ELSEWHERE

I am very sorry to hear of the death of Arthur Seldon, founder of the (British) Institute of Economic Affairs, one of the earliest free-market think-tanks. I knew Arthur personally and he was everything they say of him here. I have also put up here a tribute to Arthur from Chris Tame, whom I also know. Chris is himself in precarious health these days so it is good to see that he is still in there fighting for the light.

There is an interesting article here on the admissions policies of Ivy League universities such as Harvard. Rather amusing that, like that great imperialist, Cecil Rhodes, they look for the "all-round man" rather than intellectual excellence alone. The original intent of the policy was of course to keep Jews out. Harvard had a very good relationship with the Nazi regime in the 1930s. I myself went to a government-run Australian university that admitted people on the basis of high-school examination results only and seem to have done pretty well in all sorts of ways despite such a "handicap". I consider my life to have been something of a "dream run" in fact. I have sure had a lot of fun. As the article itself concludes, if you have the drive and the ability, that is all that matters in the end.

Tony Blair gets tough on crime: "Signalling a big expansion of what he called summary justice through on-the-spot fines and anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos), he said: "You cannot do it by the rules of the game that we have at the moment. You just can't." Using words that will infuriate the legal profession, he said: "Half of them end up getting off at the end of it . . . It's too complicated, too laborious. The police end up completely hidebound by a whole series of restrictions and difficulties. It doesn't work." .... He told his monthly press conference: "If you are a police officer patrolling the streets, and someone throws a brick through a window, or abuses an old lady on the way to the shops . . . If you have to take that person all the way through a long court process, you are not going to do it.... "The reason I introduced fixed penalties was I said `we have had enough of that'. You give them a fixed-penalty notice then they have to come to court to challenge it. That's summary justice. It's tough and it's hard but in my judgment it's the only way to deal with it." The Government is preparing a series of laws to be enforced by fixed penalties or Asbos. Mr Blair cited plans to use Asbo-style orders to evict drug dealers instantly from council houses and flats.

Mike Adams at his hilarious best. Just one excerpt: "Republican women are simply more attractive than Democratic women. It certainly feels good - after years of keeping it in - to state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Those who don’t immediately accept this revelation as true can just click on this link. Of course, I knew that Republican women were more attractive than Democratic women, long before I saw the above link. But I didn’t know that it was proper to discuss the difference until just before my speech at Ohio University. That was when three very attractive women came into the room to take their seats and I asked innocently “Are you ladies all Democrats who are here to heckle me?” Their blue-eyed blond leader responded with this far more intelligent question: “Do we look like Democrats to you?” .... The public discussion of this issue will help Republicans answer some important questions. For example: “Should we assume that being gay often causes one to be a Democrat? Isn’t it more likely that the lack of exposure to attractive women causes Democrats to be gay?” And “Do Democratic women consider compliments in the workplace to be sexual harassment simply because they rarely hear them?”"

Anything rather than sack some bureaucrats: "San Diego is more than $1.4 billion in arrears on its pension payments. Its bond rating is so low that it cannot issue bonds for needed public works. Last month city leaders acknowledged that a plan to help deal with the crisis by selling city land was almost unworkable because city bureaucrats had overvalued the city's assets by more than $600 million and the city's inventory of real estate assets actually includes land it sold, never owned or hopes to buy. "Simply put," said Jesse Knight Jr., the president of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, "San Diego is a mess." The budget crisis doesn't just humiliate San Diegans -- it's cutting into their quality of life. The crisis has forced the elimination of a citywide day-care program for children from middle-to-lower-income families. Public library hours have been slashed, and plans for a new central library in the rejuvenating downtown district have been shelved. The city's sewer system is so decrepit that it could face federal fines. Police are jumping ship to nearby cities that offer bigger salaries and the promise of a real pension. In 2004, for the first time in seven years, the region's population actually fell -- by 600. And road repairs have ground to a standstill".

I occasionally have a look at blog rankings. The "Truth Laid Bear" ranking for this blog is here. I seem to be no. 647 out of 19 million blogs at the moment so I can't grouch. I got into the top 200 a year or two ago but that was when there were only a measly 2 or 3 million blogs in existence. All these rating systems have huge holes in them, however. The two blogs with relatively high readership that I blog on -- Tongue-Tied and Majority Rights -- seem to be unknown to the "Truth Laid Bear". Technorati seems to be the most erratic of the blog evaluation systems, however. It used to show this blog as having links from nearly 500 other blogs but as of today, that has plummeted to 239. Believe it if you want to. I am pleased to say that Greenie Watch and PC Watch have picked up a few readers lately -- with "Greenie Watch" now getting about 400 hits a day and "PC Watch" now getting about 650 hits a day.

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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HITLER THE PEACENIK

An amazing snippet of history

I am always pointing out how Leftist Hitler was -- despite the hugely successful Leftist "big lie" to brand him as a Rightist. I am putting up below a picture of a Nazi propaganda poster of the 1930s that you won't believe unless you are aware of how readily all Leftists preach one thing and do another. It reads "Mit Hitler gegen den Ruestungswahnsinn der Welt".



And what does that mean? It means "With Hitler against the armaments madness of the world". ("Ruestung" could more precisely be translated as "military preparations" or "arms buildup" but "armaments" is a bit more idiomatic in English.)

So the preaching of "peace" by the bloodthirsty Soviet regime of the cold war period had its parallel with the Nazis too.

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ELSEWHERE

Maybe my being an Australian is responsible for my puzzlement but I CANNOT understand the uproar among conservatives (e.g. here) over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme court. She is not a famous legal brain but since when has the court been about the law at all? Were Thurgood Marshall or Ruth Bader Ginsburg appointed for anything but their rusted-on Leftism? Was the Grutter v. Bollinger decision a legal marvel or a defiance of the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment? Was Roe v. Wade anything to do with the constitution at all, considering that the constitution does not even mention the word abortion? SCOTUS has long been a political body rather than a legal one and GWB is appointing the most reliably conservative lawyer he knows. Conservatives should be applauding him for treating the court as the political joke it has long been and presumably always will be. Maybe my Australian bluntness prevents me from understanding the mythologies involved.

British government admits its welfare system is crazy: "Benefit cheats will face lie detector tests and have their shopping habits tracked under plans to tackle the massive abuse of a welfare system that David Blunkett last night conceded was "crackers". The Work and Pensions Secretary will unveil an anti-fraud strategy later this week which will include controversial measures such as cross-checking utility and credit card bills and voice recognition software to detect when callers are lying to government agencies. But as ministers prepared to tighten up the system, a damning report from a powerful Commons committee exposed how bureaucratic bungling and benefit fraudsters were costing taxpayers close to 3 billion pounds annually. Although the government's main focus is on tackling cheats, the report highlights how half the wastage is actually down to administrative errors. The new crackdown on incapacity benefits is being driven by Downing Street and Tony Blair is believed to have ordered ministers to slash benefits by as much as 40 pounds a week, as well as introducing American-style time limits for claims".

Think twice about buying at Target: "Target Corporation will continue to ban the Salvation Army from their 1,351 stores this Christmas season. The Army will not be allowed to place their red kettles in front of Target stores. Despite increased need caused by the hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Target continues to bar the Salvation Army. Many observers feel that the ban by Target is a result of pressure put on the company by homosexual groups. Homosexual activists have targeted the Salvation Army for years because of the Army's refusal to recognize their lifestyle. Target is a supporter of various homosexual causes. While Target contributes to homosexual groups, the company publicly states that they will not contribute to any religious groups. For Target, homosexual organizations are worthy of financial support, Christian and Jewish organizations are not".

A good idea: "There's a simple solution to the North Korea problem: build a few nuclear power plants in SOUTH Korea - near ther border - and GIVE electricity to the NORTH Koreans FREE for as long as they need it; IN RETURN, the NORTH Koreans would have to abandon their own nuclear ambitions, and stop developing and selling ballistic missiles. The NORTH Koreans get a virtually unlimited supply of electricity - FREE, and the world gets safer as a result - AND: we can check the safety of the SOUTH Korean plants easily! BONUS: it makes the "two Koreas" more dependent and reduces the threat of war and instability.

A Leftist confronts reality: "I’d argue that a strong defence of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential, perhaps a defining, component of any genuinely progressive politics in today’s world. Yet reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed “left” in the London papers in the aftermath of the bombings, I was struck by how ossified many of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the cold war have lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing little if anything in common with that “twilight conflict.” .... But theirs is also a truncated analysis. They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation. It misses the central point: that, unlike traditional “third-world” liberation movements looking for a bit of peace and quiet in which to nurture embryonic states, al-Qaida is classically imperialist, looking to subvert established social orders and to replace the cultural and institutional infrastructure of its enemies with a (divinely inspired) hierarchical autocracy of its own, looking to craft the next chapter of human history in its own image.... Moreover, many of those who reflexively blame the west do not honestly hold up a mirror to the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, and the racism and sexism and anti-semitism that is rife in many parts of it".

There is a good comparison here of the Iraq campaign with various other events in recent history. The comparison of deaths in Iraq and deaths in Detroit is rather telling. See here for background on the John Glenn speech that is also included.

See here for a history of French fruitcake Foucault's love-affair with the Iranian revolution. (The Left's support for Islamists isn't new, any violent anti-Westerners will do!)

The latest Carnival of the Vanities is now up with the posts usefully categorized.

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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A SHORT HISTORY OF TWO ACTS OF INTERNATIONAL BASTARDRY

I grew up with Melanesians (Greek for "black islanders") around and rather like them. They originate from the island of New Guinea, which is much larger than Britain and is in fact the world's second largest island. It is located immediately to the North of Australia. Melanesians (or TIs, as we called them) are generally in my observation a people of excellent physique, good-natured and not afraid of hard work. They have one large fault however: They cannot get on with one-another. More precisely, there are at least 400 different tribes of them, all speaking different, though related, languages. And what governs their relationship with one-another is whether you are a "wantok" (Pidgin for "one talk" -- i.e. same tribe) or not. You have great obligations towards your wantoks but all others are totally fair game for anything. So when people of different "wantoks" mix -- as they do in the city of Port Moresby, the level of crime and violence is incredible. Which is why Port Moresby was recently rated as the world's worst city to live in.

At war's end in 1945, the Western half of New Guinea was a Dutch colony and the Eastern half was an Australian colony (Yes. Australian, not British). And that is when the first act of international bastardry occurred. The Dutch had been kicked out by the Japanese during World War 2 and nobody much wanted them back, so all the wiseheads of the world decided that W. New Guinea should be "given" to Indonesia, a huge, mostly Muslim archipelago immediately to the West of New Guinea, which was at the time ruled by a Left-leaning despot -- Sukarno. Sukarno was doing a bit of saber-rattling over Indonesia's "claim" to the place and the Melanesian population was still pretty much in the stone age. The fact that Sukarno's Javanese could hardly be a more different race to the Melanesians (both genetically and culturally) was not of course considered. There was a farcical "act of free choice" wherein the Melanesians were supposedly "consulted" but it consisted mainly of rounding up a few Melanesians for the newsreel cameras who would mumble something vaguely approving. And the Melanesians have been fighting the Indonesians ever since in an effort to get them out -- but with no international support and virtually no technology, they've got Buckley's. And the Indonesians have behaved as you would expect Muslims to behave.

So we come to the second act. When Australia got its first Leftist postwar government under Gough Whitlam in 1972, Whitlam promptly "gave" Eastern New Guinea its independence (translation: said "f*** off. The only help you will get from us in future will be money") even though there was no visible agitation for it and even though many foresaw the anarchy that would result. Eastern New Guinea (or Papua New Guinea as it is now known) had been making steady progress under Australian administration and tribal warfare had been pretty-well eliminated. And it was foreseeable that when educational levels had risen to something approaching Western standards, there could be a peaceful and orderly transition to self-government. But Whitlam wanted to play the big Leftist hero so he cast the Melanesians off to sink or swim. And they mostly sunk.

And how do we know that they would have done better with a longer period of Australian administration? We know because one part of Melanesia is still under Australian administration: The Torres Straits Islands -- only a few miles South of Papua New Guinea. And they are perfectly peaceful and prosperous, have considerable local self-government and the same voting rights as any other Australian. And I have actually been there to look around so I am not exactly talking through my hat. They show what might have been in New Guinea if it had not been for an arrogant show-off Leftist bastard.

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ELSEWHERE

Even alcoholism is substantially genetic: "Alcoholism is a major health concern and genetic factors play an important role in the development and maintenance of alcohol drinking behaviors. In a new study appearing on October 3 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Subhash Pandey and colleagues from The University of Illinois show that decreased function of the CREB gene transcription factor in an area of the brain called the central amygdala is involved in anxiety and excessive alcohol drinking behavior."

Taiwan shows the way: "Since the late 1980s, the Chinese government in Taipei has gone from martial law to free-wheeling elections, as the 23 million people on Taiwan have created China's first full democracy. In recent decades, they have also leapt from deep poverty to the ranks of the world's wealthier polities. The usual U.N. databases do not include Taiwan, but according to the CIA World Factbook, Taiwan's per capita income these days is about $25,000--which in U.N. rankings would place it in the neighborhood of such highly developed nations as Italy and New Zealand, with almost 20 times the per capita income of Red China. Taiwan has achieved this despite being evicted from the U.N. in the 1970s, to be replaced by the communist government. For Taiwan, there has been no place at the perennial U.N. conferencing on "sustainable development." Taiwan was cut out of the U.N. picture years before the U.N. began its drumbeat for global taxation to support U.N. "millennium development goals." And lo! Taiwan has blossomed beyond the wildest dreams of the U.N. aidocrats"

FDR's affirmative action ...for whites: "A large case in point cited by Katznelson was the GI Bill of Rights, which, properly celebrated for its educational benefits, low-cost mortgages, and business loans, substantially bypassed black veterans. According to Katznelson, Southern Democrats in Congress also saw to it that some of FDR's New-Deal legislation would simply not apply to blacks. He returns repeatedly to the fact that in the 1930's and 40's, maids and farm workers accounted for the great bulk of black employees. Yet the Wagner Act and other labor laws failed to protect union-organizing efforts in these occupations, which also went uncovered by Social Security or the new minimum-wage laws. By the late 40's, white America was receiving an avalanche of benefits from the New Deal and veterans' programs, while black America, which needed far more, got far fewer".

Instapundit has already mentioned this but in case you missed it, there is an interesting and detailed story here of how the Left-leaning media edit photographs to create a false impression. Excerpt: "The Chronicle did not print an inaccuracy, nor did it doctor a photograph to misrepresent the facts. Instead, the Chronicle committed the sin of omission: it told you the truth, but it didn't tell you the whole truth. Because the whole truth -- that the girl was part of a group of naive teenagers recruited by Communist activists to wear terrorist-style bandannas and carry Palestinian flags and obscene placards -- is disturbing, and doesn't conform to the narrative that the Chronicle is trying to promote. By presenting the photo out of context, and only showing the one image that suits its purpose, the Chronicle is intentionally manipulating the reader's impression of the rally, and the rally's intent. Such tactics -- in the no-man's-land between ethical and unethical -- are commonplace in the media, and have been for decades. It is only now, with the advent of citizen journalism, that we can at last begin to see the whole story and realize that the public has been manipulated like this all along".

The latest ratings of "world's best cities to live in" are of course rather arbitrary but it is pleasing (and in my view perfectly correct) that Australia has four cities in the top 10. And I have no problem with their finding that 9 out of 10 of the worst cities are either African or Muslim either.

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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CHARLES MURRAY AGAIN POINTS OUT SOME UNPOPULAR TRUTHS

Just a small excerpt in case you have not seen the article yet -- dealing with the causes of the impoverished and criminal American underclass:

"Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly? In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here is the illegitimacy ratio--the percentage of live births that occur to single women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25% milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure was 35%--of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio in 2003 was 68%. By way of comparison: The illegitimacy ratio that caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to proclaim the breakdown of the black family in the early 1960s was 24%.

But illegitimacy is now common throughout the population, right? No, it is heavily concentrated in low-income groups. Perhaps illegitimacy isn't as bad as we used to think it was? No, during the last decade the evidence about the problems caused by illegitimacy has grown stronger. What about all the good news about falling teenage births? About plunging welfare rolls? Both trends are welcome, but neither has anything to do with the proportion of children being born and raised without fathers, and that proportion is the indicator that predicts the size of the underclass in the next generation".

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On "reparations", Eleanor Spreitzer writes: "Who got hurt more? -- If African Americans can sue because their-great-great-great-great-granddaddies were thrown on a boat and shipped over here - can African Africans sue because theirs weren't?"

I am pretty surprised that the no. 1 story on the blogosphere at the moment (according to Technorati) is this one -- about the Catholic Church no longer accepting the literal truth of the Bible. But that's been true for centuries. The church has always contended that the Bible needs interpreting and that it alone has the authority to do so. There was some guy called Martin Luther who disagreed with that, though.

Good to see that the hyper-correct Cressida Dick (former head of London Police's "Diversity Directorate", frequenter of official homosexual meetings and resolute enemy of "hate speech") seems likely to be prosecuted over the deliberate police murder of a Brazilian electrician on a London train.

Good comment from Barone: "I am struck by the sublime indifference of most critics of Bush's Iraq policy to the fate of the Iraqi people. They are totally unexultant about the overthrow of a vicious dictatorship and seem to have no interest at all in what would happen to Iraqis if we leave suddenly. Hitchens has argued persuasively that no one deserves the label of liberal who is so indifferent to whether others live in freedom or under tyranny. In this passage Bush reminded Americans more hardheadedly about our own self-interest. But of course many of his critics are more interested in hurting Bush than they are in preventing the emergence of an anti-American tyranny in Iraq."

The physical basis of psychopathy uncovered? "Study findings have provided evidence of a structural brain deficit in pathological liars, with the prefrontal cortex implicated as an important component underlying deceitful personality. Yaling Yang, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, USA, and colleagues found that pathological liars, compared with both mentally healthy individuals and those with antisocial personality disorders, had a 22-26% increase in prefrontal white matter as well as slightly reduced gray matter. This finding suggests the "prefrontal cortex is a key component in lying and if during the developmental stage an individual developed more white matter in this region, they may be more prone to have excessive lying behavior," Yang explained to MedWire News. He added that slightly reduced prefrontal gray matter has previously been associated with the behavioral pattern of breaking rules in order to gain an advantage. The significance of the increase in white matter is that it gives people the cognitive capacity to lie in order to conduct this type of behavior, he said".

There is a petition to the U.S. government demanding accountability from the U.N. here that some readers may like to sign. It is being organized by Jay McFarland.

A good rant here: Excerpt: "One of the fundamental problems with the Left is that they have apparently trained themselves to ignore distinctions, such as the distinction between producers and parasites. The Left has also shown themselves to be blind to the sequence of cause and effect. Both of these bad habits appear to benefit the adherents of the "primacy of the parasite" ideologies that were invented by such parasites as Marx and Mohammed"

The Australian government has just appointed a new chief to its major public broadcaster -- Steven Skala. He is "a rising leader in Melbourne's influential Jewish community" so we may be able to hope for some reduction in the pro-terrorist bias of the organization concerned.

We may have reform coming at the BBC too. There is an excellent and extensive article on the Leftist bias at the BBC here: Excerpt: "The growing cacophony of voices accusing the BBC of being less than impartial in its news coverage scored an important victory this week when Britain's public broadcaster appointed an independent panel to examine whether its reporting of the Middle East had been coloured by a pro-Palestinian bias."

A deeply disillusioned Leftist confronts the antisemitism and pro-Fascism of most of the modern Left. He attributes it to their failures with socialism: "The temptation in times of defeat is to believe in everything rather than nothing; to go along with whichever cause sounds radical, even if the radicalism on offer is the radicalism of the far right. In 1878, George Eliot wrote that it was "difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print". So it is again today. Outside the movies of Mel Gibson, Jews aren't Christ killers any longer, but they can't relax, because now they are Nazis, blood-soaked imperialists, the secret movers of neoconservatism, the root cause of every atrocity from 9/11 to 7/7".

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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HAIL THE CHIEF!

I am not terribly surprised to be reporting this, but the man who wrote the first program for the first personal computer (Bill Gates wrote the first BASIC compiler for the Altair) seems to be winning still. While Google are off with the fairies trying to break the grip of Microsoft on word processing and such things, they have taken their eye off the ball of their basic business -- searches. MSN Search now seems to index at least twice as many web pages as Google does (which would not be hard) and MSN does it much more quickly. Google can take a month or more to get a new page consistently available on their system, whereas MSN search gets it all up with systematic promptness. I have just installed the MSN Search toolbar on my browser and they will be my first port of call for searches from now on.

I am basically an investor in low-tech stocks but if I were an investor in hi-tech stocks, I would not be buying Google at the moment -- though hopefully, they may wake up to themselves in due course. Hubris tends to be self-correcting.

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ELSEWHERE

Patrick West correctly points out that Leftists have always celebrated "the community" (Gemeinschaft) and idealize a sense of community. Yet now they also celebrate "diversity" and "multiculturalism", which are antagonistic to the development of a sense of sharing or community. But Leftists never have had much concern for consistency, principle or logic. As long as they sound good at the time is all that matters to them.

Al Gore has repeated his "brownshirt" (Nazi Storm Troops) slur on conservative bloggers and there is even one Leftist blogger who seems to think that he has gone bonkers. America had a narrow escape indeed in 2000.

Those pesky genetics again: "Two New Jersey research teams are reporting discoveries about the biological nature of psychiatric disorders that may bring them closer to the ultimate goal of finding cures for complex diseases, such as autism and schizophrenia. Scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) have unveiled new information regarding the genetic, cellular and neurological bases of susceptibility to these diseases. Using data drawn from the Rutgers Cell and DNA Repository on 518 families, each with multiple autistic children, James Millonig and Linda Brzustowicz, assisted by Emanuel DiCicco-Bloom, led a team that further substantiates the link between autism and Engrailed 2 (EN2), a gene important in central nervous system development. Their research is presented in the November issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG)..... A second team led by Brustowicz and Bonnie Firestein, an assistant professor in Rutgers' department of cell biology and neuroscience, implicated a gene called CAPON in schizophrenia. A report of their research is available in the online journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine.... Researchers agree that there are environmental contributors to susceptibility to psychiatric disorders, but based on inheritance patterns of these diseases seen in families, the genetic component appears to be quite strong...."

I like it: "An advisory panel composed of over 100 Republican members of the House of Representatives has recommended ending all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The NEA is the federal government's chief source of funding for nonprofit theatre groups, dance companies, and arts presenters. The CPB is a major funder of noncommercial broadcast programming of the performing arts. The Republican Study Committee recommended that the two agencies be eliminated as part of its "RSC Budget Options 2005" report."

Raising the tax on hiring is the way to encourage job creation? "Louisiana is preparing to cut unemployment benefits, raise unemployment taxes on employers and trim spending on job training next year because of the mounting jobless claims after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, state officials said yesterday. Nationally, the number of job losses blamed on Katrina and Rita rose to 363,000 last week, the U.S. Labor Department reported yesterday".

Crusade misrepresentation again: "In 1979 I was taking a course on "Comparative Religion" at a highly respected, fully accredited, Christian (Baptist) four year liberal arts college. When we got to the section on Islam, we were solemnly informed that NO successful evangelism could begin with Muslims until Christians apologized for the Crusades. Not being the sophisticated, gentle soul you all know today I immediately threw up my hand to ask, "When do THEY apologize for the conquest of Christian lands in the Mid-east, Africa and the Byzantine Empire? When do THEY apologize for invading Spain, France, Hungary, and other parts of Christendom?" As I recall, the professor sputtered and mumbled and decided that it was time to move on to the next issue and I just wondered if the mush that passed for "Christian" scholarship had any intellectual credibility at all."... the Crusades were in effect a defensive war against a militant Islam"

A sad personal story about "white flight": "By this time all the good liberals who had nodded approvingly as all these changes were forced upon American society by judges, lawyers and bureaucrats were sitting in their suburban homes and school districts, smugly regarding the whites who remained in the cities as lowlifes and racists who were responsible for the problem in the first place: if it wasn't for the irrational prejudice of these neanderthal whites, the nice colored people wouldn't have anything to be upset about and things would be fine. It was always the liberals who kept the most distance between themselves and the blacks that were most anxious to make sure that everybody knew they weren't bigots. By the mid-`70s, the neighborhood was reduced to pimps and gangbangers driving around at 18 miles an hour with the lights off, the tax base was gone, the schools were shot, and Carter was president".

Antidemocratic Leftists: "When California lawmakers narrowly passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage last month, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he would veto it. Not because he opposes legal rights for gay and lesbian couples -- he doesn't -- but because he opposes treating California elections as meaningless. Five years ago, Californians went to the polls and approved Proposition 22, a ballot initiative confirming the traditional definition of marriage. Unless they change their minds or are overruled by the Supreme Court, Schwarzenegger said, their decision ought to be binding. As his spokesperson put it in a statement, ''We cannot have a system where the people vote and the Legislature derails that vote." Needless to say, liberal supporters of gay marriage had a fit.... today liberalism all too often displays a strong antidemocratic streak, and nowhere is it more blatant than on the issue of same-sex marriage."

See here for an excellent new blog from Germany (in English) by the noted Dutch author Leon de Winter.

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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ANOTHER AMUSING "FAKE BUT ACCURATE" CLAIM

We all remember how popular with the Left was the claim that the forged documents used by Dan Rather to attack GWB's military service were "fake but accurate". Given the Leftist tendency to KNOW things regardless of the evidence, it should not be surprising that another "fake but accurate" claim has emerged. In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Alan Wolfe, a Professor of Political Science, gives a reasonably fair review of how the "authoritarian personality" theory of Adorno (a prominent Marxist theoretician) and his colleagues was discredited academically not long after it was published. The rather hilarious claim of the theory was that it is conservatives who are authoritarian (Lenin and Stalin were really just misunderstood) and that conservatives are psychologically disturbed.

The theory is of course utter catnip to Leftists. They just cannot resist it regardless of the evidence against it -- so it has retained a following to this day among many Leftist academics in the social sciences. Alan Wolfe is one of those. Most authors who still refer to the theory seem unaware of the swingeing criticisms that it has attracted but Wolfe cannot claim that excuse. So it seems that he has a NEED for the theory -- which doesn't say much for his own mental health. A debunked theory is the only way he can make sense of his world. He finds the theory to offer an excellent explanation of current Republican politics generally and of the dreaded John Bolton in particular.

Given his disregard for the facts, I was not the least surprised at this passage in Wolfe's pathetic whine: "One item on the F scale, in particular, seems to capture in just a few words the way that many Christian-right politicians view the world in an age of terror: "Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.""

That sounds more like a description of Greenie thinking to me but there is a bigger problem with that observation by Prof. Wolfe than you might think: The item quoted is NOT in fact in the F scale. Table 7 of chapter VII in The Authoritarian Personality gives the final form of the F scale and that item is not included. So I think we have to say of Prof. Wolfe that he is both fake AND inaccurate. You can find a detailed account of why the Adorno claims are the reverse of the truth here. (Hat Tip to California Conservative for the link to Wolfe's howl).

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ELSEWHERE

Econbrowser has an excellent article pointing out why oil shale is an energy asset of last resort. Nuclear power and ethanol are alternatives to petroleum products that are both already available via well-tested technology, environmentally-friendly and cheap. Using Brazilian production methods, ethanol is already competitive with gasoline if oil prices stay as high as they are now. See the fourth post down here

Good stuff: "President George W. Bush last night reiterated his Government's determination to win the war on terror, likening Islamic extremism to the ideology of communism that was defeated by the US during the Cold War. In a major speech on the US commitment to continue the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan - and to prevent terrorism from "outlaw regimes" such as Iran and Syria - Mr Bush said he would fight extremists who wanted to "enslave whole nations and intimidate the world"."

India is of course famous for its bureaucracy, though it has been considerably reduced in recent years, to India's great economic benefit. This hilarious story about the New Delhi rat-catchers suggests that reform still has some way to go however.

Justice? Crooks Scam Terrorists' Families: "The latest criminal racket in the Middle East is to scam money out of the families of al Qaeda terrorists that have gone to Iraq and, well, disappeared. Several thousand Saudi Arabian men have gone to Iraq to fight for al Qaeda, or at least said they did. Not surprising for the country that supplied 15 or the 19 terrorists who carried out the 911 attacks. But this has provided opportunities for crooks in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. When these fellows find out about a young man who has gone off on jihad to Iraq, they contact his parents with the news that their son is in trouble, and that money can make it all better. The story varies, from the kid getting kidnapped, or arrested, in Syria or Iraq. The families, whether they approved of their lad's terrorist intentions or not, are usually eager to get him back. Money is sent, and the scammers are never heard from again".

The lesson of Katrina: "The Katrina hurricane has finally awakened the media and the public to one huge reality that few were formerly willing to accept -- the important difference between socialistic bureaucracy and a free market. Anyone who is aware of the reports on Katrina knows that most of the early rescues and help came from individuals and groups who saw what was needed and did what they could to help. The bureaucracies all waited for 'go-ahead' orders. 'Government at all levels failed the people,' Senator Susan Collins told the national press."

No excuse for excuses: "A decent society should be able to evacuate its weakest from a disaster zone, and Louisiana showcased the mismanagement only patronage politics buys. But it's not unreasonable to expect that, once sheltered, survivors would designate a latrine rather than smearing feces on the walls. And no historical grievance means the self-designated victims are owed a free flatscreen TV. The makeshift communities at the Superdome and Convention Center seemed to lack any civilizational impulse, firing even on the helicopters sent to save them. Far from rallying to maintain order, they contributed to the chaos or stood numb awaiting aid. Liberals will say that instinct was cheated from them -- no plantation boss wants the field hands to organize. More likely, the dividends of victimhood provide an unfortunate incentive to segregate from the social order."

Swedes turn blind eye to antisemitism: "Anti-Semitism is perceived as a minor problem in Sweden, restricted to marginal neo-Nazi and other extreme-Right groups. Anti-Jewish ferment among parts of the country's Arab and Muslim population is largely denied and ignored. Nevertheless, the phenomenon exists and manifests itself among some Arab and Muslim pupils in suburban schools, on Muslim websites in Swedish, and in attacks on Jews and their institutions. . a wave of anti-Semitic violence has swept over Europe. Most attention has been paid to the arsons and other violent attacks in France and other countries such as Germany and Belgium. But Swedish Jewry, too, has felt this phenomenon. Swedish Jewry seems, however, to have been the only segment of society not just to be affected by the violence, but also to notice it."

Hitchens on the lessons of Bali: "The return of murderous nihilism to Bali is highly instructive. It shows, first, that the fanatics of Islamism don't know how to stop. And it also shows that they never learn. How can Jemaah Islamiyah, which almost ruined Indonesia's economy by its filthy attack three years ago, possibly have tried to repeat the same crime in the same place? If we look for answers to this question, we shall find answers that completely discredit the current half-baked apologies for terrorism."

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

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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ELSEWHERE

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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ELSEWHERE

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

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

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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ELSEWHERE

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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ELSEWHERE

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)

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