MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL WHO COME BY HERE

I am an atheist but I still love Christmas and am profoundly grateful for my Judeo-Christian roots. I hope other non-Christians can enjoy as much as I do this season of goodwill and hope.

I pinched the inspirational quote below from Valete Fratres. He has some good quotes from Mother Teresa too.

"'A young man whose father is a carpenter grows up working in his father's shop. He has no formal education. He owns no property of any kind. One day he puts down his tools and walks out of his father's shop. He starts preaching on street corners and in the nearby countryside. Walking from place to place preaching all the while even though he is in no way an ordained minister he never gets farther than an area perhaps 100 miles wide at the most. He does this for three years. Then he is arrested, tried and convicted. There is no court of appeal so he is executed at age 33 along with two common thieves. Those in charge of his execution roll dice to see who gets his clothing -- the only possessions he has. His family cannot afford a burial place so he is interred in a borrowed tomb. End of story? No, this uneducated, propertyless young man who preached on street corners for only three years who left no written word has for 2000 years had a greater effect on the entire world than all the rulers, kings and emperors, all the conquerors, the generals and admirals, all the scholars, scientists and philosophers who ever lived -- all put together. How do we explain that? ...Unless he really was what he said he was.'

Ronald Reagan (Who else?)

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INDIA IS MORE ENGLISH THAN WE THINK

I have often made the point that the Left/Right divide in the English-speaking world is largely a divide between the traditional English form of political organization -- which was decentralized and consultative -- versus a desire for something like an all-powerful oriental despotism. Conservatives like the traditional limited power of the centre while Leftists want to centralize all power in their hands. I trace the English tradition of limited central power all the way back to the primitive German tribes (Angles and Saxons) who conquered Britannia 1500 years ago and made it into England.

An Indian reader has noted my arguments to that effect and says that the political organization of the early Aryan settlers of North India was similar to that of the early Anglo-Saxons: "Far from the widely held perception of 'Oriental despotism', their political system required the king ('Rajan') to act in a manner which may be described as a constitutional monarchy of sorts. He was assisted in administration by two assemblies called 'Sabha' and 'Samiti' which could even depose him if he was found to be tyrannical or currupt. Hereditary succession was not guaranteed. Later of course with the absorption of small kingdoms into a large 'Magadhan' Empire - which was strong enough to deter Alexander from invading Central India -- the 'Rajan' became 'Samrat' or Emperor and the assemblies gradually became redundant".

And Ancient Rome too started out as a republic with a powerful Senate and elected rulers. And the ancient Greeks are widely credited with having invented democracy -- though as all readers of Thucydides know, the direct form of democracy that the Athenians favoured was disastrous for them. So it seems that our good luck (or good management) as Anglo-Saxons is simply that original Indo-European traditions and systems survived longer among us than elsewhere.

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ELSEWHERE

Readers of this blog will of course have noted that Keith Burgess-Jackson and I often link to one-another. We also correspond quite a bit. What many may not realize, however, is that Keith and I actually disagree on a whole heap of things -- even on such a basic thing as the meaning of "right" and "wrong". We both enjoy careful analytical discussion of issues, however, so respect and enjoy one-another's thoughts because of that. Wouldn't it be nice if Leftists had enough intellectual calibre to discuss things that way too? Regrettably, however, all they usually seem to have is emotionalism, closed-mindedness and abuse.

An interesting excerpt from China Hand's Xmas letter. He says of his wife Susanna: "She spent the first half of the year in China although she only planned a short stay. SARS intervened and kept us hunkered down in Huizhou fearing lengthy detention for quarantine on a premature return. It was nice for Alfred coming home to home cooked food every night! She filled the time by tutoring groups of local and Korean students in English which she proved to be very good at. Teaching the locals was no challenge. But the most interesting was the Koreans - they were two 13 year old students living with their parents here in China. They communicated with Susanna in Chinese. So we thought it amusing that a Hong Kong Chinese (native language Cantonese) was teaching English to Koreans in Mandarin Chinese" The Xmas pic for the "China Hand" family is here

Wayne Lusvardi says that both modern day California and Iraq are "failed States".

There is a good article here on how politicized global warming theory has become. Distinguished scientists can be sacked if they are not of the Greenie religion. It shows how shaky the evidence is upon which the global warming claims are based. All the long-known evidence (including the settlement of Greenland by Vikings) that the earth had a warm period in the Middle Ages too has to be ignored, for a start.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again in a special Xmas edition.

If you have ever had any building work done for you, you will appreciate the real story behind the building of Noah's ark -- as related by The Wicked one

My latest upload of a published academic journal article (here or here) is one of my papers on criminology. I shoot down a Leftist academic who uses elitist arguments in defence of his "soft on crime" attitudes.

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IF CONSERVATIVES ARE SUPPOSED TO FAVOUR THE STATUS QUO, NO-ONE TOLD RICHARD NIXON

To reasonable people (NOT including Leftist psychologists) the Reagan/Thatcher revolution disposed once and for all of the Leftist myth that conservatives are mindless folk with no ideas of their own who simply favour no change from how things are. But from Edmund Burke onwards, that has never been true. What is usually conveniently forgotten is that it was not even true of Richard Milhous Nixon (37th President of the USA).

Nixon chose liberty rather than the status quo: Gary North at Lew Rockwell.com has an interesting piece on how Nixon abolished conscription and instituted an all volunteer army. North points out that for a conservative government to eliminate a long established policy, one that had been in place since FDR, during a war and against considerable opposition from the military (at that time), was "nothing short of remarkable". North traces the influence of a small group of libertarian economists, including Dr Martin Anderson, who originally sold Nixon on the idea. And it was Donald Rumsfeld who as a junior Congressman introduced the legislation to abolish the draft. Of course, neither Rummy or the "neo-liberal" economists who ended the draft get any credit or recognition from the left.

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ELSEWHERE

AUSTRALIA'S radical Muslims are trying to sabotage Christmas, according to the nation's most senior Islamic leader, Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali. The accusation from the Islamic mufti is based on a Wahabist edict from Saudi Arabia, which he said had been circulating among Australia's fundamentalist Muslims.... The edict says Muslims must not greet anyone with the phrase "Merry Christmas" and must not return the season's greetings to anyone who offers them... According to Sheikh al-Hilali, the edict also asks: "How can you Muslims participate with Christians in their festivals and celebrations? How can you greet them on this occasion in relation to the falsehood in their religion which is a symbol of their misguided, disbelieving creed?

Mike Tremoglie looks at the common Leftist claim that white cops are always killing blacks. He points to statistics showing that white cops kill fewer blacks than black cops do. Arguably, however, the cops should be more trigger-happy than they are. Why? Because "Young black males murdered police officers at a rate almost 6 times that of young white males"

Is organ bootlegging inevitable? "Not only the means, but also the motives exist to jumpstart an involuntary organ market: the shortage of transplantable organs continues to worsen worldwide. In the United States alone, the list of patients waiting for an organ continues to lengthen. There are, for example, some 83,000 people waiting for a kidney. Despite all the above, involuntary black markets in human organs are not inevitable. Aboveground markets and science can keep those urban legends legendary."

A problem without a solution? "Forty-three percent of black pregnancies end in abortion, according to a recent study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and advocacy organization promoting sex education. Nearly 70 percent of all black children are born out-of-wedlock. These two facts taken together should be perceived by everyone as clear evidence of a marriage and family crisis in black America.

Neil Cavuto says: "The French want to strike a deal with us. The Germans are saying nice things about us. And the Russians just might entertain a partnership with us. But wait a minute, I thought all these guys hated us? I think they still do, but something changed. Saddam Hussein has been captured. And now the countries who wouldn't do squat to remove him are tripping over themselves to strike a deal with the country that did. Nothing succeeds, it seems, like success"

Surprise, surprise! "If principals were put in charge of their individual schools and allowed to run them as small businesses, is it likely the schools would be more successful than if the schools and their resources were directed by a central office? After studying a variety of public and Catholic school systems in North America, UCLA Professor of Management William G. Ouchi concludes in a new book that decentralized school systems run more efficiently and produce better student achievement."

The Wild Monk points out that the Left can only say "Bush Lied" because they do not share his perspective. What the Left see as "lies", other see as common-sense! But of course the main point of the Leftist "Bush lied" chant is projective -- to distract attention from their own chronic dishonesty -- such as their decades-long scoffing at the evils of Stalin and the Soviet system.

Aaron Gross has a lot of fun Googlebombing and recommends that you Google this term: "cuckolded dyke"

A fun story about TV "psychics" via Marc Miyake: "One day we were sitting in the [fire] station and a commercial came on TV for one of these psychic readers. I had mentioned how these readings are bogus. To prove it I called the 800 number and when they asked me for my credit card number I said "you're the psychic, you tell me what my number is." They hung up on me and the guys at the station couldn't stop laughing."

Michael Darby is online again with a new range of posts as under:
The Case Against Killing Saddam
Cathy Buckle: Disaster in Zimbabwe
Good News from Prodos
Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ"
Australian Defence Force needs to be able to venture far afield
Killing him Softly
Mark Latham MP on the Ukqwitt Register

The Wicked one has found some lessons on how to deal with Islamic fundamentaism in a most unlikely source.

My latest upload of a published academic journal article (here or here) once again points out how a journal article was published that showed minimal awareness of the existing academic literature on the subject. Such behaviour is the besetting sin of psychology and renders science in the field concerned impossible.

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MORE ON THE CROOKED WOODMEN

As a comment on my recent post about the "Crooked Timber" blog (see December 21 below), one of my readers writes:

Crooked Timber is a collective blog with 12 members; the article you linked to was by Daniel Davies, also known in the blogosphere as "dsquared." The blog tends to the Left, but occasionally speaks up in favor of a libertarian view or two.

The Crooked Timber post that soured me on them was this one: about Amartya Sen's book Development as Freedom. The comments section attracted some lively input from people to the right of Sen and Crooked Timber, and the reactions of the Crooked Timber folks were despicable. Rather than engage the questions raised by the conservative commenters, they stooped (surprise) to ad hominem attacks, including the usual charges of intellectual dimness and racism. In the end they shut down the comments section; clearly they couldn't handle dissent in a constructive way. Bleh!

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ELSEWHERE

The Pope gets it right: "POPE John Paul II has praised Singaporeans for being able to live together harmoniously, especially now that religious tensions in the region are running high" What he does not ask is why. Would the Singapore government's absolute intolerance for lawlessness and tough penalties for crime have anything to do with it?

The churches that ordain homosexuals are losing both clergy and parishoners over it.

Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman-elect Jeffrey Lucy said today he was passionate about business regulation. What can you expect of a bureaucrat?

"When, one wonders, did conservatism in America become hip? In the US the new millennium seems to have entrenched a growing trend among the younger generations that, if not culturally conservative, is anti-liberal" I myself think that young people have been bored silly by the constant obsessive preaching from their Leftist teachers.

I have just learned via NZ Pundit that the BBC have banned reporters from calling Saddam Hussein a former dictator. Instead, staff must refer to the barbaric mass murderer as "the deposed former President". Is speaking the truth bad taste at the BBC or is it just a general rule not to speak ill of socialists?

Jeff Jacoby has some pretty searing comments on General Wesley Clark's activities in the former Yugoslavia -- friendly antics with vicious Serbian mass-murderers and then failing to catch any of them when they became wanted men.

European anti-Americanism: "During the Cold War the Western Alliance was essential for Europeans scared stiff of a menacing Soviet Union, but it also meant subordination to American leadership. Dependence breeds resentment and a strong desire to reassert one's independence. That desire was strongly in evidence in a Gaullist France even during the Cold War. When that struggle ended it was widespread. When fighting broke out in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1991, for example, the immediate reaction of Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission, was 'We do not interfere in American affairs. We hope they will have enough respect not to interfere in ours'. A few years later, of course, after they had failed to deal with the problem, Europeans were pleading with Washington to intervene in the Balkans. "

Despite their solidarity with the working class, and despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth over how conservatives treat the poor, Leftists turn out to be the cheap ones. A definite "compassion" transplant is needed for them. They only want to give away other people's money, not their own.

SF Fan has some good posts up at the moment. I liked this comment on the Vatican claim that the US forces in Iraq treated Saddam like a cow: "That's a load of bull. Sure we're going to milk as much information out of him as possible but that's no reason to have a beef with us. I wouldn't steer you wrong. After all, our honor is at steak!"

Useful Fools has an amusing graphic about the "threat levels" posed by Democrat candidates.

PID has a new post on foreign aid, guest workers and why Australia's multiculturalists don't like them

This post at Cronaca gave me a laugh: "Cholesterol-free mice that would make healthy snacks for cats have been created by scientists. The mice completely lack cholesterol, generally thought to be essential for survival, yet are relatively healthy".

I have just put up here Chris Brand's latest thoughts. He has a big coverage of the motivations behind the sex-mad Ian Huntley -- who has just been convicted of murdering two ten-year-old British schoolgirls.

The Wicked one says greed is STILL good.

My latest upload of a published academic journal article (here or here) is just another case of my pointing out that a fellow-psychologist fails to tell the whole story about his subject -- something I did on many occasions. The Leftist domination of psychology means that they are just not interested in the whole truth on any subject -- and it shows. As long as the conclusions support some Leftist preconception, theory or prejudice, it MUST be right!

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THE CLINTON LEGACY

"How dare we forget his appeasement toward North Korea, virtually inviting her to cheat on her nuclear agreements? Or how about his immediate retreat at the first sign of blood in Mogadishu and his persistent inaction in the face of recurring Al Qaeda terrorism against American targets, both of which virtually invited the September 11 attacks?

How about Clinton's emasculation of the FBI and CIA? He not only loathed the military, but our vital intelligence services as well. And, as Lowry details, he "refocused the CIA on humanitarian interventions, economic security, the environment, and a host of issues associated with global crime _" Terrorism was buried in a blizzard of other boutique, post-historical priorities."

Lowry shows that Clinton treated terrorism as a law enforcement matter, rather than warfare. At Clinton's direction, the FBI became the lead agency in the war on terror -- "a task for which it was inherently unfit." As a law enforcement agency, honor bound and structured to operate within the rules of evidence and the high standards of proof of American courtrooms, its hands were tied, and it was rendered ineffectual working against terrorism."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

I have just received a Xmas email from Chris Brand wishing me "Happy Kwanzaa!" I got one last year too I think. Like me, his sense of humour gets away with him sometimes. There was a happy Xmas photo of Chris and his wife in chilly Edinburgh attached which I reproduce here. If you look at the picture and then consult the classic Bogardus scale of social distance you will see what a racist Chris is! Leftist wiseheads of course don't believe Bogardus and say that "Some of my best friends are Jewish" is an antisemitic saying. None of them have however ever been able to tell me what a Philosemite would say! "Some of my worst enemies are Jewish", perhaps? I myself know only one person of Jewish ancestry well and he is one of the finest men I know. I guess that makes ME a pretty evil character by Leftist logic!

Those wacky Canadians again! Some Canadian veterinarian nearly euthanized the owner instead of the dog that was supposed to be put down! Not very politically correct and distinctly negligent!

"Economists have isolated the effects of extended unemployment benefits. Since many workers wait until their benefits are almost exhausted before taking a new job, the effect of extending benefits beyond 26 weeks simply extends the date when they have to take a job. One estimate concluded that for each week benefits are extended, the average duration of unemployment increases by about a day ..."

Indian born Australian academic Sudha Shenoy has some sharp words for the enemies of free trade -- including the current US government -- here. Sudha was asked on a recent trip to the US about public anti-intellectualism in Australian society. Apparently she said Australia was one of the few countries that treated intellectuals with the disrespect they deserved.

Sowell: "One of the reasons our children do not measure up academically to children in other countries is that so much time is spent in American classrooms twisting our history for ideological purposes.... "

GWB is building a $300 Million black history museum

Hopefully he'll do a better job than the new "postmodern" National Museum of Australia. About the same time this $200 M "politically correct" white elephant was being built one of finest, well established museums in the country, Sydney's Australia Museum was having it's magnificent collection selectively looted ...thanks to lack of funds for elementary security and asset management

At PID there is a post criticising the use and abuse of sanctions against Smith's Rhodesia, Mugabe's Zimbabwe and Iraq

Keith Burgess-Jackson has an oblique comment on my post yesterday about equality of results versus equality of opportunity. He points out that there are many versions of equality/inequality in between those cases and that one could reasonably choose any of them. He notes that even Rawls (the philosopher beloved of Leftists for his attempts to justify equality) allows inequality as having advantages.

I seem to have had a bit more free time available than usual lately so I have expanded my online biography by adding in a lot of the fun bits that I initially left out for the sake of brevity. See here or here.

My latest upload of a published academic journal article (details here or here) is a highly technical one but in it I rip apart some simplistic theories put forward by one of the grandees of Australian academic psychology. I show that at several points even his own data contradict his contentions. It must have caused some heartburn. LBJ once said of an outspoken person that he would rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. For the Australian psychology establishment, however, I was always firmly outside the tent so I had no hesitation in pissing on them when the opportunity arose. Perhaps they were right. I would have pissed on them anyhow. I was born outspoken. And anybody who remembers my mother will know where I get it from.

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CROOKED ALL-RIGHT!

"Crooked Timber" seems to be some sort of Leftist philosopher. I would never have read him except that Keith Burgess-Jackson seems to take him seriously. His defence of the Leftist "equality of results" doctrine versus the more conservative "equality of opportunity" doctrine is summarized by him in the two questions below:

1. What's the point of doing anything if you're not going to check whether it worked or not?
2. How do you find out whether a course of action worked or not, other than by the results?

He seems to think that these questions trump further discussion. So perhaps I should point out that they do not. The snide thing about the two questions is that "it worked" is not defined -- presumably in order to suggest that the favoured alternative (equal outcomes) is the only reasonable definition of it. Building your desired conclusions into your premises is an old Leftist trick of course, as I have shown many times before (e.g. here). A layman might call it "loading the dice".

So let me suggest some alternative definitions of "it worked". One suggestion would surely be that treating a person according to his own qualities rather than according to the qualities or wealth of his parents was a pretty desirable thing to do in and of itself. Why does it need to "work" in any way external to itself? If that is accepted, the Crooked One's point 2 becomes redundant.

Even if the deed is not taken to be intrinsically good, however, there are surely many, many alternative definitions of "it worked" available. If, for instance, it made people feel happier because it convinced them that they lived in a fair society, would that not be something that might cause us to say "it worked"? And checking that result could be as simple as doing a social survey.

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ELSEWHERE

I did not mention the Libyan story yesterday since everyone else was all over it but Hippercritical has some reasonable comments. Clearly, however, it is a huge triumph for GWB's policies. Saddam's capture must have tipped the scales.

The latest batch of government economic data reveals a new theme: inflation-free boom. It's a business-led scenario this country hasn't seen in many years. Bush administration supply-siders who argued in favor of permanent tax incentives to grow the investment side of the economy are being proven exactly right. Former top Bush economist Glen Hubbard -- one of the principal authors of last May's growth bill that lowered Uncle Sam's tax bite on investment by roughly 40 percent -- deserves loud kudos. Liberal columnist Paul Krugman, who opposes supply-side tax cuts at every turn, deserves a resounding Bronx cheer. Both the economy and the stock market (the Dow has moved past 10,000, and the S&P is up 23 percent on the year) are voting for President Bush.

Leftist Will Hutton is no fan of Bush, but unlike 90% of the world's environmentalists, he says the real action is in "The States", whereas the Europeans are smug. And Hutton is not kidding when he says "the States", he says that the U.S. State governments are the leading environmental reformers in the world. So you would think the Green/Left would love America, wouldn't you? No such luck of course. Like Hitler and the Islamic fundamentalists, they cannot be appeased.

Great news! Switzerland is now one of the countries which have recognized that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the mostly Christian Armenians in 1915. Muslims committing genocide? How amazing! The Kemalists took over Turkey from the Ottomans not long after that and have kept Turkey out of the hands of the Islamists since but even they are pretty brutal to their minorities -- the Kurds particularly. The last truly decent Muslim regime seems to have been that of the Kurd Saladin in the 12th century. The only prominent Muslim man of peace in the last 100 years that I can think of is Egyptian President Anwar Sadat -- and the Islamists shot him!

What's up with American Realpolitik? It's a great site -- specializing in political cartoons -- but every time I have tried to log on lately all I have got is the banner headline. Their server must be worse than blogspot -- which is saying something

Writing on Sasha Castel's blog, Scott Wickstein says that the generation of power via nuclear fusion is going commercial -- sort of. Nobody can decide where to put it, though. A notable absentee from the list of contributors to Sasha's blog is one Andrew Ian Dodge. I understand Sasha now lives in Canberra, Australia. I wonder where Andrew has got to? Did he ever make it to England?

Apparently Canada's new Prime Minister has taken some token steps in a Rightwards direction. We must be thankful for small mercies, I guess.

I am pleased to see that Michael Jennings too likes real ale. Australians are usually very rigid about liking only the lager beers that they are used to in Australia. My favourite drop was Ruddles County when I was in England. But Michael's wish for good food in an English pub is a tad optimistic.

Aaron Oakley has some good posts about the stupid and enormously expensive windmill craze that Greenies pushed so hard for so long.

I have just put up here some more of Chris Brand's latest thoughts -- on toyboys and other things.

My latest upload of a published academic journal article (here or here) is just another case of my demolishing the ill-informed arguments of a Leftist psychologist. A bit too technical for most readers, though.

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THE LYING SKEPTICS

It gets worse. It looks like "The Skeptical Inquirer" was not credulous but straight-out dishonest in their support for the global warming theory. They depicted their favoured report on global warming as the outcome of a standard scientific peer-review process. As this report from Stats.org notes, it was nothing of the sort. What was published was a totally distorted version of what the scientists had said:

Frederick Seitz, former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, claimed that he had "never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the event that led to this IPCC report." Seitz went on to charge that nearly all of the editorial changes made by the report's lead author, Benjamin Santer, "worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general or global warming in particular." Others, including the independent but industry-backed Global Climate Coalition (GCC) went so far as to claim that the report had been "scientifically cleansed" in a political effort to emphasize alarm about global warming while deleting references to uncertainty.

And the second report that the Skeptics quoted also said nothing like what they claim:

"Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a report on climate change, prepared in response to a request from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol... As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This the full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them."

Clearly, the Skeptics have been taken over by Greenie propagandists, with their characteristic disregard for the truth. Sad indeed.

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ELSEWHERE

Great stuff! In Canada a single guy can get a pension by claiming that he had a homosexual lover who died. Bad luck if your lover happens to have been a woman, I guess. "In what the gay community is describing as a monumental decision, an Ontario court ruled Friday that the federal government has discriminated against same-sex couples by denying pension benefits to survivors whose partners died before 1998"

Reality is beginning to bite for Germany's socialists. They have just introduced some reforms that are at least in the right direction: "Restrictive employment protection laws will be eased to enable small companies to dismiss workers at short notice. Unemployment and social welfare benefits will be merged to reduce costs. At the same time Germany's long-term unemployed will face penalties if they refuse to take up jobs even if they pay below union rates... The programme also includes measures to ... lower income tax"

More welfare abuse: "A STRING of Aboriginal work-for-the dole programs set up under the federal Government's $450million indigenous employment program, have collapsed amid allegations of financial misappropriation and mismanagement"

More glories of socialized medicine: "A woman was left to give birth alone in a hospital corridor, then told she had no choice but to watch her premature baby die"

Jeff Jacoby details some of the horrors perpetrated on the Iraqis by Saddam and says that no conceivable punishment can fit his crimes.

I guess its a start: "The Bush administration reached a free-trade agreement with four Central American countries yesterday, setting up a tough trade fight in Congress in an election year. The trade accord -- reached just weeks before the 10th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement -- would allow more than 80 percent of U.S. consumer and industrial products into Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras duty-free as soon as it went into force."

Michelle Malkin: "From homeland security personnel, I continue to hear open-borders horror stories. A Border Patrol agent who works along the northern border reports that federal immigration judges in his area are subverting the deportation process by refusing to issue arrest warrants for illegal alien absconders (fugitives who have been ordered deported but never showed up for their hearings). A special agent notes that San Diego supervisors continue to discourage interior immigration enforcement near the southern border. And countless rank-and-file immigration enforcement officers have written to express disgust at Washington's bipartisan talk of "amnesty" for millions of immigration law-breakers whose presence makes a mockery of homeland defense. What good is it, they wonder, to send American soldiers to defend other countries' borders if we're not willing to defend our own? "

Price controls can be deadly: "Who would ever dream that the economic fallacies to which U.S. officials subscribe could turn deadly? Yet that's what recently happened in Baghdad, where an American GI was shot dead while guarding long lines of angry and disgruntled consumers at a gasoline station in Baghdad. Why are there long lines at gas stations in Iraq?"

The Wicked one has got some good funnies up at the moment.

My latest academic upload here or here looks at attitude to Europe in England and Scotland shortly after the UK had joined. At that time opposition to joining in with Europe was primarliy associated with generally old-fashioned attitudes. I think that shows that being old-fashioned can have its advantages.

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Blogspot seems to be having another one of their "bad" periods at the moment. They have resumed "fixing" things that "aint broke". As a result, my posts on blogspot yesterday did not show all day. I know from comments that some people did however use my mirror sites instead. "PC WATCH" was out of action all day too so I have decided that I will from now on put up a mirror site for it too. The mirror is HERE.



FROM BROOKES NEWS:

Truth about Iraq -- or what the media is hiding The media has been lying to us about the real situation in Iraq. An American army officer reveals just how much progress has been made. So why have some of our journalists been lying?
George Soros, markets and democracy Recent comments by Soros on markets and democracy simply show how little knowledge of economics and history this 'brilliant' financier actually possesses. His political activities also bring into question his integrity.
Kuwaiti Daily declares that US won't quit in its war on terrorism Ahmad Al-Jarallah, the Editor-in-Chief of the Kuwaiti dailies Al-Siyassa and Arab Times, praised the U.S. fight against Jihad fighters. The following are excerpts from the article.
Taxes cuts and politics The present tax mess should really focus attention on Latham's approach to taxation and incomes compared with Beazley's approach.
Taiwanese marched for independence and democracy Up to 150,000 marchers descended on the Presidential Office to demand that President Chen Shui-bian scrap the Republic of China (ROC) and its symbols, and change the name of the country to Taiwan.

Details here

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MORE ON THE CREDULOUS "SKEPTICS":

A reader writes:

"Your blog mentions that the "Skeptical Enquirer" seems to be impressed by a pro-global warming petition. "They say that because 2500 "scientists" signed a document saying that mankind is causing global warming therefore it must be true.

Well, there is a 19,200 name long petition here -- signed by "17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two-thirds with advanced degrees... Signers of this petition so far include 2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists..who are especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's atmosphere and climate. ..(and) ..5,017 scientists whose fields of specialization in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and other life sciences"

There have of course been attempts by environmentalist true believers to sabotage the petition drive. However the organisers have, to their credit, made efforts to ensure its validity. "Of the 19,700 signatures that the project has received in total so far, 17,800 have been independently verified and the other 1,900 have not yet been independently verified. Of those signers holding the degree of PhD, 95% have now been independently verified. One name that was sent in by enviro pranksters, Geri Halliwell, PhD, has been eliminated. Several names, such as Perry Mason and Robert Byrd are still on the list even though enviro press reports have ridiculed their identity with the names of famous personalities. They are actual signers. Perry Mason, for example, is a PhD Chemist. " Of course science is never based on an opinion poll of practitioners. And governments and voters need to be skeptical about sacrificing long established rights and traditional freedoms on the altar of the scientific dogma du jour. The history of eugenics is a case in point.�

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing comment here about how the Left could see nothing good in the capture of Saddam and will not see any good in any conceivable events involving him.

It looks like Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, has had the last laugh against his critics in his home-country of Denmark.

Sowell: “Lawlessness usually conjures up images of a wild frontier or mobs in the streets. But the painful reality is that the supreme examples of lawlessness in our times are in the august and sedate chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.�

Bruce Bartlett puts the finger on WHY a lot of American manufacturing is ailing -- the huge costs imposed on it by government laws and regulations. It does look like the U.S. government is trying to drive jobs offshore.

Mark Steyn says Rumsfeld should be admired for being a plain speaker

Bleeding Brain has an amusing post about how insensitive he is when it comes to other people’s religions.

I thought at first that PrestoPundit must have a great sense of humour when I saw that he had this blog listed under “liberal bloggers� but on second thoughts I realized that he is very properly resisting the entirely inappropriate takeover of the word “liberal� by Leftists.

The latest upload of a chapter from my book shows that Leftist enmity to freedom of speech goes back a long way. Details here or in chapter 29 here. The fierce and unremitting attacks on freedom of speech by Leftists is one of the clearest proofs there is of how totalitarian and Fascistic Leftism basically is. Leftists cannot AFFORD to allow completely free speech. They NEED to monopolize the channels of communication. Why? Because the more people in general get to know about any Leftist assertion, the more absurd it will be seen to be. Leftism is simplistic and simplistic thinking cannot withstand the light of day.

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SOME N.Z. STUPIDITY

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon is famous for commenting that the constant flow of emigration from New Zealand to Australia "raises the IQ of both countries" -- implying that the Kiwis who emigrate are stupid but Australians are even stupider. That comment is only one example of a generally derogatory view of Australians almost universally held in New Zealand: Much like the attitude of Canadians towards the USA --- and for similar reasons: resentment of a more affluent and capable big brother.

I was therefore rather amused by something that happened recently. A few months ago I bought some shares in one of the icons of New Zealand industry -- Fisher & Paykel, best known for making high-tech washing machies. Yesterday I received a dividend cheque from them -- to my amazement. These days dividends are normally deposited directly into a shareholder's bank A/c. Shortly after you buy into a company, they send you a form asking for your bank particulars and thereafter the money just appears on your statement. Fisher & Paykel sent me no such form, however, so I had to make a special trip to the bank to deposit their pesky cheque -- which I regard as a prehistoric thing to have to do. But it does not end there. I resolved to write to them and ask them to deposit my dividends directly in the future. But nowhere on the documentation that came with the cheque was there any address that I could write to! So I looked up their Annual Report, a big glossy production with lots of colour photographs, graphs, auditor reports and all the usual nonsense that you expect of a company annual report. But there was no address anywhere there either! Which is probably illegal, I would think. It was only by digging out the envelope that the report came in that I found a return address on the back of that. But that is not the end of the story either! Included with my cheque was a cheque to someone else with their dividend! Which I of course promptly sent on to the correct recipient. If that is how bright a New Zealand high-flyer is, it does not say much for the average Kiwi.

I guess NZ Pundit will never forgive me for saying that.

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THE SKEPTICS HAVE SOLD OUT

It is sad to see a voice of reason fall silent but exactly that seems to have happened over at "The Skeptical Inquirer". They quite rightly say that limitless skepticism leads nowhere. To be precise it leads to solipsism -- doubting everything but your own existence -- but the means they propose to limit skepticism are astounding. They seem to want to decide scientific truth not on the facts or on the balance of the probabilities but by majority vote! If you had taken a majority vote among the learned men of Galileo’s day you would have "discovered" that the sun rotated around the earth. And you would be WRONG! The example they give is instructive. They say that because 2500 "scientists" signed a document saying that mankind is causing global warming therefore it must be true. No weighting to the degree of expertise of the "scientists" involved is given (I cannot imagine 2500 "experts" in any scientific field -- which makes the whole thing reek of a propaganda exercise) nor is any account taken of how many of them stand to lose their research grants if the theory is disproven. But above all, no weighting is given to the many discordant FACTS -- such as evidence that global warming is occurring on Mars too. Did mankind cause THAT? Or did solar variability do it? I think we will have to rename them "The Credulous Inquirer".

ELSEWHERE

Ludicrous an idea though it is, Greenies have bullied governments into spending billions on windmills as an "alternative" source of electricity, but it seems -- sorry, Mr and Mrs Taxpayer -- that windmills too are now bad: "Since the phalanx of giant windmills began churning in the air above the Altamont Pass east of San Francisco Bay, an estimated 22,000 birds have died, including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors, after flying into the spinning blades of the wind turbines". When will governments learn that it is impossible to please a Greenie?

Jeff Jacoby has a good post on how charitable donations so often don't go towards those whom they are supposed to help. I used to donate to World Vision until I discovered that they were anti-Israel. Ditto for the Red Cross. There's no simple solution. Even in India a lot of the street beggars are actually reasonably well-off by Indian standards. Treat people generously in your private life has always been my main idea of how to be kind.

Note the new address for Aaron’s Rantblog. His old address has gone to that great blogspot in the sky where blogspot sites do sometimes go. Warning: Aaron puts up lots of good graphics so his site is slow-loading unless you have a high-speed connection. Aaron’s current project is to get Hillary Clinton rather than George Bush as the No. 1 link returned by Google in response to the search-term “Miserable Failure�. A fun project, it seems to me. He has got an amusing photo of her up on his “failure� site.

Dave Huber has some more examples of the compulsive Leftism of the American teacher's union -- of which he is a regretful member.

Further to my suggestion on 15th that Saddam looked like Karl Marx, Valete Fratres has put up pictures of the two of them side by side. Scroll down to his post of 15th. The resemblance sure is there.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual select postings.

The Wicked one says that the old Soviet Union lives on -- in the U.S. bureaucracy. It is suing someone who transports elderly people too cheaply!

My latest academic upload (details here or here) is about why Scotland is a poor country when by all indicators it should be a rich one. Hint: They're knee-jerk socialists there. The enterprising Scots emigrated long ago.

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EDUCATION -- LEFTIST AND OTHERWISE

A reader notes that alternatives to the degraded “education” offered by the universities are emerging. There is a similar private J-School here in Brisbane too.:

“Keith Windschuttle and his wife Elizabeth run Macleay College a private college here in Sydney that teaches journalism, editing and PR. This college runs out of inner city locations so is easy for adult part time students to attend. Macleay students are highly regarded and tend to do better in the job market than their government trained competitors. And the idea of CBD based class rooms is something the government run colleges have never thought of. Anyone who has tried to work full time and study part time knows the pain extra commuting to and from college, over and above work commuting, causes. Windschuttle says journalism isn't an academic profession and should be seen simply as an apprenticeship, craft or trade. The main thing is accurate reporting, quality notes, documented sources and the routine follow up of other opinions. These "basics" are the things that have suffered as media sociology, political correctness and cultural relativism have replaced basic skills among academic trained journalists. The academic teachers of journalists must consider these basics beneath them. The recent Jason Blair affair and the BBC's failure to take notes in the David Kelley affair may suggest this. My guess is that a lot of the hostility Windschuttle has received has little to do with his controversial work on Australian frontier history and may represent a backlash from 'the profession'.”

Being a conservative in academe could be a lonely experience. Being born with the gift of self-confidence, I was never bothered a bit by it but I guess it would bother most. PID points out that in Australia’s “history wars” it is basically one man on the conservative side (Windschuttle) versus the rest. That sure is a lonely eminence! But it only takes one person to show that the Emperor has no clothes, of course. And for all their numbers, the lying Leftist historians still have no answer to Windschuttle. They have been forced into admissions that ought to have seen them sacked, in fact.

Now here is a sentence that any Leftist reading this blog will enjoy quoting out of context: I have recently been browsing through my copy of Mein Kampf and noted this comment about the Germany of Hitler’s time from the translator (Ralph Manheim): “Germany was a land of high general culture, with the largest reading public of any country in the world. In the lower middle class, there was a tremendous educational urge. People who in other countries would read light novels and popular magazines devoured works on art, science, history, and above all philosophy. Certain philosophical phrases became journalistic cliches. Hitler is forever speaking of ‘concepts', of things ‘as such' (an sich). Moreover, he is constantly at pains to show that he, too, is cultured”. So being intellectual and cultured leads where? Like Hitler, the intellectuals of today are mostly socialists too. Most intellectuals think they know it all and want to impose that on others. It is no coincidence that the most intellectual country in the world also became one of the most vicious. And Bolshevik Russia was run by bourgeois intellectuals too.

My goodness! The Tugboat has ventured into giving lessons about basic moral philosophy. He tries to explain what words like "ought" and "good" mean. He seems to wander about a lot, though. I think everybody now agrees that such terms function to commend but where we go from there is contentious. I myself would add that such statements can convey empirical claims but see nothing further that they could conceivably do or be -- though my deontologist friend and fellow-conservative Keith Burgess-Jackson thinks there is yet more to be found in such statements. I point out how my view is distinct from Leftist moral relativism here.

I have just discovered a new book on authoritarianism -- that favourite whipping-boy of Leftist psychologists. Only this time it is not conservatives under attack. The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, says that, behind the humanistic and permissive mask, gurus and other "alternative" cult figures and “teachers” are all really a bunch of authoritarians who subtly do their best to control others. I agree!

ELSEWHERE

I guess even the Devil would be a good guy if he was anti-American. “A senior Vatican official and critic of the war in Iraq said today that he felt compassion for Saddam Hussein, and he reproached the United States for releasing video footage showing the former Iraqi leader handled "like a cow." “

The media is reporting (shock! horror!) that segregationist Strom Thurmond had a child to a black woman. If he is or was thus a hypocrite so what? How many "multiculturalists" prefer to live in all-white neighbourhoods? How many egalitarians look out for No.1? And, come to think of it, how many Leftist whites have any sort of relationship with blacks of the opposite sex? Doesn’t it show that Strom liked blacks better than they do? But I guess I am “naive”.

An excellent demolition of Noam Chomsky and the Far Left generally in The Guardian. It makes the point that anti-Americanism is all that the Left now have to say. They stand for nothing else. Pathetic.

Jay Bryant has a good article on how the Democrats fight democracy tooth and nail.

My latest academic upload (details here or here) is from a 1986 book about Eysenck in which both Chris Brand and I had chapters -- with somewhat opposing viewpoints. The upload is of a dialogue we had about our differing views of Eysenck’s theories. Curiously, Eysenck and Chris are on the side of the libertarian theory that politics are two-dimensional and I am on the side favoured by the Left -- that politics consists only of a single Left-Right dimension. I just go where the survey evidence indicates, however -- as I also explain here.

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I think this is the best Leftist comment on the capture of Saddam so far: “"I think it is shameful that the ACLU has not commented on the obvious mistreatment Hussein has suffered at the hands of the American military." Leftists that bad are obviously skipping their medication.

BestOfMe is a variation on the “Carnival of the Vanities” theme. It revives good older posts rather than recent ones. Worth a look.

ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS AT AUSTRALIA'S PUBLIC BROADCASTER

An email from a reader:

I was very incensed to see the extended coverage given on 'Everybody's ABC' to a family of Palestinian morons.

This young couple are planning to have eight children and want at least 4 to be suicide bombers. They were presented as if this was their only option for a better future and nary a word about the payments they will receive for each child slaughtered this way. Where is the human rights outcry against this sort of abuse of children?

Not a word was mentioned of the billions given to the PLO and associates and the money spent by their leaders on their own lifestyles that should have gone to the Palestian people to ease their suffering

The reporter went on at great length with regard to the 'INCURSION' of the IDF and the destruction of Palestinian homes where 'THEY' claimed 3 terrorists were hiding. Footage was extensively focused on the damage. Then, as almost an afterthought, it was mentioned that there had been an attack on Jews in Tel Aviv. Nothing else -- no details. I am so tired of "Our" ABC's biased coverage -- not once have I seen such coverage of Jewish/Israeli families and homes when their women, children and soldiers are butchered unless it is to record the delight to the deranged Palestinan sympathizer.

It is outrageous that we are still subjected to such bias. As for the 'Wall' being built, what in God's name would we do if our lives were under constant terror attack?”

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ELSEWHERE

There is a lot to be said about what follows from the capture of Saddam and lots of people are saying it so I will forbear from adding to the hubbub but I liked Tom Barrett’s comments at Conservative Truth. I have got to say that I am pleased at what a good kick in the guts it is for GWB’s critics who were constantly harping on about his “inability” to find Saddam.

I have just received an interesting comment from one of my Portuguese readers: “Today, I read the post about your ranking on “Blogrunner”. You wrote: "I have often noted that things I post seem to have been heard even though nobody has linked back to me over them too." I think the blog's name is a reason for nobody linking back to you. People don't quote you because they try to avoid conflict - something, it seems, that you're not afraid of. They want to present ideas that deconstruct leftist views without it appearing to be a personal attack (IMHO, "dissect" is a too strong word...). Have you ever considered changing the name of your blog to "John Ray"?” I replied: “Yes. I am sure you are correct in what you say. But the name also attracts attention so that has first priority. I am more concerned to get the ideas out than to attract personal fame -- unlike Leftists!”

I wondered yesterday why there are so many good Chinese pianists and the good old blogosphere has instantly produced a possible answer. Sam Ward drew my attention to page 4 of this article: “Diana Deutsch, an expert in music cognition, discovered that, as children, we all may have had Mozart's ear for identifying notes but then lost it -- unless we were lucky enough to grow up speaking tonal languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, or Vietnamese. It turns out that speakers of these languages use absolute pitch every day, but in conversation, rather than in the concert hall." My 16 year old son appears to have perfect pitch and he was taught piano from age 4 so that fits in too.

This article is one of those accursed PDF files but if you have a high-speed connection it may be worth reading. It shows how the labyrinthine regulations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are driving companies out of the US vaccine business and creating shortages and "flu crises". We never "run out" of hamburgers or Coke because these "less important" industries are less regulated.

Arlene Peck has a post about the people the mainstream media ignore -- the maimed Israeli victims of Arab terror.

Mangled Thoughts has a fun excerpt from a column by Max Boot about ”unilateralism” and Europe. And Tim Blair has a good comment from Australia’s foreign minister about it. Amazing how sins come and go. The sin of unilateralism seems to have been invented by the Left in the last 12 months.

But the good old sin of “gluttony” is making a comeback too -- only this time it’s not your fault but somebody else’s. It’s called the “obesity epidemic” and just about all the people who feed us are under attack over it. There are all sorts of things the do-gooders want done about it -- with warning labels stuck on Big Macs being only the opening salvo. What none of the do-gooders seem to realize is that the good old socialist paradise of Sweden has been doing all that nonsense for years -- with zero effect. Swedes are as fat as anyone else. Even socialists can’t keep fatties away from their food.

A lot of the sites I link to these days hit you with popup advertisements as soon as you log onto them -- which is pretty pesky. Downloading the Google toolbar is very good at stopping them, though. You will find a link enabling you to do so at the bottom of any search you do on Google. Once you have installed it, the popups just stop!

The Wicked one has a warning about identity theft that could save you a lot of trouble if you travel at all.

Interested Participant has some more amusing stuff about the political ideas of the nutty Leftist linguist, George Lakoff.

The latest upload of a chapter from my book looks at ways of combatting union thuggery. Details here or in chapter 17 here. Since I wrote it, however, the problem has subsided a lot. The defeat of the air-traffic controllers under Ronald Reagan, the defeat of the coal miners under Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and the defeat of the wharfies (dockers, longshoremen) under Australia’s John Howard seem to have mostly knocked the stuffing out of union militancy in the Anglosphere.

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SADDAM CAPTURED!

I guess I am not the first to notice it but the picture of Saddam after his capture (.e.g. here) looks an awful lot like the usual pictures of Karl Marx! Do socialist icons even LOOK alike? Opinion Journal has a roundup of Leftist reaction and Hippercritical has a roundup of the reaction from antiwar bloggers. In summary, some pretended joy and some very unhappy people. It's a great victory for the people of Iraq and those who liberated them, though. But it was a “black day” among our dear delightful Palestinians, of course.

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ISLAMIC IMMIGRANTS

This story from someone with first-hand knowledge tells you about the delightful Islamic illegal immigrants that Australia has rightly locked up:

"Ms Thorne says her book debunks the perception that most of the illegal immigrants were hard done by. "Certainly some of them are very decent people, but some were very unpleasant characters," she says.... "They'd get angry, pull on a blue and smash everything in sight," she says. Ms Thorne says the most violent and difficult to deal with were Muslim men who were extremely demanding and readily resorted to violence over what they perceived as slights to their manhood. "Some of the biggest fights happened in the medical centre where the men would do their blocks because women and children were treated first," she said. Free phone calls permitted daily to detainees were another source of conflict. "There were three cordless phones to be used. Each person could speak to relatives in Iraq or Iran or wherever for six minutes. As soon as you told someone their six minutes were up you'd get abuse and sometimes get spat on. One guard was punched in the face." ... Guards were injured when attacked with star-pickets, shards of glass and stones. In one incident a guard had his testicles "nearly torn off"' by one of the detainees".

This graph of illegal immigrant arrivals tells how hard the anti-illegal-immigration policy recently implemented by Australia's conservative government has bitten. Note at the right of the graph that for the current year illegal arrivals have just about vanished. Illegal immigration CAN be stopped if governments have the will to do it.

I went to a private classical music concert here in Brisbane last night and heard what I believe is the best rendition of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" that I have ever heard. It was played by a young Australian-born Chinese. Why do the Chinese produce so many brilliant pianists and the Koreans so many brilliant violinists? I guess I will never know. All I know is that we are lucky to have them here in Australia. Why we have to have Islamic rubbish here when we could have any number of high-quality Han Chinese instead entirely escapes me.

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ELSEWHERE

Entertainers seem to make a specialty of being dumb when they are not entertaining but this one spoke some VERY long overdue words recently: "American singer Lauryn Hill, from a stage used by the Pope, shocked Catholic officials at a concert by telling them to "repent" and alluding to sexual abuse of children by U.S. priests. The broadside came during the recording Saturday night of a Christmas concert attended by top Vatican cardinals, bishops and many elite of Italian society, witnesses said”

Another triumph of socialized medicine: "CANCER patient Rodney Plows believes he will die waiting for relief from his chronic back pain. He has been told he faces a delay of up to five years for treatment in Queensland's public hospitals. Mr Plows, 53, was shocked to learn there were 540 people ahead of him on the waiting list for an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital. The invalid pensioner spends his days mostly housebound as he fights a losing battle to manage the pain".

Australian Leftist teachers TEACH hate-speech and do so very publicly! Read Andrew Bolt for a heap of examples.

The Greenies will love this one: Refrigerators are bad for you. They could cause the terrible rotting-bowel disease called Crohn’s: “Researchers writing in this week's issue of The Lancet hypothesise that the emergence of Crohn's at the same time Kelvinators became fixtures in kitchens around the world is no mere coincidence. In fact, that's exactly how Dr Jean-Pierre Hugot, lead author of the paper, describes his theory”. Will we see a Kyoto treaty on refrigerators in the future? It would be as logical as the current Kyoto treaty.

Further to my mention yesterday of Michael Crichton's view that environmentalism has become a religion, Gerry Jackson of Brookes News writes: "Although I'm in broad agreement with Michael Crichton regarding the Greens' cult his view of religion is a very narrow one. One might even call it prejudiced. For example, any honest person who was even slightly acquainted with the intellectual history of the Catholic Church could never call it "totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view." Nor could they assert that it thinks it knows it all. To argue otherwise would be an insult to the scholastics whose works and thoughts refute Crichton's accusations. One only has to peruse their debates on the nature of law, economics and the state to see what I mean. Atheists do not help their cause by overstating their case".

Amazing! I have just squeaked into the the top 200 of "The most influential reporters and bloggers on the web". I have often noted that things I post seem to have been heard even though nobody has linked back to me over them too. As one possible such instance, a reader recently drew my attention to the fact that a misspelt headline I alluded to here has since been fixed.

I have just put up here Chris Brand's latest thoughts. He takes up the "Flynn" challenge to the meaning of IQ scores, among other things. He notes that although IQ test scores have been rising, the Black-white gap is not closing.

The latest upload of a chapter from my book looks at ways of having universal health care without socializing medicine. Details here or in chapter 24 here.

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THE GREENIE DISASTER

Michael Crichton (popular Sci Fi author of “Jurassic Park” and TV writer of “ER”) has given an excellent and broad-ranging talk showing how environmentalism is a religion and that it needs to be returned to science. Just some quotes:

“I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing” .... “There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism. ...First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s....The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover.

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ELSEWHERE

More glories of socialized medicine: “A PATIENT bled to death unnoticed in the intensive-care unit of one of Sydney's largest public hospitals after he was left without proper medical supervision”

How lucky that your government was looking after you: “THE same strain of influenza that hit Australia during the past winter has now taken hold in the US, killing at least 20 children and causing panic among the many who have been unable to obtain vaccinations.... The most common strain of influenza being identified so far is a type-A virus known as H3N2 Fujian flu. It takes its name from the Chinese province where it originated. It is the same strain that caused widespread illness in Australia and New Zealand earlier this year.... The current vaccination available in the United States does not specifically target Fujian flu, but according to the CDC, it does offer some immunity and will reduce the severity of the disease.

When are they going to admit that Prohibition does not work? “A police chief has admitted that there are now so many drug dealers around Australia's first supervised injecting room that his officers are powerless to stop them”

Miranda Devine writes: “When it comes to playing up gender differences, women can be their own worst enemy... Gender "difference" ... drives the fantasy that women have some unique virtue that will save the world, will succeed where men have made a mess”

The Left try to portray GWB’s “pre-emptive” strikes against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq as some new sin. But pre-emption is in fact normal U.S. foreign policy. Americans have always very rightly wanted to fight their wars abroad rather than wait for them to arrive on American soil.

It’s not only GWB’s big spending that is alienating conservatives. ”I am always Right” says: “If President Bush gives amnesty to all illegal aliens, I'll have to find somebody else to vote for from the conservative side. I get a stupid ticket for having a brake-light out, and yet if you’re in my country illegally, you get off scot-free? No sir”

Leftists everywhere always claim to be on the side of “the little guy” but every so often their real contempt for the little guy shows through. Note this comment by a U.S. Democrat: “Take the average Joe six-pack down here in Texas. (Sorry to generalize but I know plenty of them and that's where my theory comes from). He may not have finished high school, or may have a few junior college credits. He's had numerous jobs because of lack of education, unreliability, failed drug tests, missing work, etc. He has no savings, no credit, and possibly a record, at least a DWI or two. He works full-time at Wal-Mart or construction and hates it. He's perpetually angry at his lot in life, though much of it is his own making.” Not exactly flattering!

During the gasoline shortage that began in 1979... Senator Kennedy said: "We must adopt a system of gasoline rationing without delay," in "a way that demands a fair sacrifice from all Americans." Ronald Reagan said that we must get rid of price controls on petroleum, so that there won't be a shortage in the first place. One of his first acts after becoming president was to end federal price controls. Lines at filling stations disappeared. Despite angry outcries from liberals that gas prices would skyrocket as Big Oil "gouged" the public, in reality prices came down within months and continued falling.

Useful Fools has an amusing post about modern art being used as torture. I believe it!

The latest upload of a chapter from my book concerns the great Greenie wail that we are going to “run out” of various things -- oil in particular and energy generally being the main candidates for disaster. I pointed out 30 years ago why that is not going to happen. Details here or in chapter 3 here. The Greenie scare campaign about that has been running for something like 40 years now and since it still shows not the slightest sign of happening, we don’t hear so much about it now. It does however seem to have got into the thick Greenie skulls that while there is nuclear power as an energy source we are never going to run out of energy -- so they now concentrate (with some success) on closing nuclear power down. New nuclear reactors are however still being built in some places so the Greenie effort to MAKE shortages happen will generally not work.

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THE CORRUPTION OF THE UNIVERSITIES SPREADS

An email from a reader:

“I am an engineer myself, and my younger brother is just completing his engineering degree. You mentioned how engineers tend to be more realistic, and therefore more conservative than the arts/humanities/social sciences morass.

However, even this oasis of commonsense within the universities is being white-anted by the hangers-on. In my later years of university we were required to take a humanities elective, in which a variety of social "science" lecturers would tell us about the evils of the industrial revolution, and how free people were before it, and how immoral business leaders were, and how scientists and engineers were responsible for the Holocaust, and the importance of the industrial relations tribunal, etc. and would generally show their ignorance about anything technological. Our tutor was a jolly and ignorant hippie who admitted in his totally unstructured tutorials that his criteria for evaluating the quality of an assignment was the number of footnotes it contained. It would have been hilarious if I wasn't paying for it. Strangely, the arts/humanities/social science crowd were not required to reciprocate by taking hard science electives.

In my brother's time, it has gotten even worse, with one subject of this ilk in nearly every semester, and some truly clueless people being appointed even in the Engineering faculty. For instance, when asked to summarise his thesis project, my brother was told that his summary was "a little more descriptive of the project than what we had originally hoped for", and what they wanted was "something a little more personal in regards to your perception or experience of the project". With "engineers" like this, you don't need terrorists to bring down skyscrapers.”

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MORE FUN WITH LAKOFF

All Too Human criticizes my article on linguist-turned-psychologist Lakoff on the grounds that Lakoff has added in to his account a lot of ifs and buts and exceptions that he can fall back on if his central thesis is challenged. Of course he did. He would not be an academic if he had done otherwise. That he allows exceptions does not alter the basic thrust of his claims however. He still claims fairly clearly that typical mothers don't do the discipline, for instance. What a laugh! And this statement from Lakoff’s recent interview: "The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people” is perfectly unambiguous about what a weird view he has of the typical conservative. It is also a demonstrably wrong view as the references I give in my article attest.

“All too Human” also defends Lakoff’s claim that Leftists are devoted to “equal treatment” and has some feeble defences of the fact that conservatives get anything BUT equal treatment on American university campuses. Rather than me reply to that just read this instance of gross, deliberate, sustained (and probably illegal) discrimination against conservatives at Washingtom University School of Law.

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ELSEWHERE

Larry Elder has a pretty disheartening summary of GWB’s socialist record. Just one excerpt: “By this time in his term, Reagan vetoed over 20 bills, President George W. Bush, none. Reagan campaigned to shut down the Department of Education. President Bush shook hands with a smiling Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., as they united to pass the so-called No Child Left Behind Act, increasing the federal government's role in education and, by the way, dropping the dreaded-by-liberals voucher provision. Bush also expanded Head Start despite the program's questionable effectiveness” Jeff Jacoby is pretty upset about it too. If the Democrats manage to find a challenger who sounds reasonably sane, I think a lot of GOP voters might stay home next election day. It’s all very reminscent of Malcolm Fraser -- a former Australian conservative Prime minister who said he loved Ayn Rand and had many years in office to do something about it but did zilch. He turned out to be a great friend of African dictators, though. It does rather remind one of some recent remarks by GWB about Taiwan and Israel’s security fence.

Wal Mart, America’s super-successful retailer of recent years, is clearly falling victim to what Australians call the “tall poppy syndrome”: Because they are so successful everyone want to cut them down to size. Some of the criticisms are mentioned here. Thomas Sowell brings a bit of economic sophistication to the discussion, however. A small excerpt: “With Wal-Mart, as with A & P before them, the big bugaboo is that their low prices put competing stores out of business. Could anyone ever have doubted that low-cost stores win customers away from higher-cost stores? It is one of the painful signs of the immaturity and lack of realism among the intelligentsia that many of them regard this as a "problem" to be "solved." “

Stop the Bleating has a good coverage of the issues involved in the French ban on women wearing Islamic dress.

The latest upload of one of my published articles is put up more as an historical curiosity than anything else. It is a report of a computer program I wrote in 1970. Being a boffin, I had access to computers a generation before most people did and I still have a copy of the first program I wrote -- in 1967. It was written for a machine that filled a room but had about the same amount of memory as a modern-day pocket calculator. It was still however very useful and a great advance on what went before. In those days the only software you could usually get for a computer was a compiler -- to enable you to write your own programs. So, unless you could get someone else to write a program for you, all computer users HAD to be programmers in those days. The program mentioned in my upload has subsequently been modernized for use in a PC environment and I am happy to forward both the source-code and an executable to anyone interested. It is however NOT a program for general use. It is for psychometricians and survey researchers only. Details here or here.

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