POLITICS INHERITED TOO

Well, well, well! I have been pointing out for years what the geneticists have been pointing out since at least 1986: That political orientation is largely genetically inherited. But it seems that the message has finally got through to that august body, the American Political Science Association. Under the title: "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?" authors John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John R. Hibbing have an article (PDF) in the May 2005 issue of the American Political Science Review (Vol. 99, No. 2). The abstract of the article follows:

"We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics -specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins -we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes. We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation".

Seeing that political scientists are overwhelmingly Leftist and seeing that Leftists hate all ideas of heritability (except in the case of homosexuality), how did the authors get their article published in the word's most prestigious political science journal? Simple: They made their conclusions palatable by dredging up all the usual Leftist claims about the psychology of Left and Right and said that genetics must influence politics by making some people inherently more flexible than others -- with Leftists being more flexible of course. And if flexibility means having no principles at all, there could be something in that. Psychopaths are very flexible. (Hat Tip to Nebraskan Liberation)

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European leaders may scorn America but Europe's best and brightest are still flocking to the USA: "Since the 1970s, America has created some 57 million new jobs, compared to just 4 million in Europe (with most of those in government). For the last quarter century, the United States has enjoyed consistently higher rates of economic growth and productivity than European countries, and the gap has been widening. The United States is now at the forefront in many critical global industries, particularly finance, technology, and entertainment.... Under such circumstances, the United States remains a tremendous lure for many Europeans, especially younger, educated individuals. This is particularly true in technological fields, where Europe's best brains are leaving in droves. Some 400,000 E.U. science and technology graduates currently reside in the United States, and barely one in seven, according to a recent European Commission poll, intend to return. "The U.S. is a sponge that's happy to soak up talent from across the globe," observes one Irish scientist".

Daniel Pipes draws our attention to a rather amazing speech by Pakistan's General Musharraf. I had thought Indonesia's Gus Dur was the only pro-Israel Muslim leader -- but not so: "He began with the important observation that Jews and Muslims "have many similarities and few divergences in their faith and culture," then listed three specifics: belief in the oneness of God, shared ways of greeting, and a common phrase in the Talmud and Koran. And Moses, he pointed out, is the prophet most often referred to in the Koran. Mr. Musharraf noted how "our experiences and histories intertwine" and then elaborated on what he called the two communities' "rich and very long" history of interaction. He mentioned the "shining examples" of Cordova, Baghdad, Istanbul, and Bukhara, the golden period of Muslim Spain, and the joint experience of the Spanish Inquisition. Generalizing from the inquisition, he correctly asserted that Jews and Muslims "have not only lived together and shared prosperity, but also suffered together."

Straight talk: "When one of Britain's wealthiest men and a former US president join forces to announce a new plan to tackle poverty in Africa, beware. Any recovery strategy for the continent described as "ambitious and bold" - ie, expensive and experimental - should be treated with caution. And if the architects of such a plan appear to share the view of Tony Blair and his Africa Commission that more money is the answer to the continent's crisis - one would be well-advised to give them, and their plan, a very wide berth indeed.... Yet with the confidence that comes of having piles of money, and with not a little condescension, Scottish multi-millionaire Sir Tom Hunter announced last week that he and former US President Bill Clinton had teamed up to "construct a new model of poverty intervention".

How absurd: The FBI is joining the Bush administration's War on Porn. And it's looking for a few good agents. Early last month, the bureau's Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad.... The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography -- not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults. "I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent"

Good comment on the German political stalemate: "The German economy can probably survive a period of little or no active government. One of the great boom periods of the Italian economy in the 1980s was when it had no government for nine months".

From Dick McDonald: "Our relentless attacks on the LA Times and their leftist LDOs together the many of us who voted by closing our checkbook to that rag, may have delivered dividends. Today we were shocked to learn that (1) they fired Michael Kinsley, the delusional propagandist for the Democrat Party and (2) endorsed John Roberts for Chief Justice of the United States. Wow, hopefully that is a shot heard round the world, especially in the offices of the ACLU. But I will believe it when they do a detailed investigative report on a Democrat blunder. Until then, they can try to convince me they have changed."

The ways of Google sure are hard to follow at times. Dick McDonald's site has been up for about a year and he has lots of links from other blogs but Google do not appear to scan his site. Enter a string of text from his site and Google will not be able to find it. Why? Nobody knows. And finding a way of contacting Google to ask them is a work of near-genius too. I am using clusty.com a lot more these days. They can often find stuff that Google does not.

Canadian law enforcement is just unbelievable sometimes, as the latest posting on Strange Justice shows.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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EXCLUSIVE ANGLOSPHERIC INTELLIGENCE

Britain's domestic security chief has warned publicly that civil rights may need to be reduced to protect the public against the growing threat of Islamist terror. And in a startling expression of official British policy, Dame Eliza-Manningham-Buller, the director general of MI5, the British domestic security service, also made very clear she was opposed to indiscriminate increased intelligence sharing with all other members of the 25-nation European Union. The European Commission in Brussels has been pushing hard for all members of the 450-million population EU to step up intelligence sharing to combat both terrorism and organized crime.

But Manningham-Buller made clear she rejected this broad approach to intelligence sharing, even if it brought Britain into conflict with the EU overall. "There can be no coercion to share intelligence. ... If we splash it (intelligence) around carelessly we shall soon have none of it," she said in her speech delivered Sept. 1 in the Netherlands at the 60th anniversary of the AIVD, the Dutch security service. "So I could never agree to a compulsory exchange of intelligence as that would risk compromising valuable sources of intelligence. There would soon be little to exchange."

Manningham-Buller's comments reflect conflicts both old and new between the British intelligence and security services and other agencies in Europe's secret world. The French, German and other Western European security and intelligence services have long envied Britain's full access to and full participation in Echelon, the long-established elint, or electronic intelligence sharing agreement between Britain's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham and America's giant National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Md. President George W. Bush recently approved Australia being granted the same full access as Britain to the NSA's "crown jewels."

More here

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The "banned" article by Prof. Fraser about Australia's immigration policy is now online here. Prof. Fraser is a Professor of Law at Macquarie University in Sydney and wrote an article which called for a reduction in the number of black and Asian immigrants that Australia is allowing into the country. The article was accepted for publication by the academic law journal hosted at Deakin university in the State of Victoria but legal pressures were brought to bear on the university not to publish it and they caved in. As a consequence it will now get more publicity than ever. Prof. Fraser has asked that it be circulated to anyone "who might be interested in defending the editorial integrity of a university law review". I have put it online not because I wholly agree with it. I don't. I am not at all bothered by Australia's intake of Asians, for instance. But, as a libertarian, I will always do my utmost to defeat censorship.

Amazing French ignorance: The Foreign minister of France (no less) did not know that the Nazis had failed to invade Britain in World War 2: "He asked - while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed - whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy's question was met by his hosts with amazement. "But Monsieur le minister," Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, "England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II." The minister apparently was not content with this answer, which, according to the magazine, was given by the museum curator, and persisted, asking: "Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?"

Rabbi Spero has got it nailed: "In New Orleans, beginning Tuesday morning, August 30, I saw men in helicopters risking their lives to save stranded flood victims from rooftops. The rescuers were White, the stranded Black. I saw Caucasians navigating their small, private boats in violent, swirling, toxic floodwaters to find fellow citizens trapped in their houses. Those they saved were Black. I saw Brotherhood. New York Congressman Charlie Rangel saw Racism. Yes, there are Two Americas. One is the real America, where virtually every White person I know sends money, food or clothes to those in need -- now and in other crises -- regardless of color. This America is colorblind. The other is the America fantasized and manufactured by Charlie Rangel, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who constantly cry racism! even in situations where it does not exist, even when undeniable images illustrate love, compassion and concern. These three men, together with today's NAACP, want to continue the notion of Racist America. It is their Mantra, their calling card. Their power, money, and continued media appearances depend on it".

Price controls will impede Katrina recovery: "Governments from the Gulf Coast to California are urging investigations of "price-gouging," but gas, hotel, water, and other price increases after Katrina are not a moral failing by companies. They are an economic necessity. Price increases mitigate the shortages that occur after natural disasters by redirecting supplies and giving an incentive for individuals to conserve resources. Unfortunately, the stories of shortages and gas lines that fill newspapers after disasters are a product of governments' misguided attempts to prevent gouging. Since raising prices in the face of sudden scarcity is considered illegal "gouging" in twenty-three states, merchants have a reduced incentive to open stores or ship groceries, water, and emergency supplies to where they are most urgently needed. Even those who wish to keep their doors open as an act of service have their attention diverted from core business in order to control lines and ration the supplies they do have".

A good comment: "My trusty local paper has listed the top ten U.S. natural disasters according to the number of estimated deaths. It consists of seven hurricanes, the Johnstown Flood, a tornado, and the (1906) S.F. Earthquake. By far the worst disaster was the Galveston Hurricane (1900). Nine of the ten most deadly natural disasters occurred during the period from 1881 to 1938, with three major hurricanes occurring in the period 1881-1883. Katrina, the first event to make the top ten since 1938, does not even crack the top five. Although this is a crude measure that does not take into account many variables, it does tend to weaken the argument that deadly hurricanes have something to do with global warming". [See also here]

I have just put up on Education Watch a "Very short story" that I think everybody should read.

And I have just put up on Gun Watch a story about Scotland -- Yes, Scotland -- being the world crime capital.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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TWO INTERESTING QUESTIONS

Eleanor French Spreitzer writes: "Why did Michael Brown, ex-head of FEMA, lose his job because of poor performance of it and yet The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin and The Governor of Louisiana, Katharine Blanco, still have their jobs. If those two airheads had gotten the people OUT OF NEW ORLEANS, as they should have - FEMA would have been inconsequential. Conservatives/Republicans are always expected to live up to and suffer if necessary; the consequences of their actions, but Liberal/Democrats are given a free pass. Could this be because Conservatives/Republicans are adults and Liberal/Democrats are over-indulged, spoiled, brats???"

Eleanor has another question: "How many displaced "Katrina Kids" from New Orleans has Teddy Kennedy's private schools taken in. Teddy Kennedy and all his kids went to fancy private schools - surely those schools have room for a few dozen of the displaced New Orleans school kids. Teddy is soooooooooooooo concerned about affirmative action and Judge Roberts' view of it. Let's see what the view of affirmative action is with the schools that formed this gloriously concerned opinion of Teddy Kennedy. How many Katrina Kids have the schools of the kids of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Charlie Rangel, Sheila Jackson Lee, Harry Bellefonte, Bruce Gordon, John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Cynthia McKinney, Eleanor Norton Holmes, and the Liberal Left Media in general taken in. Why do I have the feeling the answer is NONE?

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THE COLOR OF CRIME

I guess everybody really knows this stuff already but it is good to see it being said openly

Today, September 14, the New Century Foundation releases The Color of Crime, our relentlessly factual study of race, crime, and the criminal justice system. For anyone who ever wondered just how much more likely blacks or Hispanics are than whites to commit various crimes, the answers are here. It takes hard work to pry the facts out of the reluctant grip of federal crime databases. But the results are eye-opening:

Blacks are just 13 percent of the population but they commit more than half the muggings and murders in the country. Hispanics commit violent crimes at about three times the white rate. The proportion of blacks and Hispanics in an area is the single best indicator of how dangerous it is. The racial mix is a much better predictor of crime rates than poverty, unemployment, and dropout rates combined.

Although Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby wring their hands over black-on-black mayhem, blacks actually commit more violent crime against whites than blacks. A black is about 39 times more likely to do violence to a white than the other way around, and no less than 130 times more likely to rob a white.

And yes, everyone's suspicions about rape are correct: Every year there are about 15,000 black-on-white rapes but fewer than 900 white-on-black rapes. There are more than 3,000 gang rapes of whites by blacks-but white-on-black gang rapes are so rare they do not even show up in the statistics.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

A majority of Germans have just voted for parties of the Left. Obviously, Germany has to go further downhill before it comes to its senses.

A good short summary of the recent meltdown of the Australian Left: "His party colleagues were "sewer rats". His successor as party leader is "one of the most indecent politicians". Political journalists are "dancing bears". Mark Latham, Australia's former Labor Party leader, publishes a memoir today that makes Alan Clark's account of political life in Britain look like the literary equivalent of a Conservative ladies' tea party. The Latham Diaries is a 429-page tome packed with such vitriol that it has caused disarray within his party and left many of its key figures shocked at the scale of his betrayal. Few escape his venom, particularly Kim Beazley, who replaced Mr Latham as Labor leader... In pre-publication interviews Mr Latham, 44, continued to turn the screw on the current Labor leader. He said: "I wouldn't make him the toilet cleaner at Parliament House, let alone the Leader of the Opposition.""

Another member of the Axis of Evil surrenders?: "North Korea agreed Monday to end its nuclear weapons program in return for security, economic and energy benefits, potentially easing tensions with the United States after a two-year standoff over the North's efforts to build atomic bombs. The United States, North Korea and four other nations participating in negotiations in Beijing signed a draft accord in which the North promised to abandon efforts to produce nuclear weapons and re-admit international inspectors to its nuclear facilities.... The Bush administration had said it was prepared to take tougher measures, including freezing North Korean assets abroad and pushing for international sanctions, if the latest round of talks collapsed."

There are summaries of the Hitchens versus Galloway "debate" here and here for those who take such shows seriously. Video feed included. Why anybody would think that pitting facts against hysterical assertions would make the slightest dent in the hysterical asserters escapes me.

I have just put up here an email I received about a United Nations report that I linked to which says that European agricultural protectionism is hurting African farmers. It seems that the story is a lot more complex that that -- as one would expect of a United Nations report.

There is a new lot of postings from Chris Brand up here -- with all their usual vast incorrectness about all matters racial. Incidentally, accusations that Chris is a "racist" rather founder on the fact that he is happily married to a very bright Han Chinese lady. I am very pro-Asian myself. I have four very polite brown men (from India) living in my own large house with me. But because we are prepared to speak the truth about race, both Chris and I are still "racists" to the simple-minded propagandists of the Left.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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UNUSUAL INSIGHT FOR THE NEW STATESMAN

In writing about the present German election:

"Germans can opt for a combination of nationalism and socialism, as they have done in the past after military defeats or economic depression. This is what Oskar Lafontaine's new Left Party is offering: a "popular front" combining disgruntled Social Democrats in western Germany and former communists in the east.

His alternative narrative tells of how a wealthy, cosmopolitan elite is destroying the "community" (Gemeinschaft) of the German Volk. He denounces "foreign workers", who are allegedly taking jobs from Germans, and he demands that only those who speak German and pay their taxes should be allowed to live in Germany. He even rants about the extinction of the "white peoples" of Europe. Little wonder that polls show the far-right vote, which had been rising in the east, shifting to the Left Party.

Lafontaine will fail, but the re-emergence of his brand of demagoguery tells us that something is stirring deep in die Heimat. Germany is paying the price for Schroder's shameless anti-Americanism, which has reactivated the anti-western forces that wrecked the Weimar Republic, wreaked havoc under the Third Reich, and paralysed the former East Germany"

So they are implicitly recognizing that Hitler's Nazism was akin to Germany's modern-day far-Leftism! Just sometimes reality overcomes the propaganda. The New Statesman is of course a major organ of the British Left. The "far-right vote" (the NPD) that they refer to never was far-right at all, of course. I have shown previously that they too have always been thoroughly socialist.

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How far the BBC has fallen! "British Prime Minister Tony Blair has complained privately to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch that the BBC's coverage of Hurricane Katrina carried an anti-American bias, Murdoch said at a conference here. Murdoch, chairman of the media conglomerate News Corporation, recounted a conversation with the British leader at a panel discussion late Friday hosted by former president Bill Clinton. "Tony Blair -- perhaps I shouldn't repeat this conversation -- told me yesterday that he was in Delhi last week. And he turned on the BBC world service to see what was happening in New Orleans," Murdoch was quoted as saying in a transcript posted on the Clinton Global Initiative website. "And he said it was just full of hate of America and gloating about our troubles.... [Bill Clinton] agreed that the BBC's coverage was lacking. While the BBC's reports on the hurricane were factually accurate, its presentation was "stacked up" to criticize President George W Bush's handling of the disaster"

Same sex marriage versus democracy: "It is amazing how anti-democratic the movement for same sex marriage is. In various states, including Massachusetts, the measure only had a chance of being implemented by the courts, against the will of the legislature. Now, in California, the legislature has finally passed a same sex marriage bill, which the Governor has not yet decided whether to sign. But this apparently democratic decision violates a ballot measure that Californians voted for "overwhelmingly in 2000 that defined marriage as between a man and a woman." Clearly, same sex marriage is a measure that is supported by elites, but not by the common person."

Fat EU farmers impoverish Africa: "In Europe, farm subsidies have reached $51 billion, and although this sector accounts for less than two percent of the work force, it absorbs more than 40 percent of the European Union budget. In the European Union more than three-quarters of CAP support goes to the biggest 10% of subsidy recipients. Unfair trade policies continue to deny millions of people in the world's poorest countries an escape route from poverty, and perpetuates obscene inequalities, says the 2005 Human Development Report.... The Report said that sub-Saharan Africa, despite modest gains in exports, has become increasingly marginalized in the world market. Today, with a population of 689 million people, the region accounts for a smaller share of world exports than Belgium, with just 10 million people. The Report found that if Africa had maintained its share of world exports that it enjoyed in 1980, its exports today would be some US$119 billion higher. The authors conclude that in terms of foreign exchange this amount would equal about five times the aid flow provided by rich countries since 2002...."

And the EU still has the cheek to criticise the USA: "European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso Monday criticized the U.S. development aid strategy ahead of a U.N. summit of world leaders. Speaking at a news conference in Brussels, the former Portuguese premier said: "To use cases of corruption as a pretext for not being more committed to aid is not the right approach." Washington has long resisted calls to increase aid spending, arguing the money is wasted without political reforms in developing countries".

Leftists cook the books on foreign aid : "Two American NGOs, the Centre for Global Development and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have created an index of "commitment to development" to increase support for aid.... But the index, instead of being an objective statement of the efforts industrial countries make to help developing countries, is a highly subjective compilation of six equally graded components..... This index measures aid as a percentage of GDP, but sleights of hand are used to denigrate major donors, notably Japan, which is the second-highest aid donor in the world. The United States, which has contributed more aid than the next half-dozen donors since the Marshall Plan and which has recently stated it will increase its aid from nearly US$10 billion (A$15 billion) to US$15 billion a year by 2006, comes out as the second-worst performer after Japan in this index.... The US is the largest importer of labour-intensive goods from developing countries and among the highest importer of those goods per capita. This does not do it much good on the index. Australia has no agricultural protection, imports 40 per cent of its textiles, clothing and footwear with 80 per cent coming from developing countries, and that does not do us much good on the index either".

Some people accuse Ronald Reagan of being a big-government conservative. Milton Friedman has a most persuasive reply to that (short PDF).

A reader who is a long-time resident of Connecticut has just sent me a fascinating story of corruption in that State. You can find it here. It's a jolly good short story actually. It would make good set-reading for schoolkids.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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 GREAT MISANTHROPIST

Karl Marx is the greatest philosopher of all time. Or at least this is what many BBC Radio listeners suggested recently when asked to nominate such a person.... The BBC result, however, underlines a strange blindness about Marx persisting within Western societies....

One response is to claim that Marx's philosophy was distorted by Lenin and Stalin. Marx himself, one often hears, was a humanist who wished to liberate people from their chains. Other apologists insist that one can distinguish between the young Marx and the old Marx: the youthful philosopher being more humanistic than the grayer, more callous political revolutionary.

Even cursory attention to Marx's writings quickly reveals the hollowness of such defenses. A consistent anti-human vision features throughout Marx's thought. For Marx, man is a being whose origins are irrelevant, whose future is extinction, and whose present is beyond his control. Even people living in Marx's Communist society have no possibility of a meaningful existence. Marx once described Communist society as one in which it would be possible "to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, just as I please."

This sounds idyllic until one realizes that, from Marxism's perspective, none of these activities can have any value for humans. For true materialists, there can be no qualitative difference between reading and fishing, working or sleeping, living or dying. Everything has the same value and therefore no value. In this world, there is no difference between Mother Teresa's work and that of a concentration camp guard. They share equally in a general irrelevance of everything and everyone.

This tells us that Marxism cannot be interested in justice or liberty. It insists that we are like driftwood, floating hither and thither on the waves of history. In such a world, our lives matter naught. Our deaths are irrelevant. We merely try and salvage whatever animal satisfaction we can from life, before our essential nothingness is finalized in our ultimate annihilation as living beings.....

More here

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SOME RECENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

Why corporations fund radical Islam
Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair
Aftermath of Disengagement
Numbers Racket - Book Review
Defamation ruling: Holocaust is undeniable
In a Ruined Country
Gaza still under "Occupation"
New York Times Interviewers Fake Rice Statements
Rubin's humiliating fate no surprise
UN sees one side of Arab-Israeli conflict

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ELSEWHERE

Welfare should be earnt: "Those who receive government help should be held to certain basic requirements. They should have a real job, for example, or be out every day actively looking for one. McDonalds is always hiring – just look at their signs on any street corner. Minimum wage sure beats no wage. After that, those living on the public dole should be held to standards of personal pride and respectability. Their yards shouldn’t be unsightly and all grown up with weeds. Their houses shouldn’t be peeling paint, or their windows unwashed. Assuming they aren’t just wandering around the streets, these people should also have to take a bath every few days, put on clean clothes, and even keep their hair trimmed neatly. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness, as the old folks used to say back before the Federal government took over being our savior.... There are three things that people certainly should not have if they’re on Welfare. If you are down on your luck and trying to save money to better yourself, then you shouldn't be wasting money on frills like cigarettes, or alcohol, or satellite TV. The hard-working people of America, who have to scrimp and save to make ends meet, should have whatever luxuries they can afford. But they shouldn’t have to provide those luxuries to the lazy slackers. Likewise, any type of drug abuse should get you cut off from all government handouts, immediately"

Will science help bypass the abortion debate? "Artificial wombs will be 'reality' within 20 years, according to the London Times. Indeed, 20 years seems a conservative estimate given an earlier report in The Guardian, another UK newspaper, which predicted them for 2008. Discussion of ectogenesis -- growing an embryo outside the mother's womb -- may sound wildly futuristic. But a few years ago, cloning and genetic modification seemed impossible. A few years before that, the idea of a 66-year-old woman giving birth was absurd; it happened last January. And only last week, British scientists received an official go-ahead to create human embryos from two mothers. For better or worse, new reproductive technologies are redefining the ground rules of reproduction. (And, no, the force of law can not hold back scientific 'progress,' as authorities have discovered repeatedly since Galileo's day.)"

If this ripoff of the insurance companies succeeds, insurance costs for everyone will go up nationwide: "Mississippi's attorney general on Thursday sued insurers to force them to pay flood damage from Hurricane Katrina, saying standard insurance polices have led homeowners to believe they are covered for all hurricane damage, whether from wind or flooding. Attorney General Jim Hood asked the Hines County Chancery Court to void provisions in the policies that attempt to exclude from coverage losses or damages directly or indirectly caused by water, whether wind-driven or not. Those losses could reach into the billions of dollars. Only about 3 in 10 houses in disaster-struck portions of Mississippi and Alabama had flood insurance, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates."

Blacks deceived by the Left: "Many white Americans sincerely believe that skin color no longer matters. They have shut their eyes to the facts that: this nation's churches remain heavily segregated, research shows children perform better in school when they are taught by members of their own race, and in the singles ads, many whites still seek white partners. Meanwhile, in the black community -- which I'm a part of -- we find people believing the other extreme: that racism is at the root of nearly every problem. They have shut their eyes to the facts that: minorities are this nation's new and fastest growing group of entrepreneurs, black public officials are found in the highest levels of government, and parental involvement is a key component of academic success. Think of it this way: When race is involved, most of us are wearing cultural shades."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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LEFTISM AS PSYCHOPATHY

I have just put together a new (or newish) article under the title "Leftism as psychopathy". Because the idea is a rather bold one it has to be a longish article to be effective but I reproduce the "Summary and Conclusions" of it below. For details see the full article here or here.

All explanations simply push the need for explanation one step further back. If you show that Y is caused by X then the next question is obviously, "what causes X?". I think that what has been said so far has taken us through three such steps. We initially saw that ideologically-committed Leftists (as distinct from the much larger number of people who vote for Left-leaning political parties at election time) are motivated by a love of change. As the second step we saw that they love change because it gives them opportunities to strut and feed their large but weak egos in various ways -- including giving them opportunites for gaining power.

Now however we have come to the point of suggesting that the emotional shallowness that a large but weak ego implies may in fact be just one symptom of a much broader and more serious emotional and intellectual deficit -- psychopathy. Psychopaths are after all renowned for their emotional shallowness -- to the point where they can at times seem entirely devoid of emotion. Additionally, we have seen that Leftists not only have the moral imbecility of the psychopath but in fact proudly proclaim it -- in their "postmodernist" doctrine (See here) that everything is relative and nothing is better or worthier than anything else (except when it suits Leftists, of course). We have also seen that the other major characteristics of the psychopath -- indifference to brutality and reliance on lies -- are present in spades among Leftists. And most of all, the sense of superiority to others and the masked contempt for others are at once very psychopathic and very Leftist.

In a basic sense, then, it has been proven that Leftists are psychopathic: They have all the symptoms. To show that they and clinical psychopaths have similar brain function would be the next step but the study of psychopathy itself is still only in its infancy so that step would seem a long way off as yet. Psychologists might consider it a useful step to examine whether or not Leftists score high on standard questionnaires that are used to detect psychopathy but I have shown elsewhere the large problems in that.

In summary, then, Leftism at its deepest level would seem to be a form of sub-clinical psychopathy -- not normally severe enough to get the person into much trouble but severe enough to cause lots of trouble for others.

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ELSEWHERE

Tax hike fails by 2-to-1 margin: "A proposed half-cent sales tax increase for schools failed at the polls today in Nashville by a 2-to-1 margin. With 100% of all precincts reporting, there were 15,389 votes in favor of the increase, or about 30% of the votes tallied, and 36,090 against it, which is roughly 70% of the balloting, election officials said around 9:15 p.m. [Tuesday]. That total included early and paper ballots and all of Davidson County?s 172 precincts. The question was whether to raise the local sales tax, which if approved would have brought the combined Metro and state rates to 9.75 cents on the dollar. ... If the referendum had passed, 80% of the revenue generated by the tax would have gone toward schools while 20% was earmarked for a tax relief program for senior citizens."

Tort reform has worked in Mississippi "Prior to the legislation, Mississippi was known as the "jackpot justice capital of America." The American Tort Reform Association had labeled certain jurisdictions "judicial hellholes." A survey of more than 1,200 senior in-house counsels for the U.S. Chamber Commerce ranked Mississippi 50th in virtually every category of judicial system nationwide. Insurance companies were fleeing the state. Others were refusing to write new policies. The medical field was particularly strained: Liability insurance was in many cases unaffordable, and in some cases unavailable. One year later, the story is very different. Mass Mutual Insurance Group, St. Paul Travelers, World Insurance Co. and Equitable Life Insurance Co. are returning to Mississippi. State Farm Insurance eased its growth restrictions for homeowners' insurance and lowered its rates on property insurance. The Medical Assurance Company of Mississippi, which writes 60% of the medical malpractice coverage for doctors in the state, had raised its rates 20% the year prior to the tort reform legislation. After its passage, MACM did not raise its rates at all"

Why do we regulate? "Should government regulate business? I expect most people would answer 'yes' to that question, but if you ask them why, I expect these same people will have a harder time giving an answer that makes sense. Some may say, 'in order to prevent businesses from engaging in fraud or misrepresentation.' But we do not need regulation to do that; there are already many federal, state and local statutes against fraud and misrepresentation, and businesses that behave badly can be dealt with through normal civil and criminal legal means. Others who are a bit more sophisticated might argue that we need to regulate business in order to protect people from 'market failures.' However, the empirical evidence is that there are far fewer 'market failures' than commonly imagined, and many of these so-called market failures are actually a result of misguided government policy or regulation. For a minute, try to imagine a world without government regulation, but where all of the standard laws against theft, fraud, misrepresentation and bodily injury still exist."

See here for a good debunking of the common Leftist charge that Israel is a racist state.

Unlike PC non-Muslims, there is the odd Muslim willing to confront the Islamic nature of Islamist terrorism. See here

See here for a discussion of Tony Blair's U-Turn on multiculturalism after the bombing of London's "Tube".

See here for the Leftist view of an appropriate 9/11 monument.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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HINTS ON REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS

A great article by Pete Wilson, former governor of California, telling how they got the vital Los Angeles I-10 freeway back into action so quickly after the 1994 quake. Excerpts:

I was advised that it would require some two years and two months to repair the bridges and restore the I-10 to use.... Instead, we completed the repairs and reopened the freeway to its normal heavy traffic in just 66 days. How? We did two things. First, I quickly exercised the extraordinary emergency powers conferred upon the governor of California by the state Government Code. I suspended the operation of statutes and regulations that would have required the protracted public hearings called for before environmental impact reports could be filed and acted upon, and I suspended other normally demanded procedural hurdles.

Second, we took a page from the book of private-sector incentives for accelerating performance. We told contractors bidding to repair the bridges that they must submit bids that specified not only the cost but the date of completion, and that they must agree to an added condition: For every day they were late, they would incur a penalty of $200,000; and for every day they were early, they would be rewarded with a bonus of $200,000. The winning bidder, C.C. Myers Inc., put on three shifts that worked 24/7. In order to prevent any delay in the work, they hired a locomotive and crew to haul to Los Angeles steel sitting on a siding in Texas. Myers made more on the bonus than they did on the bid. Incentives work.

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RECENT AUSTRALIAN NEWS ROUNDUP

America-hating Americans have their equivalents among Australian intellectuals -- Australia-hating Australians. The ever-iconoclastic Keith Windschuttle shows them for the hate-filled but otherwise empty vessels that they are. It is a long and thorough article that any Australian who is tempted to respect our intellectuals should read. It will cure such temptations forthwith. I liked this typically supercilious quotation that Windschuttle dug up: "Behold the man - the Australian man of today - on Sunday mornings in the suburbs, when the high-decibel drone of the motor mower is calling the faithful to worship. A block of land, a brick veneer [house], and the motor-mower beside him in the wilderness - what more does he want to sustain him, except a Holden [car] to polish, a beer with the boys, marital sex on Saturday nights . At age of sixty-five, equipped with dashing sports coat, matched luggage, good wishes from the bowling club, and two P&O cruise tickets, he imagines he is about to begin living, not knowing that he died many years before"

Australia's conservative reforms praised: "The International Monetary Fund has weighed into Australia's politically charged industrial relations debate, throwing its support behind the Federal Government's reforms in a move that has angered unions. Issuing a glowing report on the state of the economy, the organisation praised the Government's welfare-to-work changes, particularly moves to boost the workforce participation of Australians aged 55 to 64, which the IMF described as "middling" by international standards. The Treasurer, Peter Costello, seized on the support to bolster the Government's case for further economic reform. "The point of all of this is that we must keep the reform process going, if we want to stay near the front of the pack as one of the lead economies of the developed world," he said".

Outspoken Australian politician praised: "Tony Abbott, often accused of saying the wrong thing, has received expert plaudits for his forthright warning about the likelihood of a bird flu pandemic. American risk communication consultants Jody Lanard and Peter Sandman have written a detailed - and glowing - analysis of a speech by the Health Minister in which he warned that such a pandemic could dwarf the health consequences of a terrorist attack. "Minister Abbott is saying the kinds of things government officials normally recoil from saying," doctors Lanard and Sandman wrote. "They imagine that being this candid, this alarming and this uncertain about anything is bound to boomerang badly . Abbott's speech did not do any of that. "By levelling with the public, [Mr Abbott] made a solid, informative contribution to an aspect of pandemic preparedness that has been badly neglected around the world - the preparedness of the public.""

Australian SUVs under attack: "Four-wheel-drives would leap in cost by thousands of dollars under a controversial plan to keep the fuel guzzlers out of city streets. The House of Representatives environment committee has urged the Federal Government to consider increasing the tariff on four-wheel drives (4WDs). Only farmers and others with a legitimate need for a 4WD would be spared the price jump under the plan. Imported 4WDs attract a 5 per cent tariff while other imported cars attract a tariff of 10 per cent, a concession originally intended to help farmers. But 4WDs now make up about one in five new cars sold and have become the car of choice for countless city-slickers"

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ELSEWHERE

Countries rated as good places to do business are good generally: "Doing Business in 2006 was published today (midnight GMT), tracking the state of red tape across the world... There are many wise things to be said about this data, and I'll try to say them over the next few days. But since this is a blog let me go for the cheapest headline. The top ten business environments in the world, as measured by the 'Ease of Doing Business index': 1. New Zealand; 2. Singapore; 3. United States; 4. Canada; 5. Norway; 6. Australia; 7. Hong Kong; 8. Denmark; 9. United Kingdom; 10. Japan [Note that fully half of them are English-speaking]

Was relief to Katrina victims slow because of racism? Jeff Jacoby points out: "Katrina devastated more than black-majority Orleans Parish. Four other Louisiana parishes and three coastal Mississippi counties, all with substantial white majorities, suffered heavily too. Government relief reached them no faster than it did New Orleans. If this were truly a racist country, it would have."

"Logical Meme" has been blogging up a storm. He's got a post on the vast bias shown by "Newsweek" and has also started a series on "Debunking Slavery Myths", the first installment of which is here. He is also getting steamed up about the MSM's burying of the story re. dozens and dozens of brutal murders reportedly having taken place at the Superdome and Convention Centers. He's been posting regularly on it -- e.g. here

Carnival of the Vanities is up again and very informative about the posts this time

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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EU SHENANIGANS

They are trying to give themselves power to jail British and other national citizens

EU shoots itself in the foot: "Brussels has been given the power to compel British courts to fine or imprison people for breaking EU laws, even if the Government and Parliament are opposed. An unprecedented ruling yesterday by the supreme court in Europe gives Brussels the power to introduce harmonised criminal law across the EU, creating for the first time a body of European criminal law that all member states must adopt. The judgment by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg was bitterly fought by 11 EU governments, including Britain, and marks a dramatic transfer of power from national capitals to Brussels.....

Some national government officials said that the issue was so sensitive that EU lawmaking would grind to a halt and member governments would refuse to pass legislation rather than accept harmonisation of criminal law. One diplomat said: "This stuff is political dynamite in the UK, Holland, Italy, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where they are as keen on their sovereignty as anyone. Imagine how Italians would react if their criminal law was rewritten at EU level. Ironically, it means less will be done at EU level.""

I doubt in any case that any attempt to enforce such EU edicts in Britain would get past the House of Lords. The Law Lords could well rule that Britain is not bound by something outside specific treaty obligations. Note this comment: "Gerald Barling, QC, a leading European expert, said that the European court had declared that the powers to introduce harmonised criminal laws were already there. "But that in itself is arguable - the Community treaty itself does not directly say so," he said".

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ELSEWHERE

Putting America under foreign rule: "Though John Roberts may be on the firing line this week as his Senate hearings begin, it's sitting Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who is making big court news. In the Sept. 12 New Yorker, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin pens a profile of Kennedy, who vigorously defends his use of foreign laws and constitutions to interpret U.S. laws and our Constitution. Some in Congress believe Kennedy's position - and those of several other Court Justices - is a clear violation of both U.S. law and the Justices' own solemn oath to uphold solely the U.S. Constitution.... The use of foreign and international laws in deciding Supreme Court decisions has outraged many present and former policymakers in Washington. "Relying upon foreign law, particularly international covenants to which the United States is not a party, is an illegitimate source of interpretation for the Constitution," former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese told NewsMax. "It is impossible to reconcile foreign customs or opinions of law with the meaning of the Constitution," he added..."

Is this the ultimate madness? They are disarming the National Guard in New Orleans.

American Fascism? "'All Our Visitors Bring Happiness,' reads the wrought iron sign on the front column of Albert Cousin's 102-year-old Victorian house. Not Wednesday. Sheriff's deputies in body armor and holding rifles came to try to force Cousin and other residents of St. Bernard Parish to get out of town. ... For the past few days, residents have found comfort in food and water brought by units of the Georgia National Guard, who arrived Labor Day weekend. ... With such efforts under way, the rousting of residents was left to deputies from neighboring parishes, and law enforcement members from as far away as Oklahoma City. The forced eviction of stubborn occupants of this parish, the first community downriver from New Orleans, is more aggressive than similar efforts in the city."

Great stuff!: "Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee said he has 'commandered' the Sam's and Wal-Mart stores in the parish and ordered them to open as soon as possible. Lee said he took the action after he learned that a Wal-Mart store wanted to open recently but was told by FEMA officials that it could not. 'I am upset with FEMA and some of their regulations,' Lee said. After talking about the situation concerning the Wal-Mart on Thursday, Lee said he briefly talked to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans on Friday. He asked her to check on the situation and find out if there was a legitimate reason to keep the store closed. But because of communication difficulties, he did not hear back and took the situation in his own hands. Lee said he gave handwritten notes to Wal-Mart stores in Harvey and Kenner saying they were ordered to open as soon as possible. Lee said Parish President Aaron Broussard agreed with the decision. Lee said anyone from FEMA who tries to close either store will be arrested by deputies."

FEMA should be shut down : "What if there was no such thing as FEMA? I asked myself that question after reading about the Federal Emergency Management Agency's bungled efforts to serve the poor and suffering in the area formerly known as New Orleans. Following Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, FEMA was criticized for inaction, epitomized by Director Michael Brown's August 29th memo suggesting workers be allowed two days to get to the ravaged region. (Incredibly, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke defended the two-day delay as necessary to provide workers with adequate training.)"

Labor regulations suspended to "aid hurricane recovery": "Last week President Bush, in order to speed the hurricane recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast, suspended labor regulations that control wages for workers employed by federal contractors. The additional flexibility will help create new jobs and speed the rebuilding process, raising the larger question of whether the rules should be reinstated even after the emergency has passed. The so-called 'prevailing wage' regulations which date from the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act require that federal contractors pay employees a government-determined minimum wage."

"Living wage" laws don't help low-income families: "In July, Sonoma, California passed an ordinance requiring certain employers to pay $11.70 an hour with health benefits or $13.20 without health benefits, indexed to the consumer price index. The ordinance applies to companies with a city service contract worth at least $10,000, nonprofits with city contracts of at least $75,000, and companies that receive city loans or economic assistance worth at least $100,000. But a new study of 'living wage' laws indicates the Sonoma City Council's decision may not help those the law is intended to benefit."

For old-timers or those who are interested in the history of American conservatism, there is a good review here of a recent book by Priscilla Buckley, sister and co-worker of Bill Buckley.

Chris Brand has a HUGE coverage of the controversy over male/female differences in IQ which I have just posted here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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YOUNG AUSTRALIANS BECOMING MORE CONSERVATIVE

An "Absolutely Fabulous" generation of ageing hipsters with straitlaced children is emerging across Australia, as flower-power parents grow old dis-gracefully and are viewed with amazement by their offspring. New research has found that 50-somethings have clung to baby boomer ideals of the 1960s and '70s, with a relaxed attitude towards such matters as prostitution, premarital sex and divorce. However, like Eddy's bespectacled daughter Saffy in the sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous", typical 20-somethings are more conservative than their parents and are happy to settle down with partners, mortgages and steady jobs....

Attitudes prevalent among the middle-aged include an impatience with fussy food, an appetite for the good life and a positive outlook. Their children, however, are more into spirituality than the Sex Pistols. They worry about healthy food, feel that religion plays a strong part in their lives and are believers in marriage and the family unit....

The study finds that spirituality has enjoyed a renaissance: in 1978 only 26 per cent of young people viewed religion as important to their lives. Among today's parents, it is 36 per cent while their children are holier, at 40 per cent. On moral issues, young people are far less liberal than their forebears. Just 22 per cent agree with legalised prostitution, compared with 60 per cent in 1978. The proportion backing legalised marijuana has fallen from 39 per cent to 27 per cent. Even support for pre-marital sex has taken a knock, from 84 per cent of 20-somethings in 1978 to 69 per cent today.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Democrat politics in Louisiana: "Sen. Bill Frist rode to the rescue in more ways than one last week, with his call for a comprehensive congressional investigation into the failings of planning and execution of preparing for Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing relief effort. Frist's efforts weren't intended as a slam at President Bush, who has taken a pummeling in the media from Democrats in Congress, their operatives, and cooperative journalists who were willing to set facts aside for the opportunity to create a political fire storm around the Republican president. Instead, Frist's call for an investigation sent many Democrats running for cover.... "In the end, if the Democrats want to place blame, they know the behavior of their party members, for a generation really the only party in power in New Orleans and Louisiana, is damning, and they don't want to draw any more attention to the issue than the media wants to." Senate Appropriations Committee staff late last week were drawing up statistics on just where the hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for New Orleans went over the years.... If I were a local politician or a state or local bureaucrat down there, I'd be nervous about now."

See here for how the Levee Board in New Orleans mis-spent its budget

See here for how the Levee Board was under investigation for corruption prior to Katrina

Local corruption: There is an interesting parallel to the recent failure of State and local authorities in New Orleans in the matter of Multi-Drug-Resistant-TB (MDRTB). Note this excerpt: "In the United States, a very effective national TB control program was decimated when the government, in their "wisdom" chose to give discretion on the spending of public health funds to state governments. In 1972 when this change was first contemplated, informed observers testified to the US Congress, predicting that giving discretion on TB public health funding to state governments would lead to a public health disaster: a resounding resurgence of TB! These experts were roundly ignored, yet this "block grant" exercise of the 1970s directly led to the 20% resurgence of TB in the United States (35% in children) in the 1980s and 1990s, which required a huge outlay of new funds to return to control. Not having learned their lesson, high officials in the US government continue to try to reintroduce this concept". [As a good Federalist, my view is that both State and Federal governments have their place and I think that in cases where the need is uncontroversial and strong leadership is required (which it certainly is in the difficult case of MDRTB) the Feds are usually the right place to look. After New Orleans, I suspect that the Feds will now be given full authority to override immediately the local and State bodies in managing the initial reaction to major disasters]

Canadians back down on Sharia law: "Ontario has reversed course on plans to let Islamic sharia law to be used in settling family disputes and will ban religious-based arbitration altogether, to the dismay of other groups that had used the system. A spokesman for Premier Dalton McGuinty said that the Canadian province will dispense with all types of religious-based dispute settlements on issues such as child custody and divorce, allowed under its 1991 Arbitration Act. The decision comes after months of controversy and debate over the use of sharia - a code of law based primarily on the Koran as well as the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad - to settle family issues. Critics had said it strips women and children of their rights and had rallied to have Ontario prohibit it. There were protests in Toronto and other Canadian cities, as well as in Europe."

Gaza: "But as inhabitants celebrated the end of Israeli military occupation, there were fears that Palestinians have traded one form of control for another. While there may no longer be any visible signs of an Israeli presence, Gaza's economy, security, transport and basic utilities like water and electricity, will remain in Israeli hands for the foreseeable future, leaving some Palestinians to complain that they are now inmates of a "giant prison"... Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Information Minister, said that the priority must be to give Palestinians freedom of movement, to allow the Gazan economy to export goods and attract investment. "Without freedom of passage and mobility, Gaza will be doomed to be a prison - rather than the beginning of a peace process," he said. Israelis insist that only when the Palestinians have demonstrated the ability to control militant groups and maintain security will Israel consider making further concessions."

The latest post on Strange Justice concerns my home State of Queensland and the case deserves a lot more publicity than it is getting, in my opinion.

There is a new conservative blog that you might like to have a look at here. He calls himself "The Right-Wing Warmonger Who Is Always Right". He's got a sense of humour anyway.

There have been recent objections from British Muslims about official Holocaust remembrance. I have a couple of recent posts on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH that comment on the matter.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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Cricket: My hearty congratulations to the England team for just barely managing to pull it off this time. Doggedness is rewarded in the end. Cricket is of course the world’s most widely-played bat-and-ball game, thanks to its avid following in the Indian subcontinent. How odd that the British invented most of the popular sports —tennis, cricket, golf, soccer etc and yet are usually so bad at sporting competitions.

BNP Update: It is a great relief to me personally that the threat of a Fascist Britain has receded. The British police realized that they didn't have a legal leg to stand on in seizing the BNP paper and released it eventually. "At about 1800hrs today (12th) two BNP officials received telephone calls from Kent Police who admitted they made a mistake and that the print run of 60,000 copies of our monthly newspaper can be uplifted at the earliest opportunity from the HM Customs compound at Dover docks.... The news came as a response to a legal letter delivered by a barrister, acting on behalf of the BNP that we would press for “serious and maximum damages” against Kent Constabulary for the loss of earnings from our newspaper and a further expectation of taking the Force to the European Court of Human Rights. [An online copy of page 1 of the seized publication can be accessed here (PDF).]

MORTALITY COMPARISONS REVEAL USA RESPONSE TO KATRINA WAS EXCELLENT

I have lifted this optimistic post from Reliapundit. See the original for links

Nagin - the inept and negligent and hysterical mayor of New Orleans - who bears major responsibility for the horrific conditions in the Superdome and the Convention Center (because he FAILED to evaucate his poor citizens from the city, and because he FAILED to provide security or sustenance to those who followed his advice and sought shelter where and when he advised them to, and then failed to get his governor to allow the Red Cross or the Salvation Army in to his city to replenish sustenance for his citizens) - predicted a death toll in New Orleans alone of perhaps as many as 10,000 people.

This prediction horrified the public and made people want to BLAME SOMEONE!

The current death toll from Katrina in New Orleans - and the rest of Louisiana and Mississipp and Alabama - is less than 400. This number is SURE to go up, but it is VERY UNLIKELY that it will reach 10,000 or anything near that dire and irresponsible prediction.

BY COMPARISON: the 2003 heat-wave in Europe killed 35-40,000, (14,847 in France alone; 20,000 in Italy).

And Hurricane Katrina was a HUGE natural cataclysm which wreaked huge damage to 90,000 square miles! In fact, in terms of the force and breadth of the physical destruction it wreaked, Katrina was the worst natural disater to hit a developed nation in all of human history.

I think this proves that the HYSTERICAL charges by the Left and the MSM they dominate (that the Bush Administration dropped the ball) are entirely unfounded.

In fact, if you subtract the horrifying images of the Superdome and Convention Center from the "newsreels" (and your memories) there was next-to-nothing wrong with the federal response (or the federal, state and local responses in Mississippi and Alabama, whose coasts were savaged more completely by Katrina than was the city of New Orleans). And when considers the FACT that the Superdome and Convention Center debacles were strictly the result of local and state government incompetence, it means that there was absolutely NOTHING wrong with the federal response. PERIOD. Eventually, this truth will come out. The truth always does.

In addition, when New Orleans is restored, renovated and repopulated in RECORD TIME, this will seen as a huge triumph of the federal government's wonderful efforts (huge and comprehensive efforts which went nearly completely UNREPORTED by the MSM but which are compiled HERE by RELIEFWEB, an outfit run by the UN....

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ELSEWHERE

Stupidity about fuel prices: "What is it about the price of gasoline that turns seemingly normal politicians into barking economic demagogues? When Jill puts her house on the market for $450,000 -- triple what she paid 10 years ago, but the going price in her neighborhood today -- the politicos understand that the 200 percent markup is the result of supply and demand in the real estate market. Senators don't call press conferences to denounce Jill as a profiteer. Attorneys general don't threaten to prosecute her. Governors don't compare her to looters. But when Joe's service station ups the price of gasoline by $1 a gallon, the political world freaks out. Never mind that a Category 4 hurricane has devastated oil production throughout the Gulf Coast, depleting the nation's already strained refining capacity by 2 million barrels a day and driving up the price Joe's wholesaler is now charging *him*. For some reason, politicians forget everything they learned in Economics 101, and rush to savage Joe for "gouging" his customers".

Victory for privatization in Japan: "Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, won an overwhelming election victory yesterday, crushing the Opposition, destroying rebels from within his own party and securing his reputation as the country's boldest and most brilliant post-war leader. As counting continued early this morning, Mr Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party took 296 of the 480 seats in the lower house of the Japanese Diet, one of the country's biggest-ever election victories. New Komeito, the LDP's coalition partner, was projected to win at least 30 more seats. It was the first time that the LDP has won an outright majority since 1990 and represents a vindication of Mr Koizumi's risky decision to call a snap election after the defeat of his proposals to privatise Japan's postal services". [This puts the rest of the world to shame. Who else is trying to privatize their postal service?]

Tough new U.S. nuclear policy (about time!) "A president of the United States would be able to launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes against enemies planning to use weapons of mass destruction under a revised "nuclear operations" doctrine to be signed in the next few weeks. In a significant shift after half a century of nuclear deterrence based on the threat of massive retaliation, the revised doctrine would allow pre-emptive strikes against states or terror groups, and to destroy chemical and biological weapons stockpiles.... It came to light as Iran insisted, in defiance of the European Union, that it would continue processing uranium at its Isfahan reactor. The US has called on the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Tehran for failing to shelve its nuclear programme. Referring repeatedly to "non-state actors" - parlance for terrorists - the doctrine is designed to arm the White House and US forces with a new range of threats and sanctions to counter the situation of threatened nuclear attack by al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates. The document's key phrase appears in a list of pre-emptive nuclear strike scenarios, the first of which is against an enemy using "or intending to use WMD".

Just one step away from book-burning? "The entire print run of this month's edition of the British National Party newspaper was seized by police yesterday. Sixty thousand copies of The Voice of Freedom were confiscated at Dover. Police said: "They have been seized so we can see if any criminal offences have been committed." The papers were being carried by lorry from a printworks in Slovakia. The BNP later decided to publish the edition on its website. The 16-page issue leads with the headline "What about showing some solidarity with the British people?", under the words "Britain gets bombed but it's Islam that gets the sympathy" Spokesman Dr Phill Edwards said it was "a serious attack by the state on freedom of speech"." [The BNP website also seemed to have been taken down when last I checked]

A heartfelt email from one of my Jewish correspondents: "The heart breaks at the destruction of Synagogues in Gaza. Paula Stern has written about it. Read her chilling account, her heartfelt grief at The face of Islamic intolerance, and pass it on. I've run out of words".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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