"GEORGE BUSH, THE MAN": A RARE BURST OF CANADIAN REALISM

Below is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the "Ottawa Citizen" on 9/11/2005 by David Warren. The link is to David Warren's own site as the article is no longer findable at its original source

"There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.) I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being, that when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military, efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another, who have cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail...."

I rarely say this but this time I am going to: Read the whole thing. The conclusion of his article is cutting: "Unlike his critics, Bush is a man"

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ELSEWHERE

Hurricane Center: Global Warming Equals Fewer Storms: "Environmentalists who claim global warming has caused an increase in U.S. hurricane activity obviously haven't checked with the National Hurricane Center, which has kept statistics on major storms over the last 150 years. That's probably because those statistics yield one inescapable conclusion: If global warming has had any impact at all on hurricane activity, it's lessened - not increased - the frequency of major hurricanes". [There is much more about this on "Greenie Watch" -- e.g. here and here]

Owen Harries on intellectuals: "Why do intellectuals get things so wrong, so often?" Harries asks. "The question is worth asking because they are still with us, still vocal, still taken seriously by many as interpreters of the course of human history." In answering his own question, Harries suggests that intellectuals are often wrong because thinkers tend to demand coherence in human affairs, looking "for pattern, meaning, and consistency." Since intellectuals tend to be overwhelmingly secular, Harries observes that most intellectuals attempt to find such consistency in the form of ideology. "Ideologies vary a good deal, but among the things they have in common is that they all require great selectivity with respect to empirical evidence," Harries suggests. "That which supports the ideological creed is readily assimilated and emphasized; that which conflicts with it is either noisily rejected or quietly filtered out and ignored."

From a reformed Leftist: "I believe that the key to getting leftists change is to get them to open their eyes and get them off their left-wing media addiction (which leads them to EXCLUDE reading or watching anything that is right-of-center; in other words: their self-censorship - THEIR INNER EXILE). I believe that once reasonable people start to look at events from both sides, they will begin to "see the light." The leftists in the USA and Europe - (and in the academy and in the MSM) - live in a self-imposed totalitarian regime of their own minds; whereas tyrannies like the USSR actively censored all media and prevented their trapped citizenry from reading any real news, and from reading any real history (of Communism or anything else), or from reading Hayek - or anything that opposed their rigid ideology, contemporary post-modern leftists voluntarily censor themselves and restrict their reading and viewing of news and commentary to the left-of-center media (which is still MOST of the media, so they don't FEEL like their censoring themselves)."

Study shows FDR's "New Deal" was politically corrupt: "Couch and Shughart conclude that "political self-interest was perhaps the most important motive underlying the administration's spending decisions. A state's popular vote for FDR in the 1932 election and its importance to the President's electoral college strategy are consistently [statistically] significant determinants of the amount of federal aid it received."

Australian Left tough on terrorist suspects: "Labor wants police to have the power to search anyone found in a suspected terrorist "target area", without police needing a warrant. Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said today that, under a Labor plan, police commissioners would be able to lock down a suburb or area in which terrorists were suspected of planning an attack. Mr Beazley said the plan went further than the Federal Government's idea of allowing state police to detain terror suspects for up to 14 days or track suspects by using electronic tags. "We've put out one suggestion, which is similar to the legislation which exists now in NSW but is a bit tougher, and we think it should be picked up in the other states in a uniform way and by Canberra," he said. "And that is to give the capacity to the police commissioner in any jurisdiction to lock down an area in which you believe a terrorist threat may be emerging or where it's actually occurred," Mr Beazley told ABC TV. "This gives the police substantial powers of search and seizure".

Beazley is a bit wishy-washy about disowning the antisemites in his own party, however: "Opposition Leader Kim Beazley is coming under increased pressure from Australia's influential Jewish community to publicly repudiate Labor MPs who are "Nazifying" Israel, despite its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The latest bout of justifiable Jewish angst follows another ugly outburst by Labor backbencher Julia Irwin in federal Parliament two weeks ago".

There is an interesting article here on the weird Muslim beliefs about Jesus.

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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BRITAIN SLOWLY SINKING UNDER SOCIALISM

From the time of the Thatcher reforms in the early 1980s, Britain has been the star economic performer among the major European nations. The British went from having the lowest per capita income of the European big four (Germany, France, Italy and Britain) to having the highest one, but now there are signs the economic sickness in "old Europe" is beginning to infect the British. The British economy had been growing an average of almost 3 percent yearly for the last two decades, which is quite respectable, given that French and German economies have grown much more slowly. Over the same period, the U.S. grew at an average rate of almost 4 percent, far higher than any of the major European economies.

When Tony Blair took office, he had the wisdom not to undo the Thatcher reforms. As a result, Britain has had the advantage of far freer labor markets, and a lower tax burden than most of its European competitors, along with a strong rule of law and relatively little corruption. Unfortunately for the British, the chancellor of the exchequer (i.e., treasury secretary) in the Labor government, Gordon Brown, has too much of a "social market economy" streak. As a result, domestic spending and taxes have risen rapidly, and consequently, as would be expected, economic growth has been falling to an annual rate of only 1.5 percent.

The Europeans, including Chancellor Brown, like to talk about their "social market economy" being superior and more humane than the freer U.S. market economy, but the facts paint a very different picture. Last year, the per capita GDP (on a purchasing power parity basis) of Britain. was only $29,600 as compared with $40,100 in the U.S., and the British on average are about 10 percent richer than other EU members. Even the poorest of the U.S. states, like Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi (all hit by Katrina), have slightly higher average incomes and the rich states, like Connecticut, have incomes roughly double those of the British.

More here

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Good to hear: "Israeli aircraft blasted suspected Palestinian weapons facilities and other militant targets throughout the Gaza Strip on Sunday, at the launch of what the military said would be a "prolonged" offensive against Hamas militants for bombarding Israeli towns with rockets."

A good rant from Unca Dave: "Fellow Americans, how much longer are we going to take this garbage? They've outlawed prayer. The Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are depicted as filthy slave owners. Christopher Columbus is now an eeeeevil European interested solely with enslaving the pristine, peaceful natives. Abraham Lincoln is called a racist. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro and other tin pot communist dictators with funny little hats and murdering Muslims are praised beyond description for being warm, feeling humanitarians by traitors like senators Kennedy, Kerry and Durbin. Same guys, on the other hand, have made the US out to be the bad guy for pouring water on the heads of the terrorists at Gitmo (horrors!) or, even worse, embarrassing them (how dare we!). Something's gotta give, and I have a feeling it's gonna give soon!"

More about a great hero of the Left: "A new book, about to be published in France "Cuba Nostra - Les Secrets D'Etat de Fidel Castro" by Alain Ammar has destroyed a very-well constructed myth by the left: The assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile while he was being toppled by Augusto Pinochet. This article by Eduardo Mackenzie has a brief on the book. "The fact is that Allende was not a suicide, he was not killed by the military that took the power in September, 1973. During the assault against La Moneda palace, the Chilean president was cowardly murdered by one of the Cuban agents that were in charge of his protection" says Eduardo. Allende was frightened by the military and wanted to surrender. Before he could do this, he was killed. It's the second major attack on this leftist myth this month! Early this month a new book by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin revealed that Allende, and other leftist leaders in Latin America received money from KGB...."

I have previously mentioned Allende's pre-war Fascism -- his antisemitism, eugenic ideas etc. Don't miss his "cure" for homosexuality!

Jeff Jacoby has a good summary of the Chrenkoff phenomenon and what it tells us about most of the media. If feel some totally unjustified reflected glory from the whole thing because Chrenkoff lives only about 20 minutes drive from where I do here in Brisbane.

Some good sense from Larry Elder. One excerpt: "Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman writes that before the imposition of minimum wage laws, black teens were more likely to be employed than white teens. After the imposition of minimum wage laws, an employment gap emerged between white and black teens, with black teens becoming increasingly less employed. Friedman finds " . . . the minimum wage law to be one of the most, if not the most anti-black law on the statute books."

East meets West: "Economic liberalization in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe is paying off. Per capita incomes in that region are growing faster than those in Western Europe. The fact that the new poorer EU members are catching up with the old is a tribute to the power of the market. The reforms in the new EU countries are not over, but their success should serve as an example to the moribund economies of France, Germany and Italy."

When will they ever learn?: "Barely two years since the last Concordes were retired, Airbus, the European aircraft consortium, is looking at plans for a new generation of supersonic passenger jets. The manufacturer, in which Britain's BAE Systems is a partner, is drawing up designs for a 250-seat plane with a range of up to 6,000 miles that could reach speeds approaching 1,500mph. It believes that rapid growth in the aviation market means that by 2050 there could be demand for supersonic travel on hundreds of long-haul routes". [Concorde never made a cent. All the costs were borne by the taxpayers]

Wicked Thoughts has just put up an oldie but goldie: "21 Ways To Be A Good Democrat". It's very much to the point. Have a look if you don't know it.

I have just put up here a very amusing response from a reader to the quote from Tibor Machan that I led off with yesterday. He explains how Leftists classify people (even though they are "all equal", of course).

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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TIBOR MACHAN SUMS UP AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Excerpts:

Modern liberals, however, embrace a different view of human nature. They hold that we are basically moved by impersonal forces and have no capacity to initiate any improvements in our lives. Any such improvement has to come from the outside, and government, with its concentrated and massive coercive power, is the most promising candidate to bring about such improvement. This is, in fact, the intellectual source of the switch from the American Founders' original idea of individual rights to the idea of positive rights or entitlements that was the substance of Franklin Roosevelt's "Second Bill of Rights". Of course, many other factors influenced the change, including various special interests parading as the public interest, but all rested, fundamentally, on the switch from understanding people as self-starters to seeing them as passive participants within a society. The central issue is really about human nature-are we at heart self-governing, living entities, or are we being moved about by impersonal forces and in constant need of help from government?

Yet, as should be evident, the modern liberal's approach to advancing the lot of human beings is paradoxical. While denying that individuals can help themselves if left to their own resources and to voluntary cooperation, they affirm that governments-which are, after all, composed of individuals-can take the initiative and effectuate adequate solutions to human problems. How is this possible? Either we are helpless, in which case so is the government, or we can help ourselves, in which case it is best, in most cases, to leave us free to find our own solution to problems. Moreover, if we can take the initiative, then those who know the problems they face, who have access to what has come to be called local knowledge-which is where solutions most often lie-are in a far better position to address challenges facing them than far off agencies of governments.

The modern liberal, in point of fact, is a reactionary, one who still clings to the old idea that people in the main are inept and require some supreme ruler to run their lives, to take care of them. That is the foundational idea behind feudalism and monarchy, with tsars, Caesars, kings, queens, pharaohs, and other chiefs ruling the realm with the rest of us relegated to the position of subjects required to follow the leaders' will.

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ELSEWHERE

A good article here on what is needed to get American immigration reform underway. One excerpt: "The only people whose interests would be harmed by a slowdown in immigration are not the immigrants already here-they would clearly benefit- but the ethnic activists who purport to speak for them and the employers who want a large, desperate pool of workers willing to toil for sub-American wage rates".

French academic Olivier Roy has a very reasonable article about Muslim terrorist motivations . One excerpt: "The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations"

Steve Forbes on how to use free enterprise to rebuild New Orleans: "Washington is appropriating tens of billions of dollars to rebuild New Orleans and the devastated Gulf Coast region. But one measure that would cost little and quickly spur an inspiring revival of this impacted area would be making the region a true free-enterprise zone. Residents and local businesses would be free from both federal and state capital gains levies. Parents would have genuine school choice: If they wanted to move their children to another school, they'd get a voucher or coupon equivalent to the amount spent per pupil in their current school. Pre-Katrina property tax rates would be slashed. Give people who currently live in the region or who move to it an income tax holiday: no taxes owed to Uncle Sam or state capitals for, say, ten years. With those kinds of incentives small businesses would flourish--a handful might even become tomorrow's Microsoft or Intel or Apple or Oracle. Job opportunities would proliferate. So would good schools...."

France to pay cash for more middle-class babies: "Middle-class mothers in France could be paid up to1,000 Euros (675 pounds) a month - almost the minimum wage - to stop work for a year and have a third child under a government scheme to boost the birthrate, already among the highest in Europe. Despite female employment statistics that are the envy of the continent, the government remains worried about the reluctance of better-educated women to have babies. A plan to be unveiled by the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, today is expected to double an existing cash incentive for big families."

Those Who Deny The Terrorist Threat....: "In the 1930's Adolph Hitler made no attempt to conceal his ambitions. Mein Kampf spelled out a dark strategic vision. Yet the West chose to either avert its gaze or deny reality. The prospect of fighting a major war so soon after the horror of World War I catalyzed the rationalizers. Some said Hitler was engaged in mere bravado; others said, he was a reflection of German national sentiment, not imperial ambition. Whatever the rationalizers said, they stood tremulous in the face of Hitler's goals. Now the West is engaged in its latest act of denial vis-.-vis radial Islam. The civil libertarians contend any modification of our laws in order to hunt down and destroy these shadowy killers in our midst represents a threat to the nature of our government and the Constitution. Therefore fighting an all-out war only damages our side.... Last, are the subversives from within who detest America so much they would prefer to see Osama bin Laden as president rather than George Bush. One might assume these people aren't taken seriously; alas they shouldn't be taken seriously, but in some circles they have influence. So filled with hate is this group that they do not even respect the laws that offer their freedom to resist".

Paul Mirengoff & Scott Johnson point out that the "living constitution" ideas of America's Left-leaning Supreme Court judges go back via Woodrow Wilson to Hegel, the same 19th century German philosopher who inspired Karl Marx. You can find some interesting quotations from both Hegel and Wilson in the Appendices here.

Since the Carnival of Cordite (roundup of gun blogs) has just given my GUN WATCH blog a good plug, I hope everybody with an interest in guns will read it.

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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HISPANICS PROVE THAT IT WAS RACE, NOT POVERTY THAT WAS THE BIG PROBLEM IN NEW ORLEANS

What happened to the nearly 200,000 Hispanics living in and around New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit last month? I asked the question of one reporter who had called me to comment on the role race played in the evacuation fiasco, but she didn't know. In fact, at the height of the crisis, few in the media seemed the slightest bit curious about this population, despite hundreds of stories about poverty, race, and the failure of government to rescue the most vulnerable.

I wondered in part because I saw so few Hispanic faces among those stranded at the Superdome and Convention Center. Yet I knew that many Hispanics lived in New Orleans, occupying the same service jobs they do elsewhere, often on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Most are immigrants - often illegal - from Honduras and Mexico. Then, just when I thought they were nowhere to be found, I spotted a few Hispanic men in the television footage this week of crews cleaning up the debris that has overwhelmed so much of the Gulf Coast. Wherever they went to escape the storm, they're back - because there is work to be done, and they are eager to do dirty jobs that many others shun. I wonder if these images will sink in with the anti-immigrant crowd that imagines that Mexicans come to the United States looking for a handout......

The city's Hispanics didn't need the cavalry to come to the rescue, even though many of them are very poor. They did what immigrants always do: They relied on informal networks of family, friends and fellow countrymen, and pooled their resources to get out while they could.

More here

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Antisemitic Catholics still? Marathon Pundit has been following the strange doings at DePaul university, run by the Vincentians, a Catholic charitable organization. They have fired one professor (Klocek) who spoke in up in defence of Israel and now look likely to give tenure to a notorious holocaust denier and Hitler apologist (Finkelstein). And they are of course hosting the notorious Prof. Ward Churchill there too -- the man who thinks ordinary working Americans are like Nazi officials. How any Catholic organization can be permitted by the modern church to engage in such hate-filled antisemitic weirdness completely escapes me. I am sure The Holy Father would be horrified if he heard of it.

I have just posted here some correspondence between Chris Brand and Philip Clarke, Dean, Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University -- regarding the banning of this article by Prof. Fraser about Australian immigration policy. The reply Chris sent would appear to expose the complete dishonesty of Deakin university in the matter. Sadly, Prof. Fraser's predictions already seem to be coming horrifyingly true. See here. I don't suppose many Americans would be surprised, however.

IMAPP have recently put out a study which claims to show that children from families where the parents are married are less likely to be involved in crime. Their study is a meta-analysis and a bad one, with most of the studies surveyed apparently failing to take account of race. They DID however find one study by T.M. Franke which used good sampling and good controls -- including control for race. And that study DID support the expected correlation. You can find the abstract of the Franke study here

There is a fascinating summary here of the Golitsyn predictions. Golitsyn was the only Sovietologist to predict the downfall of the old Soviet system in Russia long before it happened. He even predicted the fall of the Berlin wall years in advance. Golitsyn certainly made monkeys out of all the "intellectuals" who pooh-poohed his predictions at the time he made them. One of his predictions is a little worrying, though: He predicted that the KGB would retain its grip on Russia. And since President Putin is a former KGB chief it looks like he was right about that too. (HT Swimming Against the Red Tide)

Tennessee bureaucratic idiocy: "The state is keeping 120 lawyers on its payroll to hear the appeals of people who claim they have been wrongly cut from TennCare, even though there have been few cases for them to hear -- 16, at last count. The state began hiring the lawyers in July and is paying the temporary legal help more than $519,000 per month, according to figures provided by the state Department of Human Services, which is overseeing the appeals process. One of the lawyers who became disgruntled and left said some co-workers filled their days working crossword puzzles and reading magazines, although they were instructed to 'look busy.' State officials denied this, saying the lawyers are constantly busy training, reviewing policy, and preparing for appeals hearings to come. ... Still, critics of the TennCare cuts say the payments to the lawyers are a huge waste of money that could be better used to help TennCare enrollees."

San Francisco bureaucratic idiocy: "If a big earthquake hits San Francisco and flames spread through the city, firefighters rushing in from elsewhere to help will encounter what could be a major problem -- their hoses will not fit the city's hydrants. It has been 14 years since a similar predicament contributed to the spread of the Oakland hills fire, in which 25 people died and 2,699 homes were lost. After dozens of firefighters from surrounding agencies found that their hoses couldn't be attached to Oakland's hydrants, state lawmakers required that all cities in California adopt a standard connection size by 1994."

Japan: Victory for small government: "Small government proponents just won an overwhelming electoral victory. But it was in Japan rather than the United States. In just-completed elections, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi won two-thirds of the seats at stake in the Diet or parliament, running on a platform of cutting government bureaucracy and smaller government and less spending. It was not just talk. For four years, he restrained government spending and even eliminated many large popular public works projects, indexed and increased employee contributions to politically sensitive pensions, and allowed private firms to compete for government functions."

Congress Considers Beer a Luxury--But Not Mink Coats, Private Jets, or Yachts: "President George H.W. Bush and Congress in 1990 raised a host of excise taxes on "luxury" items including expensive cars, fur coats, jewelry, yachts, and private airplanes. Included in the list of luxury items was beer, which at the time saw a doubling of the federal excise tax, from $9 to $18 a barrel. Fifteen years later, the taxes on expensive cars, fur coats, jewelry, yachts, and private airplanes have been rolled back. The beer tax remains, even though the main purchasers of beer are lower- and middle-income consumers. Taxes make up an astounding 44 percent of the retail price of beer, according to the Beer Institute".

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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Brookes News Update

US economy, stock market mania and economic ghosts Austrian economics explains that the emergence of certain economic phenomena are invariably symptoms of a looming recession
Getting the Australian economy wrong - the consumer spending fallacy The dangerous myth of consumer-led growth still underpins all economic commentary, including that from professional economists
Debt, deflation and the US economy Those who worry about the US economy and debt are focusing on a symptom and not a problem
Diogenes' Lamp reveals all Jill Singer of the Herald Sun has made the amazing discovery that Gough Whitlam was responsible for Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Malcolm Turnbull has learned a lesson from Orwell's 1984. Unfortunately it was the wrong lesson. Not so funny is that the Brack's Government intends to destroy what is left of the state's education system and produce a generation of illiterates in order to satisfy the hateful political fantasies of the party's leftwing fanatics
Amnesty International leftists put the democracies on trial Amnesty International's disgraceful attacks on the US have laid bare its ideological bigotry
Good question, Senator Kennedy Forty years of dependency, sponsored by the Democrat Party, is truly the reason the poverty of spirit and means is so prevalent in New Orleans

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ELSEWHERE

A VERY interesting report from a helicopter pilot working over New Orleans here. Excerpt: "The violence you heard about was only the tip of the iceberg. One of our Guard members was with the Fish & Wildlife and deployed early to NO as security. They encountered four dead men in a neighborhood who had been shot, execution style. Their wives had been raped... Our hangar in Baton Rouge housed 300 Border Patrol agents with all kinds of exotic weaponry. They were inserted into the bad neighborhoods and reportedly nailed about 25 of the goons from roving armed bands. They then just withdrew and let them lay... Some have claimed that racism caused black people to be left while white people were brought out. Of the 81 people I brought out, 2 were white. Both thanked me. Only 3 other people thanked us, as I recollect. When we cruised over flooded neighborhoods, we'd say to each other, "Hey, this is a high dollar neighborhood. Let's go back to the projects." We never pulled anyone out of a good neighborhood. They left before the storm. We were trying to maximize the number of saves we had, so we'd go to the "hood."

Norberg on globalization: ""When globalisation knocks at the door of Bhagant, an elderly agricultural worker and untouchable in the Indian village of Saijani, this leads to houses being built of brick instead of mud, and to people getting shoes on their feet and clean clothes - not rags - on their backs," he wrote in In Defence of Global Capitalism. "Outdoors the streets now have drains and the fragrance of tilled earth has replaced the stench of refuse. Thirty years ago Bhagant didn't know he was living in India. Today he watches world news on television." .... "The Asian economies are the most impressive economies today," he says. "Low-income Asian countries like Taiwan and South Korea were just as poor as African countries 50 years ago. Now they are 20 times richer. Since 1981, extreme poverty in the developing world has been reduced by half. It has dropped from 40 per cent to about 21 per cent. The world has never seen such a rapid reduction in poverty, hunger and infant mortality." Or as Norberg's website says: "In the poorest developing countries, somebody working for an American employer earns no less than eight times the average wage in their own country.""

The corrupt UN It's time utopian dreamers set aside their romantic visions of the United Nations just long enough to confront the reality of what the organisation has become. The penultimate report of the Volcker inquiry into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal has lifted the lid on what can only be described as a cesspit of corruption, cynicism and incompetence.... The shadow of suspicion now extends to the entire UN procurement bureaucracy. Last week, federal prosecutors in the US launched an indictment against the head of the UN's budget oversight committee, Vladimir Kuznetsov, on charges of laundering thousands of dollars worth of bribes paid by companies seeking UN contracts. Investigations are exploring irregularities in the awarding of UN humanitarian contracts in East Timor, Liberia, Eritrea, Lebanon, Cyprus and Syria. It is a debacle. It is a disgrace".

Gruesome: "Several health workers have been arrested in Shandong Province in the east of China after the authorities admitted that local officials had been forcing women to have abortions or undergo sterilisations. Sources in Linyi City and its surrounding counties claimed that up to 120,000 women had been coerced into submitting to the procedures and that some of them were in the ninth month of their pregnancies. The arrests follow the detention on 6 September of a local activist, Chen Guangcheng. Mr Chen had claimed that women with two children were being forced to undergo sterilisations, while women pregnant with their third child were required to have abortions."

More bureaucratic madness: "Hundreds of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned. US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees. Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption."

Funding phony claims is a real FEMA disaster: "Former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown's incompetence was writ large this month when FEMA frittered while New Orleans sank. Yet long before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, FEMA had developed a reputation of gross incompetence. The nation cannot assume that Brown's departure is all that is necessary to put the agency on sound footing. FEMA came under close scrutiny by the media in Florida last year after that state was hit by four brutal hurricanes in a matter of weeks. The findings weren't encouraging. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that after Hurricane Frances, FEMA gave away more than $31 million in disaster assistance to residents of Miami-Dade County who were about 100 miles south of the storm."

A lesson from Central Europe: "Slovakia has plentiful cheap, educated labour and business-friendly tax rates, including the flat tax which takes a straight 19 per cent and no more from corporation and citizen alike. This tax clarity has reduced widespread evasion and so hugely increased revenues."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots of interesting reading.

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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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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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

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

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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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

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

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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