamas as a terrorist organization following the group's claim of responsibility for a truce-shattering bomb attack in Jerusalem."

The Wicked one notes the big growth in government under GWB and says: "Bring back Clinton".

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RACISM AND HISTORY

A reader has pointed out some interesting historical facts: "People say that Martin Luther was an antisemite, and that a "uniquely German form of antisemitism" was brought forth from his teachings. But Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and other top Nazis were brought up in the Roman Catholic faith! So, they were at least as likely to have gotten their ideas about Jews from the Catholic rather than the Lutheran Church. Even more ironically, though Karl Marx's parents were Jewish, and he was born a Jew, his father tried to bring him up to be a good Lutheran! And in his essay "The Jewish Question", Marx wrote a tirade that if anyone nowadays were to write, he would be branded a Neo Nazi". So the Catholic-origin chief Nazi and the Lutheran-origin chief Communist were both racists! What to make of that?

There is a heap of research evidence to show that racism of some form is universal so the important thing is not to try to pin it on any one group but to ask under what circumstances it becomes harmful. That patriotic British conservatives who had not the slightest doubt of British superiority made a Jew (Disraeli) their Prime Minister at the height of the British empire shows that not all racism is dangerous. Both Marx and Hitler, by contrast, were socialists.

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THOSE PAINFUL LEFTIST EGOS

How to Save the World is the name of a relatively recent Leftist blog. The very name encapsulates the vast ego needs of the typical Leftist intellectual. He needs to be a world-saving hero. And what are the ways this one plans to save the world? Take a look at his trite “ideas” on education for instance: “The 'teacher's' role in all of this is facilitation, not instruction”. So he does not want teachers to teach! No wonder the kids learn so little in school off their Left-leaning teachers these days!

In his desperation to have something to say that seems marginally different he is just trotting out hoary old “progressive” education ideas that never stop being tried somewhere and which always self-destruct after a few years -- Bertrand Russell’s “Beacon Hill” school of the 1920s being just one example of such failure. But Leftists rarely know much history. They can’t afford to. It makes such asses of them.

I myself taught in a “progressive” school once so I saw it all close up. The kids who had self-discipline or some pressure from home did OK but the other half mostly played cards and learnt nothing.

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