Brookes News Update

Labour market reform comes under attack and the Liberal Government flounders : The left have launched a fierce assault against the Liberal Government's labour market reform policy. As expected, the Liberal Party's brilliant elite failed dismally to counterattack
A bigoted journalist slimes President Bush, US and the market: Martin Flanagan is another sickening example of the mainstream media's hatred of President Bush and loathing of free markets
Hussein's media collaborators use anthrax lie to slander the US: The London Times and The Australian published a story accusing the US of aiding Hussein's biological-weapons program, even though they knew the story was false
Los Angeles Times libels Israel, and enough is never enough: The anti-Semitic Los Angeles Times libels Israel over Palestinian living standards. What is it about the lefty media that drives them nuts about Israel -- or should I say Jews?
Econometric models - what are they all about? : Econometric models are clumsy and expensive extrapolative devices which have nothing in common with real economies
Labour market reform and the costs argument: How the concept of costs was used to try and discredit the idea of free labour markets
Free labour markets and a leftwing academic's propaganda: The mere mention of free markets is enough to drive left-wing academics like John Legge into a frenzy. In a truly educated climate Legge's economic views would, at best, be the subject of some amusement. Unfortunately, many journalists and politicians share his deplorable economic ignorance
Free markets, science, technology and conservation: Free markets drive technology, not self-important bureaucrats, arrogant academics or ignorant politicians

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Disturbing if true. There's nothing worse than a dummy with a gun: "Further evidence that the war in Iraq is wrecking the U.S. Army: Recruiters, having failed to meet their enlistment targets, are now being authorized to pursue high-school dropouts and (not to mince words) stupid people. This year the Army set a goal of recruiting 80,000 active-duty soldiers, but it wound up with just 73,000 -- almost 10 percent short. As a result, the Army Times reported this week, the Pentagon has decided to make up the difference by expanding the pool -- by letting up to 10 percent of new recruits be young men and women who have neither graduated high school nor earned a General Equivalency Diploma. More than that, the Los Angeles Times reports today that 4 percent of recruits will be allowed to score as low as in the 16th to 30th percentile -- a grouping known as 'Category IV' -- on the U.S. Armed Forces' mental-aptitude exam."

FEMA gets even nuttier: "The Phoenix Fire Department's Urban Search and Rescue team has been suspended from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for deploying armed police officers to protect firefighters in violation of the agency's rules. As a result, Phoenix officials now are threatening to refuse some of the most dangerous deployments in the future or possibly even pull out of the federal agency altogether, unless the rules are changed to allow teams to bring their own security, even if that means police with guns. FEMA has been the target of widespread criticism for its perceived slow response to Hurricane Katrina. Assistant Phoenix Fire Chief Bob Khan said his department also is questioning the federal agency's ability to manage working conditions, security and communications. 'Our priority has to be the safety of the firefighters we're sending,' Khan said."

No mention of how many died violently: "The search for Hurricane Katrina victims has ended in Louisiana with a death toll at 964, but more searches will be conducted if someone reports seeing a body, a state official said Monday. State and federal agencies have finished their sweeps through the city, but Kenyon International Emergency Services, the private company hired by the state to remove the bodies, is on call if any other body is found, said Bob Johannessen, a spokesman with the state Department of Health and Hospitals."

The heirs of the Soviets like Fascism: How unsurprising: "Russia has caught World War II fever 60 years after the war's end, but the books and DVDs flying off store shelves are far from patriotic. They contain Nazi themes and often offer Nazi ideology. 'It's already a fashion,' said Sergei Stepanich, an expert on fascist literature at the Center for Human Rights. Nestled among pornographic DVDs at kiosks at Leningradsky Station are numerous discs offering original Nazi propaganda from the 1940s. The DVDs carry the original newsreels that were shown in German cinemas. A DVD on the Nazi SS has a blurb on the back of the box that talks about the troops' 'genuine professionalism.'"

Sounds reasonable: "Republican Gov. George Pataki has ordered state officials to keep some sexual predators locked up after their prison sentences are up, despite objections from those who say it may not be legal. Pataki, who is eyeing a run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, issued the order Sept. 12 after failing for years to persuade lawmakers to pass legislation authorizing civil confinement for sex offenders. The order extends the state's involuntary commitment law, normally used for the mentally ill, to sexual predators. It requires offenders nearing the end of their sentences undergo an evaluation to determine if they are a public safety risk."

Rather encouraging: "Orthodox priests chanted prayers and believers lighted candles as Patriarch Alexy II led reburial rites yesterday for Gen. Anton Denikin, who fought against the Red Army during Russia's civil war and is now cast as a patriot. The ceremony was Russia's latest attempt to close a bitter chapter in its history, when the country was divided into communists and their foes. The reconciliation seeks to give respect to all Russians who fought for their nation".

Typical Leftist elitism: "The man once known as the most trusted journalist in America no longer trusts Americans to vote for their own leaders, saying average citizens are just too ignorant to cast their ballots wisely. "We [as a nation] are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders," CBS News legend Walter Cronkite told the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication last week".

Daniel Pipes has an amusing article about the incredible stupidity of many Muslim terrorists.

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

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

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

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

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BOGUS LEFTIST "SCIENCE"

As regular readers of this blog will be well aware, I am one of the very small band of atheists who takes a considerable and sympathetic interest in Christianity. Like the Devil, I even quote scripture for my purposes sometimes. And I did for a while do a regular scripture blog devoted to recovering via New Testament exegesis what first century Christians believed -- before the paganizing influences of later centuries had set in. If you are an orthodox Christian, don't read it. You may find it disturbing.

And I have written at some length on what history shows us about the common Christian claim that Christianity is an essential foundation for a moral society and individual liberty. I could find little support for that claim. But I see no evidence for the opposite claim, either: That Christianity is bad for you.

So when I saw a report of the negative garbage written about Christianity by "humanist" Gregory Paul in the Journal of Religion and Society, I gave him a pretty good blast (yesterday) over his apparently clueless "research" methods -- without bothering to check on what others had written before me . One of my readers, however, has pointed me to a very comprehensive article by Statguy -- who has taken the trouble to look in more detail at the "research" concerned. And it is, as I thought, incompetent to the point of fraud. Paul apparently carried out no appropriate statistical analysis of any kind. No reputable academic journal in the social sciences would have accepted such clueless garbage -- and I say that from the viewpoint of someone who has had many critiques of academic journal articles published. So I think that identifies without need for further enquiry what the Journal of Religion and Society is: a Leftist rant and nothing more is my guess.

It might be of interest for me to pass on something else that my reader emailed me about Gregory Paul: "I heard him defend his study on a national talk show here in the States. The reason he gave for including Black violence was that Blacks were mainly influenced by "Southern Redneck" culture which came from Protestant Southern English culture and therefore Christian religion is the reason for Black violence. This Leftist's logic is so bad I really don't know what to say".

Amen to that. For more on the "troubled" relationship Leftists have with science, see GREENIE WATCH. The fourth post down that I put up there yesterday is very much to the point. And genetic science is very inconvenient for Leftists too. See, for example here

Before I leave the subject of dodgy Leftist science, have a look at this report: "In a Cornell University study [of Cornell Sociology students], men who perceived their masculinity to be maligned displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle. In other words, men overcompensate when they feel their masculinity is threatened".

I get a bit tired of pointing out the holes in this sort of study so I will simply note that there was NO sampling done for the "research" so NO generalizations from the study are possible -- not even generalizations about all Cornell students, let alone about men in general. And students do of course become expert at telling their teachers what their teachers want to hear. A university education in the "Humanities" seems to consist of little else these days. And having taught sociology students for 12 years at a major university, I know what a wacko lot they can be. I remember one student who seemed to think that the idea of negative numbers was some sort of CIA plot. And I am pretty sure he ended up graduating!

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The always well-informed Keith Windschuttle has weighed in on the Andrew Fraser controversy -- where Fraser's academic journal article on Australian immigration policy was suppressed from publication in an Australian law journal. I was the one who first put the article online so have some interest in the matter. Windschuttle points out something I have been pointing out for a long time -- that the old "White Australia" policy (originally designed to exclude the Chinese from Australia) always had its principal support from the Left. It was news to me that Fraser too has extensive Leftist affiliations but Windschuttle's conclusion that Fraser is in fact an old-fashioned Leftist rather than any type of conservative should come as no surprise to anyone who knows history. Leftist histrionics have been amazingly successful in suppressing all memory of how openly racist Leftists were up until about 1950 to 1960 but the facts are there for anyone who wants to check (See here and here). And I thoroughly agree with Windschuttle in seeing no problem with Australia's intake of Asians. I made my disagreement with Fraser about that clear from the outset. Windschuttle avoids mentioning the other leg of Fraser's paper, however: The serious doubts Fraser has raised about the wisdom of Australia's intake of African refugees. I think Fraser is well justified in those doubts -- as I have pointed out at length elsewhere.

Australian attitudes to immigration: "More than half of Australians would like to see fewer migrants from the Middle East, despite a decade-long softening in opposition to immigration, new research shows. The study also found British migrants here want more of their own kind to come here. Overall, despite the divisive debate about boat people, refugees and the Federal Government's mandatory detention policy, Australians appear to be becoming more tolerant, with overall opposition to immigration dropping greatly in recent years. But 53 per cent would like to see fewer migrants from the Middle East, according to the research, to be published in Monash University's People and Place this month. There is opposition, too, to more Asian migrants, with 36.7 per cent of Australian-born people wanting to see fewer Asians coming to this country. But opposition to further migration was much more moderate in relation to migrants from southern Europe or Britain. Only 15.4 per cent of the overall population thought fewer southern Europeans should come here, and only 13.9 per cent thought fewer Britons should come"

There is a very good cartoon here about use of the word "niggardly". See here and here for examples of the uproar that use of the word "niggardly" has produced in the past. Despite appearances, "niggardly" has nothing whatever to do with the famous "N word".

I liked this comment: "An eye-witness account of the talks between EU Commissioner Peter Mandleson and his Chinese counterpart, held in Beijing at the height of the textiles trade dispute: "One of them was an unaccountable, unelected politician from a sprawling bureaucracy who was promoting protectionism," says the Confederation of British Industry Director, Sir Digby Jones. "And the other was Chinese.""

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

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

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

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

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Theodore Dalrymple asks, is The Guardian institutionally racist?

This is another "read the whole thing" article but below is the beginning of it. Dalrymple normally seems to avoid all mention of race -- perhaps because he is himself Jewish -- but "The Guardian" finally seems to have got his goat:

Is The Guardian - the best newspaper in Britain - institutionally racist? Alas, I think the answer must be a resounding Yes. I had long had the impression that blacks were over-represented in photographs published in the newspaper by comparison with people from the Indian subcontinent or with the Chinese, and I tested the accuracy of my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.

There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in a commercial advertisement, over the content of which The Guardian, presumably, had little or no control. By contrast, there were 26 photographs of blacks. Surely this was a discrepancy that could not have arisen by chance, and is proof positive of a systematic bias amounting to racism. After all, there are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, and yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of all the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear in the newspaper.

How are we to explain this? Does it mean that The Guardian, if it systematically ignores Indians, harbours specially friendly feelings towards blacks? By no means: I think the most likely explanation is quite otherwise. I admit that my hypothesis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.

The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.

They don't have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition. By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection.

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A "humanist" dinosaur expert masquerading as a social scientist (Gregory Paul) has recently published a much-noted article in the Journal of Religion and Society which declares that religion is bad for you. His main evidence for that seems to be that the USA is both heavily Christian and has higher crime rates than less religious European countries. The fact that the USA has a higher percentage of blacks (with their attendant high crime-rates) seems not to have been mentioned. If he had been a REAL social scientist, he would have "partialled out" the effect of race from all his correlations -- but he probably would not even know what "partialling out" means. See here for more about the author of the article.

Wowee! "Language Log" sure has some nuclear strikes on French. See here and here for things you cannot express well in French. I know more about German and I think the score is about 50/50 there. We cannot translate adequately words like "Reich" and Volk" and they cannot adequately translate (amazingly) "happiness" or "pink". Given the penchant that English-speakers have for "stealing" words from all around the world, it is rather a wonder that "Reich" and "Volk" have not come into much use among English-speakers but their prominence in a certain very regrettable historical episode probably accounts for that. We did however manage to steal "ersatz" from that selfsame historical episode, though our use of it is more derogatory than it is in German. A thousand years ago, we did of course have in English a form of the word "Reich" but it survives today only as part of the word "bishopric". Schoolboy hilarity aside, a bishopric is the Reich (ric) of a bishop. And the Swedes still use the word too. The very word for Sweden is in Swedish "Sverige" -- the "rig" of the Svea. The Svea were the Southern Swedish tribe that eventually came to dominate all Sweden.

The DNA of Race: There is no topic on which Americans are more muzzled than race. Even mentioning the word is almost taboo. About the only thing you can safely say on the subject is the monotonous Leftist chant that "race does not exist". Yet Americans not only notice racial differences but they respond very strongly to them -- as the "white flight" phenomenon shows. So in such circumstances it is perhaps encouraging that some geneticists (many of whom seem to be Asian) are resolute enough to continue their studies of the matter. And what they find is that the different races (which Leftists assure us are all "a social contruct") are genetically very distinct. You can predict from a person's DNA which "social" race he belongs to -- and you can predict it with a very high probability of getting the prediction right. The Abstract (scientific summary) of the latest research report is here and you can find some interpretative commentary from an anthropologist here

Dems cover up dirty tricks used to attack black Republican candidate: "Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a rising star in the party, is considering a Senate bid for the Maryland seat being vacated by Democrat Paul Sarbanes next year. Apparently threatened by the prospect of a strong, popular, black Republican candidate, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee got down and dirty. Two of Schumer's staffers on the committee, including a former top researcher for David Brock's left-wing "think tank," obtained Steele's confidential credit report by using his Social Security number, which they had reportedly culled from court records. Under federal law, it is illegal to knowingly and willfully obtain a credit report under false pretenses. The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act imposes a maximum two-year prison sentence for the crime.... Law enforcement officials are taking this criminal intrusion into private records deadly seriously. But left-wing partisans are nowhere to be found. Steele's staff tells me that longtime crusader against identity theft Sen. Schumer, who denies having any knowledge of the scheme, has still issued no apology for the abuse of Steele's personal data. And there has been no outcry from the ACLU, the champions of clean campaigns, or any major national newspaper editorial board".

Ovi Magazine has a new issue out with forty-five new articles, over 26,000 words of text and a PDF packed with colourful text and imagery

There is a pretty disgusting story up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE today. The British pay their health insurance premiums to their government. But their government often won't deliver -- even when life is at stake. You sometimes need a newspaper publicity campaign to get life-saving drugs.

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

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

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

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

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STUPID WHITE GUILT

A few excerpts from a very comprehensive article:

"In the aftermath of the worst natural disaster in American history, we have seen a spectacular resurgence of the indictment against white America that has been an organizing theme of our national discourse since the 1960s. Starting from the liberal assumption that any undesirable outcome for black people is the result of white racism, black leaders and spokesmen-supported, according to one poll, by 66 percent of all blacks-have charged in the most virulent terms that white indifference towards or outright hostility to blacks slowed the response to the disaster, leaving tens of thousands of poor blacks to suffer needlessly. As Rabbi Aryeh Spero writes, even as white men in helicopters were risking their lives to save black people stranded on rooftops, and even as whites were navigating their small, private boats in swirling, toxic floodwaters to rescue their black fellow citizens trapped in their houses, black leaders were crying white racism.

To the extent that most whites think about the issue at all, they seem to imagine that acting decently is a sufficient response to being called a racist. But if past experience is any guide, such a passive and uncomplaining attitude on the part of whites, far from clearing them of the racism charge in the eyes of blacks, leaves them looking guiltier than ever. Why else-as blacks see it-would whites not defend themselves against such a damning accusation? Why else-unless whites really are racists-would they not indignantly strike back at people who are saying such terrible things about them? Thus whites' unprecedented outpouring of generosity, far from acquitting them of racism, merely continues the familiar psychodrama of white liberal guilt, in which whites are forever trying through conspicuous demonstrations of compassion and good will to shield themselves from a racism charge against which they appear to have no real defense.....

However, of all the factors that serve as a pretext for the racism charge and make intelligent discussion of race- and culture-related problems impossible, the most important is the black differential in academic achievement and socioeconomic outcomes. While the liberal media have routinely published articles since the early 1990s showing that black students score below whites on basic skills tests, and that even upper middle class black students score lower than poor white students, the explanations offered for this phenomenon always come down to some sin or failure on the part of whites....

The most likely reason for whites' intellectual paralysis regarding racial issues in general and the charge of racism in particular is that whites do indeed experience sincere guilt-and a sense of their own moral illegitimacy as a group-as a result of America's history of discrimination against blacks. Whites therefore feel that they have no right to assert themselves as the historic majority people of America, either in promoting moral and educational standards for the whole society, or in defending the majority culture and national identity from the forces of mass immigration and multiculturalism.....

One problem with the notion of a historic white guilt is that many other nations have oppressed their ethnic or religious minorities in the past, yet did not ever afterward feel that they were deprived of the right to preserve their majority culture or to exist as a distinct society. This suggests that white America's susceptibility to the charge of racism does not derive from its past treatment of blacks, but from blacks' current condition, namely their lagging intellectual and economic performance relative to the rest of the population, and the backwardness, incompetence, and moral disorder that characterize so many inner city black communities. Yet because of the egalitarian, oppressor/oppressed model that has informed the civil rights movement at least since 1966 when the black left pushed liberal integrationists like Martin Luther King aside, it has been totally unacceptable to the white left as well as to blacks to believe that the cause of persistent black deficiencies lies in the black community itself".

(Please read the above excerpts in the context of my own previous comments on the matter here)

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And it took over 10 years before the medical community believed them: "Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Medicine prize for discovering a bacterium that causes gastritis and stomach ulcers, the Nobel Assembly of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said. They made the "remarkable and unexpected discovery that inflammation in the stomach as well as ulceration of the stomach ... is the result of an infection of the stomach caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori," it said, announcing the winners of the 10 million crown (A$1.69 million) prize".

More FEMA stupidity: "Now there's more news that ought to be, but isn't, a joke. Casting about for a place to temporarily house the people stuck in the Superdome and convention center in the days following Katrina, FEMA contracted with a cruise line to provide three ships at a cost of $236 million. But as aides for Sen. Tom Coburn calculated and The Washington Post reported, this averaged out to a rate of $1,275 per evacuee, per week. A quick glance at the newspaper would reveal that a seven-day western Caribbean cruise embarking from Galveston can go for as little as $599 per person. And that includes entertainment and the cost of actually propelling the ship through the water. How did FEMA get snookered? Well, just consider the demands the agency made on would-be suppliers. Apparently, after a one-day competition, the agency received bids from 13 ships -- but only four met FEMA's requirements. Among these necessities were "full meal service, between-meal snacks, linen and maid service, medical support, and prescription refills." People evacuated from the Superdome could not be expected to make their own beds or clean their own rooms aboard an all-expenses-paid cruise ship?"

A good comment on economic progress over the last 20 years: "The four English-speaking countries have done particularly well. That's because their financial and labor markets are less regulated, so they are more "resilient and spontaneously self-correcting," says Jean-Philippe Cotis, chief economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. If a worker loses his job in one industry, he is more likely to take one at a lower wage in another. Firms are more likely to cut prices and shrink capacity in the face of falling demand. This, Mr. Cotis says, makes it easier for a central bank to cut interest rates, and for those cuts to flow through to home buyers and businesses". (HT Albion's Seedling)

Austria saves the day: "Turkey's 40-year campaign to join the European Union is on the brink of collapse after emergency talks between EU foreign ministers broke up without agreement just hours before entry negotiations were due to start. Amid frenetic diplomacy and warnings of dire consequences if the EU rejected Turkey, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, chaired fraught negotiations through the night in an attempt to stop Austria from torpedoing the membership talks.... Austria has demanded that Turkey be offered a "privileged partnership" as an alternative to full membership, an offer that Turkey has made clear is unacceptable. Although Austria stands alone on the issue, it has the power of veto..... Opponents of Turkish membership claim that the country is too big, too poor and too culturally different to join the EU. With the EU in crisis over the rejection of its constitution by French and Dutch voters, they claim that it is not capable of absorbing the Muslim country. Opinion polls show that the majority of EU citizens are opposed to Turkey's membership, with opposition particularly high in Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands"

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

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

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

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

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SEX DIFFERENCES IN IQ

This issue was in the news not long ago but it has now made the front page of "The Australian", Australia's national daily (issue of Sat., Oct 1) so it is good to see that the "incorrectness" of discussing IQ now seems to be waning. And the article that the headline leads to is unusually comprehensive so I am going to quote a little more from it than I usually would. The article does of course include comments from feminists about the issue but they are long on abuse and short on facts.

"The idea is as simple as its implications are seismic: women, as a group, lack the evolutionary genetic intelligence to master the highest strata of mathematics and the hard sciences. This is the central tenet of a contentious theory forwarded by famed US social scientist Charles Murray, who a decade ago made similarly explosive claims about the inferior genetic intelligence of blacks in his best-selling book The Bell Curve....

He had not intended to delve again into the genetic nature of group intelligence -- he received death threats after publishing, along with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve in 1994 -- until a controversy erupted at Harvard last January over comments made by its president, former Clinton administration cabinet officer Lawrence Summers. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tended to score around the top on standardised maths tests and wondered aloud in casual remarks whether that chasm stemmed from biological differences between the sexes. It was a radical idea and not well received within the academic community. After being shouted down at almost every turn Summers, not surprisingly, quickly backpedalled.

"It absolutely appalled me, the reaction to what was a fairly unremarkable observation that men seem more predisposed to excel in these areas than women," Murray says. "I mean, it's true, isn't it? He had actually done his homework, which is more than I can say for those who attacked him." And so Murray set about writing The Inequality Taboo, which was published in September.

"The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy," he writes. "That assumption is wrong. When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong. "The historical reality of male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument. The question is whether the social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this situation or whether sex-specific characteristics are also at work." ...

Murray -- who believes intelligence is the most important attribute if society is to become a true meritocracy -- is convinced that new breakthroughs will reveal that biology plays an overwhelming role in intelligence quotient, which in turn helps predict societal success. In examining the differences between the sexes, he cites as proof the fact that, among mathematically gifted students, seven times as many boys as girls scored in the top percentile of the standardised American SAT mathematics test....

"There is nothing inherent in being a woman that precludes high math ability. But there remains a distributional difference in male and female characteristics that leads to a larger number of men with high visuospatial skills. The difference has an evolutionary rationale, a physiological basis and a direct correlation with math scores." per cent of Nobel prizes in sciences were awarded to women in the 20th century....

Murray, however, remains unrepentant. "Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified," he writes. In education, he says that the taboo has hurt boys because educators see their development as an aberration and girls as the norm. "I am confronting realities, dealing with the way the world exists," he says. "There are group differences but they don't preclude an individual from rising above them.

(Please read the above excerpts in the context of my own previous comments on the matter here and here)

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The fast-vanishing truth about New Orleans: "In his recent article "Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina," which runs in the Oct. 2005 issue of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor gives an account of horrifying and explicit details concerning the actions of thugs and criminals in New Orleans which severely frustrated, and often completely halted, relief efforts for several days following Hurricane Katrina. The thugs and criminals happen to be black, which is not surprising since 67% of New Orleans population is black. On the other hand 1) nobody else has reported these outrages in the comprehensive manner Taylor has and 2) many black leaders like Jesse Jackson have used the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina as an indictment of white people. Apparently fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights acts, when the very mayor in charge of government in New Orleans is a black man elected by its people, the only acceptable discussion of race in America is one that conforms to the dramas of half a century before. Even if black people suffer at the hands of black people, whitey must be somehow to blame".

In the brainless world of the Left, the cure for poverty is to give the poor more money. The concept that poverty in the modern-day Western world may be mainly an attitudinal and behaviour problem is too deep for them. But what happens when the poor ARE given a lot of money through no exertions of their own? This story is pretty typical: "A couple who won nearly $800,000 on Lotto have told how they blew the lot in just seven weeks. Pregnant mother-of-five Donna Lynden described how she and partner Allan Taylor were pressured to give away much of their win to relatives, after buying a house and cars for themselves. She said their winnings quickly ran out and they continued to claim welfare payments to survive, despite hitting a $793,151.87 jackpot in June 2003.... They pleaded guilty this week to charges related to receiving about $29,000 of payments"

Blair disses Europe: "In terms of international diplomacy it was the equivalent of an unprovoked elbow to the back of the head. Tony Blair, speaking to the annual conference of his Labour Party, decided that the easiest way to pump up a bit of pride in Britain and his Government was to have a gratuitous whack at the country's biggest allies in Europe. "This is a country today that increasingly sets the standard," he boasted to a packed conference hall and dozens of TV cameras. "Not for us the malaise of France or the angst of Germany." The offence was magnified because Blair's gibe was so unexpected; in a few weeks he will be hosting a summit meeting with his German and French counterparts. But Blair's swipe was even more wounding because it was deadly accurate".

No underclass in Australia: "It's assumed that Australia, like most Western nations, has an underclass: a group of people who will always be poor. These people are sometimes called the disadvantaged, said to exist in reasonably large numbers and expected, as a social reality, to be always with us. But is it true? New research drawn from data previously unavailable to Australian academics suggests it's not: the underclass isn't vast and, what's more, disadvantage is a transient state, something that some people slip into before clambering up from. "The idea that there is a large number of people who, in crude terms, you might think of as being losers, who are basically beyond help, it's factually incorrect," says Bruce Headey, principal fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne".

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

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

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

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

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SOME RECENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

Letter to Palestinians
View from the other side
Two Rallies
BBC refuses to hand over evidence on Islamics to Police
How The United Nation's Neutrality Props Up Evil Regimes
Nazifying Israel returns to haunt the Labor Party
THE ONLINE BIOS OF IRAQ'S Suicidology
Rushdie speaks out against Islamic extremism
American anti-terror fatwa falls short
ABC's culture of contempt

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ELSEWHERE

I have just put up here an email from a reader in the Houston petroleum industry. He explains exactly how and why there were huge traffic jams and gasoline shortages in the recent evacuation of Houston before hurricane Rita.

A libertarian defence of the Iraq intervention: "The fact remains that there were reasons to believe Saddam had WMDs -- wherever they may be today. Whether they were buried in the sand or moved (with the help of the Russian military) elsewhere is not known by the West. But even if there were never any WMDs at all -- which is nonsense -- the Bush Administration still had moral and legal justification for its action there. What about the "international community" you ask? Well, if by "international community" is meant the corrupt United Nations, then it should not be forgot that Saddam Hussein was in violation of several UN resolutions as well as the terms of the cease fire. So, any way you want to look at it -- basic classical liberal or libertarian principles or international law -- the Bush Administration has as much right as anyone to overthrow Saddam and his regime"

Mark Latham, who led the Australian Labor Party into their great defeat in the 2004 Federal election, has recently put on a huge tantrum blaming everybody but himself. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day and he did manage some pretty conservative words of wisdom in a recent speech to university students, explaining his retirement from politics. Especially apt was his last sentence. "The sane, rational choice: If you are a young, idealistic person, don't get involved in organised politics. Contribute to your community, your neighbourhood, your immediate circle of trust and support. This is the best way forward for a better society."

Foreign aid is futile: "Foreign aid was invented in 1948 with President Truman's Four Point Program. In almost six decades, some 2.3 trillion dollars have been dished out worldwide to poor countries by rich ones-about half the cost of World War II! In that time, not a single country has significantly reduced poverty as a result of foreign aid. If we examine U.S. foreign aid in the last decade, we find that there is no relation between these transfers and the reduction of poverty. In Egypt, extreme poverty as a percentage of the population has remained the same despite the money given to that country, the second biggest beneficiary of U.S. largesse. China, while receiving two thousand times less aid than Egypt, reduced extreme poverty by half. Bolivia, one of the eleven biggest recipients of U.S. assistance, has managed to double the percentage of people living in extreme poverty.... But the causes of the wealth of nations are well known: open economies and secure property rights. The countries that are moving in that direction are reducing poverty; those that are not are getting worse. (On average, the first type of countries reduced poverty from 60 to 19 percent of the population in the last three decades, while the second type has managed only a twelve percent reduction.)...."

Why am I not surprised by this? "The California Department of Transportation is poised to buy $7 million worth of new trucks and trailers to help control highway stormwater pollution, even though it already owns similar equipment that sits idle because there aren't enough workers to operate it. The Department of Finance has approved a Caltrans proposal to buy 12 "Super Sucker" vacuum excavator trucks for $6.5 million. They clear highway stormwater drains of sediment and debris. The proposal also includes plans to buy a dozen hydroseeder trailers, devices that spread grass seed, water and mulch, for $540,000, state documents show. But Caltrans now owns 30 vacuum trucks and eight hydroseeder trailers across the state, and documents show the equipment often sits unused for weeks."

This didn't happen, of course: "The police department said Thursday it is investigating a dozen officers in connection with looting during the lawlessness that engulfed the city after Hurricane Katrina. News reports in the aftermath of the storm put officers at the scene of some of the heaviest looting, at the Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. Some witnesses, including a Times-Picayune reporter, said police were taking items from shelves."

Global warming didn't generate storms: "USA TODAY is right: Activists who blame Katrina on global warming may gain short-term publicity, but risk losing long-term credibility. The increasing frequency of hurricane activity in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico since 1995 is due to a natural, multidecadal shift in the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation (THC), the oceanic 'conveyor belt' that pulls warm water from the tropics northward to the British Isles."

Carnival of Cordite (gun blog roundup) is up again.

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

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

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

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

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Brookes News Update

Will the baby boomers cure Australia's unemployment?: Commentators have yet to realise that the contention that retiring baby boomers will cure our unemployment supports the economic argument that unemployment is caused by over pricing labour
CIA intelligence failures, Iraq War and the Democrats' treason: Democratic Congressmen went out of their way to cripple America's intelligence agencies. In this endeavour they had the aid and encouragement of the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies
Consumption and economic growth: the economic fallacy that won't die : The economic situation in America, China and Australia has brought into focus the old economic fallacy that consumption drives the economy
Money supply and the velocity myth: Doing nothing as far as the central bank and the government are concerned is the best policy. For it is active governments and central banks that cause the boom-bust cycle
Australian economy: unions, minimum wages and unemployment: Fallacies about the desirability of minimum wages are like noxious weeds, they just keep on returning. And now the Australian Council of Trade Unions is at it again

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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

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

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

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

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THE 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.

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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

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

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

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

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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".

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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

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

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

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

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"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.

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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

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

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

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