ELSEWHERE

My post of 8th. on why elites tend to be Leftist was advertised on the most recent "Carnival of the Vanities" and seems to have evoked a lot of interest -- judging by the hundreds of extra hits I got on Thursday. I have therefore posted a much expanded version of the post here -- in which I point to the important role of the educational system in producing Leftist elites.

Sounds accurate to me: "KISS bass player Gene Simmons has caused an uproar among Australia's Muslim community by launching an attack on Islamic culture while in Melbourne. The lizard-tongued rock god who is touring Australia with the world's most enduring glam rock band launched an attack on Muslim extremists during an interview on Melbourne's 3AW radio - including comments which were labelled inaccurate. "Extremism believes that it's okay to strap bombs on to your children and send them to paradise and whatever else and to behead people," he said yesterday. The Israeli-born US musician went on to say Islam was a "vile culture" that treated women worse than dogs."

Open Stalinism still thrives among U.S. elites: "If you believe the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) - an organization that extols the virtues of communism and detests capitalism - North Korea is nearly a paradise. A nation where a peace-loving president governs a land of contented people, living a happy existence, with sustenance not even a tertiary concern. On September 29th, 2003, a self-appointed group of representatives of the United States of America traveled to North Korea to build a bridge between the two nations. The group consisted of four NLG lawyers... The NLG repeatedly claims there is no starvation in the DPRK."

Norm Weatherby outlines a much tougher approach to the war on Islamic terrorism than the approach the U.S. is presently taking. I myself think that, like the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, a tougher approach would save a lot more lives in the end.

Good news from Qom: ""Either officials change their methods and give freedom to the people, and stop interfering in elections, or the people will rise up with another revolution," Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri told me"

Keith Burgess-Jackson is obviously very cheerful and positive. He even has a post that praises the U.S. Postal Service! Brave man. He is happy that a letter posted on Monday arrives on Thursday. In Australia, it would USUALLY arrive on Tuesday. He also praises highly this article about bringing up boys. Maybe boys are different in Australia and in America but I would have thought that MOST boys are not like the two extreme types described there. They seem like two variants of the underclass to me. But, aside from that, Keith has helped two fine women to start blogging recently -- Ally Eskin and Peg Kaplan. Go visit!

The wicked one has the 2004 Darwin "awards" up.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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Update from a reader in Denmark -- in response to my post about today's Royal wedding and the award of the "Order of the Elephant" to the Princess-to-be:

"This is the highest order Denmark can dish out, she will join a small brotherhood of other mainly slim recipients, like Nicolae Ceausescu... NB: Breaking news on three channels, Mary dropped her hat!!!!! I can't wait for the endless repeats..."

FROM BROOKES NEWS

Beijing makes its move in Latin America Beijing has been using Cuba's Fidel Castro as a means to subvert South America and Central America while President Bush has been waging war against terrorism.
Former diplomat savages Howard and Bush over the liberation of Iraq Richard Woolcott, a retired Australian diplomat, savaged Howard and Bush for liberating the Iraqi people from the sadistic Saddam Hussein. This brilliant diplomat now argues that only the UN can save the Iraqi people from "catastrophe".
Kerry's Vietnam mates claim he is unfit to be President 189 of Kerry's fellow veterans supported an open letter stating that he was not fit to be president. As expected, the mainstream media gave it a miss.
US trade deficits and foreign debt: problems or symptoms? The size of the U.S. deficit is causing alarm among some commentators who are using it to draw attention to America's foreign debt. But are trade deficits and foreign debt real problems or is something else at work?
Austrian economics and privatisation Socialists cannot grasp the benefits of privatization because they don't understand the nature of markets. It's not enough to empirically show that privatization has generated benefits. One must explain why free markets produce these results: this is where Austrian economics has been exceptionally successful.
Costs don't determine telecommunication prices It is what consumers pay for the final product that determines the prices of inputs. Therefore the view that prices must reflect costs is utterly fallacious.

Details here

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Amusing: Australian Mary Donaldson is about to become a Princess of Denmark. In honour of the occasion, the Danes have just awarded her the "Order of the Elephant". A dubious honour? I thought she was quite slim myself.

Rather Biased has comprehensive comments on the refusal by CBS News and other mainstream media to broadcast pictures of Islamic barbarism (Berg's beheading) even though they featured pictures of American military police treating terrorist prisoners roughly. As one commenter said: "One of the few similarities between this war and Viet Nam is the consistently anti-American coverage the public is being fed by the media". Jeff Jacoby's latest column sums it up well too.

I am indebted to Brian Micklethwait (post of 6th) for pointing out that the British Left (the Whigs) of Napoleon's days so admired Napoleon that they had a lifelong hatred of the man who defeated him -- The Duke of Wellington of Waterloo fame. The Leftist love for its country's enemies goes back a long way. They are enemies of their country themselves so it is not really surprising.

For some reason the BBC recently got the idiosyncratic conservative Peter Hitchens to make a TV program critical of Nelson Mandela. Perhaps they thought it would discredit conservatism to see a conservative criticizing a saint. What they got from Hitchens included some pretty silly stuff (saying Mandela was "too Thatcherite" and blaming him for not stopping AIDS!) but the BBC has still felt the need to present a more leftist view of Mandela here. It is amusing that the BBC says that Left-liberal pressure was the reason for the abandonment of apartheid whereas Hitchens says the reason was an excess of foreign debt. There is really only one reason for the end of Apartheid -- the courage and decency of President F.W. de Klerk, the head of the apartheid regime, who voluntarily gave up power. The foreign debt issue is a red-herring. South Africa could easily have repudiated its debt. South American countries do it all the time with no adverse consequences to themselves.

Most readers have probably heard by now about how the Christians of GWB's home town (Midland, Texas) are helping to bring peace between Muslims and Christians in Sudan. Here is an extended account of it.

An interesting article here on the one Anglican diocese in the Western world that has overflowing congregations. The Sydney diocese rejects both High Church traditionalism and modern "anything-goes" Anglicanism. Yet in their strong and forthright evangelical Protestantism their beliefs are very much like those expressed in the Church of England's own "39 Articles" of 1571. New Testament Christianity still has the great power it has always had -- something far beyond the ken of the wafflers and play-actors in "modern" churches.

How 'well meaning multiculturalism' frustrates Australians of immigrant origin: "From playground confusion to strangers' interrogation, not having blonde hair and blue eyes has proven to be a difficult reality. It's not that I ever complained. My siblings and I never got sunburnt at school swimming carnivals. We always had the largest number of friends and family attending annual award ceremonies and we always had the most interesting packed lunch.

The Kerry-Kennedy court: "Thus, in November, the voters will determine far more than who lives in the White House. They will determine, indirectly, who sits in the nine seats on bench of the highest court in the land. It's a choice between judicial restraint and judicial activism. It's a choice between what is actually written in the Constitution and what an unelected judge believes should be written there."

Carnival of the Vanities is still going strong with the latest edition here.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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SOME POLITICAL HISTORY

There is a long and wide-ranging essay here which looks at the major influences in modern American conservatism. I am certainly inclined to agree with this: "From the 1950s to the present, libertarianism has been an important and influential - arguably the most influential - stream of thought on the Right, informing both Republican policy making and conservative ideology more generally". He faults libertarianism, however, for not coming to terms with the fact that lots of people seem to WANT big government and says that it is only the neoconservatives who are realistic about that fact. He presents the neoconservatives as being the practical, pragmatic dealers in political reality. He does definitely have a point but I would argue that no libertarian is unaware of how difficult it is to implement any part of a libertarian agenda and that ALL conservatives compromise with the possible. The difference is that the libertarians have the clearest vision of the direction in which they want to head -- and the best evidence that their ideas work for the general betterment.

There is another good review out of In Denial by Haynes & Klehr: Glenn Garvin opens his rather amusing comments on the ineptitude and dishonesty of America's many pro-Communist historians and other academics as follows: "In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system." Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart."

To be Australian is to believe in the `fair go', even if it is not always clear what this means in practice.... examples suggest that the `fair go' in 19th century Australia was largely associated with a set of ethical principles which today we would recognise as `meritocratic'. The belief was not that everybody should end up with the same shares (egalitarianism), but was rather that everybody should get the opportunity to compete and thereby to improve themselves.... In August 2003, AC Nielsen carried out a survey of public opinion ... there was very strong (85%) public support for a meritocratic definition of fairness"

"One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the conversation of their ancestors -- to enable them to understand the language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, in their maturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own. The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science or American history is really modern liberal propaganda.

Sowell: "Nowhere have whole peoples seen their situation reversed more visibly or more painfully than the peoples of the Islamic world... Why do they hate us? Maybe it is because the alternative to hating us is to hate themselves".

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Government by judges: "As an American in remission, I have a romantic fondness for the notion of constitutional government, which of course doesn't exist and never will again in the United States if it ever did. Face it: The constitution is deader than a doorknob. I mean a doorknob with melanoma and clogged arteries.... Courts run the country these days. The will of the people is irrelevant. When did you last hear of anything of lasting import being done by Congress? I can't either. But almost every week you read about some federal judge, or that ratpack of pompous drones on the Supreme Court, who have... defunded the Boy Scouts, or invented a constitutional right to abortion, or imposed integration, or outlawed the public expression of Christianity, or made it impossible to stop immigration. They tell you who you can hire, who you can sell your house to, what your children will be taught. They serve to impose what could never be legislatively enacted. The judges are out of control. They're at it again. Marriage doesn't mean what it has always meant. It means what some over-promoted nonentity wants it to mean. And the country will obey. Roll over. Bark. Fetch".

A million ... er, 2,000 march against guns: "About 2,000 people celebrated Mother's Day yesterday by attending a Million Mom March rally at the Capitol to demonstrate support for extending the nation's ban on assault weapons." Interested Participant uses the occasion to comment on the way the media usually accept Leftist overestimates of numbers.

About time! White House to impose sanctions on Syria: "President Bush will order economic sanctions against Syria this week for supporting terrorism and not doing enough to prevent militant fighters from entering neighboring Iraq, congressional and administration sources said Monday. The sanctions, which the White House will impose as early as Tuesday, are being ordered because the administration believes Syria has aggravated tensions in the Middle East by supporting militant groups."

There is another excellent letter from a U.S. soldier in Iraq here which tells the news from Iraq in a way that you will never hear from the mass media. And there is a very recent letter from Iraq here too.

Arlene Peck reproduces an email she received from a Palestinian girl who was publicly raped by her FATHER as punishment for criticizing the Hamas terrorists.

Metal Yarmulke is blogging again. He is a bit upset by "lookism" in the blogosphere. He has a point. Being fat is death to the acceptability of women in our culture but in China and the Middle East it is admired, from what I know.

Bill Keezer has a stab at explaining chaos theory to us all. I always DID suspect that butterflies could not cause hurricanes!

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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MEDICAL MAYHEM

Lies, Lies Lies: "Obesity is fast becoming one of the world's leading reasons why people die" See here for the real story.

Hating the life-savers: Perhaps no one is more consistently demonized for doing more good today in the United States than the pharmaceutical companies. The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the new drug Avastin, which shrinks tumors. The medicine helps patients with advanced bowel cancer. Yet in the view of many Americans - not to mention politicians like Kerry - the pharmaceutical companies are the enemy.... Even the Vatican seems to have joined in know-nothing drug industry bashing. The firms demonstrated a "lack of social conscience" by making massive profits on AIDS drugs, charged Rev. Angelo D'Agostino, a Jesuit. But AIDS medicines exist only because of profit-making companies that conduct drug research. In the early 1980s, the disease was a death sentence, taking some 28 million people to their graves. Today, AIDS patients survive and even thrive because private companies have developed scores of medicines.

Drug fanaticism: "Here's a bit of legal information that may interest Rush Limbaugh: Under Florida law, illegally obtaining more than 28 grams of painkillers containing the narcotic oxycodone -- a threshold exceeded by a single 60-pill Percocet prescription -- automatically makes you the worst sort of drug trafficker, even if you never sold a single pill. Even if, like Richard Paey, you were using the drugs to relieve severe chronic pain. Although prosecutors admitted Paey was not a drug trafficker, on April 16 he received a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years for drug trafficking."

Sowell on socialized medicine: "Britain, which has had government-run medical care for more than half a century, has to import doctors from the Third World, where medical school standards are lower.... Only the patients will find out, the hard way, what declining quality means. I saw a vivid example of what bureaucratic medical care meant back in 1959, when I had a summer job at the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. Around 5 o'clock one afternoon, a man had a heart attack on the street near our office. He was taken to the nurse's room and asked if he was a federal employee. If he was, he could be sent to the large, modern medical facility there in the Public Health Service headquarters. But he was not a government employee, so an ambulance was summoned from a local hospital. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of downtown Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. That is what bureaucracy means".

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I have a motto at the top of my blog and a rubric at the bottom of each day's posts which makes the point that Leftists owe much of their success with voters to their claim that they are "compassionate" -- a claim which the history of Leftist deeds shows to be a fraud. Whenever they get complete power (e.g. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot), Leftists are in fact ruthless murderers and have no concern for anybody but themselves. But few people know much history (and Leftist teachers do their best to keep it that way) so the Big Lie about Leftist compassion is often believed. A recent letter from a reader that Keith Burgess-Jackson posted on his blog is in my view an example of that effect. The writer is obviously a very good and kind man who votes Democrat because he thinks that they are more like him than conservatives are. Random Observations has however pointed out another important failure in the letter-writer's thinking. He points out that the letter-writer has committed a variant of what logicians call the ad hominem fallacy -- judging the truth of a statement by the person who utters it. The letter writer sees Leftists as kind people and conservatives as unkind people and infers therefore that conservative POLICIES must be unkind in their effects too. Adam Smith, of course, pointed out centuruies ago that selfish deeds by selfish people can and do have BENEFICIAL effects. So the letter-writer really IS a Leftist in one important respect -- he thinks very simplistically. It is the actual effect of the policies that matters, not who proposed the policies.

How un-Islamic! "A University of Illinois research team is working on turning pig manure into a form of crude oil that could be refined to heat homes or generate electricity."

Michael Moore doesn't understand the First Amendment works both ways. Disney doesn't have to publish his stuff if they don't want to

There is another mention here of the seeming paradox that one of the world's most pro-American places is Iran.

Halliburton: Odd profiteers. "But here's the funny thing. So far, the Iraq war hasn't proved much of a boon for Halliburton's shareholders. Because of incompetence, the chaos of working in the war zone, and a contract that limits profits, KBR's margins on its hazardous work are pretty marginal".

As a keen Chaucerian, I have got to give econoblogger The Man Without Qualities a plug. In his postings of May 3rd, he actually managed to find some wisdom about Iraq in Chaucer!

Dick McDonald has some good posts on the prisoner-abuse panic.

Che is Gay is an amusing site. I liked this comment: "It is ironic that the 'pro tree' element is usually 'anti Bush'. Work that one out!"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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THE BLOGGER.COM "IMPROVEMENTS"

Hooray! The "improvements" at blogger.com (Pyra) seem not to have caused any crashes or prolonged service outages this time -- though the new software does not like the bit of Java I use to protect my Gmail address from spammers. My code worked fine on the old software but I did expect the "improvements" to be anything but. They no longer let you use the two-window "classic" interface either. Ho hum. Definitely a bureaucratic version of "improvement".

I emailed Pyra's Jason Shellen with an advance copy of the above comment. He replied: "Awfully pessimistic given the bevy of improvements like: this. There is even a way to preview your post on the page, if you do miss the 'classic' interface. See here".

My qualified relief was shortlived, however. As I originally expected, I had a lot of trouble getting this post up.

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SOME MORE ECONOMICS

Rent control as urban warfare. Economist Walter Williams rightly says: "Short of aerial bombardment, the best way to destroy a city is through rent control."

America's economic secret: A willingness to allow dying industries to die in peace. "A country with no declining industries is a country that doesn't have many better new ideas."

"Michael Barone, America's foremost political analyst, wonders why America produces so many incompetent 18-year-olds but remarkably competent 30-year-olds.... One answer to Barone's question is: schools. In 1900 only 10 percent of high school-age Americans went to high school. Subsequently, schooling became universal and then schools became emblematic of Soft America, suffused with ``progressive'' values -- banning dodge ball and other games deemed too competitive, attempting personality adjustment, promoting self-esteem and almost anyone with a pulse. In contrast, Barone says, ``Hard America plays for keeps: The private sector fires people when profits fall and the military trains under live fire.'' Soft America depends on the productivity, creativity and competence of Hard America, which protects the country and pays its bills."
Jobs: "Coming on top of the 337,000 new jobs created in March (revised up from 308,000), the economy has now created 625,000 jobs in just two months. This is a very impressive performance"

Protectionism via tax favouritism: "It started as an effort to eliminate a $5 billion tax break for exporters that irked the European Union. Since then, a tax bill has blossomed into a $170 billion cornucopia of special breaks for the cruise ship industry, former Oldsmobile dealers, NASCAR and makers of bows and arrows. Typically, critics say, it is during that dark of night that lawmakers slip such benefits into bills like the one now before the Senate."

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ELSEWHERE

Readers may note that I have a new motto at the top of my page. The only problem with it is that I myself feel a lot more goatish than sheepish! But you know what the man means. He preferred sheep. Not sure why. Woollier, I guess.

John Moore has reminded me of the famous experiment devised by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo -- noting that it explains the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by American military guards. The Zimbardo experiment showed that putting almost ANYONE into the role of a prison guard will make them oppressive, sadistic etc. So the fact that there has been so little harm done to Iraqi prisoners shows in fact how restrained American military guards have been.

I believe the Colonel: "German troops serving with an international peacekeeping contingent in Kosovo have been accused of hiding in barracks "like frightened rabbits" during the inter-ethnic rioting that erupted in the province in March. A German police report sent to the government last week criticises the troops for cowardice and for their failure to quell the rioting, in which 19 people died and about 900 others were injured... The head of the contingent, Colonel Dieter Hintelmann, insisted that his men had simply obeyed rules of engagement" American rules of engagement are hobbling enough. What must EU ones be like? They're probably allowed to fire at Americans only.

Amusing: Brazil's President Lula is indignant at being portrayed as a "boozehound". Although I am 99% teetotal myself, I see drinking alcohol as a normal human recreation and he would surely be a pretty odd Brazilian if he did not like a drink or three.

Fascinating that the Iranian people (unlike their Ayatollahs) are very pro-American. Turkey is pro-Western too. It looks like the Islamic problem is mainly an Arab problem.

The Blowhards have an interesting short survey of conservatism in the blogosphere. The comments are good too. I liked this one: "The fundamental American stance - leave me alone, just leave me alone to live my life as I see fit, don't tread on me - is conservative"

Dick McDonald traces the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American troops to the poor education the troops got from America's Left-dominated educational system.

There is an interesting new blog here. I think it is supposed to be called "Wide Open" but her professional web designer seems to have been too arty to make that obvious. Anyway, her post "Ladies, we did it to ourselves" is a good poke in the eye for the radical feminists.

The wicked one tells you all you need to know about dogs.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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SOME ECONOMICS

Globalization saves the day in New Zealand: " It's Saturday morning and you've just noticed that the data projector is missing a fairly important element, known as a power cord. The conference starts in 30 minutes. What does one do? There is no electronics shop open. But there is a Warehouse. Now the Warehouse does not have any power cords for sale, but it does have an electric jug selling for only $10, which uses the same sort of cord. The cost of the jug with cord is much the same as buying just the cord elsewhere, so one purchase is quickly made. Thank God for free trade and cheap China-made electric jugs". [Just by way of explanation, The Warehouse is a New Zealand version of Wal Mart and both Australians and New Zealanders mostly boil water in electric jugs rather than in electric kettles].

The roar of good economic news is getting louder. Our economy expanded 4.2 percent in the first quarter of the year. That follows 4.1 percent growth in the fourth quarter, and 8.2 percent growth in the quarter before that. Over the last three months alone, our economy created more than a half-million jobs. Business investment grew 11.4 percent. Wages and salaries jumped 4.8 percent... Surprised? There's no reason to be. In the second quarter of 2003, President Bush signed legislation that lowered tax rates on the money entrepreneurs invest in the economy -- and those rate cuts took effect immediately.

How much do economists agree among themselves? "The authors survey 1000 economists from the AEA roster; the data cover both 1990 and 2000. Here is one result: ...there was strong agreement with the propositions that restraints on free trade reduce welfare...and that market-determined exchange rates are effective...There was also strong disagreement with the propositions that increasing globalization threatens national sovereignty "

Facts about Sweden No new net jobs have been produced in the Swedish private sector since 1950. None of top 50 companies on the Stockholm stock exchange has been started since 1970. ...well over 1 million people out of a work force of around four million did not work in 2003 but lived on various kinds of public welfare programs, such as, pre-pension schemes, unemployment benefits, sick-leave programs, etc. Sweden has dropped from fourth to 14th place in 2002 among the OECD countries (i.e., affluent industrialized countries) in terms of GDP per capita since 1970.

An all-investor nation? "Imagine if every worker in the United States had the opportunity to become an investor. Well, that dream has a shot at reality. In his 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush suggested workers be allowed to redirect part of their payroll taxes into individual retirement accounts. That was a big statement. It means there's now a legitimate chance to transform Social Security from a financially bankrupt system into a source of real ownership and prosperity for all Americans. ... Since the Reagan presidency, the U.S. has made great strides toward democratizing capitalism by reducing marginal tax rates, deregulating the financial-services industry and creating savings vehicles like IRAs and 401(k)s. Mr. Bush's latest proposal for Lifetime Savings Accounts is another step in the right direction."

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An email I posted yesterday tended to give the impression that U.S. forces in the Vietnam war condoned prisoner abuse by allied South Vietnamese forces. Another reader who was there rejects that. He says: "I served as an advisor to a Vietnamese Infantry Battalion in the Mekong Delta. Concerning the claim that ARVN routinely cut off the VC's gonads: I NEVER heard of such a thing! We were trying to win the hearts and minds, etc. We actually punished our soldiers when they committed some crime (usually theft of something from a villager's hut). We didn't abuse, there were no rapes and no torture! I have seen my boss threaten to pull his advisory team when we thought that the ARVN were picking up too many villagers for questioning! Without an advisory team, the ARVN unit would not have been protected by American air support! I have seen an ARVN 1st Sgt beat the crap out of one of his soldiers for stealing from a villager in a village that was way out in VC controlled territory!" And, speaking of prisoner abuse, we won't mention Palestinian prisons and torture will we?

There is a good email here about antisemitism in Australia that notes the erosion of Australia's traditional tolerance by Muslims and their Leftist supporters.

Keith Burgess-Jackson has a good post on the sheer mindless evil of America's Left.

Amusing: "The National Women's Law Center has released its annual exercise in Bush-bashing in the guise of a state-by-state report card on women's health. Why, precisely, is the president at fault if women in some states don't eat their veggies?"

Steve Sailer has more on the 'story' doing the rounds on the web that Gore-voting US States have higher average IQs than Bush-voting states. It is a hoax of course but Steve has some REAL data showing that educational achievement does differ from State to State. So what characterizes the high-achieving States? Democrat voting? No. A higher percentage of whites in their population -- unsurprisingly.

Random Observations has a good essay on what conservatism is and why libertarians are wrong about Leftists. He seems however to have overlooked that many libertarians are Minimal Statists (as I am) rather than Anarcho-capitalists -- which is why they get on with conservatives. Both conservatives and Minimal Statists see SOME need for a State but the Minimal Statist wants to cut it back a lot further.

Iceland has libertarians too and this one blogs in English. I always think Icelanders must be pretty smart. They have kept out of other people's wars for around 1,000 years.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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ERK! Blogger.com is going to be "down" tomorrow while they install some "improvements". Someone needs to tell them: "If it aint broke, don't fix it". After the last lot of improvements nobody could post for most of two days. So check my mirror sites if I seem suddenly to have fallen strangely silent. My only "consolation" for blogger.com's frequent problems is that the various other sites that I use all seem to have periodic problems too. I think most of the MT enthusiasts have found the same. The only reliable system is a redundant one -- which is why I put up mirror sites.




CONSERVATIVE THINKING

The genius of Edmund Burke: "After two centuries, there remains no better analysis of the first two years of the French Revolution than Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).... Had the English ministry and his fellow Parliamentarians followed his advice in the 1770s, they would never have driven the Americans to revolt and hence lost their most valuable colonies in the world. Had the French, they would have been spared the Terror, total war, and Napoleon".

Russell Kirk : "Scholars who call themselves "Kirkians" or "traditionalist conservatives" tend to have severe reservations not only about the present Republican administration but also about some of the dominant strains in conservative policymaking, whether libertarian or neoconservative.... What Kirk extracted from Burke's thought -- and found embodied in the work of British and American figures as diverse as John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, and T.S. Eliot -- was a strong sense that tradition and order were the bedrock of any political system able to provide a real measure of freedom... "The individual is foolish," wrote Kirk in The Conservative Mind, "but the species is wise." We have inherited from the past "the instruments which the wisdom of the species employs to safeguard man against his own passions and appetites... "The Kirkian tradition is in the minority within modern conservatism," says Mr. Cheek. "It is skeptical of foreign entanglements. It believes in the minimalist state, but believes that the government does have a role. Kirk had some skepticism about capitalism, which puts him at odds with the libertarians"

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ELSEWHERE

Prisoner abuse: An interesting comment from a reader: "As a Viet Nam Vet of the U.S. Army 25th Infantry Division (Cu Chi, Vietnam 1967), perhaps I can put the war prisoner abuse media events currently swirling around the Bush Administration into perspective. I was a Spec/4 Medic in Vietnam assigned to work with the 25th Medical Battalion psychiatrist. I assisted in medicating and evacuating by helicopter "psychiatric casualties" of the war. This entailed flying into fire fights to pick up the wounded, including wounded enemy NVA soldiers. It was usual for the South Vietnamese ARVN soldiers to strip the enemy soldiers naked and cut their gonads off, then call in U.S. medical personnel to evacuate them as a prisoner. To my knowledge this practice was never covered by the media. To state the obvious: War is brutal. The media scenes the American public are now seeing on TV and the Net pale in comparison to the daily events in Vietnam, let alone what went on in Cambodia after the war with Pol Pot.

I have not so far said anything about the prisoner mistreatment scandal in Iraq but Bleeding Brain sums it up pretty well, I think. And Dick McDonald is irate at the way the media have treated it. And Matthew Cowie is one of many who have noted that one of the humiliated Iraqis still wants to come to America!

And yet the "feminists" stay silent: "Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves." Most feminist activists don't give a damn about women, in other words. They just use women to excuse their hatred of their own society. Like Greenie activists, they are just another flavour of Leftism. If they really cared about women, they would be backing GWB to the hilt.

Fascinating. It seems that Canada is like Australia in that it is common for very religious people there to be on the Left as well as on the Right: "Devout Liberal MPs are appalled by their party's attempt to demonize the Conservatives as a bunch of extreme religious zealots". I have commented on the relationship between conservatism and Christianity at some length here.

The Leftist hatred of McDonald's is just another example of Leftist jealousy of other people's success. There is a short summary of how unreasonable it is to attack McDonald's here. What nobody seems to mention is that what McDonald's sells is just a minor variation on a standard Western diet of beef, bread, salad and potatoes. If that is bad for you we are all doomed. Funny that average lifespans are always getting longer in the West, though!

From Chris Brand: "According to environmentaloons, the human male's asthetic preference for women having the hourglass shape is due to `conditioning'. But new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society found that wasp-waisted women were 30% higher in the hormone oestradiol and would thus have double or treble the normal chance of conceiving during any one menstrual cycle" Another blow to the constant Leftist claim that everything about us is the product of our environment rather than of biology. Here or here are links to the academic article Chris mentions.

Some things that governments do you couldn't make up: Germany has passed a law to say that legal brothels must train apprentice whores! No doubt the usual 5 years of training will be necessary before they can do it.

What has the EU got in common with Robert Mugabe? A lot. As the case of Hans-Martin Tillack shows. They are using their police to intimidate an exposer of their corruption.

There is a review here of a new book: How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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WHY ELITES TEND LEFT

Why is a man as privileged as John Kerry on the Left of politics? Why are people who are well-organized, well-paid and successful in life often Left-leaning? Surely they should be thankful for the system that gave them their success instead of wanting to tear it down? The answer is really quite simple. If your life had made you feel superior to most people wouldn't you want to be treated in a superior way too? More importantly, wouldn't you feel that your inferiors should be got out of your way and told what to do? Wouldn't you feel that they should be herded onto public transport and thus leave the roads free for you to drive where you want without being held up by traffic jams? That is EXACTLY how elite Leftists think. Only they cannot say that out loud of course. To say it out loud would not only be obnoxious but it would also achieve nothing. So our elites are smarter than that. They know they have to cloak their oppression in the mantle of a claim that "It's all for your own good". And knowing how rich, clever and well-organized they themselves are, they are confident that they will be able to escape the limits and confines that they put on other people. Even high taxes are no worry to them when they already have most things that money can buy. So regulate, regulate, regulate is their cry. And that's Leftism.

A classic example was pre-Thatcher Britain in the 60s. The British Labour party had nationalized practically all the hospitals leaving only a very small and expensive private sector. And the nationalized hospitals were of course overcrowded and gave inferior service in various ways. Britain's "Red Queen" at the time was Barbara Castle, a minister in Harold Wilson's Labour government. She was famous for saying that it was "obscene" for anybody to "carve their way to a hospital bed with a chequebook": Good propaganda. But what did she do when her son got sick? Being very well-paid as a government minister, she got him admitted to a private hospital, of course, under a false name. When the press got wind of it were any on the Left upset by her actions? Not at all. They understood what she was doing and why. Harold Wilson ended up making the obscene one a Baroness, in fact. Leftist elites WANT one law for the rich and another law for the poor. That is why the British Labour party let a small private medicine sector survive in Britain. They knew that they might need it one day: No grotty public hospitals for them. Public hospitals are only for "the people".

And my post of December 12th, last year shows that the same mentality prevails among the Leftist British elite to this day.

And Leftist elitism even explains the current Leftist war on "obesity":

"Medical and public health authorities have determined a BMI of 25 or above is hazardous to a person's health. This belief, however, is not supported by the available evidence... In almost all large-scale epidemiological studies, little or no correlation between weight and health can be found for a large majority of the population... "overweight" people actually had a lower overall cancer mortality rate than "ideal weight" individuals.. Even massively obese men and women do not appear to be more prone to vascular disease than average... deaths from heart disease have been plunging at precisely the same time that obesity rates have been skyrocketing... on average, poor people in America are fat and rich people are thin. The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority"

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ELSEWHERE

The media and the Democrats (same thing) seem to have gone rather quiet about GWB's "lies" over WMDs lately. Even John Kerry has hedged his bets. Could this be part of the reason why? "Jordan recently seized 20 tons of chemicals trucked in by confessed al Qaeda members who brought the stuff in from Syria. The chemicals included VX, Sarin and 70 others. ... There's a lot of reason to think (the source of the chemicals) might be Iraq..... The best U.S. and allied intelligence say that in the 10 weeks before the Iraq war, Saddam's Russian adviser told him to get rid of all the nerve gas."

Dreadful news for John Kerry: "A springtime surge in hiring rumbled into a second month as employers added nearly 300,000 new jobs in April, which lowered the unemployment rate to 5.6 percent".

There is a set of figures going the rounds on the net which purport to show that U.S. States which supported Bush in the last Presidential election have lower average IQs. This author wisely suspects that the figures are a fake. Chris Brand has contacted the author of the test concerned and he says that he knows of no authentic State-by-State averages for his test.

Catallarchy has a celebration of May Day which notes accurately what socialism has done for the workers.

Brigitte Bardot was once the symbol of France. It is good to see her defending the France she once stood for.

A blunt New Zealand comment: "Michael Moore is being interviewed on CNN as I blog. He actually used the term "crushing of dissent". Stupid fat bastard!"

China Hand has a big new post up on his recent travels around China -- with some striking photos.

Both China Hand and I found this article about British cars very funny -- despite that fact that China Hand is a car buff and I am anything but. It is British humour from an American. Page 3 is the best.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Sen. Lautenberg: Patriot or fifth columnist? Last week Frank Lautenberg took to the floor of the Senate and launched a vicious and insulting attack on President Bush and some of his advisers. Now it's time to look at Lautenberg's anti-American voting record.
Did Gorelick's infamous memo provide the missing link between Chinagate and 9/11? Jamie Gorelick not only blinded the US to foreign intelligence information, she also allowed Clinton to offer access and key strategic technologies to the highest bidder: China, and Indonesian/Chinese billionaire donors with close ties to China's dictatorial regime were recipients.
America's media subversives There is no escaping the fact that the mainstream media largely consists of leftwing political bigots whose contempt for the truth is only exceeded by the hatred for President Bush.
Oysters, the ABC and so-called market failure: Revealed it to be a myth that frees market policies allowed media owners to ruthlessly impose politically homogeneous views media reporting.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Revel: Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism: "How to understand this war against globalization, which has grown in scope and virulence over the past five years? First, we must realize that it is a war in the real, not the figurative, sense of the word. It is a physical struggle being fought in the streets, not just theoretically. The demonstrators who are its shock troops are organized by activist organizations, many of them subsidized by governments, and they sack cities and lay siege to international meetings during their battles. What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to be violently hostile to that"

For those who want the detailed figures, Donald Luskin shows that the last U.S. economic recession took place under Clinton and that it was under the Bush administration that the recovery took place. His chart of GDP growth is pretty persuasive.

Hooray! "The World Trade Organization ruled that the government's multibillion-dollar subsidies to the U.S. cotton industry violate global trade rules. The landmark case could compel Washington to cut farm subsidies and force the United States, Europe and other wealthy economies to make greater concessions to poor countries at global trade talks. It was the first successful challenge of a wealthy nation's domestic agricultural subsidies."

Interesting comment from a reader: "In the Bible (Genesis 27: 29), there is a remark that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. Countries who are friendly towards Israel and/or who treat Jews equally do seem to have most prosperity and freedom, whereas antagonism towards Jews seems to be associated with poverty and oppression. Whether it is the work of God or a remarkably prescient comment on the human condition, it does seem to hold true."

CafeHayek says the statistics show SUVs are NOT safer than other vehicles (which their buyers often claim) but NOR are they more dangerous (which their opponents routinely claim).

David's Medienkritik points out that there is abuse of prisoners in German prisons too and asks why the German government is not apologizing: A very sarcastic post.

The Left are fervent in their belief that criminality is NOT genetically inherited but is due to "poverty", "discrimination" etc. So Chris Brand's latest post is a VERY interesting one: "Identical twins were found to share anti-social behaviour patterns "much more strongly" than did fraternal twins in a study of 670 twins pairs conducted from the University of Wales College of Medicine (Arch. Gen. Psychiat.; Times, 4 v). Apparently `basic' antisocial personality was "wholly genetic", though the environment added finishing touches." This is the academic article Chris is referring to (Summary only).

There is now a PDF version online here of Chris's book The g factor which is a bit more convenient than the previous zipped version. Chris has also advised that he is prepared to email to those who request it a copy of his chapter in the 2003 book The scientific study of general intelligence (edited by Danish psychologist Helmuth Nyborg and published by Pergamon). The chapter -- jointly authored by Brand, Constales and Kane -- is called 'Why ignore the g factor?' and contains new vindications of the strength of g, of the measurability of g and of g's 'differentiation' at higher-g levels. There is more about the book here. Email: cbrand@cycad.com or brand@crispian.demon.co.uk

Hmmm... I dabbled a bit with Technorati last night -- who track over 2 million blogs worldwide. From what I can make out, it seems that I am -- rather to my surprise -- the No. 3 Australian blogger. I seem to be behind only the two Tims in the number of other blogs that link to me: The Conservative Tim (Blair) has over 800 linkers and the Leftist Tim (Dunlop) has nearly 400 linkers whereas I have just over 300 linkers -- adding together those who link to me via my old site and those who link to me via my current site. I also seem to pick up quite a few unique links via "PC Watch". Australian blogging is only a small world, however, so being No. 3 is no great distinction.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here. GREENIE WATCH responds to the latest Greenie scare about kangaroos.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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THAT WONDERFUL U.N.

Kofi-gate kickbacks: "Kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein's regime on contracts signed under the United Nations' oil-for-food programme were far higher than the 10 per cent rake-off previously assumed to be the norm.... The discrepancy represents the kickbacks for leaders and regime officials who skimmed off billions of pounds from the scheme that was supposed to provide food, medicine and essential supplies for the Iraqi people... The inflated contracts were apparently not noticed or ignored at the UN in New York.

Kofi Annan was chiefly to blame for the Rwanda genocide: "During the hundred days of slaughter and until it stopped, says Hourigan, "consistently, repeatedly people like Kofi Annan failed to act. I think there can be nothing else to do for that person either to resign themselves or be replaced." And, added Colvin, the United Nations' own internal inquiry actually did blame Kofi Annan and the unit he led. "Yes," replied Hourigan, "the Carlson Commission did just that.""

The Sudan: "Now I'm in another Sudan, in the Darfur region to the west of the country, witnessing the horrendous and tragic results of a campaign of ugly ethnic violence, which has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless". Where is "the international community" when you need them? Surely a U.N. resolution would fix the problem?

Setting the fox to guard the henhouse: "Sudan won re-election to the United Nations' main human rights watchdog on Tuesday, prompting the United States to walk out because of ethnic cleansing in the country's Darfur region..... Sichan Siv, the U.S. delegate to the council, accused Sudan of having no right to sit on the rights commission because of ethnic cleansing in Darfur where government troops are accused of backing Arab militia which pillage black Africa villages, raping and killing". See Dhimmi Watch for more on the delights of Sudan. Even though it's in Africa Sudan is definitely not a good place to be black. But, come to think of it, nowhere in Africa is nearly as good to blacks as the USA is. Mass death seems to be happening all the time somewhere or other in Africa.

Tim Worstall goes into a bit more detail about the strange membership of the UN "Human Rights" Commission.

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ELSEWHERE

More glories of socialized medicine: A pregnant Australian mother was told by two public hospital doctors that the baby was dead inside her and she was sent for a curette to remove the "remains". She asked several times for an ultrasound scan to confirm the diagnosis but was refused because: "The obstetrician said she didn't want to place an undue burden on the ultrasound staff". While she was waiting to go into theatre -- a long wait, of course -- she felt that all was not right, checked herself out and went to a private doctor who booked her in immediately for a scan. The scan showed there was nothing wrong with the baby. So a precious life was saved because of Australia's large private medicine sector. In Canada the baby would be dead.

Socialized arrogance: "A huge headline on the front of a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine said more than was intended: 'Now are we ready to talk about health care?' Inside was an article with the same title by Sen. Hillary Clinton. The casual arrogance of that question is staggering. We talked endlessly about Hillary's proposed government-run medical system a decade ago and decided against it for many reasons. Now this rerun of the same issues proceeds as if the question is whether the rest of us are 'ready' to talk about such things."

Keith Burgess-Jackson has reproduced a letter originally printed in the New York Times in which a woman repeats the familiar complaint that men won't "commit" to marriage or any lasting relationship. She is surprised?? The way politically correct American divorce and palimony laws attack men, I wonder why ANY American male gets married or risks fatherhood. All who do are either heroes or incorrigible optimists. See here. Or maybe they don't know what they are letting themselves in for.

Silver lining? Has Islam killed multiculturalism? The Spectator thinks that may be so in the UK: "The rest of us might have suspected that multiculturalism was officially dead on 12 September 2001; but to hear multiculturalism disavowed, in public, by an organisation hitherto dedicated to its propagation is something else entirely".

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a wide range of reading.

Dick McDonald reminds the younger generation of what the righteous Senator Ted Kennedy really is.

The wicked one tells you what you need to do to get to heaven. You'll never guess.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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FASCISM

I mentioned last Sunday the latest book on Fascism (The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert. O. Paxton) but was too deterred by its obvious biases to do anything more than link to my own article on Hitler so that readers could see for themselves what Paxton had "overlooked".

Marxist "superstar" Terry Eagleton has however now reviewed the book and most of what he says is surprisingly fair. He does, for instance, make clear the antipathy between conservatism and Fascism and even hints at Fascism's Leftist origins and its affinities with modern-day Leftist "post-modernism". He also concludes, as I do, that Fascism seems in the long run to have won the day and that most of the world's political systems are now at least moving towards what would once have been called Fascism.

One of my readers bridled at Eagleton's statement: "The assumption that the free market and political democracy go naturally together was always pretty dubious" but I am afraid Eagleton is right. Up until recently the world's most free market society was Hong Kong, with no democracy at all, and intensely capitalist Singapore has pretty limited democracy too. As in most of his comments, however, Eagleton is overstating his case. Although there is no necessary association between democracy and capitalism, the two do seem to have some rough association.

I should mention, however, that the opening of Eagleton's review is deceptive. He says that Mussolini (the founder of Fascism) opposed Socialism. He omits to mention that what was called Socialism in Mussolini's day was what we would now call Communism. Mussolini, like the Mensheviks, considered Communism/Bolshevism to be a deviation from true Marxist doctrine. Mussolini was a non-Communist Leftist, in other words -- something that is still all around us today. The main difference between the Communists and the Fascists was that the Fascists detested the idea of class-warfare. They wanted the people of their countries to be united in one brotherly band rather than at war with one-another. But both the Communists and the Fascists wanted (and got) an all-powerful State that would allegedly "look after" its people -- not much different in the end from what modern-day Western Leftists clamour for.

And Eagleton's description of Fascists as "uncouth bruisers" is absurd. Eagleton admits that Britain's Sir Oswald Mosley was an "exception" to that but so was Mussolini. Like many modern-day Leftists, Mussolini was an intellectual. He read poetry and philosophy voraciously, including Socrates and Plato. He spoke several foreign languages, was always interested in discussing political and philosophical ideas with almost anyone, had considerable acceptance in his early days as a leading Marxist theoretician, wrote over 40 books, and was a tree-lover and environmentalist 50 years before Greenies were thought of!

I linked to a review of Eagleton's own recent book on 29th April. That reviewer noted Eagleton's superficial cleverness. A good example of it can be found in the last sentence of his review of the Paxton book.

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ELSEWHERE

The hysteria about childhood obesity is rising -- as this article shows. Obesity is a great discovery for the Left. It will NEVER be cured so they will be able to go on for years making nuisances of themselves over it.

Statistical expert John Lott Jr. sets out why California's virtual ban on electonic voting is just ignorant technophobia. Australia has paper voting only so I have no personal knowledge of alternatives but his claim that electronic voting is in fact more secure than paper voting seems reasonable to me. Voting security in Australia is a joke -- leading to Al Capone's famous saying "Vote early and vote often" being regarded as good election-day advice in some Australian Leftist circles. Rather like Pakistan.

From one who knows: "I was on Mr. Kerry's boat in Vietnam. He doesn't deserve to be commander in chief."

Steve Sailer tells us what few others will about Europe's Gypsy problem.

How odd! Many of the "ex-diplomat" critics of Tony Blair are so involved in businesses in Arab countries that they are known as the "Camel Corps". But none of them declared a conflict of interest, of course.

This very amusing but serious article by David Carr on the recently enlarged EU shows all by itself why "Samizdata" is such a popular blog.

Who armed Saddam? There is a great chart here showing that 57% of Saddam's arms imports came from Russia, 13% from France and 1% from the USA.

In his post of 28th April (no permalink) Snowball sets out a whole host of criticisms of the proposed ID card for the UK. There is opposition to national ID cards on both the Right and the Left but I must say that they seem a reasonable way of limiting fraud to me. Perhaps I am not paranoid enough.

Icelandic blogger Willy Sutton has now started a separate blog for what he calls "visual economics". See here. It's a good idea to show the follies of socialism in pictorial form and he does have some good pictures.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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LADY THATCHER

I was delighted to read that Lady Thatcher has made a good recovery from her recent illness and bereavement. And this comment rings true too:

"She remains a self-effacing, charming, polite woman in private, never seeking to be the centre of attention - though of course she cannot help but be in almost every setting - and with an immense humanity that her critics simply refuse to believe exists. Her sincerity and basic decency illustrate one of the most important and fundamental truths about her, that she was never in it for herself."

That self-effacement is precisely what I noted on the occasion that I met her at a small garden party in Kent in 1977. When people began to make her the centre of attention then (while I was talking to her as it happens) she turned around and did her best to break it up.

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby points out that America's marching feminists are not feminists at all, just far-Leftists. If they were really concerned about women, they would be attacking Islamic fundamentalists, not GWB. But you never hear a word from them about the suffering of women under Islam: The usual total hypocrisy of the Left.

Sad: The Australian Federal government is trying to bribe young men into taking up primary school teaching. Given the prejudiced way false allegations of sexual abuse against male teachers are handled, I can only hope that no young men are desperate enough to take up the offer. They risk having their lives ruined if they do.

Shawcross on Iraq: "Do not forget that during the 1990s, when there was no war in Iraq, perhaps tens of thousands of Islamic warriors were trained in the bin Laden camps in Afghanistan. That was a time when the US president, Bill Clinton, was working overtime to create an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The US finally came to the rescue of Muslims in Bosnia, after Europe had failed to do so, and then led the effort to save Muslims in Kosovo. None of that stopped bin Laden from building up his organisation and attacking the US wherever he could.... They live to kill. The most determined and, by their own standards, the most devout live to die. They cannot be appeased." Note that Shawcross was an ardent Leftie once. See here. He now says: ""As in the twentieth century, so in the twenty-first, only America has both the power and the optimism to defend the international community against what really are the forces of darkness." How awful for the Left!

The man behind most of the anti-Bush ads: "During the eighties he grew more corporate and at the same time more radical, building offices for Fenton Communications in New York City and Washington while fattening his payroll by performing services for various communist state and "liberation" groups, including the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the dictatorship of Grenada's Maurice Bishop that President Ronald Reagan sent troops to overthrow in 1983, the El Salvadoran terrorist Farabundo Marti National Liberation group and the conspiratorial Christic Institute, which spread vicious, baseless smears about retired U.S. military heroes." So you know you can trust him.

Some good quotations recently in The Federalist:
"The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly." --Theodore Roosevelt
"Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong." --Calvin Coolidge
"The elements of our strength are many. They include our democratic government, our economic system, our great natural resources. But, the basic source of our strength is spiritual. We believe in the dignity of man." --Jeane Kirkpatrick
"Eternal vigilance is only part of the price of freedom. The maturity to live with imperfections is another crucial part of the price of freedom." --Thomas Sowell

Amusing. Chris Brand has started off his postings for May with a full measure of the incorrectness that he is known for: "Star slut Sharon Osbourne was also in trouble at the Grauniad for saying she wanted to have sex with a well-hung Black man before she died. What could she mean, asked the troubled Grauninannies? She surely could not be referring to Phil Rushton's anathematized findings, contested by the small-peniled left, - findings which actually take no account of the pretty minimal staying power of the average Black or of females' greater interest in property values than in penile volume. [While we're at it, it should be noted that the evolutionary advantages of a modest and amply-foreskinned penis are to avoid frostbite while hunting in northern climes and to allow of ready erection in days before Viagra. Sluggish AIDS-prone slit-splitting members are of more interest to pervs than to women.]" I have added a couple of links and edited the quote slightly to make Chris's telegraphic style a bit easier to follow but you can find the original at the BOTTOM of his page here.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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SOME ECONOMIC REALITIES

Marginal Revolution discusses (Nobel prize winning economist) Gary Becker's plan to cut drug prices by cutting FDA red tape: "...a return to a safety standard alone would lower costs and raise the number of therapeutic compounds available. In particular, this would include more drugs from small biotech firms that do not have the deep pockets to invest in extended efficacy trials. And the resulting increase in competition would mean lower prices - without the bureaucratic burden of price controls..."

Is the EU a tax cartel? "Germany yesterday threw cold water on the festive mood ahead of this week's European Union enlargement by telling its eastern neighbours that low corporate tax rates used to attract foreign investment were unacceptable"

In Argentina privatization of the water supply led to a drop in child mortality of 5-7 percent, with reductions of 24% in the poorest areas

The Stossel "problem": "According to some leading journalists and consumer activists, ABC's news division suffers from a major problem: John Stossel. He used to be such a good consumer reporter, years ago, worthy of his numerous Emmies. But now he thinks that markets protect consumers better than governments do, and he's skeptical of all sorts of beliefs that we all just know are right. ... The real Stossel problem is that he's so alone..."

The private sector in Australia has been using new technology (mobile phones and trunk radio) to provide a better service to taxicab users. So the government wants to ban it: "Groups of entrepreneurial cabbies have created a thriving business providing luxurious, limo-class service at cab prices. The passengers are thrilled and the drivers are getting ahead in an ingenious example of how the market can outwit the leaden bureaucracies of big government regulation. But last week, the Transport Minister, Michael Costa, spoiled it all. As part of his "reform" of the taxi industry, Costa announced a ban on "private network" cab drivers who use mobile phones to service private clients, threatening fines ranging from $1100 to a staggering $110,000"

South Africa today. "South Africa now has a high rate of taxation, restrictive labor laws, is Africa's largest welfare state and has Africa's largest, most politically well-connected and politically influential labor union movement... At the present day, an estimated 42% or 8-million employable non-white South Africans are unemployed. The unemployment among this segment of the population is higher today than at any time during the apartheid era... South Africa's long term economic future appears bleak due to the policies that the nation's government has already enacted. The disarming of the civilian population has left it at the mercy of armed criminals."

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