ELSEWHERE

Rather Biased is good on the way the mainstream media have "sanitized" the anti-Republican demonstrators in New York.

Clayton Cramer reports a typical example of Leftist attention-seeking at the Republican convention and is puzzled by it. He does not seem to realize that attention-seeking is what motivates Leftists in general. Leftism makes sense only as a psychological condition, not as as a serious analysis of anything. More on that here.

Taranto has some good excerpts from the convention speech by the last real Republican mayor of NYC.

LOL. Leftist self-delusion: "In the end, there was no need for a big rally in Central Park. No need for a string of angry speakers standing at some podium bashing President Bush and the Republicans. In the end, the torrent of people and placards that choked the streets of Manhattan yesterday was more powerful than any speech."

Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch "identifies himself with pride as a lifelong Democrat.... No surprise, then, that Koch disagrees with George W. Bush on just about every domestic issue, from taxes to marriage to prescription drugs. But he's voting for him in November. "I've never before supported a Republican for president," Koch told me last week. "But I'm doing so this time because of the one issue that trumps everything else: international terrorism. In my judgment, the Democratic Party just doesn't have the stomach to stand up to the terrorists. But Bush is a fighter."

Look at the facts, not conspiracy theories: "If we move beyond the conspiracy mode of thinking, we can begin to judge the total contribution of the Bush presidency and see that we are far better off than we were at the end of the Clinton administration. The president has ably led us through the uncertain days following the worst attack on our country in modern times. Funding of terror cells has been disrupted; Al Qaeda operations have been crippled. A brilliant military victory in Afghanistan has eliminated bases for training camps that were turning out fanatical anti-American terrorists, and this victory and the one in Iraq have made the Middle East and the world a safer place on the whole.... The jobs that John Kerry has complained about for months are beginning to come through in substantial numbers. The largest tax cut in American history has returned the people's money to them".

Second-term hopes?: "Bush-bashers enjoy saying President Bush is far, far to the right. But as virtually any conservative will tell you, the president has been a me-too liberal on many of the issues that matter most -- spending like crazy, expanding the bureaucracy, subsidizing farmers, caving in to free-speech curbs and recklessly enlarging an entitlement program. That list is just for starters. The question is whether he and his supporters can make a convincing case before the end of the Republican National Convention that he will rectify his errors -- get right with the right -- while moving boldly with particularized, innovative policies on some major problems mostly ignored in the first term."

David Brooks says there is not a lot of public support for cuts to big government so conservatives have to get used to that. He points to historical precedents for GWB's alternative strategy of using big government in a way that liberates and empowers the individual rather than taking his choices away and forcing him into a straitjacket of uniformity.

Dick McDonald has had problems with an unreadably wide page lately but I fixed it for him last night. He has a very good short post here about how the Bush tax-cuts on investment income have kept the economy surging ahead despite oil shocks and other pressures.

Marybeth has been having fun comparing Google with other search engines. Her comment on Cambodia gave me a laugh.

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

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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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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IS LEFT AND RIGHT ALL THERE IS IN POLITICS?

I am afraid I have to get a bit academic here:

The idea that political orientation needs to be described in terms of two dimensions instead of a single Left-Right dimension is an old one -- going at least as far back as the factor-analytic work of Ferguson in the 1940s. It also seems to be something of an article of faith for most libertarians -- though the usual 1% of the vote gained by the U.S. Libertarian Party in national elections tends to show how far the theory is from reality. The latest attempt at a two-dimensional description is some work by Lightfoot. I took the Lightfoot quiz myself and you can see my results here. Note that according to Lightfoot, Stalin was a Rightist! Black might as well be white.

I have no idea of Lightfoot's political orientation but it does rather look like the attempt made by Leftist psychologists to claim that all political baddies are conservatives. They have falsely claimed for years that the socialist Hitler was a Rightist, so why not Stalin too? For a quick treatment of why two-dimensional descriptions of politics don't work, see here. My own statistical research into the dimensionality question goes back over 30 years and my reply to the claim that Communists are conservatives is here.

Putting it at its briefest, the Left/Right division is so pervasive because that IS how the great majority of people think. There are of course varieties of conservatism --- with religious conservatives and economic conservatives having least in common -- but they all do have SOME things in common: Principally a respect for the individual. Leftists, by contrast, talk in terms of groups and say that the individual must bow down and conform to some largely mythical "community'. And both the Communists and Hitler were very good at that.

See here for some statistical evidence that economic and religious conservatism do combine in the general population. And that is why (to be very technical) the first eigenvalue is always large relative to subsequent ones.

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ELSEWHERE

Wow! I am beginning to think that Nelson Ascher is the most brilliant blogger around at the moment. He seems to have taken over "Europundits" and last night I just read right through through every word of the current postings there. He is a Brazilian of Hungarian origin but really sticks the knife into anti-American stupidity. His sarcastic comment on Springsteen is a gem. And if you are interested in languages and in poetry (long great interests of mine) this long post is gripping. Thanks to Marc Miyake for introducing me to Ascher.

Speaking of sarcasm, This WSJ piece by Peggy Noonan from last April is very pointed too.

A libertarian case for GWB: "voting for George W. Bush on Nov. 2 may be the best choice for advocates of a free society. In fact, on several issues important to libertarians, Bush has even staked out positions clearly superior to those of his Democratic opponent. Chief among them is Social Security reform. Since he first ran in 2000, Bush has proposed to return a share of Social Security taxes to workers in the form of private pension accounts invested in the market.... Ditto for health care reform. Bush signed legislation establishing health savings accounts, which empower more consumers to decide how their health dollars will be spent..... While Bush has been a big spender, he has not been a big regulator... On gun control, Bush is a consistent defender of the moral and constitutional right to keep and bear arms.... On free trade, Bush has embraced the freedom of Americans to trade and invest in the global economy. His administration won trade promotion authority, launched a new round of negotiations in the World Trade Organization and signed a number of free trade agreements.. On tax reform, Bush shares the Reagan vision of a tax system that encourages economic success. With a GOP Congress, he has cut marginal tax rates across the board and especially on dividends and capital gains."

Good comment from a reader: "I am reading "Unfit for Command" at the moment. WOW! The 30 second sound bites and O'Reilly interviews don't do it justice - there is more here than you possibly can imagine. And it's all internally consistent - how could the authors possibly get so many people to lie consistently? Yet leftists just discard obvious facts and defend Kerry. Kerry's insults to soldiers were never forgotten - most veterans just were happy to get on with their productive lives - unlike Kerry, who never had a real job".

"Unfit for Command" is a Regnery book and might not have got published without them so click here to read a summary of the book and perhaps buy it. And here is a way to get a free(ish) copy of it.

A fun post about Kerry and dogs on the WSJ

The Christian Science Monitor has a rare flash of humour in reporting the lies of the Chinese Fascists about Tibet.

The Happy Carpenter has a big post about how a government bureaucracy that hands out licences to build things is heavily up its own rear-end -- And helping nobody in the process.

Lost Tooth Society is a new conservative blog with a lot of good links.

Wayne Lusvardi has a good short review of a book on the motivations of one of America's home-grown terrorists -- the Unabomber. As with Muslims, it looks like sexual frustration had a lot to do with his destructive behaviour.

In case you have not come across it yet, Communists for Kerry seems to be very popular at the moment.

Another socialist icon bites the dust: The Kibbutzim have gone capitalist.

Wicked Thoughts has put up heaps of good jokes lately

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

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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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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PROBLEMS IN THE HEXAGON

"The hexagon" is a common French synonym for France. A map will show you why

French arrogance crumbling? "This week marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris, but the champagne corks were flying beneath clouds of French despair. As the Government of Jacques Chirac tries to mend chronic flaws in the country's social fabric -- highlighted by a rise in racist and anti-Semitic violence -- the French intelligentsia is lamenting the nation's loss of diplomatic clout and cultural authority.. . The mood of national lamentation is summed up by philosopher Chantal Delsol, who asks: "How is it that such a brilliant nation has become such a mediocre power, so out of breath, so indebted, so closed in its own prejudices ... To be French today is to mourn for what we no longer are." In the past few years many of the nation's delusional bubbles have been pricked one by one... "

And The Guardian reports this summary of the French predicament: "The economy is suffocating. Big industrial groups are investing elsewhere," he said. "The best-off are fleeing, the most talented are leaving. Even the middle classes are demoralised by the taxation levels."

Self-inflicted economic woes: "The latest reports on France's socialistic economy portray a bleak picture of French workers on a treadmill running faster and faster just to stay in place. The French unemployment rate has soared to 9.5 percent, and the economic growth rate over the past year has trudged forward at the turtle-like speed of 1.5 percent (versus about 4.5 percent for the U.S.). If the U.S. had an unemployment rate as high as France, there would be about six million more Americans out of work - the equivalent of putting every worker in the state of Michigan in an unemployment line"

There is a TREMENDOUS demolition job done on French history by Prof. Christie Davies here. Just one excerpt: "Ninety years ago in August 1914 Britain was dragged into a war between France and Germany for which France was largely to blame. It was that French war that fatally undermined British power and thus Britain's ability and willingness to withstand the Nazi and Soviet threats that were the very consequence of the war that France began. Not for the first time France had reduced Europe to ruins with her insane and criminal aggression". He goes on to argue that the French were just as Nazi-inclined as the Germans.

I linked to this article on 12th March but two people have recently sent me copies of it so I guess it is worth another note. It is by a former Francophile and describes the pervasive antisemitism of the French. It shows how pathetic France is and why their moral posturing should be totally ignored. One quote: "This, it seems, is their new Maginot line: the sneer of hatred. Hand in hand with the government and the intellectual classes, the French media are channeling the national dismay over lost grandeur into contempt for America."

Incidentally, has anybody used the new blogger search bar at the head of this blog? I entered the word "Francophile" and it found nothing. My post of 12th March was invisible to it. Pretty useless! I found the entry in my files by using good old Ctrl+F.

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ELSEWHERE

There are a couple of news reports here and here of the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Manhattan at the moment. There is a good report from the conservative counter-demonstrators here. I am told that some of my readers were there.

Peg Kaplan reports a prescription for Black success that would undoubtedly work. A very similar prescription works fine for Asians.

62% of US Senators are attorneys. Their average number of years in elected office is 24; and 97 of the 100 Senators are career politicians. "We keep sending the same old people to the Senate, year after year. They debate the same old topics, and come up with the same old, tired conclusions ... and we wonder why our Social Security System is on the verge of bankruptcy.why there is still no immigration policy that is fair to all.why a great public education is a thing of the past." But it's not the Senators' fault - it's our fault for sending the same old people to the Senate year after year. Many of them had their last fresh thought twenty years ago. Most have never worked for a living, so they have no clue what you and I go through every work day. They exist in their plush ivory tower where their every whim is catered to because WE allow it.

One reason for the African IQ problem: "Western experts tend to tiptoe around the issue of how malnourishment makes people less intelligent, but local experts sometimes do not. "If your brain is stunted when you are young, that affects the decisions you make in later life. If you can't do simple arithmetic, you won't invest wisely. The cost of that will be very high," says Tomaida Msisika, a consultant on food security in Malawi. Sam Chimwaza, an analyst for Malawi's Famine Early Warning Systems Network, says that the reasoning ability of people in rural areas has been affected by malnutrition and it is hard for them to execute simple instructions. "They can work as servants in the city for two or three years and still not figure out how to adjust the temperature on an iron," he says."

In response to an idea from one of my readers, I have just started a new blogspot site (not really a blog) called SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. It is just a place where I have gathered together just about all of my past posts on the subject so people can see how the "compassion" behind socialized medicine works out in real-life. (Hint: The compassion is basically non-existent). I will keep posting to it periodically as relevant news items come up but I foresee the principal usefulness of the site as a standing resource for use in any discussions of socialized medicine that my readers might get into. Links, submissions and suggestions for the site are of course very welcome. I also of course have another such narrowly focused site in LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS.

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

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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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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TRUMAN

Some readers think that I was unfair to the late President Truman in what I said yesterday -- quoting his aid to Greece to fight the communist insurrection, NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, etc. They are of course perfectly correct in saying that many Democrats up to and including LBJ were anti-Communist Leftists who did good things in that cause which deserve some respect. My point is only that the A-bombings showed the Leftist callousness that was also lurking in such people and that anti-communism is no excuse for showing the same sort of callousness that Communists themselves have always displayed. In good Leftist fashion, Truman was also noted for the way he greatly expanded his own Presidential power at the expense of Congress -- just one example of which being his unconstitutional use of U.S. troops in Korea without prior congressional consent, unlike GWB in Iraq.

Some readers have also repeated the conventional excuse that the A-bombing saved many American lives by obviating the need for America to invade Japan. But there was never any need for America to invade Japan. Japan was almost totally collapsed already. It was already no danger to anyone. It was neutered. Conquest would have served machismo, nothing else. Simple maintenance of the blockade and occasional bombing of any remaining industrial or militarily-relevant targets was all that was required. If Japan had chosen to go back to primitive Tokugawa-style isolation for a time, so what? Readers also seem to overlook the importance of loss of face in the ruling Japanese Bushido code. Getting the the Imperial palace flattened would have been a great disgrace probably requiring seppuku (suicide) of the Japanese leaders concerned.

I should also note that callousness does not necessarily imply grit. It was ultimately lack of grit by Truman in Korea and LBJ in Vietnam that caused them to bungle those wars and leave Communist regimes in place there. So again conservatives have nothing to apologize for there. GWB has so far shown some grit in Iraq. There is therefore some hope that the long-term outcome there will be better than what Democrats achieved in Korea and Vietnam.

Again I could go on but alternative history is not a great interest of mine and the relevance of Truman to present-days issues is slight.

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ELSEWHERE

"The New York Times ... has myriad and dubious financial and political ties to John Kerry's presidential campaign.... According to major news outlets, including the Times, the fact that a major Republican donor has contributed money to the group known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth calls into question the impartiality of that group and ties it to the Republicans. If that is indeed the case - that an exchange of funds between an entity and a partisan contributor dispositively links the entity to a partisan cause - then, by their own logic, the Times is unquestionably linked to Kerry's campaign and other far-left groups".

Further to my recent post on John Kerry as a psychopath, Dennis Mangan has some good points

An instructive anniversary: We have just had the anniversary of the signing by the USA of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact in Paris -- a pact outlawing war and providing for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. It achieved precisely nothing, of course. But Kerry and the Left still claim today that similar "international" solutions (via the U.N., the 'world court', the ICC etc) are a good idea. They rely on the fact that the Left-dominated schools no longer teach history to any meaningful degree.

One Hundred Percenter has lots of pictures up of the Leftist demonstrators in NYC at the moment -- all of course trying their utmost to get the attention their egos so desperately need.

More glories of socialized medicine: "Almost 2000 New South Wales patients had died or "could not be contacted" by the time they reached the top of the elective surgery waiting list, a new report reveals. The figure is contained in the latest Australian Hospital Statistics 2002-2003 report. Released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the report provides a breakdown of waiting list statistics across states and territories. Of the 214,298 additions to the list in NSW, more than half were admitted within the year" [meaning that half weren't!]

Oil under the bed: "Some left-wing commentators have interpreted the motive behind Washington's newfound concern for Darfur - as well as the British and Australian governments' volunteering of troops for a phantom UN intervention force - as an effort by Washington to justify an Iraq-style invasion of Sudan to achieve "regime change" and seize control of its potentially massive oil reserves".

American conservatives eat your heart out: What sort of political party leader would say this? "[Our] commitment is surplus budgeting for every year of the next parliament and we will do everything we can to have downward pressure on interest rates. That is our budgetary commitment, that's important for families and the future of the economy. We believe in surplus budgets and we will have that in place through the next parliamentary term." How does that compare with GWB's big-spending ways? The quote is from the leader of Australia's major LEFTIST party, who also has an honours degree in economics from one of Australia's most prestigious universities. And his sidekicks have economics qualifications too. And both major Australian parties DO run economically responsible budgets. It is not just hot air. More here

A nasty one for the feminists: "Women tend to get lower pay than men because they generally work shorter hours, research in a new book reveals. In a blow to feminists claiming gender bias in the workplace, the book says males often work longer full-time hours than females in the same or similar jobs."

The current crop of Islamic crackpots are far from being simple Muslim traditionalists. The Islamic hate merchants in fact learnt most of their hatreds from the Western Left, including Western Fascists. As Nial Ferguson says in this book review: "in Occidentalism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have gone a step further. They argue that the most radical critics of the West today – including Osama bin Laden and other "Islamist" extremists – are not the upholders of pure, untainted Eastern values. Their extreme anti-Western ideologies are, paradoxically, in large measure Western in origin". There is more to that effect here

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

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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

Comments? Email me 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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DEMOCRAT HISTORY IS NOT THE SAME AS AMERICAN HISTORY

Oversimplifications and conventional thinking always get my teeth on edge and the way past deeds of American Democrat Presidents get blamed on America as a whole constantly amazes me. But the reason why that happens is plain: Leftist historians and intellectuals generally are the ones who write history and they have done a pretty good job of conning a lot of people. Take the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities -- the doing of a DEMOCRAT President (Truman). Japan was thoroughly stuffed by that stage without even control over its own airspace so there was absolutely no need to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent and defenceless men women and children in those two cities. Flattening the Imperial palace in Tokyo would have been infinitely more merciful and equally demoralizing to the Japanese (who thought the Emperor was divine). And if that didn't suffice, a simple blockade would soon have sent Japan back to the stone age and thus made it no danger to anyone. Japan had to import almost all its raw materials (including oil) so preventing any ships from entering or leaving Japanese ports would have caused a very rapid collapse. So all Truman did was show what a callous Leftist ba****d he was.

And who was it who got America into Vietnam? The DEMOCRAT President Kennedy. And who escalated the Vietnam war and totally bungled it? The DEMOCRAT President Johnson. And who got America out of Vietnam? The REPUBLICAN President Nixon. And who ended the Cold War? The REPUBLICAN President Reagan. Conservatives have nothing to apologize for in the above. But it does give them good reason to campaign against Democrat Presidents.

And there is a good historical article here written in March 2003 which points out that it was actually J.F. Kennedy who set up Saddam Hussein in power. Its final sentence has proved prophetic: "If a new war in Iraq seems fraught with danger and uncertainty, just wait for the peace".

I could go on but I will leave it at that.

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ELSEWHERE

"Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released recently declassified documents showing that Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry accepted laundered contributions for his 1996 re-election campaign from the Communist Chinese government"

Ollie North's message to John Kerry. Excerpts: "The issue is what you did to us when you came home, John. When you got home, you co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War and wrote The New Soldier, which denounced those of us who served - and were still serving - on the battlefields of a thankless war. Worst of all, John, you then accused me - and all of us who served in Vietnam - of committing terrible crimes and atrocities".

If you want to have a look at John Kerry's disgraceful anti-American book of the 1970s, the whole thing is online here.

Kerrynomics: "Those politicians who propose policies that would restrict trade, increase taxes on capital and/or labor; and increase costly regulations on labor and business are in effect proposing policies to reduce economic and job growth. Unfortunately, Mr. Kerry proposes to do all of the above. He wants to put restrictions on both current and future trade agreements — and each one of these would cause a one-time drop in baseline economic growth and a permanently reduced economic level. His proposals to "tax the rich" would in fact increase taxes on capital — i.e., capital gains, dividends and savings, all of which will reduce the capital stock... Also, his proposals to raise the minimum wage and impose other restrictions on worker employment will only reduce jobs and real wages. Such policies are not compassionate but in fact are hurtful. Either Mr. Kerry does not or chooses not to understand economic reality".

The BBC gets it right at last: "The UN report confirms what many involved in counter-terrorism have increasingly come to believe - that, whilst they have their uses, sanctions and other attempts to stem the flow of money into al-Qaeda are not necessarily the most effective way of preventing future attacks."

Two "Middle Eastern" men have just been arrested for planning to blow up a NYC subway station

NYC shows that standards work: "Who, in the late '80s and early '90s, could have predicted that New York City would soon claim the title of safest big city in America? Yet national crime statistics compiled by the FBI say Gotham has done just that. The key was James Q. Wilson's and George Kelling's ideas about "broken-window policing," the concept that cracking down on small quality-of-life crimes (like turnstile-jumping and graffiti) could bring an out-of-control city under control. Giuliani's embrace of this strategy led to his being portrayed as a "thug" and a "fascist" - but it worked. In 1990, New York City saw 2,245 murders; in 2001, just 642. By 2002, the city's murder rate had dropped to its lowest level since 1963.... Can Bush bring Americans around to his compassionate-conservative agenda of holding children to tougher academic standards, opening up social services to entrepreneurship and reducing the tax burden on all Americans? Maybe he could if all Americans were New Yorkers."

The Singapore government understands incentives: "Tax relief for parents, family allowance for the first and fourth children in addition to the second and third, cheaper mortgages for large families, lower maid fees and longer maternity leave and holiday entitlement for mothers are just some of the measures [Singapore's] ministers hope will mean busier maternity wards from next May".

Useful experience: The blogger at Metal Yarmulke was recently having a big problem with her blog. Somehow, when anybody tried to access it, they got sent to an unrelated site! So her blog had become completely inaccessible! Hair-tearing stuff for any blogger! I could think of a couple of ways in which things could have gone wrong so tried to help. None of my solutions did help but I was able to work out that some hostile person had put a redirect up and told her so. She then got a techie friend to trace the bug and he found a javascript redirect in the blog template itself! I was rather irate at myself for not thinking of that so I thought I should pass the information on as a warning to others. If something similar now happens to my blog I will know where to look for the problem and should be able to fix it immediatey. I always have an up-to-date copy of my template saved to disk in case of crashes anyway, so it would take me only two seconds of copying and pasting to reverse any meddling. Forewarned is forearmed!

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

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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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 ECONOMICS

The real farm subsidy scandal: "The most enduring political illusion is that farm subsidies are necessary to maintain the small family farmer. ... Small family farmers are not the primary dollar recipients of federal subsidies, however. According to the subsidy watchdog Environmental Working Group, 71 percent of farm subsidies go to the top 10 percent of subsidy beneficiaries, almost all of which are large farms. In 2002, 78 farms, none small or struggling, each received over a million dollars in subsidies. The bottom 80 percent of recipients average only $846 per year."

The never-ending war on protectionist ignorance: "By the late 1990s, the protectionists --now rechristened "anti-globalizers" to reflect the expanded scope of their agenda-- seemed to have recovered some of their lost ground. Their newfound vocalism made headlines during the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. Today, however, advocates of globalization are gaining the upper hand again. Bhagwati's strikingly successful defense of open markets in his recent book In Defense of Globalization has been bolstered by another influential pro-globalization voice, that of Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. Wolf's weekly columns have already established him as one of the world's most respected economic journalists. Now his ambitious new book, Why Globalization Works, offers a patient and persuasive refutation of many of the arguments most frequently marshaled by critics of trade liberalization".

In defence of price gougers: Imagine a system that could instantly respond to a calamity like Hurricane Charley by mobilizing suppliers to speed urgently needed resources to the victims. Imagine that such a system could quickly attract the out-of-town manpower needed for cleanup and repairs, while seeing to it that existing supplies were neither recklessly squandered nor hoarded. Imagine that it could prompt thousands of men and women to act in the public interest, yet not force anyone to do anything against his will. Actually, there's no need to imagine. The system already exists. Economists refer to it as the law of supply and demand. Unfortunately, too many journalists and politicians call it by a more pejorative and destructive name: "price-gouging."

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ELSEWHERE

From John Kerry's interview with GQ magazine: "GQ: You've never seen a therapist? JK: No. I had some nightmares when I came home, which is not unusual. GQ: Like what? JK: I can't say. To me Vietnam is an old place, an old memory. It is old history, it's gone, it's past. The less I have to talk about it, frankly, the happier I am." He must be the most miserable man alive if that's the case!

Peg Kaplan points out that only 6 out of 100 pages of Kerry's military records have been released and that his discharge was delayed for 6 years. Highly suspicious.

Hold the Mayo has lots on Kerry -- including comments on his old antiwar book that he is now trying to suppress. Lots of documentation here too.

Good comment from a reader: "Kerry's reaction to the Swift Boat Vets (censorship, lawsuits, threats) reminds me of Stalin or Hitler. If Kerry had their power I don't think there is much doubt that he would send his secret police to arrest the vets and throw them in the Gulag or the concentration camp".

Political censorship is a reflex for the Left: "I got an e-mail from a person who identified herself as Melissa Salmanowitz with a group called Media Matters for America. It supposedly is a watchdog on conservatives, and she was wanting me to write about her group's effort to get chain book stores to quit selling Unfit for Command due to accuracy problems. So I e-mailed Salmanowitz and told her that I'd write about their cause to quash the book's examination of John F. Kerry's military record and anti-war activities if they'd make the same appeal to the movie theaters to stop showing Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. ... if Democrats and liberals nationally are going to dish it out, they should accept the consequences. They can't cheer the smear by Michael Moore, Whoopi Goldberg and Moveon.org, then try to silence the Swift Boat vets. That's too hypocritical, even for presidential politics."

People still escaping the socialist paradise: "A Cuban woman tucked herself inside a wooden crate the size of a small filing cabinet and had herself shipped from the Bahamas to Miami aboard a cargo plane. The woman, whose name was not released, will be allowed to stay in the United States. A cargo crew found her curled up inside the crate after unloading it late Tuesday at the Miami airport. 'Certainly she's lucky to be alive,' said Zach Mann, spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. Under the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot policy, Cubans who reach U.S. soil are usually allowed to stay, while those who are picked up at sea are sent home. Federal officials released no information on how the woman got from Cuba to the Bahamas. The 180-mile route is flown by a third-party contractor for the delivery service DHL, which said it was investigating."

From a Dennis Prager interview: "I believe that if I took a thousand evangelical ministers... and I took a thousand professors in the liberal arts, I would bet every penny I have that the moral acuity of the thousand evangelical ministers would dwarf the moral acuity of a thousand liberal arts professors. For which reason Lawrence Summers, for example, the president of Harvard, announced two years ago that the seat -- the seat -- of anti-Semitism in America had shifted to the university. The university had also been the seat of support for Stalin. The university in Germany was the seat of the place to get Nazi philosophers."

Dumb Canadians: "A July 2004 study by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, Paying, More, Getting Less, concluded that after years of government control, the Canadian medical system is badly injured and bleeding citizens' hard-earned tax dollars. The institute compared health care systems in the industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and found Canada currently spends the most, yet ranks among the lowest on such indicators as access to physicians, quality of medical equipment, and key health outcomes. One of the major reasons for this discrepancy is that, unlike the countries in the study that outperformed Canada--Sweden, Japan, Australia, and France, for example-- Canada outlaws most private health care".

"The left takes its vision seriously -- more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep." -- Thomas Sowell

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

**************************

The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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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JOHN KERRY: PSYCHOPATH

Sometimes little things can tell you a lot and John Kerry's totally implausible story about his dog is an example of that. It is a classic psychopathic lie -- something said which earns momentary acclaim but which is uttered without any thought of its being found out as false.

It is highly comparable to Bill Clinton's lie that his wife was named after Sir Edmund Hillary when in fact Sir Edmund was an unknown New Zealand farmer at the time of her birth. Kerry's lack of any consistency in what he says from occasion to occasion has always seemed suspiciously psychopathic but I think this seals the diagnosis.

Given the chronic lying of psychopaths, this story also begins to makes sense. It claims that the details of his war record posted on the net by John Kerry are fraudulent: "I looked at that Web site and the first thing I looked at was Kerry's Silver Star citation. Guess what? It is for an action that took place in 1969, but it is signed by Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. Strangely, Lehman was secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987,"

I am also beginning to see why Kerry made his outrageous claims about American war crimes as soon as he got back from Vietnam. The sampan incident and various others incidents indicate that Kerry himself was something of a war criminal and it seems to be a reflexive Leftist strategy to accuse others of what are in fact their own faults (Freudian "projection").

Anyway, America survived the psychopathic Clinton reasonably well so it should be able to survive a President Kerry. It could even work out in an amoral sort of way. A psychopathic President would have no compunction about nuking Mecca if that seemed like a good idea at the time (remember Clinton bombing the Serbs) and that could save as many American lives as the atrocity that another Democrat President committed over Hiroshima.

In case anybody thinks I am talking through my hat about psychopathy, I should perhaps point out that I have had a couple of academic journal articles published on the subject of psychopathy in non-clinical populations (See here and here or here and here ).

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ELSEWHERE

There is an article from GQ here that says GWB's record in the Air National Guard is a bit murky because he was engaged in undercover work at that time. It gives a lot of detail and argument to support the claim. Excerpt: "Bush was serving his country elsewhere, in a clandestine military unit: the Special Undercover Missions Service (SUMS), an elite air-force agency specializing in national security and acts of espionage"

"Even if Kerry's Vietnam record is every bit as heroic as he presents it, the notion that this makes him fit to be president is ludicrous. The man spent four months in combat as a junior officer; he's not exactly Eisenhower." -- James Taranto

That wonderful "public" (free-rider) medicine: "Los Angeles County, which has lost six emergency rooms in a little over a year, is on the brink of a far more serious problem, facing more closures that could jeopardize emergency care for tens of thousands of residents, according to public officials and independent analysts".

An interesting article here on the close convergence between Australian and U.S. policy -- with a suggestion that U.S. interest in reducing income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax may have been sparked by the successful Australian introduction of just such a change.

Currency Lad has a good reply to the charge that Australia's present conservative government has made Australia "racist": He quotes famous anti-Asian remarks from two of Australia's most prominent Leftist leaders. He also has this delightful story of George Bush Senior trusting and welcoming a young woman purely because she was Australian! Good man!

Michael Darby is on the web again with a few new posts -- in particular he takes on the accusation that Australian conservative politicians are "chickenhawks" by listing the considerable number who have military connections.

Laugh at liberals has a comprehensive demolition of most of the dumb Leftist accusations that are routinely hurled at GWB.

I came across this good Reagan quote on the website of the dynamic Prodos: ""How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin." Lots of other good stuff there too.

Squander Two has an amusing article about British customer service. Everything he says is true with knobs on.

A new blog by a physicist who describes himself as a "warmongering neo-conservative, NRA life member, and professional laser-weapon designer... Supporter of nuclear power, the militarization of Space, and Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate" seems to be shaping up well.

One blog that I think might have a rather small "market" is a Catholic blog devoted to chastity, yes, chastity -- an apparently outmoded concept even among the Catholic clergy, to judge by their behaviour. But this post on sexual equality as a cause of fertility decline is interesting.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual big range of blogospheric reading.

Wicked Thoughts has a good John Kerry joke.

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

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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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

John Kerry media jackals go after swift boat veterans Deeply worried that the swift boat veterans' ads are damaging John Kerry his media pals intensified their smear campaign to destroy the credibility of these veterans
John Kerry and his anti-American IPS playmates John Kerry collaborated with the infamous pro-Castro Institute for Policy Studies in undermining the military and sabotaging the CIA
Don't forget 'The John Kerry Committee' John Kerry used his Senate position to help Nicaragua's Marxist-Leninists stay in power
The consumption fallacy: another lesson for the US economy Consumption does nothing to improve the US economy because it does nothing to increase productivity
Scott Peterson trial: Don't you cry for Amber Frey Why the whole Scott Peterson trial is revolting and disgusting within itself
Economic reality and the self-righteous ignorance of the left Our economic meddlers are back in the news with the loopy idea that they can raise living standards by legislating for higher real wages

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby: "With the exception of the Fox News Channel, the liberal tilt of the mainstream media - the major newspapers, the networks, National Public Radio, the news magazines - has long been a fact of American life.... Evan Thomas, the assistant managing editor of Newsweek, put it plainly last month: "Let's talk a little media bias here," he said on the PBS program "Inside Washington" on July 11. "The media, I think, want Kerry to win. And I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards . . . as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there's going to be this glow about them that is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points.""

Oil. Letter excerpted from the Letters column of the Pasadena Star News, Pasadena, California, August 20: "What happened to the voices who said that President Bush had a deal with the Saudis to lower oil prices just before the election? Seems that conspiracy theory went out the window now didn't it? But I don't hear any of the Democrats who had this "knowledge' coming out and saying they were wrong. So I will. They are wrong again, but that won't matter, I'm sure they will have a new theory soon".

An excellent spoof by Rand Simberg. Excerpt: "Sixty years after Paris was seized by the "Allies," and the beginning of the American occupation, France remains a failed nation, mired in political corruption and beset by vast pockets of Muslim extremism and anti-semitism, into which the gendarmerie fear to tread. The economy continues to struggle under economic policies driven by failed ideologies"

Some Leftist propagandist has got into sports writing and asserts that because ONE white man won a sprinting event at the Olympic games, therefore blacks in general are not better at sprinting. Only a Leftist would bother with such non-logic. The writer also refers to that old Marxist propagandist, Stephen Jay Gould as an authority on race. Here is just one comment pointing out what a klutz Gould was. And for an exhaustive scientific refutation of Gould by an expert in the field, see here. Gould's distortions of the facts really are quite breathtaking.

Democrat principles on display: "Some 46,000 New Yorkers are registered to vote in both the city and Florida, a shocking finding that exposes both states to potential abuses that could alter the outcome of elections, a Daily News investigation shows. Registering in two places is illegal in both states, but the massive snowbird scandal goes undetected because election officials don't check rolls across state lines. The finding is even more stunning given the pivotal role Florida played in the 2000 presidential election, when a margin there of 537 votes tipped a victory to George W. Bush.... Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68% are Democrats, 12% are Republicans and 16% didn't claim a party".

"Darfur is a remote part of Sudan -- itself remote from cosmopolitan centres of Europe and North America. There, in the arid deserts of the eastern Sahara, where living is a bitter daily struggle against sand and sun, a genocide is unfolding, with nary a whimper from the folks at the UN and sophisticates in cosmopolitan centres who remain outraged over American "imperialism" dismantling brutal rogue regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.... Here, the contrast between the Arab treatment of blacks, irrespective of whether they are Muslims or not, and the Israeli assimilation of black Jews of Ethiopia, known as Falashas, cannot go unnoticed."

Mike Tremoglie has a tremendous demolition of the Woodstock myth -- showing that it was in fact an ineptly run business venture that would have starved its patrons except for assistance from the establishment it condemned.

After a ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court, a horde of sex perverts were released from prison and the media is giving the story bare mention. Details here. Excerpt: "According to this report, over 500 rapists, child molesters and other sexual offenders have been released from prison and taken up residence in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County within the past year".

Wayne Lusvardi reports another case where Leftist authorities resort to their usual kneejerk tax-and-regulate strategies when faced with what they see as a housing "crisis". All just to create further problems, of course.

Peg Kaplan has a couple of prize examples of one-eyed Stalinist thinking up at the moment.

Donald Luskin's latest demolition of Leftist hate-merchant Paul Krugman really pulls out the stops.

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

**************************

The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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 REFLECTIONS ABOUT AUSTRALIA

I have just been reading the thoroughly sensible things that Ambra, a black blogress, says about black English and standard English. She rightly says that being at ease in standard English is essential if you wish to communicate widely and easily with others. I note however that she seems to have no regrets about not speaking black English. I must say that I greatly regret my inability to write in broad Australian on this blog. I would love to refer to Leftists as "drongoes", "galahs", "ratbags" and "big-noters" and say that they are not "fair dinkum" or "ridjy didj" but I know that I would just not be understood outside Australia. Even many younger Australians might not understand. I grew up in the country before the age of TV so acquired a full measure of traditional Australian slang but the TV generation in Australia probably knows American slang better than they do their own vivid linguistic heritage. I also try to avoid obscure academic words such as "arcane" and "lacunae" and "orthogonal" but I slip up sometimes.

Australia must have the world's worst internet service provider. Our erstwhile telecoms monopoly, Telstra, runs an internet service that they call "Bigpond" and lots of people I know have been suckered in to signing up with them. So I have been sending emails to Bigpond addresses for years now. And Bigpond regularly "bounces" (fails to deliver) emails sent to it. They have been doing it for years, have allegedly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "fixing" the problem but they still cannot get it right. One person I email regularly is in fact a Telstra techie but they are still randomly bouncing emails to him too. They are at least 100 times worse than any other ISP I know. Anybody with a Bigpond address is missing a lot of mail. The only way I can be sure my techie friend gets what I send is to copy everything to his Yahoo address as well. Those emails are never bounced, though they can occasionally be held up for a few hours. Government-owned bureaucracies just don't know how to be efficient.

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ELSEWHERE

GWB as Not Kerry: Nothing that Bush has done, or will do, has anything whatsoever to do with John Kerry's truthfulness, his character or his mental stability. Humans are not a zero-sum game."

Abandonment of conservatives may cost Bush the election: "The latest presidential election polling data should be giving President Bush's campaign staff a lot of concern. The most recent Zogby poll released earlier this week shows the Democratic presidential ticket of Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, leading President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney by a seven point margin at 50-43% which is the largest lead that Kerry has ever had over Bush since the man that conservative talk-show host, Rush Limbaugh, has described as America's most accurate pollster, John Zogby, began polling when Kerry became the de-facto nominee back in February."

A huge cost everyone pays: "Federal government regulators issued 4,148 new rules in the 71,269-page Federal Register in 2003, 19 fewer than they did in 2002. The cost of those rules appears nowhere in the federal budget. In his fiscal year 2005 federal budget, President Bush proposed $2.4 trillion in discretionary, entitlement, and interest spending. Although that figure fully expresses the on-budget scope of the federal government, there is considerably more to the government's reach. Federal environmental, safety and health, and economic regulations cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year on top of official federal outlays."

The marvels of socialized medicine in New Zealand: "Hundreds of Hawke's Bay people are waiting for gastroenterology procedures as the health board desperately appeals for general surgeons to help with the hospital's sole specialist's gruelling workload. Hawke's Bay Regional Hospital's only gastroenterologist and part-time general physician, Malcolm Arnold, said there were 458 patients were on his waiting list alone, with 180 still awaiting a definite time to have their procedures performed... Those with highest priority included patients with bowel cancer or cancer of the oesophagus".

An interesting article here on the neurological evidence that Leftists are driven more by emotion than by reason. I have been pointing out for years that Leftism is substantially genetic.

Drug terrorists: "A guns-drawn raid at a high school last year did not violate civil rights laws and the case is closed, the U.S. Justice Department said. The decision means there will be no criminal charges, said Andy Savage, a lawyer for officers in the sweep at the Goose Creek high school. Fifteen officers entered Stratford High School's main hallway and ordered 130 students to the floor November 5 of last year. They used plastic ties to handcuff 18 students and school officials opened and searched 17 book bags using a drug dog. Police found no drugs or weapons, but the raid frightened children, provoked marches and lawsuits and brought national media attention and the resignation of the school's longtime principal."

Bitchy feminists: "The Los Angeles, California chapter of the pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood has been the subject of several recent complaints of racism and discrimination by both African-American and Latino employees which were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as well as the California Fair Employment & Housing Administration. The complaints by the Planned Parenthood employees allege that the group is led by Caucasian women who have created a hostile working environment for men as well as minorities. In one sworn affidavit, an African-American employee said a female manager with Planned Parenthood looked directly at him and called him a 'nigger. ... I am African and was shocked by her cultural insensitivity,' the employee wrote in his affidavit and asked not to be identified."

Californian business-people are voting with their feet: ""Legislators don't seem to get it that businesses have far more options now. They can open another factory in another state, send manufacturing offshore, go into the cash economy, or even go out of business," says Mr. Kyser. "How they deal with the reforms will have serious consequences on states around us for years." Business raiders from Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas have been eager to welcome frustrated California businesses, and developers can barely suppress smiles over new home sales generated by newly arrived California families.... Partly because of California's housing costs, higher taxes, more regulation, and higher utility rates, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada are all faring better than California from job growth to personal income."

There is an interesting blog here from a conservative atheist medic with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Beat that!

GUN WATCH has an Oldie but Goldie up today. If it isn't true it ought to be. New rubric below today too.

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

**************************

The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of Great Britain -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hated is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

Comments? Email me 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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MORE TROOPS FOR IRAQ?

Wayne Lusvardi writes:

I refer to an article in "Foreign Affairs" headed "What Went Wrong With Iraq": The article is a sobering analysis of the Iraq War that makes the case that the main blunder was the lack of troop deployment by the U.S.

As a Vietnam War vet, I question the notion that what has been needed are more troops and a broader coalition with European forces involved. The experience of Vietnam is clear - the more troops you flood the country with, the more reliant the Iraqis will be on them to fight their war for them. This is what happened in Vietnam. The Vietnamese embraced the trappings of modernity (the motor scooters, the crappy American music, the money that comes from various sorts of prostitution and patronage) but, despite some valiant battles, didn't really want to fight their own war. The Iraqis don't even want to embrace modernity let alone fight for anything beyond their tribe. Flooding the country with more outside troops won't solve that. Like big welfare programs, big warfare programs will only make the populace more dependent. The prospect of a partition such as occurred in Korea and Germany is now becoming more apparent. But will Baghdad be in the Iranian camp or in the Iraqi camp?

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ELSEWHERE

A great letter from a U.S. Marine here: Just one excerpt: "The pre-emptive doctrine of the current administration will continue to be debated long after I'm gone, but one fact stands for itself: America has not been hit with another catastrophic attack since 9/11. I firmly believe that our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are major reasons that we've had it so good at home. Building a "fortress America" is not only impractical, it's impossible. Prudent homeland security measures are vital, to be sure, but attacking the source of the threat remains essential".

This sounds apocryphal but I like it: "T. Bubba Bechtol, part time City Councilman from Pensacola, Florida, was asked on a local live radio talk show the other day just what he thought of the allegations of torture of the Iraqi prisoners. His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but to thunderous applause from the audience: "If hooking up an Iraqi prisoner's scrotum to a car's battery cables will save one American GI's life, then I have just two things to say: "Red is positive, black is negative""

I have just been reading Michelle Malkin's brilliant book In Defense of Internment, which rightly says that "everything you have been taught about the World war II "internment camps" in America is wrong". A very minor bonus I got from the book is to note that her real surname is "Maglalang", which is obviously from the Tagalog language. I had always carelessly assumed that her ancestry was Japanese. From the name, it is in fact Filipino. As the WWII internments were the work of America's first socialist President (FDR), no conservative should feel much need to defend them but the facts show that what was done was both reasonable and carried out with overall humanity. And since Left-leaning historians have managed to convince just about everybody that the internments are a blot on America's honour (rather than on FDR's) it is good to find that the whole story about them is a great load of steaming dung. But I will not try to summarize a big book beyond that. Regnery are one of the few commercial publishers of conservative books so, if you are the book-buying type, log on here to read more about the book and perhaps buy it.

More glories of socialized medicine: "The healthcare research group, Dr Foster, reports today in the British Medical Journal that one in every ten patients admitted to NHS hospitals in Britain will suffer at the hands of medical errors. Such errors contribute to the deaths of 72,000 people a year, and are directly blamed for the deaths of 40,000 people. Medical errors in the NHS now constitute the fourth largest cause of death in Britain. The charity Action Against Medical Accidents states that the figures under-estimate total errors by not including those which take place at the primary care level of family doctors, and are based only on reported errors. The figures do not include hospital-acquired infections".

A pretty sensible editorial in USA Today about the importation of cheap drugs from Canada into the USA. If the U.S. administration had given the drug companies more support in their negotiations with foreign governments, the artificially high prices for Americans would never have happened.

There is a good post here pointing out that the Leftist hunger for change often leads to large costs (like death) for the individuals involved. I personally think that hunger for change for change's sake is pretty infantile. I have had a great life with lots of changes in it (including four wives) but I did not need to do anything radical in order to remain interested.

"Spectator" on Go Nuclear: Makes a good case for atomic power but it relies too much on running-out-of-oil ideas: "Rod Liddle says the answer to our energy needs is obvious: cheap and reliable nuclear power. But before we can embrace a sane future we have to overcome the Cold War superstitions of the Green Left"

Gipperism of the week: "..when Reagan was offered a ride on a submersible to get a look at the continental shelf, The Gipper turned it down, cracking, "I get claustrophobia when I draw the curtains." "

Leftist warmongers: "Contrary to the conventional wisdom, American imperialism is, at its roots, a left-wing disorder rather than a conservative impulse. A seemingly ceaseless supply of new books and radio talk-show commentary in support of George W. Bush and his foreign policy give the impression that the only controversy in America worth mentioning involves patriotic Bush supporters and knee-jerk opposition to war by liberals. Two arguments are being made here: that the Iraq War and foreign-policy aggressiveness constitute the self-evidently correct conservative position and that liberals are philosophically and historically squeamish about going to war. The first of these arguments has been addressed at length in these pages. It is the second claim, involving the American Left's alleged aversion to war, that remains to be overturned, for ever since the Spanish-American War of 1898, leftists have more often than not been at the forefront of calls for American military intervention abroad".

Promethean Antagonist is a bit unusual. He not only blogs from Japan but takes astrology seriously. He notes that astrology seems to be mostly Left-leaning but explains why "that aint necessarily so". His account of his trip to Fascist China is more outspoken than we usually hear now that everybody wants to think the best of China's reforms.

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

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Leftists acclaim "diversity" yet say "All men are equal". Figure that one out.

Why can those who claim to understand the dangers of meddling with a complex ecosystem like the natural environment, not understand that government interference with a complex system like the economy is perilous too?

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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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BLACK ON BLACK GENOCIDE IN AUSTRALIA

On 15th., I mentioned here the summary by Windschuttle about the pygmy population that the early settlers of Australia found in the jungles of Far North Queensland. Julian Calendar in his post of 16th. has taken Windschuttle to task over the matter with the claim that the pygmies are not a remnant population but rather an adaptation to jungle life on the part of other black populations. I am no physical anthropologist but the sheer wrongheadedness of the claim seems fairly breathtaking to me -- particularly coming from an Australian. Australia not only has a halo of Melanesian nations (e.g. Papua New Guinea) to its immediate North but part of Melanesia is actually IN Australia (the Torres Strait Islands). And what do we know about Melanesia? We know that the jungles of New Guinea and its surrounding islands are as dense as jungles anywhere -- so they must all be pygmies too? The Melanesians of New Guinea and elsewhere are in fact a fine upstanding race of generally rather big men. The Fiji police force has long made female visitors to Fiji drool! And what about one of the world's most notable pygmy races -- the Bushmen of South Africa?. I suppose the Kalahari desert where they live is a jungle too? What utter rot it all is! Clearly pygmies are earlier races who have sought refuge in inaccessible places to avoid being totally wiped out by bigger and stronger races.

Further notes: Harpending & Eller (PDF) explain why even a low interbreeding rate could over time lead to the observed similarities in appearance between pygmy and surrounding tribes without at the same time wiping out all tribal distinctiveness and the rock-art record suggests a two stage immigration of primitive people into Australia.

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ELSEWHERE

Powerline Blog seems to have managed to get into the thick of the Presidential election campaign. They note that political blogs generally are getting a lot more hits lately as people turn to them as an alternative to the pro-Kerry mainstream media. This blog has had a big increase in hits lately too.

Randall Parker has some news that the press seems mostly to have buried: The EU is now building a fence along its Eastern border to keep illegal immigrants from Russia and elsewhere out of the EU. In effect, the Berlin wall is being put up again -- only a lot further East this time. He rightly notes the hypocrisy of the EU in saying that Israel should not build its fence and also thinks America could do with such a fence on its Southern border. If it's good enough for those paragons of virtue in the EU, why is it not good enough for Israel and the USA?

Prominent UK libertarian Sean Gabb has an interesting history of his unusual schooldays here. He had a rough time of it and ended up largely self-taught. I too was largely self-taught (See here) but had none of the traumas he had.

Venezuela's Chavez: "For all Chavez's talk about bringing through a revolution in favour of the poor, his policies have been pretty conservative. There have been a lot of showy attacks on the old elite - he replaced judges, reshuffled executives on the state oil company, and undercut the Senate by establishing a new Constituent Assembly. But even Chavez sympathiser Richard Gott admits that he has been 'pragmatic' with the economy - bringing in an austere and orthodox economic policy, seeking to keep on the right side of international investors. Edgardo Lander, sociology lecturer at Venezuelan Central University, said: 'There has been no real redistribution of wealth, and land reform has been very timid. There's been hardly any private property confiscated...and hardly any changes in the tax structure....' In fact, the radical rhetoric is more a replacement for radical action than an expression of it".

A charming case of media bias in Australia. Sydney "Sunday Telegraph" columnist Diana Simmonds is apparently in Athens for the Olympic games and refers to Australia's Prime minister under the heading "Not a PM in sight" as follows: "I LOVE the Olympic Games -- the cathartic effect of a good bellow and leap up and down, followed by a bit of a snivel and a good blow is just the thing as winter drags on. And on. And on. And, as much as I adored Sydney and wouldn't have been anywhere else for quids, I'm loving Athens even more. Know why? Because there's no need to keep the thumb poised over the "off'' button in case the Kirribilli Squatter leaps into the picture to shower Our Kids with his appreciative spittle". [Kirribilli House is the Sydney home of Australian Prime Ministers]. Quote from p.123 -- not online.

An interesting email from a Canadian reader referring to my third post yesterday: "I am very impressed with the idea of the militants and leftists both embracing the idea of "dhimmi", it makes sense to me; unfortunately some of the people I know here seem psychologically ready to capitulate to Islam, and I wouldn't be surprized if some of the women I know convert in the next few years [they are single and way past the age of marrying] -- when I foresee pressure being put on Canadian municipalities where there is a large Islamic population being pressured to broadcast the call to prayer daily [and silence the church bells at the same time!] Let us hope it is just my paranoia!"

Further to my mention of film-maker Elia Kazan yesterday, there is more on the courage of Kazan here. Excerpt: "But for many of us he will not only be remembered for his art but also as a courageous man who fearlessly stood his ground against La-La Land's undercurrent of Stalinism and its mindless support of anti-American causes".

The policeman is a very funny guy if you like British humour. I do. Example: "I thought I would prepare for the forthcoming terrorist attack by manufacturing some ammunition. Above is a picture of my nine year old son holding the mould, while I filled it with molten lead (don't worry he's wearing gloves). The balls were allowed to cool and then inserted into shotgun cartridges, we later fired the 12-gauge lead balls into a tree trunk as a test. It worked, we are now fully protected from Al-Quaeda and social workers". He has a good cartoon in the same post as well.

Alan McCann responds to my post about St. Thomas Aquinas -- pointing out that NOTHING Thomas said justifies government redistribution of wealth.

I have just transferred here a new lot of Chris Brand's postings. As usual, he has found quite a few chinks in the armour of political correctness.

I have just put up a new post on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS and there is an amusing post on GREENIE WATCH about Greenies contradicting one-another. GUN WATCH has a link to a great speech by Charlton Heston. On POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH there is a post which says that official anti-racist policies in Britain in fact make racism worse.

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Leftists acclaim "diversity" yet say "All men are equal". Figure that one out.

Why can those who claim to understand the dangers of meddling with a complex ecosystem like the natural environment, not understand that government interference with a complex system like the economy is perilous too?

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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SOME MORE INTERESTING EMAILS FROM READERS

"I wonder if the current Arab militancy is motivated by the thought that oil will eventually run out, and that their influence and wealth will then cease. If they believe the dire predictions of the Greenies, they might just think that this is their last chance to be a force in the world."

"I just read an account of Lynddie England's testimony about Abu Ghraib. Apparently, her original testimony was that she dreamed up this stuff by herself with a few friends -- to have fun taking naked photos etc. Not difficult to believe. Of course, after consulting with liberal attorneys who hate Bush, she changed her story to "I was just folllowing orders". The attorneys argued that England simply wasn't smart enough to think of this stuff on her own. Where are the Bra Burners? Isn't this an insult to just about any woman anyhwhere -- that England wasn't smart enough to dream up this scheme of taking dirty pictures without someone else telling her what to do?"

"It is more than obvious to me that the "Dhimmi" idea of Islam rather suits modern Leftists. Both the Muslims and the Leftists want to subjugate other people. Apart from slight modifications and the obvious technological changes of today, the intention at least is to return us all to the mediaeval Dhimmi era. And then what? This Utopian crap is hard to fathom. But both Leftists and Islamists want the new worlds such as America and Australia -- the last frontiers, lands of opportunity, and a chance to a real start in a new life -- to end up the same basket-cases as in Europe and elsewhere."

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