POLITICS, HAPPINESS AND GENES

The fact that political stance is highly hereditary ties the two reports below together:

Even the Left-leaning Pew Research Center is still finding that conservatives are happier than Leftists. Such results are hardly surprising. Leftist politics are the politics of grievance, complaint and whining. But I also liked the comment about Democrats by Statguy: "Anyone who consistently looks to the government for help is in for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness".

Depression: Those pesky genes at work yet again: "In a world first, researchers from NSW have discovered the gene responsible for depression. After 25 years' research, scientists have found that people who carry a particular gene are more likely to suffer depression regardless of their life experiences. The medical breakthrough will have major ramifications for diagnosis and treatment of the disease which affects one in four Australians. The study, to be published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry this week, shows that people who carry a short serotonin transporter gene are predisposed to depression. Conversely, those who carry a long version of the serotonin transporter gene would be more resilient to whatever life throws at them. Around 43per cent of the population is believed to carry the short version of the gene".

So we should perhaps feel sorry for Leftists. They are born miserable. The trouble is that they want to take all the rest of us down with them too. They hate other people being happy. That is why their policies are good at tearing down the rich but hopeless at lifting up the poor. The results of their policies uncover what their real priorities are -- hurting rather than helping. Stalin and his ilk were no accident.

Update:

There is another report on the genetics of depression here.

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Well-deserved: "The sharp drop in the price of Google's shares may portend a long-awaited pullback in the broader stock market, technical analysts said. Google closed on Nasdaq at $US362.62 ($488.11), down $US27.76 ($37.36) for the day, after earlier falling as low as $US338.51 ($455.56). Google's 7.1 percent drop didn't come out of the blue. The stock is down 23.7 percent since January 11, when it hit its lifetime high of $US475.11 ($639.50)."

I guess the media will try to ignore this but a manifesto against Islamofascism has just been signed by some notable campaigners -- Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bernard-Henri Levy etc. Excerpt: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats...."

Leftists blame the victim: "There's a certain consistent pattern regarding the worldwide Left's assessment of culpability for Muslim terror. It is the fault of the murdered.... For a decade or more, it has been a given on the Left that Israel is to blame for terror committed against Israelis by Palestinian Muslims (Palestinian Christians don't engage in suicide terror). What else are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they had Apache helicopters, the argument goes, they would use them. But they don't, so they use the poor man's nuclear weapon -- suicide terror. The same argument is given to explain 9-11. Three thousand innocent Americans were incinerated by Islamic terrorists because America has been meddling in the Middle East so long. This was bound to happen. And, anyway, don't we support Israel? And when Muslim terrorists blew up Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others, the Left in Spain and elsewhere blamed Spanish foreign policy. After all, the Spanish government had sent troops into Iraq. When largely Muslim rioters burned and looted for a month in France, who was blamed? France, of course -- France doesn't know how to assimilate immigrants... During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, black mobs murdered innocent Korean shopkeepers and burned sections of the city. The liberal response in America was virtually universal: We must understand the anger of these people..."

Abortions getting easier: "Women who are less than nine weeks pregnant can safely have medical abortions at home, according to the head of a government-backed pilot project. Abortion services for the 20,000 women who seek a chemically induced abortion every year could be transformed should the Department of Health's official evaluation of the pilot confirm initial findings. But it is also likely to provoke controversy from anti-abortion campaigners who will claim that home abortions would make the procedure easier and therefore lead to more women having terminations. Shirley Butler, the project manager of one pilot which has tested the abortions with 172 women patients since 2004, told the Guardian: "We haven't had any significant problems apart from one woman who had a slightly heavy bleed. In my opinion medical abortions outside of acute hospitals seem to be safe.""

Why foreign aid to Africa does not work: "Economic development in Africa will depend -- as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world -- on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders. Development everywhere is homegrown. As G-8 ministers and rock stars fussed about a few billion dollars here or there for African governments, the citizens of India and China (where foreign aid is a microscopic share of income) were busy increasing their own incomes by $715 billion in 2005."

Leftist scam in Britain: "A 2 million pound bid for funds made to Walsall Council has been turned down as officials have never heard of the organisation and were staggered that its plea was for nearly twice as much cash as 53 others put together. The Anti Abuse Of Minorities group request was to help fund investigations into racial abuse and institutionalised racism. The application was nearly twice as much as the total 1.2 million pounds requested by 53 other groups across the borough. Councillor Zahid Ali, communities and partnership cabinet membership, said he had never heard of the group, which cannot be found on the internet. The application was one of the least researched he had ever seen he added. "It was the first time I had heard of them. We just don't know much about them. It was their first application and many of the forms were incomplete. There was no way we could give this kind of money." Efforts to contact AAOM were unsuccessful."

Tim Blair has an interesting look back in time to when British cartoons about the Nazis were causing official palpitations similar to what we now see in response to the Mohammed cartoons.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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SIKHISM

I have always liked the Sikhs. Sikhs were one of the many groups in the very multi-ethnic area where I grew up. I remember in my early teens how a tall dignified brown man in a blue turban gave me a tract about Guru Nanak (founder of Sikhism). The name of the publisher of the tract so amused me that I remember it to this day, nearly 50 years later: The Gurpurb publishing company.

Although Sikhs are sometimes mistaken for Muslims because they wear turbans, Sikhism in fact started out as an Indian alternative to Islam and Sikhs fought the Muslims almost from the inception of Sikhism. There is a good interview here with a British Sikh leader who calls on Britain to stand firm against Islamic pressure.

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Arrogant EU elitists: "The French President, Jacques Chirac, will urge European leaders to set the doomed European Union constitution aside and consider radical projects that can be pushed through under existing treaties. A list of more than a dozen such projects has been drawn up already, some at the heart of the EU constitutional treaty frozen since France and Holland rejected it in referendums last year, and from which Mr Chirac will choose a few to present at summits in March and June. Ideas salvaged from the constitution include the creation of an elected EU president, replacing the present system of a six-month rotating presidency. The French list includes asking the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, to take on the effective role of EU foreign minister. Paris also said it would be possible to use existing treaties to form an EU diplomatic service. New EU embassies would replace overseas delegation offices now operated by the European Commission.... A French official called for European Union lessons for secondary school pupils in all 25 member states, based on a standardised teaching model covering EU values and history."

Addiction Gene: "Genetics researchers have confirmed that people with a different form of a certain gene are more susceptible to drug and alcohol addiction. They hope the finding will help predict who might get hooked and what treatments will help those who do. Researchers led by Wolfgang Sadee, a scientist at the Ohio State University, have figured out how differences in one gene can make the brain more sensitive to alcohol, narcotics, or nicotine. The gene Sadee's team looked at has long been known to code for a kind of brain protein called an opioid receptor, which acts like a switch, turning on pleasure and blocking pain when triggered by certain addictive drugs."

Mexico still stupidly socialist: "The future for foreign manufacturing (maquiladoras) in Mexico is bleak. Tijuana, home to one half of the nation's foreign owned plants, has enjoyed zero unemployment for the last five years. That trend has reversed. This month 17 Japanese manufacturers in TJ announced they are moving their operations to Asia. There is now growing unemployment in every sector of Tijuana's economy. Vicente Fox deserves much of the responsibility for making Mexico less investor friendly by not advancing two of his campaign pledges: To overhaul a socialistic and antiquated set of labor laws and reducing bureaucratic red tape. His policies, in fact, have created more red tape and increased the costs of doing business in this country."

Venezuela: Another destructive revolution: "Seven years after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez first took office, an event commemorated earlier this month, Juan Francisco Rivas is still waiting for the 'revolution.' His 24-square-meter makeshift house, currently inhabited by nine people, sits at a 45-degree angle atop one of the city's worst hillside slums, Petare. His roof is a single metal sheet. There is no hot water. Mr. Rivas voted for Mr. Chavez in 1998 but today, while showing his often-flooded living room, says, 'Look at this place and tell me honestly that Chavez is for the poor.' During the 1990s, Rivas worked as a carpenter and even had social security. Today he is grateful to get three days of work per week, all in the underground economy."

Stateless in Somalia, and loving it : "Somalia is in the news again. Rival gangs are shooting each other, and why? The reason is always the same: the prospect that the weak-to-invisible transitional government in Mogadishu will become a real government with actual power. The media invariably describe this prospect as a 'hope.' But it's a strange hope that is accompanied by violence and dread throughout the country. Somalia has done very well for itself in the 15 years since its government was eliminated. The future of peace and prosperity there depends in part on keeping one from forming."

Wanted: Secretary General: "This week, The New York Times finally caught onto a story that U.N. experts and others in the press have been focused on for months -- the world body's upcoming selection of its next Secretary General. The current Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was first elected in 1996, and according to U.N. tradition may only serve two terms. It doesn't help, of course, that on his watch corruption, nepotism and incompetence have become the organization's defining traits. So what happens now?"

80,000+ now on "no-fly" lists: "The latest figures that I have seen are that at least 80,000 Americans are now on FBI and Homeland Security's red-flagged 'no fly' lists with another 325,000 on yellow-flagged 'watch lists' (the latter being subject to body and luggage searches). Hundreds more names are added every week. The criteria for being put in these lists is secret, and there is no official procedure for getting off a list. Government propaganda for these lists implies that only 'known terrorists' and terror 'suspects' are on the lists, but the reality is far different."

FDR believed in Stalin: "The great irony, unacknowledged by Russian historians even today, is that had it not been for the hundreds of thousands of Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the Red Army would never have reached Berlin before the Americans. Roosevelt refused to attach strings to aid. Nor, more surprisingly, did he intervene or protest when it was discovered that the Soviet Military Mission in the US was spying shamelessly and flying quantities of stolen documents from the Manhattan Project out of the country". More on Roosevelt and Stalin here.

Rand Simberg has a good fisking of a particularly nutty bit of Leftist kookery.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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STALINISM STILL LIVES AMONG AMERICAN "LIBERALS"

Stalin of course said that there was perfect freedom of speech in Russia -- as long as people agreed with him

A friend of mine took his young daughter to visit the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, explaining to her that the place is important because years ago it sold books no other store would - even, perhaps especially, books whose ideas many people found offensive. So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he didn't really mind seeing piles of Churchill's books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in.

However, it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed English translation of Oriana Fallaci's new book, "The Force of Reason," might finally be available, and that because Fallaci's militant stance against Islamic militants offends so many people, a store committed to selling banned books would be the perfect place to buy it. So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was in yet.

"No," snapped the clerk. "We don't carry books by fascists."

Now let's just savor the absurd details of this for a minute. City Lights has a long and proud history of supporting banned authors - owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted (and acquitted) for obscenity in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and a photo at the bookstore showed Ferlinghetti proudly posing next to a sign reading "banned books."

Yet his store won't carry, of all people, Fallaci, who is not only being sued in Italy for insulting religion because of her latest book but continues to fight the good fight against those who think that the appropriate response to offensive books and cartoons is violent riots. It's particularly repugnant that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by a snotty San Francisco clerk.....

Strangest of all is the scenario of such a person disliking an author for defending Western civilization against radical Islam - when one of the first things those poor, persecuted Islamists would do, if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the United States, is crush suspected homosexuals like him beneath walls.... The store's website proudly declares that the place is "known for our commitment to freedom of expression".

More here. (HT Augean Stables)

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ELSEWHERE



Google have just introduced the trial (beta) version of a new facility called Google Pages. It is yet another facility that claims to make it easy to create your own home page without your needing to know any html etc. It appears to be in a very rough state at the moment, however. About all I could find that I could usefully do with it was to upload and store images there. The image above comes down from my site there. I hope they allow a bit of bandwidth or the image will NOT come down. They are very generous with diskspace so I hope the same applies to bandwidth. Yes. I do know about photobucket. I have got my most sickening image stored there. See below:



Should Wal-Mart reduce wages? : "Legislators who take orders (and favors) from Wal-Mart's rivals hope their meddling will raise Wal-Mart's labor costs and thus render the company less competitive. But this is a delusion. The whole burden will be borne by workers and by those forced into less-desirable work (or none). Maryland's mandate does not compel Wal-Mart to spend a dollar more on employee compensation. All it demands is that Wal-Mart pays no more than 92 percent of compensation as wages (or non-health benefits). Compelling Wal-Mart employees to accept a larger fraction of their pay in the form of health insurance rather than cash is a particularly bad deal for housewives and students, who are usually covered under Dad's family plan. It is also a bad deal for seniors covered by Medicare. The law injures actual and potential Wal-Mart employees in Maryland, particularly housewives, students and seniors seeking relatively easy part-time work."

There is an interesting site called "Union Facts". They say that "Union leaders have abused the trust of their members. They've misspent member dues and harmed the very same people they promise to protect. The Center for Union Facts has gathered a wealth of information about the size, scope, political activities, and criminal activity of the labor movement in the United States of America". A fact I particularly liked is this one: "Workers at Wal-Mart stores in Ontario earn higher wages than workers at UFCW-represented Real Canadian Super Stores"

Media scum: "Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven." Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends. Yet no major French newspaper carried the story."



Why Summers fell: "Harvard's 27th president announced his resignation last week, but Lawrence Summers's fall from grace actually began on Oct. 26, 2001, less than four months after his presidency began. That was the date on which he addressed the annual public service awards banquest at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and had the temerity to speak favorably of American patriotism -- and, even more audaciously, to express admiration for the men and women who serve in the US armed forces. Patriotism is a word "used too infrequently" on campuses like Harvard's, Summers said, and too many academics regard those who wear the uniform with ''disaffection." He stressed "the importance of clearly expressing our respect and support for the military," and pointedly voiced the "hope that when you have this award next year, among those who will be recognized will be those who have served our country in uniform. . . . [W]e need to remember that of all the kinds of public service, there is a special nobility, a special grace, to those who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for our country." .... Harvard's motto is "Veritas," Latin for "truth." But at Harvard, as in much of academia, ideology, not truth, is the highest value"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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MIKE TREMOGLIE SUMS UP THE PORTS NONSENSE

The "Washington Post" headline sounded the clarion call that Arabs are "poised to take over significant operations at six American ports."..... This was all very confusing to me. As a Philadelphian who used to live near the waterfront, knew people who worked there and would occasionally watch ships unload, I knew that the port was controlled by the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority (PRPA) - not by any one company.....

It seems the facts are quite different from the hysteria. I asked the port authority to explain what will happen after DPW buys P&O. According to Joe Menta, communications director for the PRPA, what this sale means to Philadelphia is that Dubai Ports will acquire half interest in a firm that loads and unloads ships at one terminal - Tioga Marine. Little or no container cargo passes through this terminal, primarily used for the fruit trade. Menta explained the structure of the port of Philadelphia. It's controlled by the PRPA, an independent entity of the state. PRPA owns several terminals on the waterfront. It leases these terminals to private operators who are primarily responsible for arranging the loading and unloading of cargo.

Arabs will own or control no part of the port itself. The only Arab influence will be on the appointments of some of the board members of the stevedoring firm. This is quite different from the image of Arabs controlling the port. The idea that Dubai Ports World will be determining who comes, who goes, the number and type of ships, how and where they are unloaded and loaded, who's hired and the security for the entire port of Philadelphia is simply not true.

Ever since 9/11, the liberal mantra (which included even some Republicans) has been to chide Americans in general and the Bush administration specifically to be careful about stereotyping all Arabs and Muslims as terrorists. As recently as last week, Al Gore, while speaking in Saudi Arabia, said that the Bush administration had mistreated Arabs. Now, many of these same folks are now themselves stereotyping Arabs.... Many Democrats went from demanding constitutional rights for Arab terrorists in court to opposing Arab business owners buying a share of some terminals.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Feisty Scottish blogger, Neil Craig has had an apt letter published in The Scotsman: "David Irving is sentenced to three years in jail for denying the Holocaust. The late ruler of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, also denied the Holocaust, but this did not prevent us helping him to get his own country and ethnically cleansing 560,000 Serbs, 240,000 of whom are still "missing". Nor did it prevent him being invited to the United Kingdom's celebration of the defeat of Nazism in Europe. Just as there are some Holocausts which may not be denied and some which may, there are clearly acceptable and unacceptable Nazis".

Was Jerry Jewish?: "Tom and Jerry" was part of a Jewish conspiracy to present mice as clean, an Iranian official said. Hasan Bolkhari, an adviser to the Iranian Education ministry on mass media, said Hollywood Jews created the cartoon in an attempt to turn around the dirty image of mice, because Nazis had stigmatized Jews as mice. "The mouse is very clever and smart," Bolkhari said in a televised seminar on film last week monitored by the Middle East Media Research Instuite. "Everything he does is so cute. He kicks the poor cat's ass. Yet this cruelty does not make you despise the mouse. He looks so nice, and he is so clever...This is exactly why some say it was meant to erase this image of mice from the minds of European children, and to show that the mouse is not dirty and has these traits."

The British answer to rising crime: Reduced punishment: "Home Secretary Charles Clarke has outlined plans to reform the punishment system by pushing forward a new community sentencing policy which would reduce the amount of black offenders sentenced to prison for less serious offences. The incentive is part of a five year plan for the new National Offender Management Service (Noms) which will emphasis tough community punishments and sending criminals to jail only when there is a strong case. It would also contribute towards reducing the problem of prison overcrowding. Offenders who are given community orders will undertake unpaid work with possible `rewards' for offenders in the community who go on the straight and narrow. Mr Clarke was also expected to highlight previously-announced plans for "adult community prisons" for less serious offenders, which would maintain links with family and the local area. A Home Office source said: "This is the Home Secretary's vision for the future direction of how we manage offenders as well as summary of where we are now. "The Home Secretary will look at increasing the number of hours of visible, unpaid work performed by offenders in the community."

It couldn't happen to a better bunch of bastards: "CBS Corp. reported a loss of $9.1 billion in the fourth quarter on hefty charges to write down the value of its radio and television businesses, the media company reported Thursday. CBS was reporting earnings for the first time as a separate company since its split with Viacom Inc. was completed at the beginning of the year. CBS reported the fourth quarter as if it were already a separate entity. On that basis, CBS had a net loss amounting to $6 per share for the three months ended Dec. 31, weighed down by charges to write down the fair market value of its radio and television properties. The valuations of radio stations in particular have suffered in recent years due to stagnant revenues and higher costs. The latest results compared to an even larger net loss of $18.4 billion, or $10.99 per share, in the comparable period in 2004, when the company also recorded big charges to write down its radio stations as well as its outdoor advertising business".

Sharia has won in the media: "Apparently, it hasn't occurred to the media poo-bahs that the prohibition against likenesses of Mohammed should apply only to Muslims, not to the rest of us. (As Dennis Prager noted, 'It's like Jews rioting when someone else eats pork.') The cartoons should've been printed and broadcast as widely as the bruised face of Cheney's hunting partner when he got out of the hospital. That would've resolved the matter overnight, by giving cover to every news outlet and reasserting the primacy of free expression in a free society. And that's what makes the press's abject cravenness so consequential. It implies that, for all intents and purposes, we are living under sharia."

Progress on used nuclear reactor fuel: "It's a question that has dogged the nuclear industry since the 1970s: What can it do with spent fuel rods? The radioactive waste, eventually slated for permanent storage at a still unfinished site in Nevada, has been piling up, mostly at the nation's 65 commercial nuclear power plants. Late Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave its blessing to a solution: a storage site on a barren patch of a reservation in Utah that's home to some 25 native Americans, next to a proving ground for chemical and biological weapons, and near an Air Force bombing range. The NRC licensed what would be the nation's largest -- and only private -- nuclear-waste storage facility. A consortium of utility companies would store for up to 40 years some 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel for an industry rapidly running out of space."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE FACTS

From my point of view as someone whose ancestors came to Australia chained up in the holds of sailing ships, America's two civil wars -- the war of independence being the first -- are quite appalling. Australians achieved all the same ends without a drop of blood being spilt. We were just more patient and less driven by religiously-based absolutism. The excerpts below are from the editor of America's "Patriot Post"

The Founding Fathers established the Constitutional Union as a voluntary agreement among the several states, subordinate to The Declaration of Independence, which never mentions the nation as a singular entity, but instead repeatedly references the states as sovereign bodies, unanimously asserting their independence. The states, in ratifying the Constitution, established the federal government as their agent -- not the other way around. At Virginia's ratification convention, for example, the delegates affirmed "that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to injury or oppression." Were this not true, the federal government would not have been established as federal, but instead a national, unitary and unlimited authority. Notably, and in large measure as a consequence of the War between the States, the "federal" government has grown to become an all-but unitary and unlimited authority.

Our Founders upheld the individual sovereignty of the states, even though the wisdom of secessionist movements was a source of great tension and debate from the day the Constitution was ratified. Tellingly, Hamilton, the greatest proponent of centralization among the Founders, noted in Federalist No. 81 that waging war against the states "would be altogether forced and unwarranted." At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton argued, "Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?"

Yet Lincoln threatened the use of force to maintain the Union in his First Inaugural Address, saying, "In [preserving the Union] there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority." Lincoln may have preserved the Union geographically (at great cost to the Constitution), but politically and philosophically, the concept of a voluntary union was shredded by sword, rifle and cannon.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln employed lofty rhetoric to conceal the truth of our nation's most costly war -- a war that resulted in the deaths of some 600,000 Americans and the severe disabling of over 400,000 more. He claimed to be fighting so that "this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." In fact, Lincoln was ensuring just the opposite by waging an appallingly bloody war while ignoring calls for negotiated peace. It was the "rebels" who were intent on self-government, and it was Lincoln who rejected their right to that end, despite our Founders' clear admonition to the contrary in the Declaration....

The second of Lincoln's two most oft-noted achievements was ending the abomination of slavery. It has come to be understood that this calamitous war was the necessary cost of ridding our nation of slavery, yet no other nation at the time required war to do so. In fact, the cost of the war itself would have more than paid for compensatory emancipation, giving each slave 40 acres and a mule -- all without bloodshed....

Little reported and lightly regarded in our history books is the way Lincoln abused and discarded the individual rights of Northern citizens. Tens of thousands of citizens were imprisoned (most without trial) for political opposition, or "treason," and their property confiscated. Habeas corpus and, in effect, the entire Bill of Rights were suspended. In fact, the Declaration of Independence details remarkably similar abuses by King George to those committed by Lincoln.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

More reason for the Left to hate Wal-Mart: "Wal-Mart is opening more 50 health clinics in their stores, adding to the nine started in a pilot program mainly in the Southeast. This could be the start of something remarkable-if Wal-Mart can begin applying the same downward price pressures to medical prices that it has applied to goods in general, then it could be the beginning of a trend that finally halts the long upward march of medical prices." (HT Brothers Judd)

What can we expect from a corrupt organization? "There are still too many complaints of sexual abuse against United Nations troops, the head of peacekeeping operations has said. Jean-Marie Guehenno said the UN had investigated 295 cases under a new reporting system introduced last year. It could take several more years to reform the system fully, says Jordan's UN envoy who last year urged changes. The 18 peace missions worldwide employ 85,000 staff from over 100 countries, with a budget of nearly $5bn. Mr Guehenno said although significant progress had been made in reducing the number of cases of sexual exploitation following an investigation in the Democratic Republic of Congo two years ago, much more needed to be done. "Allegations being lodged against UN peacekeeping personnel remain high and unacceptably so," he said."

Leftist antisemitism gets a slap: "London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Mr Livingstone was suspended from duty for four weeks from March 1 after being found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute. The three-man Adjudication Panel for England unanimously ruled that Mr Livingstone had been "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive" to Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold in February last year... Since Mr Livingstone lost the case he must pay his own costs - estimated at more than 80,000 pounds".

TSA hysteria never stops: "Some gates shut down after Bush Intercontinental security breach Houston Chronicle "Authorities evacuated thousands of passengers from Bush Intercontinental Airport today after a woman cut through a security checkpoint without being screened. Officials do not think the woman intended any harm. 'She was, in fact, looking for a restroom,' said Christopher White, spokesman for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. 'She walked out the exit lane and turned around and walked right back in,' White said."

African Christians not so patient: "Christian youths burned the corpses of Muslims on Thursday on the streets of Onitsha in southeastern Nigeria, the city worst hit by religious riots that have killed at least 146 people across the country in five days. Christian mobs, seeking revenge for the killings of Christians in the north, attacked Muslims with machetes, set fire to them, destroyed their houses and torched mosques in two days of violence in Onitsha, where 93 people died. "We are very happy that this thing is happening so that the north will learn their lesson," said Anthony Umai, a motorcycle taxi rider, standing close to where Christian youths had piled up the corpses of 10 Muslims and were burning them. Dozens more corpses had been thrown into the back of pick-up trucks by security services overnight, residents said.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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Thoughts on David Irving

I note that The Wall St. Journal has editorialized in defence of imprisoned historian David Irving. Excerpt: "And just when the Danish government is under unprecedented attack for its refusal to intervene in the editorial decision-making of a private newspaper, it seems perverse to offer Muslim provocateurs an example of a European country catering to one set of sensitivities but not another".

The WSJ accompanies this defence, however, with vast aspersions on the character and competence of Irving. But any claim that Irving is incompetent is absurd. I have been studying the Hitler era for over 40 years and it is clear to me that NOBODY knows the period better or in more detail than Irving does. He was after all the only one of the many eminent historians consulted who immediately picked the Kujau "Hitler Diaries" as a fake.

So what of the aspersions on Irving's character? I think those aspersions show a lack of understanding too. I would like to venture a more nuanced view. For a start, Irving's earlier position (which he now appears to have recanted) that there was no holocaust at all is clearly absurd. He is undoubtedly right in pointing to the 6 million figure as the roughest of guesses but I am totally unmoved by that. Whether 6 million died or 1 million died, the loss that Hitler inflicted on the human gene pool by his attacks on Jewry is incalculable (I am avoiding moral language here. Outrage is the Leftist's usual substitute for thinking and I hope to do better than that).

So what motivates Irving's gnawing away at the details of the holocaust? I think the WSJ is right in saying that Irving wishes to rehabilitate Hitler as far as he can. But why would he do that? I think I know. I think that Irving has immersed himself so deeply in the Hitler period that it is alive to him. I think in fact that he has fallen under the spell of Hitler. Mainly because of their need to deny that Hitler was a socialist, almost nobody in the modern world understands why Hitler had such vast appeal to Germans or why Germany followed him fanatically to the bitter end. Both Roberts (1938) and Heiden (1939) -- prewar anti-Nazi writers -- portray Hitler as widely revered and popular among the Germans of their day. As Heiden (1939, p. 98) put it: "The great masses of the people did not merely put up with National Socialism. They welcomed it".

So why did they welcome it? It is simple. Socialism and nationalism have long been and long will be the two political ideas which have most emotional appeal to people. And Hitler offered both in one package. That package would be powerfully appealing to this day except for the way Hitler's follies discredited it.

But in his constant reading of material from the period, Irving lives in a world where Hitler's ideas have not yet been discredited and he has fallen victim to their appeal. Very few people these days seem to have read Mein Kampf but it is in fact (as it was meant to be) a very persuasive book if you read it without thought of what it led to. Hitler comes across as an enquiring, passionate and yet reasonable mind who offers persuasive explanations of what has gone wrong with the world. And I think he has persuaded Irving. It is a strange thing but, as we know from the example of Leftist intellectuals today, simplistic explanations often do attract intelligent people.

References:
Heiden, K. (1939) One man against Europe Harmondsworth, Mddx.: Penguin
Roberts, S.H. (1938) The house that Hitler built N.Y.: Harper.

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Eclectecon is an economist who does not know the difference between "forgo" and "forego" but has a good selection of cartoons about cartoonists and Muslims up at the moment.

The AFL-CIO sweatshop: "They work outside in the middle of February at poverty-level wages. They don't have health benefits or regular hours. Their pay is docked for taking bathroom breaks. And they have no one to speak up for their needs. Ask a labor leader if these workers are in desperate need of a union. Then see if he'd like to revise his thought when he learns they're employees of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. With a ringing endorsement from AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, the Carpenters have taken to hiring the homeless to picket construction sites. Needless to say, there's no health care or pension plan contributions for these folks. In Las Vegas, the temp workers hired by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to protest outside Wal-Mart were paid a grand total of $6 an hour. The union was generous enough to cover bathroom breaks, but in the middle of a scorching desert summer with picketers dropping out from the heat, perhaps these part-time employees would have preferred health care."

English to run England again? "William Hague disclosed Tory ambitions to cut back the influence of Scottish MPs on laws affecting England during an attack on Gordon Brown and his powerbase yesterday. Mr Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, barely touched on international issues as he delivered a 20-minute tirade against the Chancellor for being bossy and "stuck in the past".... He opened a new line of attack on the Chancellor, the man most likely to lead Labour against the Tories at the next election, for his defence of Scottish MPs' power at Westminster. In a revival of his own policy as leader of the Conservative Party in the four years to 2001, Mr Hague added: "As Leader of the Opposition during the debates we had on devolution I feel no pleasure in pointing out that Scottish Labour MPs forcing through changes to England's laws does not make for a more harmonious United Kingdom. "Anyone who thinks that we can carry on legislating for England in exactly the same way as we did before devolution is clearly living in the past.""

Google still not Leftist enough. They defy the Bush administration and co-operate with the Chinese Communists but now the Chinese want more: "A state-run newspaper reported Tuesday that Google Inc. is under investigation for operating without a proper license in China and quoted an unnamed government official as saying the Internet giant needs to cooperate further with the authorities in blocking "harmful information" from its search results.... Dubbed the "eunuch edition" by some Chinese Internet users, the new search engine withholds results from Web sites the governing Communist Party finds objectionable, and returns limited results when users enter politically sensitive keywords. Google has defended its decision to launch the censored site, arguing that people in China can continue to use the Chinese version of its regular search engine, Google.com. It has also pointed out that the new search engine is the first in China to inform users when results have been removed because of the government's "laws, regulations and policies." But it appears Chinese authorities are now pressuring Google to cut off access in China to its regular search engine, and to stop telling users of the new site every time a search is censored.

"Yahoo" also does its share of political pandering. There is a story here noting that the words "allah" "binladen" "osama" and "raghead" (among others) were not allowed as part of Yahoo usernames -- until that got adverse publicity.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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 GOOD QUOTES FROM WINDSCHUTTLE'S LATEST ESSAY

"The Western concept of freedom of speech is not an absolute. The limits that should be imposed by good taste, social responsibility and respect for others will always be a matter for debate. But this is a debate that needs to be conducted within Western culture, not imposed on it from outside by threats of death and violence by those who want to put an end to all free debate."

"The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress it."

"But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue."

"Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist."

"The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies."

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Brookes News Update

Did the KGB help plan America's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?: Was Jimmy's Carter's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the culmination of a very successful campaign by the Washington-based Marxist-Leninistm Institute of Policies Studies and the KGB to permanently cripple America's intelligence services?
Why is the Kroger Liberal Party giving Bracks' Muslim blasphemy laws a pass?: Once again, Michael Kroger, why are you allowing Bracks to get away with his pro-Muslim blasphemy laws? I think it's time we got some answers
GDP's gross misconceptions about the Australian and US economies: So how can an economy be adding jobs while manufacturing is shedding them and forecasts for consumption appear optimistic?
So-called ethics, wages and economic stupidity: Labour rents its services out to employers who use it, in combination with other factors, to produce other goods or services, each factor being paid up to the value of its marginal product
Democrats, isolation and the de-ghetto-izing effect of the New Media: If one analyzes just who still votes Democrat these days there are certain commonalities to those communities. Not least amongst them is near-total isolation from the real world
The New York Times and mainstream media hypocrisy: The New York Times has proven to be a dishonest, cowardly, treasonous and bigoted rag
Water. a simple comfort for the citizens of Baghdad: The US Army is supplying Iraqis with the basic services that Saddam's regime had run down

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Jason Malloy has done a HUGE review of Richard Lynn's latest book: Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis. Jason's review is a solid academic paper in its own right but is nonetheless highly readable. Jason does find a few points of contention in what Lynn writes but the vast body of scientific findings that Lynn marshalls puts the case for racial differences in IQ beyond any reasonable scholarly doubt -- though not of course beyond political doubt. Leftists want acclaim, not the facts so they will dispute anything, logic and evidence regardless.



Garrison Keillor, vulgarian: "Yellow-dog Democrats like Keillor spend a lot of time whining about how America's standing in the world has declined of late, but this is how he treats a guest who spends half his time combating anti-Americanism in France. Simply because BHL mentions a fact that has actually caught other eyes (the tendency of Americans to become riotously fat) he is addressed like this: 'Thanks pal. . Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was all that about? Were fat people involved?' One moans for shame that such a vulgar jerk is thought of, and even known overseas, as some kind of national entertainer."

About time: "Japanese Red Army founder Fusako Shigenobu was sentenced to 20 years in prison today for a 1974 siege of the French embassy in The Netherlands during her once-dreaded group's decade of global violence. The grey-haired 60-year-old raised her fist as the judge found her guilty of attempted murder, although he did give her the life sentence requested by prosecutors. "The verdict is not the end. It is only the beginning. Strong will shall keep spreading," Shigenobu said in a haiku poem read outside the courtroom by her lawyer. Shigenobu, a former soy-sauce company worker turned militant supporter of the Palestinian cause, had lived in the Middle East for about 30 years before resurfacing in Japan with her 2000 arrest. As her leftist radicalism lost support both in Japan and the Arab world, she announced the end of the Japanese Red Army in 2001 and has voiced regret over the group's victims, although not the cause."

A population on welfare limits your options: "Detroit's financial mess has put the Detroit Zoo on the endangered list. City council members said their vote was not to close the zoo, but some felt they were being bullied by a state deadline and lawmakers who look down on Detroit.... The Kilpatrick administration and the Zoological society proposed an agreement that council rejected on Monday. A spokesperson for the mayor said the process of closing the zoo has begun. But, she added, the door is still open to discussions with council members should they come up with an alternate plan."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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Why have I put a picture of GWB at the top of my blog? It is NOT because I totally agree with him. His big government policies are completely antithetical to my libertarian views. I have just put the picture there as a counterweight to the Leftists who deride this thoroughly responsible, moderate and decent man as "Chimpoleon" etc.

SOME ECONOMICS

Sad to see that Ireland is slipping back into economic Fascism: "Ireland is commonly regarded around the world as a shining example of private markets at work. Yet, unnoticed by many, over the last five years, the country has been sliding into the abyss of rising government spending, indirect tax increases and more regulation and state involvement in the economy.... The whole premise of the European social model based on partnership agreements over wages, including the one practiced in Ireland, is supposed to ensure that the state protects the worker interests. This stated objective of the European corporatist model is not supported by the hard evidence. In fact, the cumulative wage growth in the US since 1996 was 55.7 percent - a full 24.6 percent higher than labor productivity gains alone, making US workers the greatest beneficiaries of total productivity growth. For the Eurozone, the cumulative wage growth was just 24.2 percent as opposed to 44.6 percent in the group of flexible labor market economies. Thus, less partnership-driven economies saw greater gains to workers, while more corporatist economies saw greater returns accruing to the capital owners - hardly the evidence in support of the "caring partnership" vision of our Taoiseach" [Prime Minister].

Friedman on Germany: "At the moment, of course, Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible-to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed. This is far more urgent than it would otherwise be if Germany were not in the euro. This set of policies would open up the German potential. After all, Germany has a very able and productive workforce. It has high-quality products that are valued all over the world. It has every opportunity to be a productive, growing state. It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs."

The politics of economic nationalism : "The rhetoric of economic nationalism is scattered throughout this year's Economic Report of the President, and it pervades policy discussions among politicians and in the press. It comes so naturally that we hardly even notice it -- I'm sure I've slipped into it myself. So it's important to point out how unnatural it really is. ... Nationalism about the economy is a marketing tool for politicians, and it leads to loss of freedom and responsibility, with enormous quantities of resources channeled through government."

Is free trade really wrecking the union?: "The case for free trade really isn't about jobs at all, but rather living standards. In a free labor market, wages and salaries would adjust until all who wanted to work (at the prevailing market rates) could do so. In such a scenario, dropping tariffs wouldn't create jobs, it would merely shift workers from less to more productive lines. Now it's true, in our heavily taxed and regulated labor market, a worker needs to possess a minimum productivity to make him employable, and thus if his productivity goes up (because of free trade) then he is more likely to pass this threshold, so in that sense one could argue that free trade leads to net job growth. But I just wanted to correct the popular misconception that the case for free trade concerns jobs."

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing article here by a Muslim that holds out India as an example of Muslims and non-Muslims all getting along peacefully together. I guess most Indian writers might be reluctant to puncture that balloon but it is of course the most colossal nonsense. "Communal" (Hindu/Muslim) riots and violent clashes are endemic in India. Even Mahatma Gandhi could not stop it. It is true that Hindus and Mussulmen do get along in everyday life in India after a fashion but in India religion is a deadly serious matter. Reincarnation, for instance, is central to how a Hindu understands the world he lives in. If India has not produced Jihadis who go abroad to kill and maim, it is only because Indian Muslims have the more immediate worry of their Hindu neighbours.

The underlying Muslim problem: "It is my belief that a substantial part of what drives Islamism is a cultural dysfunction broadly defined by a terrible fear of sexuality resulting in a vile hatred of women. In other words, the awesome power of female sexuality scares the daylights out of fundamentalist Muslims. My theory might explain why Islamist suicide bombers often wrap their penises in tinfoil so that it's still usable -- ready to deflower (subtext: despoil) virgins galore after Allah supposedly greets what's left of them in "Paradise." My theory might also explain why situational (prison-style) homosexuality, though officially punishable by death, is widespread in the fundamentalist Muslim world. It certainly explains why the practice of forced clitoridectomy; the destruction of a woman's clitoris, is rampant in the Arab Muslim world."

Tony Blair's "Enabling Act" (On March 23 of 1933, Hitler got the German parliament to pass a similar Act): "Some have called it the Henry VIII bill; one MP thought Stalin would be a more appropriate dictator to put his name to it. A leading academic refers to it as the "abolition of parliament bill". You get the point. The bill's real title is bland and boring to the point of soporific, which may be why it hasn't been much noticed; but underneath the benign facade of the legislative and regulatory reform bill lurks a machinery that would give the government the power to pass far-reaching laws without the bother of getting the approval of parliament. On the surface, the bill is aimed at removing regulatory burdens on business by using short-cut procedures which wouldn't require parliamentary debate. The same process would also put into law uncontroversial recommendations by Britain's law commissions, the government's legal thinktanks. All that seems not only reasonable, but positively helpful to the efficiency of law-making. But look again, and Henry VIII comes into the picture. What the government has inserted into the bill is a way of allowing laws to be passed by a minister's order, which bypasses parliament altogether.... It will become possible for the government, by ministerial order, without a debate in parliament, to create new criminal offences, punishable with less than two years imprisonment. It could also, according to Cambridge law professor John Spencer (who is not alone in his analysis), introduce house-arrest, give the police stronger powers of arrest and interrogation, set up new courts, and in effect re-write the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges."

Extraordinary! "Wearing vests covered in military patches, a band of motorcyclists rolls around the country from one soldier's funeral to another, cheering respectfully to overshadow jeers from church protesters. They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals. Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs -- explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq. The bikers shield the families of dead soldiers from the protesters, and overshadow the jeers with patriotic chants and a sea of red, white and blue flags. "The most important thing we can do is let families know that the nation cares," said Don Woodrick, the group's Kentucky captain. "When a total stranger gets on a motorcycle in the middle of winter and drives 300 miles to hold a flag, that makes a powerful statement.""

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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BLOGGER.COM MALFUNCTION

I am rather peeved that I am not being allowed to post on "Socialized Medicine" at the moment. The error message I get is:

553 Permission denied.blog/28/14/4/socglory/archives/2006_02_01_socglory_archive.html

Any clues to what it is all about?

Fortunately the Mirror Site is up and running.

Update

Miracles do happen! I got a same-day reply from blogger.com in response to my email complaining of the above problem. And they fixed the problem too! Below is the reply:

"Thanks for writing in. I've just checked the blog you mentioned, and I was able to post and republish without a problem. A small number of users are seeing a 553 Permission denied error when publishing to Blog*Spot. If this happens to you, log out of Blogger, clear your Blogger.com cookies, and log back in. We are working to fix this problem. For further updates on Blogger issues, please see our Blogger Status page here: http://status.blogger.com/ Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns!"

I used to check the Status page when problems arose but it was rarely updated and never told me anything relevant to the mess of the day so I no longer do.

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BLACK AGGRESSION

That populations of African ancestry worldwide are characterized by enormously high levels of aggression, violence and crime is beyond question. It happens in Africa. It happens in Britain and it happens in the USA. It can of course be suppressed. Apartheid South Africa and pre-1960 America certainly kept it down to much lower levels than it is these days. But the extremity of the measures needed to suppress it tells a tale in itself.

The only really interesting question is why the levels of black aggression are so high. The kneejerk Leftist explanation is of course that it is all due to white "racism". How that explains the huge levels of violence in the all-black countries of Africa is not mentioned. Generations have now grown up in Africa who have scarcely even SEEN a white man and the violence seems to have escalated rather than diminished. So I propose simply to ignore here brain-dead Leftist "explanations".

The higher level of black aggressiveness COULD be explained as an outcome of the exhaustively-documented black/white difference in average IQ. Stupid people have fewer ways of getting what they want so often resort to violence as a last resort. For that reason, Australia's prisons are full of dumb whites. Lynn, however, points to statistical studies showing that the higher level of black aggressiveness cannot be explained by IQ differences alone. He shows that there must be personality differences involved as well and goes on to make a carefully-reasoned case for saying that Blacks are more psychopathic than whites. In a slightly earlier work, Lynn interprets psychopathy as being itself the manifestation of two more basic traits. To quote Itzkoff's summary of Lynn:

"He demonstrates convincingly that from all the available research, psychopaths along with low intelligence are responsible for society's problems with crime, drug addiction, unwed mothers, drug abuse, rape, child abuse, unemployment, etc. These people are the underclass. And they result from the combination of two behavioral traits. They almost universally have low conscientiousness and agreeableness or altruism. (Lynn explains that "altruism" would be a better term than "agreeableness" but that term has now "stuck" as the common descriptor for this behavioral trait). That is, people who are both highly unconscientious and disagreeable are pathological, and both of these traits are highly heritable."

So there is a reasonable case for saying that many blacks have personality deficits on top of ability deficits. And the results are all to obvious in the form of massive black crime -- often crime of the most callous sort.

What the above analysis overlooks to some extent, however, is that whites can be pretty aggressive and violent too. Neither Hitler nor Stalin were blacks and the recent barbarities in the former Yugoslavia are surely second to none in brutality. The obvious difference is, of course, that aggression is not a daily experience amongst most whites, whereas it certainly is a constant undertow in most black populations. It can certainly be argued that the occasional explosive outbursts of aggression that characterize white populations are in fact worse than the constant bubbling of aggression that characterizes black populations but I am here concerned with the factual rather than the evaluative aspects of the matter.

And it would seem that there is at least one place where whites have a pretty high level of constant aggression too: Scotland in general and Glasgow in particular. Glasgow is an enormously violent place in some ways. Knifing people to death in drunken Saturday night brawls is an old tradition among the Glasgow "Jimmies". Yet Glaswegians do not at all come across as particularly aggressive people. In 1977 I personally did a doorknock survey of a random sample of Glaswegians -- including slum-clearance suburbs such as Easterhouse. And, accent aside, they seemed to me to be no different from the average Anglo-Australian. And the results of the survey tended to confirm that lack of distinctiveness. On the two major personality variables that I measured (aggressive dominance and ambition), Glaswegians were found to be no different from Londoners.

So I think that in Glasgow we have a very clear case of a difference being solely attitude-driven -- attitudes which are themselves in turn tradition-driven. I found that Glaswegians were as different to Londoners in attitudes as they were similar in personality. And the tradition at work in the Glasgow fighting is really no mystery. Clan warfare was long endemic in Scotland until the accursed English suppressed it. But attitudinal remnants of that warfare survive. To this day you can hear in Glasgow derisive words such as "Choochtah" applied to Highlanders. In short, I think a culture of pugnacity was long ago generated in Scotland (presumably due to rivalry over very scarce resources) and that the persistence of culture has ensured that considerable remnants of that pugnacity survive into modern times.

That similar traditions would be at work among blacks is obvious. They really are victims of "three strikes and you are out". They are disadvantaged by their abilities, their personalities and their attitudes. Changing ability and personality is is not at present within our reach but there are some possibilities for changing attitudes. So those who aim to improve the situation of blacks should concentrate on the attitudes that blacks have. The attitudes that are at present being inculcated in blacks (that they are helpless "victims") would however seem to be the exact reverse of what is required if improvements in black welfare are seriously desired.

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ELSEWHERE



Still no free speech in Hitler's homeland: "Right-wing British historian David Irving has been sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court for denying the Holocaust 17 years ago, despite his claim to have changed his views. Irving, 67, had pleaded guilty at the trial in Vienna on a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry but insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving, a controversial figure who has had brushes with the law in several countries, appeared stunned by the three-year sentence. "I'm very shocked and I'm going to appeal," he said as he walked out of court."

Perverse Leftist judges in Italy too: "A panel of Italian judges upheld the November acquittals of three North Africans on international terror charges, ruling that recruiting suicide bombers to fight against U.S. soldiers is not terrorism, a lawyer said Thursday. The verdict by the Milan judges, released Wednesday, echoes an earlier one in the case when a lower court judge ruled the actions of the three men were those of guerrillas, not terrorists."

MSM coverup of Saddam's WMDs: "Tape recordings released over the weekend show that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program at least as recently as 2000 - but the press has decided the bombshell development isn't newsworthy. Speaking at the Intelligence Group Summit in Arlington, Va., Saddam tapes translator Bill Tierney revealed that in one recorded conversation, the Iraqi dictator can be heard discussing a plan to enrich uranium using a technique known as plasma separation.... News that Saddam had an ongoing enrichment program comports with the account of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the nuclear physicist who ran Iraq's nuclear centrifuge program. After turning himself in to U.S. forces in July 2003, Dr. Obeidi revealed that he had successfully hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints from U.N. weapons inspectors on Saddam's orders. Despite the staggering implications of the audiotaped uranium revelation, only one mainstream media outlet had covered the news as of Monday morning. Noting that Saddam's enrichment program was "totally unknown to U.N. weapons inspectors," the Washington Times editorialized on Monday: "It is apparent that the American public has much more to learn about . . . . precisely when Saddam's nuclear weapons programs actually stopped.""

Madsen Pirie says that British food has improved way out of sight in recent years and he attributes it to McDonalds! How incorrect can you get?

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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 precentor and the dragon

What is a precentor? Give up? A precentor is a senior official of a cathedral or other large ecclesiastical establishment. It is a minor part of our European Christian background and culture so I like to know about such things. The precentor originally led the singing and he is still usually in charge of a cathedral's musical affairs -- though he also is a senior administrator generally -- often the next down in seniority to the Dean.

I met a precentor last Sunday. Anne and were were in town for a stroll and noticed a service in progress at the metropolitical cathedral of St John (Anglican) so we popped in for a biscuit and a sip of wine. (Just joking! Atheists don't take communion). Anyway the music was good, the service was delightfully mediaeval and we had a quick chat with the precentor afterwards. In the absence of the Dean (who was over at the CATHOLIC cathedral in some good cause!) the Precentor celebrated the Eucharist so also had hand-shaking duties afterwards.

I must admit that I was a bit fuzzy about what precentors actually did -- partly because the duties of precentors do vary -- so I was pleased to meet a live one and find out what he did. He was indeed 2IC to the Dean.

After church we strolled down to the Botanical Gardens for another sit-down and had a very fat dragon (an 18" long lizard) come up to us in an apparent quest for food. A very pleasant Sunday morning!

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The destruction of Rhodesia

This is just a post for those interested in 20th century history. If you don't know anything about the Rhodesia controversy, however, something I wrote over 30 years ago might provide a useful quick update. Now that Zimbabwe (Rhodesia's successor State) is one of the most brutal and mismanaged countries on earth an email I received recently is interesting:

"At some time in the early to mid-1990s, Ian Smith gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. The auditorium was packed, the lobby was packed, and the crowd spilled out of the building. It was the largest turn-out for such a gathering that I have seen in 20+ years. Most of those in attendance were too young to remember the "Unilateral Declaration of Independence" of 1965, and could barely remember the betrayal of 1980. However, they had some inkling of what this man had done and what he had tried to do, and were there to see a living remnant of 20th century history. Smith was completely forthright about what his goal had been: the defense of Western Civilisation -- nothing more and certainly nothing less. The respect accorded him verged on reverence, and he was thronged with autograph seekers.

Yes, Mrs. Thatcher should have dismissed the advice she was given in 1980 (along with the advisors who offered it) and retained Muzorewa. But the real villain of the piece is the clueless Harold Wilson and the gaggle of parlour pinks who surrounded him and ran his government in the swinging '60s. They got the praise of the Wise and Good, their honours and their pensions, but the horrific price was paid by the immiserated unfortunates down in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe."

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ELSEWHERE



The more things change, the more they remain the same: "The Muhammad cartoon protest took a new direction in Pakistan this week as demonstrators took to the streets in Islamabad brandishing signs that proclaimed "God Bless Hitler." Tens of thousands of people took part in the latest round of protests, which took place throughout Pakistan - with gunfire and rioting erupting in some precincts. By midweek, three people, including an 8-year-old boy, had been killed.... Despite wide coverage of the Pakistani protests, the incendiary pro-Nazi placards were ignored in Western media accounts. But a photograph posted to the Web site of the German TV news station N-TV.de shows several Pakistani women clad in traditional Muslim garb holding aloft a large white poster with a message spelled out in English: "God Bless Hitler."

The Muslims have won: "For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries. "They think they have won the debate," he says with a sigh. "They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not. "The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory. "It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent." Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that "in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law".

Fear of Muslims cows the U.S. media: "The Phoenix is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons.... But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and on February 10, in a brutally candid editorial, it explained why. ''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. . . . Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history." The vast majority of US media outlets have shied away from reproducing the drawings, but to my knowledge only the Phoenix has been honest enough to admit that it is capitulating to fear".

The Muslim/Jewish difference: "Muslim fundamentalists have decided that even if you never saw or heard of the cartoons, you deserve to be hit with rocks, have your car wrecked and your embassies destroyed.... Could you picture a Jew killing anybody for such meaningless reasons? If a Jew gets mad he might sneak into your house and steal your Lipitor or he would make a deal with your doctor to lie about your cholesterol number, or just when you have fasted a whole day on Yom Kippur he would sneak into your house and steal all the pastrami sandwiches. I never saw a Jew going into meaningless fights. That is why you seldom see Jewish football players. A Jew is not going to take a chance in spraining his neck or tearing a ligament in his knee just because he was fighting with somebody about catching a ball. He would rather go to a store and buy another ball and avoid the whole problem.... Jews are never known to get into unnecessary physical battles. That is why people are never afraid of being attacked by a Jew. Did you ever hear anybody say, "Don't go into that neighborhood, it is very dangerous, there are a lot of Jews there"?

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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