TOWNHALL SAYS:

Two good quotes from Dennis Prager: “The more people marry, and especially the more they have children after they marry, the more likely they are to hold conservative values and vote Republican” and: “Am I implying that increasing one's maturity and wisdom works in favor of the Republicans and against liberalism and the Democrats? Absolutely. Wisdom and contemporary liberalism are in conflict. That is why the vast majority of people who change their politics as they get older (and presumably wiser) change them from liberal to conservative”

"What is a conservative? I'm not sure, but if I were to offer adjectives about my fellow scribes, I would say that conservatives as a group are smarter, funnier and wiser than those other guys.... Apparently lots of folks may have forgotten the driving conservative principle of a free market economy. Distilled herewith: the best things in life are not free. At the top of the list of un-free things, we find freedom.."

R. Emmett Tyrrell is a fun sort of guy who likes to play with words but he gets a bit carried away at times. In the quote following I think he means "normal" instead of "normative" and soi disant is just French for "so-called".... Anyway, Tyrrell says: "The reason that a man of such normative views as Estrada has been opposed by the Democrats is that they see themselves as the party of the ethnic minorities. Estrada is a Latino.... That the Republicans would raise him to one of the highest courts in the country proves that Latinos are welcome in the Republican Party, too. They do not have to be beholden to Democrats... Thus the soi-disant party of Latinos comes down hard on a successful Latino.

Why did Bin Laden do it? "Bin Laden expected the US military to carpet bomb Afghanistan and many other places. He thought he'd draw the Yankee's raw power into the entire Muslim world, and expected a global intifada to ensue. Interestingly enough the Jihadists anticipated millions of death in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Some indications lead me to guess that the Sultan of the Mujahedin wanted the great Satan to do the unthinkable and resort to doomsday devices. That is the war that Usama Bin Laden wanted to instigate. A war that would drive America into nihilism, shatter international law into pieces and project himself as the new Caliph"

"Democrat politicians do seem to take black voters for granted, and they do betray their interests ... by treating them like a subculture of disaffected people rather than like human beings... They betray them by treating them like numbers -- primarily in the numbers of votes they produce, but also in the sense of bean counting: always keeping score based on the color of people's skin. Their ultimate betrayal of blacks is in treating them as a commodity. No matter how often they invoke the name of Martin Luther King in their pathetic quest to ingratiate themselves with blacks, they just as often undermine his dream of a colorblind society where all people are judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

The Toyota Example: "A lot of people believe economic growth comes at the expense of the environment. Quite the contrary, the economic growth imperative drives investment in technology, which continuously improves our products and protects the environment".

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby notes all the Leftist protests about Schwarzenegger’s “horndog” past and wonders where the same protesters were when Clinton was accused of much the same. Saying it didn’t matter -- that’s where.

The soul of capitalism: "If capitalism were someday found to have a soul, it would probably be located in the mystic qualities of capital itself. ... Once set in motion, the surplus wealth ... becomes one of capitalism's three classic factors of production, alongside human labor and nature. Capital puts up the money to build the factory, buys the machines and pays the company's bills until its goods are produced and sold, thus yielding the new returns that pay back the lenders and investors with an expected increase. It is not simple, but that is the essence."

If you think French foreign policy is disgusting, read here what a charmer their favourite philosopher was.

It looks like the opposition of American busybodies to genetic research may hand the race to the Chinese.

One in the eye for the “alternative” crowd: There has been a bit of a hoo-ha in recent years about how your blood type influences the type of person you are. A recent systematic study of the relationship between various supposedly relevant personality variables and blood type found absolutely no relationship between any blood type and any type of personality!

The Wicked one has a fun post about bureaucratic dead horses.

Most people agree that a good medical practitioner needs more than just academic ability but how do we ensure that doctors are not just good at passing examinations? My latest academic upload here (or here) shows that there are no easy fixes.

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POLITICAL DYNAMITE?

Some British psychologists have recently done a study which shows that Bosnian refugees who came to Britain to escape the war ended up worse-off psychologically than those who stayed in Bosnia. The implication is that accepting refugees is bad for the mental health of the refugees themselves. The stress of adapting to a new country seems to be worse than the other stresses they experience. So it might be humanitarian to keep most "refugees" OUT! I can see lots of governments seizing on THAT thought with some gladness. In case the Leftists get wind of the study and try to censor it, I have saved a copy to disk and will immediately re-post it if it is taken down.

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FEAR OF UNCERTAINTY

The infamous "Berkeley study" reserved its warmest praise for a theory of conservative motivation put forward by Glenn Wilson in his 1973 book, The psychology of conservatism. I know that book pretty well. I wrote chapter 2 of it. I also know Glenn well. He buys me a lunch whenever I am in London. He is a pretty conservative guy himself these days so there are certain ironies there. I also note how well ahead of his times Glenn was in 1973 when he stressed the possibility that political stance may often be genetically inherited. We now know that to be so but there was little evidence of it back in the 70s.

The central proposal of the theory is that conservatives have a greater fear of uncertainty than Leftists. As far as I know, however, nobody has ever tested that on a general population sample. The authors of the "Berkeley study" certainly mentioned no such research. It should not be hard to test the theory directly. I am sure I could whip up a fear of uncertainty scale in short order. It is however known that conservatives are not more fearful in general so the questionnaire would have to be carefully designed to concentrate on fear of uncertainty in particular. I am however now too old and lazy to do the legwork of a general population survey myself so if you know anybody who wants an interesting research project to do, give them my email address.

Incidentally, the authors of the "Berkeley study" headlined their article with a quote from George Will. Will had a few sarcastic words to say about that at the time.

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NOT SO GREEDY

As a comment on the Greenie claim that rich countries consume 80% of the world's resources, Gerry Jackson has emailed me the following:

"Greenie claims that the rich countries consume 80 per cent of the world's resources while poor countries consume the remainder is just sloppy thinking. If this were literally true there would be nothing left after 12 months. What the rich countries actually do is produce 80 per cent of the world's annual output, the value of which they then consume. They do this by converting raw materials into higher-valued goods. For example, silicon is transformed into fibre optic cables and computer chips. Therefore, once we look at the situation in terms of production we see that leftwing claims that rich countries consume at the expense of the poor ones are utter nonsense.

In any case, the earth's resources are not fixed. How can they be when the state of technology defines resources? This means that because technology has to be applied through the use of capital, economic growth is really a resource-generating process. It follows that the only road to prosperity is economic growth, the very process that the Greens are dedicated to destroying."

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ELSEWHERE

Fascinating: Hans Blix thinks the anti-war demonstrators caused the war on Iraq. He has a point.

This "Earth Liberation Front" seems to be a nasty business. They not only torch SUVs but also homes under construction. The police may have to use RICO (organized crime) laws against them. In true Leftist fashion they have no respect for democracy. "It makes no sense to think that we can have success without combining legal and illegal tactics, both violent and non-violent", they say. What people can be persuaded to vote for is irrelevant to them. THEY KNOW what is good for us and too bad if people don't agree with them.

The American Library Association (ALA) has declared this week to be Banned Book Week. Practically anything that has ever been “banned” can however be read here. What the week is all really about is an attack on Christian groups and parents exercising their right to have a say in the education of their children. As Steve McKinzie pointed out a few years ago, very few of the ALA’s “banned” books have in fact been banned by anyone. All that has happened is that parents and Christian groups have questioned their suitability for use in schools due to their explicit sexual content etc. The whole exercise pretty dishonest, in other words. Any guesses about how most ALA members vote?

America’s leading expert on the Islamic countries says that it is only their own failure to modernize that lies behind the way the West has got so far ahead of them in the last few hundred years. But he sees no reason why they cannot modernize.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I report some findings about the nature of immigrants. Do they tend to be misfits or to be especially enterprising?

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HITLER AND CHILD-ABUSE

Prof. Steve Dutch of the University of Wisconsin writes:

You mentioned in your post of 12th. Alice Miller's book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelties in Childhood and the Roots of Violence. One of Miller's claims is that Adolf Hitler was a victim of child abuse. In support, she cites John Toland's biography. Now it so happens I looked into this because I have a course on technology in socio-historical context, and I once did lectures on Nazi Germany and how an advanced society could engage in genocide and use all the instruments of an industrial society to carry it out. I specifically researched whether Hitler had been abused and found no evidence at all, including in Toland's book.

Also I looked at Mein Kampf to see if Hitler provided any clues - if anything he was a bit affectionate and condescending about his father. Of course Miller would equate any slap on the butt with "abuse," so by her definition Hitler was almost certainly abused. But so were all the victims of the Holocaust and all the people who risked their lives opposing it. People like Miller end up trivializing abuse.

It is simply not true that abuse cuts across all socio-economic lines. If you look at the really egregious cases of kids being killed, seriously injured, or chained for years on end, they are heavily concentrated in underclass settings.

And reporting is biased. If a middle class kid tells his teacher he was slapped, there's a good chance the police or social workers will get involved. If a cop finds an abuse victim in the inner city, the social workers will tell him they're too overworked already. Middle class people are easy to regulate. If a parent is cited for child abuse and ignores the summons, he has a job and home he can lose. If an inner city parent ignores a summons, the police and courts have bigger fish to fry. So trivial abuse gets reported in the suburbs and only the most flagrant cases in inner cities.

Now for a real heresy: The single strongest clue I got from Mein Kampf about what made Hitler tick was in his discussion of his years in Vienna and his disgust at the intellectual dishonesty he found among leftists. Now I think Hitler was probably terribly naive and simplistic at the time, and probably engaged in what is called "naive disconfirmation," in which someone will come up with a simplistic counterargument and assume he has settled the issue when anyone with more information can see he hasn't. But he probably had plenty of real cause for disgust as well.

And, to support another post on your blog, the Ba'ath Party IS classic fascism. It has all the attributes: the ethnocentrism, the denial of the concept of individual rights, and the notion that the only right is membership in the group. And Iraq had a pro-Nazi government until the Brits toppled it in 1941.

I guess Steve must have tenure.

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MORE ON THE SAD PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LEFT

Murray Soupcoff socks it to them: "Camille Paglia uncorked this insightful quote: "One problem is that too many leftist periodicals are run by callow cliques whose vaunted populism is a mask for snobbery." No kidding! But in this scribe's opinion, Ms. Paglia's apt critique would apply to almost all of the American left these days. Indeed if there is a latent role for contemporary leftism among today's journalistic, academic and Hollywood elite, it's to serve as an identifying badge of sophistication and superiority to distinguish these haughty souls from those whom they view as their inferiors -- namely the entire rest of the population"

James Hudnall had some good comments a while back about the Leftist reaction to Fox News: “The detractors like to accuse Fox watchers of being nazis, zombies or idiots.... The contempt the so called progressives (aka liberals) have for opinions other than their own is more a cry for help, a weak attempt at projection and self delusion than anything else” Leftists certainly do seem to feel very threatened by anything that contradicts them -- which seems a pretty good confession of how fragile and poorly-based their belief system is. (Link via Amritas).

How desperate the America-hating Leftists get! This Leftist report claims that the USA is way down (compared to other countries) in the amount it spends on education and concludes therefore that the USA is not “kid-friendly”. But they only count FEDERAL spending on education -- whereas most U.S. education spending is at the State or local level. It’s not even a clever lie!

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ELSEWHERE

That wonderful public education: “There are, of course, many reasons why so many students can't qualify for college. Most of them never get the cultural support to overcome the general debasement of public education. Nobody knows this better than the teachers, which is why so many public-school teachers send their kids to private schools.”

An unequal distribution -- of capitalism "Twenty percent of the world's population (we often hear) consumes more than 80 percent of the earth's resources, while the other 80 percent consume less than 20 percent. Critics of globalization never tire of reminding us of this injustice. Far less often do we hear a proper analysis of the reason for this state of affairs."

I always get a laugh out of the lugubrious Leftist who runs the “Tugboat” blog -- which is why I keep him on my blogroll on the left of this page. I have shown how his past attempts to criticize my arguments founder on simple logic so now he is reduced to abuse. He refers to this site as “John Ray's on-line clearing house for batty ideas”. Amusing. He also makes a mess of using a French term of abuse for Germans. He confuses “Bosch” (a German electrical firm) with “Boche” -- a French abbreviation of “caboche” -- meaning “cabbage”. A common English term for Germans -- “Kraut” -- also means “cabbage” (in German). I guess Germans do eat a lot of Sauerkraut (sour cabbage).

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I offer a catalog of all the tests that psychologists have used to measure materialistic ambition.

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QUIZ

Guess whom I am talking about. Hint: He was featured in the British “Homes & Gardens” magazine -- which described him thus (excerpts):

“There is nothing pretentious about his little estate. It is one that any merchant might possess in these lovely hills. All visitors are shown their host’s model kennels, where he keeps magnificent Alsatians. Some of his pedigree pets are allowed the run of the house, especially on days when he gives a “Fun Fair” for the local children. He delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, singers and musicians. As host he is a droll raconteur. Every morning at nine he goes out for a talk with his gardeners about their day’s work. These men, like the chauffeur and air-pilot, are not so much servants as loyal friends. A life-long vegetarian at table, his kitchen plots are both varied and heavy with produce. Even in his meatless diet, he is something of a gourmet. He is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect.”

This apparently pleasant, artistic country gentleman is of course our old friend Adolf -- as described in the 1938 edition of “Homes & Gardens” -- which is now on the net here. The story of how it got on the net is here. The “insanity” that Leftists usually attribute to him is not much in evidence is it? The “insanity” claim is just a coverup of what he really was, of course: He was just another clever socialist -- with the typical socialist’s elitist disregard for ordinary people, individual liberty and human life -- disguised with a lot of talk about being on the side of “the worker”, of course. He did, after all, call his political party “The National Socialist German Worker’s party”.

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ELSEWHERE

In the light of my post yesterday about unionist attacks on Republican college students, the following seems a relevant comment: The Democrats' contempt for democracy: "If you believe in liberalism -- the idea that the economy should be heavily controlled, that resources should be distributed "fairly," that opportunities should be allocated by a central authority -- then you hate the idea of an independent American populace.... Democracy, according to the left, means only part-time democracy: It's democracy when people vote for us; it's a threat to democracy when they vote against us. It is no coincidence that fascism in the 20th century sprang from socialism. Socialists and the modern-day left feel that they have the only Truth. If democracy fails to recognize that Truth, democracy must be superseded."

General Clark is now part of the Democrat line-up to run against GWB in the next Presidential election. The Left have proclaimed him as the “hero of Kosovo” for his role in commanding US forces during Kosovo’s liberation. As A Little More to the Right comments: “Yesterday during an interview Clark was asked about the war in Iraq and whether it was the right thing to do. Clark replied that no, it wasn't because there was "no imminent threat to the United States". Well, what was the imminent threat in Kosovo General Clark??” He has only just become a Democrat politician but already the dishonesty is starting to set in.

Amazing! The Dalai Lama supports the war on terror and has refused to condemn the Iraq intervention!

Australian historian and whistle-blower Keith Windschuttle has a short reply to his critics in his latest posting. The Leftist attack on him edited by Robert Manne fails completely to look at the evidence. Windschuttle is of course known for exploding the Leftist lie that Tasmania recorded the one clear case of genocide in the British Empire. Leftists use the lie to claim that the early British colonists from whom most Australians are descended were like the Nazis!

Patrick West makes a good point about recent crashes of privately-run British passenger trains. The Left-leaning media are parading it as just what you would expect of privatization and those heartless, cost-cutting capitalists. He points out that there were roughly TWICE as many deaths BEFORE privatization. Touche!

George Will has some interesting comments about recent research showing that people are hardwired (born) to be part of a community and share that community’s values -- which is why membership of a church or religious group is so often beneficial to a person’s mental health and adaptation to society. GWB is a good case in point. Turning to Christian faith changed him from being a drunkard into President of the United States.

Sowell says: One of the signs of our times is a recent ruling by a federal judge that those who lost loved ones in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks can sue the planes' manufacturer and the owners of the World Trade Center, among others. This extraordinary -- indeed, unique -- terrorist attack was "foreseeable," according to Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in New York. By the same reasoning, it was "foreseeable" that there would be jackasses like Judge Hellerstein on the federal bench. Similar judges have allowed our courts to become clogged with frivolous lawsuits and turned law into an instrument of legalized extortion.

Jonathan Rauch says that “Frankenfood” will save the planet. Seriously, GM food looks set to be so beneficial to the environment that even the Greens should eventually reverse their “anti” position if they have any contact with reality at all.

The Misanthropyst has a fun post devoted to the view that life itself is the ultimate test of IQ

The Wicked one has just made up for all his Irish jokes by pointing to what a great job the Irish have done of reducing the size of their government and thus greatly increasing their prosperity.

My latest academic upload here (or here) is one of the many shots I fired in my failed 20-year campaign to inject a bit more science into psychology. All sciences have indexing services that enable individual scientists to find existing publications relevant to their own work. I show that the official psychology indexing service is ludicrously incomplete. Basically, unlike true scientists, psychologists do not care about what has gone before. They have a typically Leftist disregard for what history might teach.

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Democrat-supporting unionists have just physically attacked a small group of Republican college kids who were placarding in support of Ward Connerly’s racial privacy initiative. The Soviet mentality is never far below the surface in Western World Leftists. I have myself in my own long-gone student days been on the receiving end of similar Stalinist treatment from Leftist unionists -- as I recorded here

FREE TRADE

Steel Tariffs Are a Net Job Killer: "In a decision largely driven by his political advisers, President Bush set aside his free-trade principles last year and imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel to help out struggling mills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, two states crucial for his re-election. Eighteen months later, key administration officials have concluded that Bush's order has turned into a debacle. Some economists say the tariffs may have cost more jobs than they saved, by driving up costs for automakers and other steel users." When will they ever learn? More on the folly of Protectionism here.

"We are hearing more and more about the loss of manufacturing jobs.... History, however, suggests that manufacturing can take care of itself. It's important to remember that warnings about the death of manufacturing are not new. I have been hearing them for more than 20 years." More here.

The WTO: "The talks in Cancun failed for two reasons. First, they failed because Americans and Europeans talk a great game about free trade but are outrageously protectionist when it comes to agriculture. And, second, because the poor countries, led by Brazil, were sufficiently peeved by point No. 1 so as to foolishly decide that no progress was better than some progress."

This abstract from an academic paper shows that the WTO is something of a paper tiger anyway. The evidence is that the minor concessions made via the WTO and its predecessor body (GATT) have had very little beneficial effect. But special concessions to allow goods from poor countries into rich countries do have a large beneficial effect.

Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya argue that the bilateral trade deals are pretty useless too and that real free trade would be much better.

Colin Teese argues that the proposed US-Australia "Free Trade" agreement is of dubious value too -- depending on your assumptions. But there is little doubt that it will help our farmers IF it gives them better access to the US market. But that is the big sticking point of course.

"Globalisation is good" tells a tale of two countries that were equally poor 50 years ago - Taiwan and Kenya. Today Taiwan is 20 times richer than Kenya. We meet the farmers and entrepreneurs that could develop Taiwan because it introduced a market economy and integrated into global trade. And we meet the Kenyan farmers and slum dwellers that are still desperately poor, because Kenya shut its door to globalisation. Link via Valete Fratres.

US to China: Make goods more expensive! "There is, it seems, a segment of the American population that firmly believes China to be the greatest economic threat facing our country. As if domestic taxation, regulation and deficit spending were of negligible effect upon America's economic well being, dealing with the threat from the Far East now ranks as our nation's #1 priority." And what a "threat" it is: How dare they sell us electrical goods at low prices!

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GREENIE NONSENSE

Environmental scientists must stop crying wolf: "There is a crisis emerging in the scientific community. The ideals of science are being sacrificed to the god of political expediency. Environmental scientists are becoming so obsessed with the righteousness of their cause that they are damning those who wish to use science as an objective tool in public policy decisions."

As an example of crying wolf, A Little More to the Right has some remarkable pictures of that ozone hole in the atmosphere that the Greenies are all so desperately worried about.

The latest EU attack on chemicals is just chasing rainbows. Even water, salt and vitamins are bad for you if misused or taken in excessive doses. Chemical safety is a myth -- but a very costly myth for us all. And more regulations are most unlikely to improve our already high level of safety.

Moon power alright: "Homes on the Arctic tip of Norway started getting power from the moon on Saturday via a unique subsea power station driven by the rise and fall of the tide." What a lot of rot! What do they do when the tide is on the turn? Turn to coal, oil or nuclear power, of course. Intermittent sources of energy just force a hugely expensive doubling up of generating capacity.

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ELSEWHERE

I like it! Apparently there is a college in Cuba named after Korean Communist dictator Kim Il Sung. The WSJ wryly comments: "Kim Il Sung Economic College in Cuba? Sounds almost as left-wing as American colleges." There is also a fun post about the metric system on the same page. As a born-and-bred Imperial man, I think America is the only place where they still measure things properly. Both Britain and Australia have converted to Metric.

Putting it plainly: "Fear of provoking terrorists is a cowardly basis on which to oppose war."

Good to see: "President Bush renewed his campaign against what he considers abuses of the legal system Saturday, returning to a longtime interest that remained mostly sidelined during the first two years of his presidency. In his weekly radio address, Bush pushed for Congress to limit damage awards in medical malpractice cases, arguing that lawsuits are sending malpractice insurance costs soaring so that shortages of doctors are occurring in many places." Australia has done it, why not the U.S.?

Interested Participant has the story about the Leftist "Rainbow Family" who love the earth but trash national forests at great cost to the taxpayer.

The Wicked one has just given the rural socialists (tax-fed farmers) another blast.

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SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL FINDINGS YOU CAN USE!

Emory University researcher Sarah Brosnan has found that monkeys get envious if another monkey does better than them and start behaving in angry and irrational ways. I have often pointed out that a lot of Leftism is genetically encoded so that monkeys are Leftists is no surprise to me.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at whether or not there is such a thing as racism. What I found was that there is only a weak tendency for dislike of one ethnic group to generalize to dislike of another ethnic group. This indicates that most ethnic dislikes are NOT motivated by an overall attitude of racism. It shows that most people who express views that Leftists would call “racist” are in fact simply objecting to real phenomena that they dislike.

My theme that what the Leftists say about conservatives is mostly Freudian “projection” is confirmed in a recent WSJ article, where Bruce Bartley gives chapter and verse of Democrats accusing Republicans of things that they themselves do repeatedly. He concludes: “When Democrats assert that the Republicans will do anything to win, their complaint is relevant only in terms of what psychologists call "projection," finding your own faults in others”

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PORTUGAL

Well, shiver me timbers! (as an old sailor might say). It turns out that at least two of the Lusosphere (Portuguese-language) blogs that have been linking to me are actually from Portugal, not Brazil. If the blogs concerned had been in German or Italian I might have figured their origin out better but Portuguese stretches me a bit too far. At least I figured out that they were in Portuguese! Enlightenment came via this email from Joao Noronha of Valete Fratres (just to confuse you that means “Farewell brothers” in LATIN):

“At least a few of your Portuguese language readers and fans are... Portuguese. But the problems here are not very different from those described in by your Brazilian reader (and Lula is a media hero here in Portugal.) In Portugal, a member of the EU, NATO, etc..., our constitution, mostly written in 1975 by Marxists, still states that we're trying to build a socialist society (preamble 4th paragraph)... A minister has recently proposed that we revise the constitution in order to get rid of all that ideological nonsense... He was immediately classified as a "far-right extremist".”

Joao has lots of interesting posts transcribed from English-language sources so pay him a visit. And I have also now heard from another blogger in Portugal -- Miguel Noronha of O Intermitente -- who links to me. He quotes some English-language sources too.

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FROM “TOWNHALL”

W. F. Buckley defends Israel's security fence and ridicules the pressure against it from GWB. Linda Chavez agrees.

Pandering to the Arabs: What a blooper! When will GWB give up on a failed policy?

Walter Williams applies a bit of sarcasm to the idea that "We need a job-saving law" in the high-tech industries.

Michelle Malkin says all that can be said about the recent picture of unborn babies smiling.

“It was only a matter of time, I suppose. Comic-book superheroes have gone into the liberal political indoctrination business.” More here

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ELSEWHERE

Wayne Lusvardi drew my attention to this story about a Greenie vandal who destroys SUVs. The vandal describes himself as: “a high school dropout with a passion for math as well as Greek and Roman history” ... A math formula — Euler's Theorem — was spray painted on one of the SUVs as a way of distinguishing the participants' work. "We thought it would be nice to have something a little kooky just in case this happened," he said, adding that he finds the formula "beautiful." Comparing the guy to the Unabomber, Wayne comments: “Should we be afraid of the anti-intellectuals like President Bush or the pseudo-intellectuals like the eco-terrorists?”

Mike Tremoglie reports a little-known happening in the City of Brotherly Love: “A Molotov cocktail was tossed into the campaign office of the white, Jewish, Republican candidate for mayor Sam Katz... Supposing the circumstances were that a Molotov had been thrown into the campaign office of a black, Democrat, mayoral candidate and the campaign workers for the white, Republican, Jewish mayor had been implicated. How long would it be before CBS/NBC/ABC/CNN/MSNBC/NPR/ New York Times and the rest of the usual suspects would be reporting live from North Philadelphia?

Even in Seattle ... “A proposal to levy a 10-cent-per-cup tax on espresso in what is known as the coffee capital of the nation was overwhelmingly rejected on Tuesday by Seattle voters. The measure failed by two to one” How nasty it is for Leftists when they have to give people a choice!

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CONSTITUTIONS: THE GIPPPER SAYS IT BEST

"I had a copy of the Soviet Constitution and I read it with great interest. And I saw all kinds of terms in there that sound just exactly like our own: 'Freedom of assembly' and 'freedom of speech' and so forth. Of course, they don't allow them to have those things, but they're in there in the constitution. But I began to wonder about the other constitutions -- everyone has one -- and our own, and why so much emphasis on ours. And then I found out, and the answer was very simple -- that's why you don't notice it at first. But it is so great that it tells the entire difference. All those other constitutions are documents that say, 'We, the government, allow the people the following rights,' and our Constitution says 'We the People, allow the government the following privileges and rights.' We give our permission to government to do the things that it does. And that's the whole story of the difference--why we're unique in the world and why no matter what our troubles may be, we're going to overcome." --Ronald Reagan. Via The Federalist.

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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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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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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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