ELSEWHERE
Well, how about that! All that is old is new again. In the time before we had antibiotics, the only effective treatment for syphilis that we had was to induce a fever in the patient -- as the high temperature of a fever could kill off the spirochaetes that cause syphilis. But high temperatures these days are treated as dangerous and as requiring suppression by antipyretic drugs such as aspirin. A recent scientific paper however has just "discovered" that drug resistance in pathogens "was abrogated by Hsp90 inhibitors and by febrile temperatures". In other words, the therapeutic value of fever as one of nature's defence mechanisms is creeping out into the light again.
Star Parker on black poverty: "Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. More than $7 trillion has been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson declared his "war on poverty" 40 years ago, with effectively zero impact on overall black poverty. Yet 40 years of failure doesn't seem to be enough to suggest to liberals, black and white, that their approach to poverty might be wrong..... At least as incredible as the insistence of liberals on perpetuating failure is their absolute refusal to consider a single new idea.... Black kids are trapped in hopeless, failing inner-city public schools. There is only one answer here, and that is school choice. We need voucher programs that would let black parents send their kids to school wherever they choose. The marketplace delivers the best products in the world to American consumers. We need to let that same marketplace deliver education.... Social Security private accounts is another issue, proposed by Bush, that the Black Caucus has fought to the detriment of its own community. Black politicians, if they really wanted to lift the economic shackles off their own constituents, would be fighting to free them from the regressive payroll tax that deprives them of ownership and wealth creation. Despite the political smoke, this reform is for poor people, not rich people. The wealthy can pay the tax and have plenty spare cash left over to save in 401(k)s and IRAs. But for someone making $25,000 a year, that's not the case. The only cash that could be available for saving is taxed into Social Security.
Reliapundit tells the facts about Vietnam. Excerpt: "Vietnam suffered about 2-4 MILLION casualties inthe Vietnam War. They LOST nearly every battle, INLCUDING the Tet Offensive. Their only successful strategy was getting the Left to get the American public to abandon their ally - the emerging democracy in the south - by withdrawing the US troops and ending financial and military aid to the SVG. On this front - and only on this front - they succeeded, in LARGE measure due to TRAITOROUS activities by people like John Forbes Kerry. The Vietcong generals have ADMITTED this fact; (Google General Giap)...."
Whimpering about poverty: "You don't have to be helpless, nor useless, nor immoral because you were born poor. If this were not true, the Irish, Italians, Jews, the Chinese of railroad coolie days, the Poles and the Czechs would still be in slums. They aren't. They made it, as Violeta made it, as Eva and lots of black cops made it, without Section Eight housing, welfare, scholarships, minority preferences with no expectations attached, medical charity, or monotonous self-pity. She has a contempt for those who could, but don't, that would peel chrome from an engine block."
It's not just Australian Aboriginal (black) leaders who are raiding the Aboriginal affairs gravy train: "A deep, dark secret dominates the politics of Aboriginal disadvantage. Millions upon millions of dollars of federal money given to the states and territories never finds its way to the tens of thousands of Aboriginal Australians who are living in conditions that are as shocking as anywhere in the world. The Commonwealth Grants Commission, the Productivity Commission and experts such as Dr John Taylor at the Australian National University have been saying for some time that money given to the states and territories does not find its way to the people intended."
Red Cross criticized, urged to share cash : "As its hurricane relief donations near the $1 billion mark, more than double all other charities combined, the American Red Crossis encountering sharp criticism of its efforts and mounting pressure to share funds with smaller groups. The complaints -- that Red Cross operations were chaotic in some places, inequitable in others -- have stung deeply within an organization that is proud of its overall response to Hurricane Katrina, by far the most devastating natural disaster it has confronted on U.S. soil. ... The frustration stems partly from the fact that the Red Cross has worked to avoid a recurrence of the humbling fundraising controversy that flared after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, the Red Cross raised about $1.1 billion -- its record so far for a single disaster -- but the organization was assailed when donors belatedly learned that $200 million of their gifts were being earmarked to prepare for future crises rather than to help victims."
Typically nutty Anglican bishop: "The new head of the Anglican Church of Australia has delivered a strong warning against what he describes as the evils of materialism and the dangers of scientific advances. In his first sermon as the youngest ever primate of the church in Australia, Archbishop Aspinall also denounced terrorism while describing "supposed security measures" among the evils of society. Dr Aspinall, who was elected to lead the nation's four million Anglicans in July, delivered the sermon at St John's Cathedral in Brisbane last night. He said today materialism was fast emerging as an evil "dragon" afflicting society".
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.
********************************
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Friday, September 30, 2005
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN NEW ORLEANS WAS GOVERNMENT
Government agencies constantly stopped people from being helped or helping themselves. Just one tiny excerpt from a detailed article:
"Yet, for all of the public angst over the federal government's - and especially FEMA's - post-disaster response, most observers have missed what is painfully obvious: the government's response was perfectly in character to how people in government act in such situations. To say this in an alternative way, government was being government the same way that a dog is a dog.
As anyone knows, dogs are territorial animals, and governments are territorial entities. The first rule that a government agent follows when confronted with an "emergency" is to "secure the area." For example, when two young men were merrily going on a murder and mayhem spree at Columbine High School in 1999, the vaunted police "SWAT" team stayed outside and encircled the complex because someone said that the area had to be "secured" before police actually could try to save anyone. (Of course, we found out later that not only did police fail to save people, but at least one person bled to death because police refused to get help until the man had died. This was not incompetence; it was the normal workings of the "I am in charge and don't you forget it" mentality that permeates government at all levels.)
Immediately after the hurricane had stopped in New Orleans, for example, a Wal-Mart had brought a truckload of bottled water; FEMA officials turned the truck away, declaring that it was "not needed." Before we dismiss this incident as yet another example of incompetent government, we should realize that the official's actions were completely within the character of government".
You really MUST read the whole thing in this case. You will be horrified
An Australian compares what happened in New Orleans with what happened in our last big flood, which happened right here in my home town of Brisbane in 1974. And everything he says is true. The water was over the top of the roofs of great tracts of houses here. I guess I don't have to tell you how differently the two situations worked out.
*****************************************
Government agencies constantly stopped people from being helped or helping themselves. Just one tiny excerpt from a detailed article:
"Yet, for all of the public angst over the federal government's - and especially FEMA's - post-disaster response, most observers have missed what is painfully obvious: the government's response was perfectly in character to how people in government act in such situations. To say this in an alternative way, government was being government the same way that a dog is a dog.
As anyone knows, dogs are territorial animals, and governments are territorial entities. The first rule that a government agent follows when confronted with an "emergency" is to "secure the area." For example, when two young men were merrily going on a murder and mayhem spree at Columbine High School in 1999, the vaunted police "SWAT" team stayed outside and encircled the complex because someone said that the area had to be "secured" before police actually could try to save anyone. (Of course, we found out later that not only did police fail to save people, but at least one person bled to death because police refused to get help until the man had died. This was not incompetence; it was the normal workings of the "I am in charge and don't you forget it" mentality that permeates government at all levels.)
Immediately after the hurricane had stopped in New Orleans, for example, a Wal-Mart had brought a truckload of bottled water; FEMA officials turned the truck away, declaring that it was "not needed." Before we dismiss this incident as yet another example of incompetent government, we should realize that the official's actions were completely within the character of government".
You really MUST read the whole thing in this case. You will be horrified
An Australian compares what happened in New Orleans with what happened in our last big flood, which happened right here in my home town of Brisbane in 1974. And everything he says is true. The water was over the top of the roofs of great tracts of houses here. I guess I don't have to tell you how differently the two situations worked out.
*****************************************
ELSEWHERE
I mentioned the yesterday the United Nations Human Development Index. One of my readers looked into it a bit more deeply and found this page -- where it tells you how the index is calculated. There is actually a bit of bare-faced fraud in it -- surprise, surprise! As my reader dryly comments: "I was interested to see the equations used to generate the index. In particular, the fact that the GDP per capita component is the only one that is subjected to logarithmic compression before being applied. I'm figuring they do that to make sure the US doesn't top the table -- can't have the evil hegemon pointing the way now can we?"
Walter Williams points out how price controls made problems worse for people evacuating Houston and Galveston before hurricane Rita.
It takes the Europeans to make heroes out of Palestinian suicide bombers. See here and here for brief reviews of a new movie called "Paradise now" about two Palestinian suicide bombers, about their "motives" and their "human side". It's a German-Dutch-French co-production, funded by the "World Cinema Fund", which consists of the Berlinale and the Bundeskulturstiftung (Federal Culture Foundation) -- it's the first movie produced with their help. For the "Evangelische Filmjury", it's the movie of the month, since it "invites us to reflect about the motives of the attackers", and Amnesty International awards it with it's "peace prize", because it's "weder belehrend noch moralisierend" - neither moralizing nor cautionary.... The movie won the audience's award and the "Blauen Engel" (Blue Angel) as the "best European movie" at the 55. Internationalen Filmfestspielen in Berlin 2005. The movie ends with the explosion of the bomb. But you do not see mutilated bodies. The screen simply goes white... At least Die Welt (a major German newspaper) had the grace to call the film "enttaeuschend" (disappointing).
Abraham Lincoln where are you? There's a Leftist Confederacy forming: "In answer to a growing swell of interest in realistic responses to the excesses of the present American empire, The Middlebury Institute has been launched by a group of activists and professionals to promote the serious study of separatism, secession, self-determination and similar devolutionary trends and developments, on both national and international scales".
The Red Cross racket: "This skewed giving to Red Cross would be justified if the organization had to pay the cost of the 300,000 people it has sheltered. But FEMA and the affected states are reimbursing the Red Cross under preexisting contracts for emergency shelter and other disaster services. The existence of these contracts is no secret to anyone but the American public. The Red Cross carefully says it functions only by the grace of the American people - but "people" includes government, national and local. What we've now come to expect from a major disaster is a Red Cross media blitz. .... The Red Cross brand is platinum. Its fundraising vastly outruns its programs because it does very little or nothing to rescue survivors, provide direct medical care or rebuild houses. After 9/11, the Red Cross collected more than $1 billion, a record in philanthropic fundraising after a disaster. But the Red Cross could do little more than trace missing people, help a handful of people in shelters and provide food to firefighters, police, paramedics and evacuation crews during that catastrophe. When New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer asked for documentation of 9/11 expenditures, the Red Cross' response was that it is federally chartered and not answerable to state government regulators."
There is an interesting post up at Sir Humphrey that requires a bit of deep thought. It is about Lefties backing evolution under a rational disguise while simultaneously irrationally denying free market ideas, despite evolution and free markets being very close analogues. The post is a response to a number of Lefty blogs getting all self-righteous about the current resurgence of the intelligent design/evolution controversy in education in America at the moment. Excerpt: "So economically speaking the analog of the ID proponent is the socialist. Scientifically the analog of the free marketeer is the evolutionist. An ID advocate who also wants to control the economy is at least consistent to a set of principles, even if you might disagree with them. Those deriding ID while backing market interference or planning are inconsistent and anything but rational, let alone moral".
Great! The disgusting Leftist so-called "International Freedom Center" has been dropped from the 9/11 site in NYC.
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.
********************************
I mentioned the yesterday the United Nations Human Development Index. One of my readers looked into it a bit more deeply and found this page -- where it tells you how the index is calculated. There is actually a bit of bare-faced fraud in it -- surprise, surprise! As my reader dryly comments: "I was interested to see the equations used to generate the index. In particular, the fact that the GDP per capita component is the only one that is subjected to logarithmic compression before being applied. I'm figuring they do that to make sure the US doesn't top the table -- can't have the evil hegemon pointing the way now can we?"
Walter Williams points out how price controls made problems worse for people evacuating Houston and Galveston before hurricane Rita.
It takes the Europeans to make heroes out of Palestinian suicide bombers. See here and here for brief reviews of a new movie called "Paradise now" about two Palestinian suicide bombers, about their "motives" and their "human side". It's a German-Dutch-French co-production, funded by the "World Cinema Fund", which consists of the Berlinale and the Bundeskulturstiftung (Federal Culture Foundation) -- it's the first movie produced with their help. For the "Evangelische Filmjury", it's the movie of the month, since it "invites us to reflect about the motives of the attackers", and Amnesty International awards it with it's "peace prize", because it's "weder belehrend noch moralisierend" - neither moralizing nor cautionary.... The movie won the audience's award and the "Blauen Engel" (Blue Angel) as the "best European movie" at the 55. Internationalen Filmfestspielen in Berlin 2005. The movie ends with the explosion of the bomb. But you do not see mutilated bodies. The screen simply goes white... At least Die Welt (a major German newspaper) had the grace to call the film "enttaeuschend" (disappointing).
Abraham Lincoln where are you? There's a Leftist Confederacy forming: "In answer to a growing swell of interest in realistic responses to the excesses of the present American empire, The Middlebury Institute has been launched by a group of activists and professionals to promote the serious study of separatism, secession, self-determination and similar devolutionary trends and developments, on both national and international scales".
The Red Cross racket: "This skewed giving to Red Cross would be justified if the organization had to pay the cost of the 300,000 people it has sheltered. But FEMA and the affected states are reimbursing the Red Cross under preexisting contracts for emergency shelter and other disaster services. The existence of these contracts is no secret to anyone but the American public. The Red Cross carefully says it functions only by the grace of the American people - but "people" includes government, national and local. What we've now come to expect from a major disaster is a Red Cross media blitz. .... The Red Cross brand is platinum. Its fundraising vastly outruns its programs because it does very little or nothing to rescue survivors, provide direct medical care or rebuild houses. After 9/11, the Red Cross collected more than $1 billion, a record in philanthropic fundraising after a disaster. But the Red Cross could do little more than trace missing people, help a handful of people in shelters and provide food to firefighters, police, paramedics and evacuation crews during that catastrophe. When New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer asked for documentation of 9/11 expenditures, the Red Cross' response was that it is federally chartered and not answerable to state government regulators."
There is an interesting post up at Sir Humphrey that requires a bit of deep thought. It is about Lefties backing evolution under a rational disguise while simultaneously irrationally denying free market ideas, despite evolution and free markets being very close analogues. The post is a response to a number of Lefty blogs getting all self-righteous about the current resurgence of the intelligent design/evolution controversy in education in America at the moment. Excerpt: "So economically speaking the analog of the ID proponent is the socialist. Scientifically the analog of the free marketeer is the evolutionist. An ID advocate who also wants to control the economy is at least consistent to a set of principles, even if you might disagree with them. Those deriding ID while backing market interference or planning are inconsistent and anything but rational, let alone moral".
Great! The disgusting Leftist so-called "International Freedom Center" has been dropped from the 9/11 site in NYC.
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.
********************************
Thursday, September 29, 2005
AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL HISTORY
There is an excellent review of Australian politics here -- stretching back over a hundred years but focusing mainly on the achievements of Australia's present conservative Prime-Minister, John Howard. I liked this comment on the conflict between Billy Hughes, Australia's Prime Minister of World War I, and that great enemy of the American constitution, President Woodrow Wilson:
"At the Paris peace conference at the end of World War I, Billy Hughes insisted on annexing the South Pacific islands his country had captured from Germany and made little secret of his contempt for Woodrow Wilson, his Fourteen Points, and the League of Nations. Wilson returned the compliment, calling Hughes a "pestiferous varmint.""
The utter uselessness of the League of Nations certainly proved that Hughes was the wiser man.
And here's the Australian situation as of yesterday: "Australia has bounded into the world's top 10 competitive economies, winning praise for its long-term reforms and stability. The latest rankings of global economies, released today by the World Economic Forum (WEF) show Australia has jumped four spots to number 10. Finland clinched the top spot for the third consecutive year, followed by the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Taiwan and Singapore in the 117-country index. WEF chief economist Augusto Lopez-Claros said Australia had performed well on all three of the forum's competitiveness measures - macroeconomic stability, the quality of public institutions and technology".
**************************
There is an excellent review of Australian politics here -- stretching back over a hundred years but focusing mainly on the achievements of Australia's present conservative Prime-Minister, John Howard. I liked this comment on the conflict between Billy Hughes, Australia's Prime Minister of World War I, and that great enemy of the American constitution, President Woodrow Wilson:
"At the Paris peace conference at the end of World War I, Billy Hughes insisted on annexing the South Pacific islands his country had captured from Germany and made little secret of his contempt for Woodrow Wilson, his Fourteen Points, and the League of Nations. Wilson returned the compliment, calling Hughes a "pestiferous varmint.""
The utter uselessness of the League of Nations certainly proved that Hughes was the wiser man.
And here's the Australian situation as of yesterday: "Australia has bounded into the world's top 10 competitive economies, winning praise for its long-term reforms and stability. The latest rankings of global economies, released today by the World Economic Forum (WEF) show Australia has jumped four spots to number 10. Finland clinched the top spot for the third consecutive year, followed by the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Taiwan and Singapore in the 117-country index. WEF chief economist Augusto Lopez-Claros said Australia had performed well on all three of the forum's competitiveness measures - macroeconomic stability, the quality of public institutions and technology".
**************************
ELSEWHERE
The coverup has begun: All those nice people in New Orleans were not behaving badly at all. ONLY "Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center". The initial media reports were all wild exaggerations, we are now told by the selfsame media. I am sure that the media DID exaggerate. What conservative would expect otherwise? And even among blacks ONLY about a third of black adult males have spent time in jail so I am perfectly ready to believe that most blacks in New Orleans behaved decently. But we seem to be moving swiftly towards a politically correct account that says that nothing nasty happened in New Orleans at all. When that Right-wing Death-beast (sorry: Democrat) Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people', he was just having bad dreams.
Sometimes, however, the media can't help telling the truth. Click the link and have a look at the photos accompanying this dreadful story: "Four Central Florida middle school students were arrested Monday for allegedly ripping off the clothes off classmates and then snapping photos with their cell phones, according to a Local 6 News report. Investigators said the boys, ages 12, 13 and 14 years old, attacked the girls Friday at Tavares Middle School in Lake County, Fla., in the back of a school bus. The boys then allegedly groped the girls and took pictures of them". I have also uploaded the pictures here in case they get taken down.
National Guard off the hook -- sort of: "The morning Hurricane Katrina thundered ashore, Louisiana National Guard commanders thought they were prepared to save their state. But when 15-foot floodwaters swept into their headquarters, cut their communications and disabled their high-water trucks, they had their hands full just saving themselves. For a crucial 24 hours after landfall on Aug. 29, Guard officers said, they were preoccupied with protecting their nerve center from the waves topping the windows at Jackson Barracks and rescuing soldiers who could not swim. The next morning, they had to evacuate their entire headquarters force of 375 guardsmen by boat and helicopter to the Superdome.... At the convention center, 222 soldiers trained in levee repair, not police work, locked themselves into an exhibit hall at the convention center rather than challenge an angry and desperate crowd of more than 10,000 hurricane victims at the center. The near-total collapse of communications made every task far more difficult, forcing some Guard commanders to use "runners, like in World War I," as one put it. With land lines, cellphones and many satellite phones out of action, the frequencies used by the radios still functioning were often so jammed that they were useless.... Yet questions about the first few days haunt many Louisiana guard officials: Should commanders have moved their headquarters to higher ground before the storm? Could they have better headed off the lawlessness or built more resilient communications?
On the United Nations Human Development Index Australia ranks third and of the top six countries, five are monarchies. As it says here: "The UN Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, and other factors for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being". You will never guess on which continent most countries with least human development are located. And if the United Nations says so, it must be right, mustn't it?
Great stuff!: "County Judge Carl Griffith said today he has become so frustrated with the federal relief effort that he has instructed all local officials to use police force if they have to to take supplies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "If you have enough policemen to take it from them, take it," Griffith said. His frustration comes as squabbling continues among federal, state and local over what some characterize as a woeful lack of communication."
A British blogger comments on the British Labour party: "You have been in power since 1997, and have achieved (aside form a bit of constitutional vandalism) very little. The greatest electoral mandate ever has been squandered. A lot more tax spent on utterly useless pen-pushers. Billions spent on management consultants, and an ever more thirsty-for-cash, but otherwise unreconstructed NHS. There has been little reform of education (except a lowering of standards). Tuition fees, a sticking plaster to cover the disastrous target of 50% participation in higher education without offering commensurate funding, has become this governments second-most unpopular policy."
Some heavy sarcasm from California Conservative: "Viagra is the pharmaceutical form of liberalism! Think about it. Like a Michael Moore documentary, Viagra delivers the look and feel of the real thing without the need for intellectual or spiritual honesty that true love (or a documentary) demands. And now that doctors have warned consumers that the drug can cause blindness, Viagra becomes an ideal metaphor of the Democratic Party".
If you want to know about the crazy leftist goings-on in Oregon, this is the blog for you.
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.
********************************
The coverup has begun: All those nice people in New Orleans were not behaving badly at all. ONLY "Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center". The initial media reports were all wild exaggerations, we are now told by the selfsame media. I am sure that the media DID exaggerate. What conservative would expect otherwise? And even among blacks ONLY about a third of black adult males have spent time in jail so I am perfectly ready to believe that most blacks in New Orleans behaved decently. But we seem to be moving swiftly towards a politically correct account that says that nothing nasty happened in New Orleans at all. When that Right-wing Death-beast (sorry: Democrat) Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people', he was just having bad dreams.
Sometimes, however, the media can't help telling the truth. Click the link and have a look at the photos accompanying this dreadful story: "Four Central Florida middle school students were arrested Monday for allegedly ripping off the clothes off classmates and then snapping photos with their cell phones, according to a Local 6 News report. Investigators said the boys, ages 12, 13 and 14 years old, attacked the girls Friday at Tavares Middle School in Lake County, Fla., in the back of a school bus. The boys then allegedly groped the girls and took pictures of them". I have also uploaded the pictures here in case they get taken down.
National Guard off the hook -- sort of: "The morning Hurricane Katrina thundered ashore, Louisiana National Guard commanders thought they were prepared to save their state. But when 15-foot floodwaters swept into their headquarters, cut their communications and disabled their high-water trucks, they had their hands full just saving themselves. For a crucial 24 hours after landfall on Aug. 29, Guard officers said, they were preoccupied with protecting their nerve center from the waves topping the windows at Jackson Barracks and rescuing soldiers who could not swim. The next morning, they had to evacuate their entire headquarters force of 375 guardsmen by boat and helicopter to the Superdome.... At the convention center, 222 soldiers trained in levee repair, not police work, locked themselves into an exhibit hall at the convention center rather than challenge an angry and desperate crowd of more than 10,000 hurricane victims at the center. The near-total collapse of communications made every task far more difficult, forcing some Guard commanders to use "runners, like in World War I," as one put it. With land lines, cellphones and many satellite phones out of action, the frequencies used by the radios still functioning were often so jammed that they were useless.... Yet questions about the first few days haunt many Louisiana guard officials: Should commanders have moved their headquarters to higher ground before the storm? Could they have better headed off the lawlessness or built more resilient communications?
On the United Nations Human Development Index Australia ranks third and of the top six countries, five are monarchies. As it says here: "The UN Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, and other factors for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being". You will never guess on which continent most countries with least human development are located. And if the United Nations says so, it must be right, mustn't it?
Great stuff!: "County Judge Carl Griffith said today he has become so frustrated with the federal relief effort that he has instructed all local officials to use police force if they have to to take supplies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "If you have enough policemen to take it from them, take it," Griffith said. His frustration comes as squabbling continues among federal, state and local over what some characterize as a woeful lack of communication."
A British blogger comments on the British Labour party: "You have been in power since 1997, and have achieved (aside form a bit of constitutional vandalism) very little. The greatest electoral mandate ever has been squandered. A lot more tax spent on utterly useless pen-pushers. Billions spent on management consultants, and an ever more thirsty-for-cash, but otherwise unreconstructed NHS. There has been little reform of education (except a lowering of standards). Tuition fees, a sticking plaster to cover the disastrous target of 50% participation in higher education without offering commensurate funding, has become this governments second-most unpopular policy."
Some heavy sarcasm from California Conservative: "Viagra is the pharmaceutical form of liberalism! Think about it. Like a Michael Moore documentary, Viagra delivers the look and feel of the real thing without the need for intellectual or spiritual honesty that true love (or a documentary) demands. And now that doctors have warned consumers that the drug can cause blindness, Viagra becomes an ideal metaphor of the Democratic Party".
If you want to know about the crazy leftist goings-on in Oregon, this is the blog for you.
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.
********************************
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
"DON'T TRUST THE BA****DS"
I have just put up the above heading as a motto in the green area at the top of this site. I intend to leave it there for some time. I am moving towards the idea that such a motto is indeed the best short summary of a conservative attitude. I think the psychological basis of conservatism is wariness and skepticism. And it is a wariness that is reinforced by experience as we go through life. Which is presumably why conservatism increases markedly with age. Aging tends to move people from Left to Right far more often than in the opposite direction. Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill are probably the two best known examples of such a movement in thinking.
But a conservative does not of course distrust everybody always. He is mainly distrustful of Leftists, reformers, planners, intellectuals and "experts" of all kinds -- as the historian Feiling, and many others have been pointing out for many years. But even in everyday life the conservative probably practices to some degree what Ronald Reagan so memorably said: "Trust but verify". How trusting of others conservatives are in everyday life is probably a matter of individual personality but, for all that, I think few conservatives would dispute that trust has to be earned rather than being assumed.
Leftists will no doubt say that my words above prove that conservatives are "misanthropic" (people-haters). I have however written a longish and carefully researched academic journal article on just that claim so further reading should clarify why that is not so.
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Phew! Read Steve Sailer on the contrast between the severe flooding in Bombay recently and the severe flooding in New Orleans! The Indians pulled together and there was NO reported crime! But India is of course an ancient civilization. I have four quite dark Indians living in my own large house with me precisely because of their highly civilized ways.
India and the Anglo-Saxons: "The United States has struck a historic deal with India under which India will be permitted to acquire civilian nuclear technology internationally while retaining its nuclear arms. According to the Indian Express, the US is offering India high-tech defence and space cooperation in terms of satellites and launch vehicles, Patriot and Arrow missiles and a greater role in global institutions. When Condoleezza Rice visited India in March, she said: "This is my first stop as Secretary of State in Asia. The President has personally put a lot of time and energy into the relationship. The US has determined that this is going to be a very important relationship going forward and we are going to put whatever time we need into it." The aim was to take US-India ties "to another level". According to her, the Bush Administration was sworn to assisting "India become a major world power in the 21st century". It is rare in the past 100 years that a US president has sent a signal of this dimension. It means that the US will help India realise the global aspiration that its size, geography and its post-1991 economic reform agenda have made into a national obsession. While Bill Clinton's 2000 visit to India symbolised a new outlook, the conceptual change has come under Bush. The core judgement is that a strong, democratic and influential India is an asset for the US in the region and the world... The Prime Minister's media aide Sanjya Baru has said, "India is an ancient civilisation and has a mind of its own on each issue. But our views are moving in parallel with the US and Anglo-Saxon world."
Dr. Jack Wheeler writes: "INFANTILIZOMANIA" Yes, I invented this term. You won't find it in Webster's, the OED, or Google. At least not now. Hopefully soon you will, as it becomes the accepted term for the neurosis with which all those on the Left are afflicted. Just as a pyromaniac is driven by a compulsion to set fires, a kleptomaniac by a compulsion to steal, and - everyone's favorite example - a nymphomaniac by a compulsion to have sex, an infantilizomaniac is driven by a compulsion to treat adult human beings as children. The compulsion to infantilize people is the neurotic compulsion of liberals. Liberals of course do not call it infantilizomania. They call it compassion. We can see the results of liberal compassion in the wake of Katrina: hundreds of thousands of New Orleans inner city blacks helpless to take responsibility for themselves. Liberal compassion is the modern form of the White Man's Burden, and has destroyed, just obliterated, three to four generations of inner city poor in America. How many more generations of inner city blacks have to be wiped out until liberals admit their compassion is a fraud of epically tragic proportions? It is a blatantly phony compassion. Compassion for the plight of others in difficult and desperate circumstances is a noble emotion. But it becomes fraudulent when you demand that your compassion be paid for with other people's money....."
Britain: An old girl with guts: "A retired social worker was jailed yesterday for seven days for refusing to pay a 53.71 pound increase in her council tax. Sylvia Hardy, a 73-year-old spinster, had refused all offers of help from well-wishers. She was making a stand in the hope of forcing the Government to reconsider an unjust tax, she said.... Her imprisonment will cost taxpayers five times more than her council tax arrears. She will serve only 3.5 days because all prisoners sentenced to twelve months or less are automatically released at the halfway stage. By that time it will have cost the state a total of 336 pounds, compared with council tax arrears of 53.71 pounds.... Hardy made her stand because her council tax had risen by six times the increase in her pension. She receives an occupational pension from her former employer, Devon County Council, and the state pension which, combined, give her a weekly income of 270 pounds. Over the past four years the council tax charge on her 130,000 pound flat [apartment] has increased by 38 per cent to 708.26 pounds, compared with a rise of only 6.8 per cent in her pension.... She continued: "Throughout history, people have fought to change laws which are unjust, and often the only way to do this is to break the law or ignore it and to accept the punishment. That is why I am appearing here today to accept my punishment for desperately trying to salvage my ever-reducing quality of life.
Full details here about how Chilean Marxist leader Salvador Allende was shot by his Cuban minders to prevent him surrendering to Pinochet's forces.
Indepundit has an amusing account (with photos) of a San Diego "Peace" rally.
I have just put up here an email from someone who thinks that most people never get out of mental childhood. It would certainly help explain a lot of Leftist thinking (if you can call it thinking).
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.
********************************
I have just put up the above heading as a motto in the green area at the top of this site. I intend to leave it there for some time. I am moving towards the idea that such a motto is indeed the best short summary of a conservative attitude. I think the psychological basis of conservatism is wariness and skepticism. And it is a wariness that is reinforced by experience as we go through life. Which is presumably why conservatism increases markedly with age. Aging tends to move people from Left to Right far more often than in the opposite direction. Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill are probably the two best known examples of such a movement in thinking.
But a conservative does not of course distrust everybody always. He is mainly distrustful of Leftists, reformers, planners, intellectuals and "experts" of all kinds -- as the historian Feiling, and many others have been pointing out for many years. But even in everyday life the conservative probably practices to some degree what Ronald Reagan so memorably said: "Trust but verify". How trusting of others conservatives are in everyday life is probably a matter of individual personality but, for all that, I think few conservatives would dispute that trust has to be earned rather than being assumed.
Leftists will no doubt say that my words above prove that conservatives are "misanthropic" (people-haters). I have however written a longish and carefully researched academic journal article on just that claim so further reading should clarify why that is not so.
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Phew! Read Steve Sailer on the contrast between the severe flooding in Bombay recently and the severe flooding in New Orleans! The Indians pulled together and there was NO reported crime! But India is of course an ancient civilization. I have four quite dark Indians living in my own large house with me precisely because of their highly civilized ways.
India and the Anglo-Saxons: "The United States has struck a historic deal with India under which India will be permitted to acquire civilian nuclear technology internationally while retaining its nuclear arms. According to the Indian Express, the US is offering India high-tech defence and space cooperation in terms of satellites and launch vehicles, Patriot and Arrow missiles and a greater role in global institutions. When Condoleezza Rice visited India in March, she said: "This is my first stop as Secretary of State in Asia. The President has personally put a lot of time and energy into the relationship. The US has determined that this is going to be a very important relationship going forward and we are going to put whatever time we need into it." The aim was to take US-India ties "to another level". According to her, the Bush Administration was sworn to assisting "India become a major world power in the 21st century". It is rare in the past 100 years that a US president has sent a signal of this dimension. It means that the US will help India realise the global aspiration that its size, geography and its post-1991 economic reform agenda have made into a national obsession. While Bill Clinton's 2000 visit to India symbolised a new outlook, the conceptual change has come under Bush. The core judgement is that a strong, democratic and influential India is an asset for the US in the region and the world... The Prime Minister's media aide Sanjya Baru has said, "India is an ancient civilisation and has a mind of its own on each issue. But our views are moving in parallel with the US and Anglo-Saxon world."
Dr. Jack Wheeler writes: "INFANTILIZOMANIA" Yes, I invented this term. You won't find it in Webster's, the OED, or Google. At least not now. Hopefully soon you will, as it becomes the accepted term for the neurosis with which all those on the Left are afflicted. Just as a pyromaniac is driven by a compulsion to set fires, a kleptomaniac by a compulsion to steal, and - everyone's favorite example - a nymphomaniac by a compulsion to have sex, an infantilizomaniac is driven by a compulsion to treat adult human beings as children. The compulsion to infantilize people is the neurotic compulsion of liberals. Liberals of course do not call it infantilizomania. They call it compassion. We can see the results of liberal compassion in the wake of Katrina: hundreds of thousands of New Orleans inner city blacks helpless to take responsibility for themselves. Liberal compassion is the modern form of the White Man's Burden, and has destroyed, just obliterated, three to four generations of inner city poor in America. How many more generations of inner city blacks have to be wiped out until liberals admit their compassion is a fraud of epically tragic proportions? It is a blatantly phony compassion. Compassion for the plight of others in difficult and desperate circumstances is a noble emotion. But it becomes fraudulent when you demand that your compassion be paid for with other people's money....."
Britain: An old girl with guts: "A retired social worker was jailed yesterday for seven days for refusing to pay a 53.71 pound increase in her council tax. Sylvia Hardy, a 73-year-old spinster, had refused all offers of help from well-wishers. She was making a stand in the hope of forcing the Government to reconsider an unjust tax, she said.... Her imprisonment will cost taxpayers five times more than her council tax arrears. She will serve only 3.5 days because all prisoners sentenced to twelve months or less are automatically released at the halfway stage. By that time it will have cost the state a total of 336 pounds, compared with council tax arrears of 53.71 pounds.... Hardy made her stand because her council tax had risen by six times the increase in her pension. She receives an occupational pension from her former employer, Devon County Council, and the state pension which, combined, give her a weekly income of 270 pounds. Over the past four years the council tax charge on her 130,000 pound flat [apartment] has increased by 38 per cent to 708.26 pounds, compared with a rise of only 6.8 per cent in her pension.... She continued: "Throughout history, people have fought to change laws which are unjust, and often the only way to do this is to break the law or ignore it and to accept the punishment. That is why I am appearing here today to accept my punishment for desperately trying to salvage my ever-reducing quality of life.
Full details here about how Chilean Marxist leader Salvador Allende was shot by his Cuban minders to prevent him surrendering to Pinochet's forces.
Indepundit has an amusing account (with photos) of a San Diego "Peace" rally.
I have just put up here an email from someone who thinks that most people never get out of mental childhood. It would certainly help explain a lot of Leftist thinking (if you can call it thinking).
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.
********************************
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
"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
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"
********************************
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
**************************
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.
********************************
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"
********************************
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
**************************
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.
********************************
Monday, September 26, 2005
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
*********************************
ELSEWHERE
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
**************************
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.
********************************
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
*********************************
ELSEWHERE
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
**************************
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.
********************************
Sunday, September 25, 2005
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.
**********************************
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
**************************
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.
********************************
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.
**********************************
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
**************************
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.
********************************
Saturday, September 24, 2005
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
*********************************
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
*********************************
ELSEWHERE
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
**************************
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.
********************************
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
**************************
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.
********************************
Friday, September 23, 2005
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
************************************
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
**************************
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.
********************************
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
************************************
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
**************************
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.
********************************
Thursday, September 22, 2005
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:
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)
***************************************
ELSEWHERE
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
**************************
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.
********************************
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)
***************************************
ELSEWHERE
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
**************************
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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