ISRAEL

Why America supports Israel: "America's loyalty to Israel isn't engineered by a Zionist cabal that dupes American citizens and hijacks their government. US policy tends to align closely with Israel's because Americans *like* Israel. They instinctively sympathize with Israel's fight for survival in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods. If public opinion weren't robustly pro-Israel in the first place, the White House and Congress would be far less inclined to give Israel's advocates the time of day. There's a name for that phenomenon. It's called democracy.... American history is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian soil, nourishing a special kinship between America's Christians and the Jewish people. The founders of the American republic were deeply influenced by the Hebrew scriptures and believed that they, like the Jews of old, had been taken out of bondage by God and led by Him to a Promised Land. Long before there was a modern state of Israel, American leaders expressed "Zionist" leanings: "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation," former President John Adams wrote in 1819. Nearly two centuries later, millions of American Christians are passionate supporters of the Jewish state."

Harvard hucksters hype Israeli pseudo-historians: "The real rock stars of the Israeli intelligentsia -- Israel's own Ward Churchills -- are the pretentiously self-styled 'New Historians.' This is a group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted: 'We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas'), who've cocked a snook at the liberal country in which they've thrived, so as to gain admittance into the fashionable Palestinian pantheon. They claim 'Zionist imperialists' cheated Palestinian peasants out of their land (which was, in fact, bought fairly and legally), and that these interlopers conducted a systematic and deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing with respect to the 'indigenous population.' (There undoubtedly have been sporadic acts of aggression and even terror against Palestinian Arabs by Jews during the War of Independence. But there is simply no historical evidence that they have been the result of a concerted or systematic campaign.)"

Overstating Jewish power : "If it is Israel that decides on the deployment of American force, it seems odd that the first President Bush had to order them to stay out of the coalition to free Kuwait, and it is even more odd that the first order of neocon business has not been an attack on Iran, as Israeli hawks have been urging. Mearsheimer and Walt are especially weak on this point: They speak darkly about neocon and Israeli maneuvers in respect to Tehran today, but they entirely fail to explain why the main initiative against the mullahs has come from the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Authority, two organizations where the voice of the Jewish lobby is, to say the least, distinctly muted. Their theory does nothing to explain why it was French President Jacques Chirac who took the lead in isolating the death-squad regime of Assad's Syria (a government that Mearsheimer and Walt regard, for reasons of their own, as a force for stability)."

Israel avoids victory : "As Israelis go to the polls, not one of the leading parties offers the option of winning the war against the Palestinians. It's a striking and dangerous lacuna. ... The Arabs fight to eliminate Israel, Israel fights to win the acceptance of its neighbors. The first is offensive in intent, the second is defensive. The former is barbaric, and the latter civilized."

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ELSEWHERE

High IQ Kids Have Different Brain Growth : "The brains of high IQ children show a distinct pattern of development, according to a study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. The cortex, or outer mantle of the brain, starts out thinner and thickens more rapidly in very intelligent children, say the researchers. It then peaks at around 11 or 12 years old before thinning rapidly in the late teens. This developmental pattern, rather than sheer brain size, may have more to do with intelligence said Philip Shaw, lead author of the NIH study. He said the changes are subtle and what is driving them is a mystery. The scientists discovered the association between intelligence and brain development by taking MRI scans of 307 healthy children and teenagers, aged 5-19, over 2-year intervals as they grew up.

Commemorative crosses constitute the establishment of a church??: "The Utah Attorney General's Office has asked a judge to toss out a lawsuit filed against the state over roadside crosses honoring troopers killed in the line of duty. The lawsuit was filed by the American Atheists, who say the crosses are religious symbols that violate the separation of church and state." There is NO constitutional requirement to separate church and State -- only a requirement that no particular church be "established" (State supported)

French winemakers surrender to Anglo-Saxon practices (how that must hurt!): "After failing to hold off the onslaught from New World winemakers, France is to join them in such heresies as adding wood chips and - perhaps - even watering down the wine. The Agriculture Minister has issued a plan to let vignerons compete with growers in the Antipodes and the Americas whose simple flavours and clever marketing have been winning the world's wine drinkers. "We have to make wine for consumers, not wine that producers dream of," said Bernard Pomel, author of the plan, which is likely to be adopted soon as law. France still dominates the wine trade, with 40 per cent of world production by value, but its share of the market has been dwindling for a decade. Brussels is even about to allow France to turn thousands of barrels of unsold bordeaux into vinegar.

New Canadian government shows principles: "Hamas ministers on their first day in office today pledged to continue the battle for Israel's destruction and shrugged off warnings that they were leading the Palestinian Authority into a financial and political abyss.... Canada announced that it was cutting off aid as of today, while Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said that America was reviewing its Palestinian aid programmes to see which ones it would need to freeze. "The principle is very clear. We're not going to fund a Hamas-led government, provide funding to a Hamas-led government," she said".

More pandering to the fragile self-esteem of Muslims: "Posters with the phrase "America's latest hero is a Muslim straight out of jail" has been banned from the Tube [subway] by London Underground. LU said it will not show the posters from a 1 million pound advertising campaign for new TV series "Sleeper Cell" until creators remove the word Muslim from the text. It claims it will offend people and it is trying to be sensationalist".

No homosexual marriage for Australia: "The Federal Government will legislate against any attempts by the ACT to give gay couples the same rights as married couples, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said today. Mr Ruddock said today the Government would investigate what it could do to block attempts by the ACT Labor Government to pass laws that would establish civil unions for homosexual couples. The ACT legislation would allow those in a civil union the same rights as marriage in everything but name. Under the constitution, the Commonwealth has responsibility for marriage and in 2004, with bipartisan support, the Federal Government legislated to effectively ban gay marriage. Mr Ruddock said the Commonwealth was unhappy with the ACT's attempts to work around federal laws. "Let me make it very clear, that will not satisfy the Commonwealth and we would include the introduction of legislation to prevent that from occurring," he 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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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CALIFORNIA CONFUSION ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Comment lifted from Stephen Frank

Yesterday, the Governor [Schwarzenegger] in an L.A. Times Op-Ed piece said this, "As our nation begins a national debate on immigration, I propose that we lower our voices and lift our sights. We need a debate that attacks the issue without attacking individuals. And we need a comprehensive new law that respects immigrants and protects our nation. Frankly, the debate in Congress thus far has focused too much on politics and too little on principles. Ever since I first ran for office, I've talked about the importance of having a comprehensive immigration policy. Now the moment has arrived."

The truth is, the debate in Washington has nothing to do with immigration policy. The debate is what to do about those who have violated our immigration laws--illegal aliens. Few are talking about ending legal immigration, few are talking about totally open borders. The legislation, Frist, McCain-Feingold, Kyl, Sensebrenner, all deal with the disposition of those who have entered our nation illegally and now take jobs from honest citizens, employers that use illegal aliens as a means to hold down wages and the overcrowding of our schools and health care facilities by the illegal aliens.

The Governor is mixing two separate, and important issues. The issue today is about those violating our immigration laws, period.

He goes on to say, "Criminalizing immigrants for coming here is a slogan, not a solution. Instead, I urge Congress to get tough on those illegal immigrants who are a danger to society. If an illegal immigrant commits a serious crime, he must leave the country ? one strike and you're out. No excuses, no delays."

No one, not a single GOP or Democrat member of Congress, not a single member of the Minutemen or the ACLU has even suggested that immigrants be criminalized. That is just a silly statement. No one wants those who have played by the rules, like the Governor himself, to be considered a criminal. Instead, those who have violated our immigration laws, by their own voluntary actions, have become criminals. Let's not allow these straw man arguments to hide a simple fact: sneaking into the United States, in violation of our laws, is a criminal offense. These folks know they are breaking the law. If they were abiding by the law they would come through the border at legal border crossings, not in the middle of the night, in tunnels, paying coyotes huge fee's to outsmart our border guards. These people know they are breaking the law, and the governor knows it.

Then the Guv writes, "Granting citizenship to people who are here illegally is not just amnesty -- it's anarchy. We are a country of immigrants, yes. But we are also a nation of laws. People who want to be citizens will want to do it the right way." He is absolutely right, amnesty is anarchy. Yet, he steps on his own message by then advocating amnesty! Just before the above statement he writes, "I support efforts to ensure that our businesses have the workers they need and that immigrants are treated with the respect they deserve. We should pass a common-sense temporary worker program so that every person in our nation is documented."

Clearly, he is saying that if you can sneak into the country, find an employer willing to pay you under the table, then you can be eligible for a "common sense temporary worker program". This would be for those who violated our laws and it would be called amnesty--or anarchy as the Governor does.

The bottom line is that the Governor is trying to appeal to those who support strict enforcement of our laws and those who support any and all law breakers who can steal and bribe their way into the United States. This is so transparent a political stance, that he will make enemies of both camps. In fact, he will cause Minutemen and the ACLU to join together in a statement that the Governor "wants votes, not consistent policy".

This is an issue that is difficult. Don't make it more so by opposing amnesty, then proposing it--in the same article! That just takes away your credibility. The Governor doesn't believe that if a bank robber could sneak into a bank, steal lots of money and get 50 miles away, the robber should keep the money? Nor does he believe that if a student fails his exit exams he should still receive a diploma. So, why are his advisors telling him to say that if you sneak into this country and can get a job, you should get documents that legitimize your legal violations?

Debra Saunders in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle reminded us of this:

The Los Angeles Times duly reported, "Some Republicans fear that pushing too hard against illegal immigrants could backfire nationally, as with Proposition 187 (the 1994 ballot measure that sought to deny benefits for illegal immigrants, that) helped spur record numbers of California Latinos to become U.S. citizens and register to vote. Those voters subsequently helped Democrats regain political control in the state."

Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get drivers' licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.

She also noted, "While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver' licenses to illegal immigrants."

Some say this is an economic issue, that we can not afford to pay real wages to these menial workers--that is why we need illegals. It may be true that the cost of food and services would go up. At the same time we would save billions in tax dollars (net of taxes paid by the illegals) for the cost of education, welfare, health care and law enforcement costs by ending the free reign of illegal aliens in our nation. We are already paying lots more for that head of lettuce--in taxes, if not at the check out counter. Our schools would not be overcrowded and we wouldn't need $11 billion in General Obligation bonds to pay for new schools. The Emergency Rooms would be more plentiful, allowing the saving of lives of legal residents and citizens, instead of squeezing them out so illegal aliens could receive medical care.

While I am writing this about our Governor, he is not the only Republican or elected official suffering from "illegal alien schizophrenia". In the Senate Brownback, McCain, DeWine, Specter and Graham also suffer from this disease. Hillary wants our borders closed and amnesty for those already here.

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ELSEWHERE

Another phony "protest": "The leftist media have tried to portray this weekend's massive protests against House measures to curtail illegal immigration as the uprising of "The Other America": forgotten, humble, hidden Hispanic members of the working poor simply demanding their "rights." As events spanned from California to Detroit, Phoenix to Washington, D.C., the media kept up its anti-enforcement drumbeat. Although some have credited Latino DJs for the 500,000-strong illegal immigrant turnout in Los Angeles alone - and some credit is deserved - the real legwork was done by a more eclectic group of organizations: leftist labor unions, George Soros-funded agitators, Open Borders lobbyists, Roman Catholic clergy, and teachers unions.... Latino organizations did not act alone. The media has failed to report that organized labor directed the illegals and minors. The L.A. Times revealed the rally's "security" was handled by a union identified only as "Local 1877." That would be local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the far-Left union founded by New Left radical Andrew Stern"

Immigration backdown in Senate: "The Senate Judiciary Committee approved sweeping election-year legislation today that clears the way for 11 million illegal aliens to seek U.S. citizenship, a victory for demonstrators who had spilled into the streets by the hundreds of thousands demanding better treatment for immigrants. With a bipartisan coalition in control, the committee also voted down proposed criminal penalties on immigrants found to be in the country illegally. It approved a new temporary program allowing entry for 1.5 million workers seeking jobs in the agriculture industry."

Radioactive matter gets into US in test : "Undercover investigators slipped radioactive material -- enough to make two small 'dirty bombs' -- across U.S. borders in Texas and Washington state in a test last year of security at American points of entry. Radiation alarms at the unidentified sites detected the small amounts of cesium-137, a nuclear material used in industrial gauges. But U.S. customs agents permitted the investigators to enter the United States because they were tricked with counterfeit documents."

Canada's new Conservative government gets tough on illegals: "The federal government has no plans to follow in the footsteps of the United States, which appears ready to give as many as 11 million illegal workers a chance at U.S. citizenship, Immigration Minister Monte Solberg says. Solberg bluntly rejected the U.S. proposal as a solution for Canada, saying that letting illegal workers remain in this country would send the signal that it's okay to slip in the back door. "The ideal, of course, is for people to play by the rules and to get in line like everyone else is forced to do," he said after a cabinet meeting. "If we don't emphasize that . . . you are sending the message that the way to get in here quickly is to come illegally. We don't want to send that message," he said. A U.S. Senate panel just this week approved sweeping election-year legislation that clears the way for 11 million illegal aliens to apply for citizenship without first having to return home. "We're not looking at the American model," he said. "We have our own ideas on that."

I have just put up here the reply by Prof. Andrew Fraser of Macquarie University in Sydney to accusations that he made illegally racist statements in his comments about Australia's current immigration practices.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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"Stirring the possum" and European IQ differences

"Stirring the possum" is a common expression in Australia but I doubt that the term is much understood outside Australia so I will try to summarize what it means. For a start, Australia has lots of possums (a different species from the American opossum). I even have some living in the roofspace of my house -- as is common in Brisbane. They are however nocturnal and if you disturb one during the day it may well snarl and spit at you. And people know that. So if they DO stir a possum, they expect to be growled at.

So when Australians deliberately say something provocative but not terribly serious they will often refer to it as "Stirring the possum". Note however that such stirs are intended in good humour. Very few Australians would think of harming a possum (unlike in New Zealand, where they trap them) so stirring one is not an aggressive act. It is seen as a bit of harmless fun.

So when I referred recently to the interview in "The Times" with Richard Lynn as an example of "Stirring the possum" I was implying that Lynn was having a bit of fun with "The Times" rather than making a fully-rounded assessment of his subject -- which was national differences in European IQ. And the claim that Germans and Poles were considerably more intelligent than the English was indeed a delicious stir.

So I think I should note that on pages 21 and 22 of his recent book "Race Differences in Intelligence" (reviewed here and here), Lynn reports considerable variations in European IQ estimates: Irish from 87 to 97, Poland from 92 to 106, and Germans from 90 to 107. And if, as is common practice, one takes the median of these scores, one ends up with averages as follows: Ireland, 92; Poland 99; Germany 99. And none of that is particularly surprising.

What is slightly surprising is that Lynn's comments about European IQ were greeted and publicized without rancour -- while the vastly lower median scores found with African populations are usually ignored and sometimes execrated. But an impartial committment to truth is of course not to be expected from the media.

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Stranger than fiction

I have concluded that the "Majority Rights" blog is a perfect example of why people should be conservative. The fundamental truth that only conservatives seem able to recognize is that the world is far more complex than any theory can accommodate. More than that, reality actually makes utter nonsense of most theories. I have two favourite examples of that: The neo-Nazi guy (hello Martyn!) I knew whose best friend was a very dark Bengali and another guy I knew (the sadly deceased Brian Jackson -- a lovely man) who despised Asians but was married to a Filipina!

And something similar goes on with "Majority Rights". I put up by far the most posts on that blog even though I am a cast-iron supporter of the State of Israel and even though most other people associated with the blog are Judeophobes! Can you get more wacky than that?

And yet my posts help to keep the blog humming. About 50% of the time they generate a fair bit of discussion. Even my post about dogs was well received.

So find a theory that fits all that! The only theory that fits it is a conservative one: Truth is stranger than fiction. Though even that is an empirical generalization rather than a theory.

I suspect that my posts on MR actually give a sort of perverse pleasure to many readers there. My posts there give the commenters the satisfaction of shooting me down. I am the accessible ogre who can be dispatched with a quick reference to race-theorists such as McDonald or Salter (Hello Frank!). The fact that I don't remotely feel shot down is beside the point.

So why do I continue to post there? Easy. I just LOVE "stirring the possum". And even Christ supped with sinners.

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Brookes News Update

Keynesian nostrums still plague the US economy: That Keynesianism is still the prevailing orthodoxy among the economic commentariat is plain to see. What is not so plain is the consequences of this thinking.
France revolts against economic reason: You defy the market at your peril. France is now paying the price for her defiance. Such self-deception could only flourish in an environment dominated by economic illiteracy.
Is the Democratic Party a fifth column?: Those who believe that the Democratic Party is corrupt are absolutely right. But it is an ideological corruption that threatens America's very existence.
Black History Month ignored genuine black heroes: Eusebio Penalver suffered three times as long in Castro's Gulag as Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin's. He suffered longer than Mandela suffered in South Africa's - 28 years. He's the longest serving black political prisoner of the 20th century.
The Academy Awards are war by another name: In my more cynical moments I recognize the 'best picture' category of the Academy Awards to be nothing other than an intentional assault upon America by people who seek its destruction.
Latte leftist defends the ABC's phony independence with phony economics: Errol Simper is a typical leftist, smug, ignorant and patronizing. According to this clown the ABC is not to be held accountable to those elected by the people and whose money funds its operations.
Did Bracks and Ronnie Walker rip off a gun club?: Has the Bracks' Government committed serious crimes in its efforts to destroy common law rights?

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I have just put up on Australian Politics an interesting comparison between New Orleans and the cyclone-hit Australian town of Innisfail.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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A BLACK SOCIOLOGIST GETS IT HALF RIGHT

Orlando Patterson has some good thoughts on America's black underclass:

"Several recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it. The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes - its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members - and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing."

Hard to argue with that. But what does Patterson see as the ultimate cause or causes of the large and maladaptive black underclass culture? He seems not to know -- perhaps in part because his past theories have been so thoroughly taken apart -- e.g. here. If he can't ultimately blame "whitey" he is bereft of ideas.

Crazily enough, "whitey" IS partly to blame -- but not in a way that Patterson seems able to face up to. Before the welfare explosion of the ill-starred LBJ's "Great Society", blacks mostly lived in two-parent families and were in general much less mired in social pathologies. Leftist welfare schemes are certainly not the only source of black problems but it is amazing that any sociologist cannot look just a little way back into history and see in how many ways blacks were better off before such schemes.

If Patterson wanted a quick refresher course in the history of these matters, he could find it in a recent article by Kay Hymowitz. She notes that between 1965 and 1980, "the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks had more than doubled, to 56 percent. In the ghetto, that number was considerably higher, as high as 66 percent in New York City. Many experts comforted themselves by pointing out that white mothers were also beginning to forgo marriage, but the truth was that only 9 percent of white births occurred out of wedlock..."

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ELSEWHERE

Another physical basis for IQ: "Researchers at England's John Radcliffe Hospital, in Oxford, report that our brain's pH--how acidic or alkaline it is--might be a clue to our intelligence. Using a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), researchers examined the brains of 42 British schoolboys. Just as its close cousin MRI creates vivid images of a person's internal anatomy, MRS lets doctors study an organ's chemistry. When the British scientists compared the lads' IQ scores with their MRS results, they uncovered an intriguing relationship: the smarter the boy, the more alkaline his brain. Although the relationship between alkalinity and aptitude didn't hold for every aspect of intelligence, verbal skills and reading comprehension seemed especially linked to pH, the Radcliffe team reports in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

European economic stagnation: "Europe's well-intentioned model is not working because it does not pay to work after the taxman has taken his share. Europe is not innovating because it does not pay to innovate after the huge costs of complying with all the prescriptions, limitations and restrictions in all Europe's overabundant licences and autorisations. Demoralization is the real cause of Europe's stagnation. Europe's workforce is tired of being incessantly hindered in its task of producing wealth. Demoralization is the reasen why ever more engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs flee Europe's tax misery. Paradoxically, the Old Europe of the West must now learn from the New Europe of the East, where after years of disastrous socialism, low and simple flat taxes are being introduced, luring investors from all over the world."

The truth about Africa: "Africa is quite rich. As the economist Walter Williams of George Mason University wrote, "In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world's richest continent. It has 50 percent of the world's gold, most of the world's diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland as well as other natural resources." What Africa needs is not "aid," but less corruption".

Islamic barbarism increases support for Israel: "A Gallup poll released last month puts American support for Israel at near-record levels. When asked for their views on the Middle East, 59 percent of Americans say they sympathize with the Israelis, while just 15 percent favor the Palestinians. Pro-Israel sentiment rises with increased knowledge -- 66 percent of those who follow international affairs "very closely" support Israel, compared with 52 percent of those who don't pay close attention. Other findings are comparable. More than two-thirds of Americans say their overall view of Israel is favorable; only 11 percent have a favorable opinion of the Palestinian Authority."

Even "The Guardian" loves the House of Lords these days -- for good reason: "When Lord Armstrong rises to amend the government's ID cards bill in the House of Lords tomorrow, a new stage will be reached in the epic struggle between the Lords and the forces of darkness in the House of Commons... If the Lords have their way, it will mean the compulsory introduction will be delayed until 2011, well after a general election, which will give the public a second chance to examine and debate the proposals. This would not suit the government, because the public is gradually coming to understand the bill's grave consequences for personal freedom".

World Bank corrupt too: "Back in the early 1980s, Leslie Jean-Robert Pean was in a heap of trouble. Flat broke, in bankruptcy court, he had $10 in a savings account and a whole lot more debts than assets. Over the next half-dozen years, he scratched out a living in a variety of jobs. But in 1989, Pean, an economist, landed a job at the headquarters of the World Bank, in Washington, D.C. By the early 1990s, Pean and his family had bought a big house on 3 acres of manicured grounds outside Washington, and he was passing around $100 bills like so much chump change. "Our dream," the World Bank's mission statement says, "is a world free of poverty," something Pean really understood. The only trouble, bank investigators say, is that he wasn't focusing so much on helping the poor as he was on helping himself. Pean admitted to bank investigators that he had some $2.5 million salted away in a Swiss bank account, but he says it was family money. Pean's activities are now under investigation by federal prosecutors, but to bank investigators the case is far more important than the alleged misdeeds of a midlevel manager whose bank salary never exceeded $166,000 a year. Kickbacks, payoffs, bribery, embezzlement, and collusive bidding plague bank-funded projects around the world"

Chris Brand has just put up a good comment about the European IQ averages I posted yesterday.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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DICK LYNN IS STIRRING THE POSSUM ONCE AGAIN

A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc. "The early human beings in northerly areas had to survive during cold winters when there were no plant foods and they were forced to hunt big game," he said. "The main environmental influence on IQ is diet, and people in southeast Europe would have had less of the proteins, minerals and vitamins provided by meat which are essential for brain development."

He added that differences in intelligence across Britain could be attributed to bright people moving to London over hundreds of years. Adults in England and Wales have an IQ of 100.5, higher than Ireland and Scotland, both with 97. People living in London and the South East average 102. "Once in the capital they have settled and reared children, and these children have inherited their high intelligence and transmitted it to further generations." ...

Professor Lynn ascribes the differences between British and French intelligence levels to the results of military conflict. He described it as "a hitherto unrecognised law of history" that "the side with the higher IQ normally wins, unless they are hugely outnumbered, as Germany was after 1942".

More here



One would have to know a lot more about the data to make sense of all this. The British results could for instance have been deflated by the large number of U.K. citizens of African and rural Pakistani ancestry

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The new pragmatic Israel: "Thirteen miles inside the Palestinian-majority West Bank, Israeli bulldozers are trying to lay out the Jewish state's new borders in concrete and razor wire. As Israeli voters head to the polls tomorrow, the ruling Kadima party created by Ariel Sharon has redrawn the political landscape and is now trying to secure its place in history by seeking unilaterally to redraw Israel's boundaries. The giant earthen scar running beneath the Jewish settlement of Ariel reflects the "separation" strategy of Mr Sharon - which is set to propel Kadima to electoral victory even though he lies comatose in a hospital in Jerusalem after suffering a massive stroke in January. Under the plan - the centrepiece of Kadima's appeal to the voters - Israel will withdraw from remote Jewish settlements outside the barrier to secure its hold on the huge settlement blocs around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that it really wants to keep".

Good speech by Tony Blair on his Australian visit: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair used a speech to Federal Parliament today to urge global unity in the fight against terrorism and warn against the "madness" of growing anti-Americanism worldwide. Mr Blair said war against terror was as much a battle about values as it was about arms, and that those values were the universal property of humanity. "(It is also) a struggle about values and about modernity, whether to be at ease with it or enraged at it," said Mr Blair, the fifth world leader to address Federal Parliament. "And to win this struggle we have to win the battle of values as much as arms.""

Pedophile Muslims in Britain: "A leading Muslim figure has called for tougher guidelines to outlaw physical and sexual abuse against children at north west madrassas. According to a report published by the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, the problem of abuse is "widespread" and that thousands of children were under risk of being abused by their religious teachers. The report warns that the Muslim community could face the kind of child abuse claims that have scandalised the Roman Catholic churches. Co-author of the report Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui said it is time the Muslim community stopped "brushing the problem under the carpet." He said: "Up to 100,000 children are taught at 700 Islamic schools, or madrassas, of which almost a half use unlawful corporal punishment to discipline pupils. "Each year at least a dozen children are sexually abused by their teachers and Imams with very few cases ever being made public."

A pinhead tries to prick Mansfield: "The sneering review in the New York Times Book Review by a novelist called Walter Kirn of Harvey Mansfield's Manliness could have been anticipated, but its obtuseness - especially when viewed alongside the subtle and supple line of argument pursued by Professor Mansfield - is unusual even for the mainstream media culture which Mr Kirn represents. He compares the professor to Hans and Franz, the German body-builders portrayed by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon on "Saturday Night Live" back in the 1990s. "Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed," he writes, "partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words `girly' and `manly' - a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans?" So now are we to suppose that the prestigious New York Times regards it as a sufficient refutation of a serious work of political philosophy to say that it isn't "hip"? There could hardly be a better illustration of the dumbing down of the culture. Thought and argument count for nothing with the truly pinheaded Mr Kirn, only fashion, "cool" and, perhaps, celebrity, which sets the tone of what is fashionable and cool. He doesn't even know that calling an idea "out of date" is only a comment on its fashionability and not on its validity."

Keith Burgess Jackson has up an excellent quote from Steven Pinker which points out that sterotypes have considerable truth value. There has long been support for that in the academic psychology literature.

I hope most readers here have added "Tongue-Tied" to their regular tour of the internet. I have just put up a really good cartoon there. I was originally going to post there on weekends only but I seem to post there pretty often during the week now too. And on days when I am not posting, the posts that Scott puts up are in my view at least as good as mine.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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TEST SOPHISTICATION

What I put up yesterday about IQ was preparatory to what I want to say today. I have been thinking about the Lynn effect -- which is usually called the Flynn effect -- after its main publicist -- James Flynn. It was however discovered by Richard Lynn. What it refers to is the fact that average IQ test scores rose steadily thoroughout the 20th century. The process may however have reached an asymptote (peaked) now.

For a long time, I accepted that the rising scores represented a real increase in 'g' (underlying general intelligence). Two of my three very minor contributions to the academic literature on IQ were based on that view (See here and here). There were good reasons for that view. Nutrition does have a (usually small) effect on IQ and nutrition did improve over the 20th century. IQ can be influenced in some ways by general health -- and medical care did improve over the 20th century -- with improved perinatal care being an obvious candidate for positive effects. And signs that people were in fact better off physically were there -- an increase in average brain size particularly. And brain size does correlate to a degree (correlation of around .40) with IQ.

BUT: It seems that I was wrong. Although scores on all sorts of IQ subtests (puzzle categories) rose, they did not rise evenly. And the scores that rose least were for those problems that loaded most highly on 'g' (See e.g. here). The implication is that scores on a perfect measure of 'g' would not have risen at all.

So how do we explain the Lynn effect? There is no general agreement but I find the commonest explanation to be pretty persuasive -- that it reflects increasing test sophistication. Kids now spend MANY more years in the educational system than they once did and although there is probably little to show for that overall, kids DO get a lot of practice in passing tests of various sorts. And practice may not make perfect but it would be surprising if test-taking skills and strategies (such as guessing when you are not certain) were not improved by many years of extra practice at taking such tests.

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Senate corruption

"Remember when Al Gore pledged to create a 'lockbox' to protect Social Security trust fund surpluses from the annual Congressional spending raid? Well last week, while voting to raise the federal-debt ceiling to $8.96 trillion, Senators had a chance to terminate this notorious money-laundering scheme. And guess what? Every Democrat in the Senate joined with eight Republicans to kill an amendment by GOP Senators Jim DeMint and Mike Crapo that would have stopped the Bonnie and Clyde budgeting...

Apparently, these Senators want the money stored in a lock box, but only on the condition that they know how to pick the lock. The DeMint-Crapo proposal would deposit surplus payroll tax dollars in personalized bank accounts for each U.S. worker. This would in effect have created more than 100 million personalized lock boxes-and as taxpayers' private property, well out of the reach of the politicians.

We're talking big dollars here. The payroll tax will collect some $80 billion more in taxes next year, and $436 billion more over the next five years, than Social Security will pay out to current retirees. Under today's law, Congress simply keeps that cash to spend itself. Under the DeMint-Crapo idea, the average young worker would be able to accumulate roughly $40,000 in tax-free wealth for retirement based on eight years of surplus tax payments and 30 years of interest. And if you want to know why Members of Congress want to keep this annual spending raid going, all you have to do is look at the budget outline for Fiscal 2007 that this ostensibly Republican Senate passed last week."

Source

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Media bias about the economy: "Media Research Center (MRC) examined the year 2005, specifically how ABC, NBC and CBS covered employment news. In 2005, the economy created 2 million jobs. According to the MRC, however, more than 50 percent of the stories involved job losses rather than gains. Professor John Lott, economist and resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, and Kevin A. Hassett, the Institute's director of economic policy studies, examined, among other things, newspapers' economic political bias as reflected by their headlines: "We found that newspaper headlines reporting economic news on unemployment, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales, and durable goods tended to be much more frequently negative when a Republican was in the White House".

I have just put up on Australian Politics a story about a nasty little bit of Leftist bias in the Australian media too.

Left versus Right: Chimps versus cavemen?: "Wrote Tucker: "Once established, however, monogamy proved to have enormous advantages. Our ancestors were smaller, weaker, and slower than almost evey other species with which they cohabited, Their only advantage was their ability to work together. Armed with only the social compact of monogamy, they were able to survive on the savannah, learn to scavenge and hunt, make tools, tame fire, and eventually migrate to almost every climate on earth. It is a remarkable outcome for such a small social adjustment." It is conservatives, of course, who defend the ideals of monogamy. It was the lefties who promoted free love and all sorts of other tommyrot which reached fruition in the simian couplings of Bill Clinton in Little Rock hotel rooms and Oval Office ante-rooms, and (to believe the reports) of Ted Kennedy in all sorts of hideouts. Then there's the fact that gorillas and chimps are almost entirely vegetarian -- another primarily Lefty fetish".

The real tragedy of Iraq: "The tragedy of what went wrong in Iraq, therefore, is that the failure to locate WMD has made action against Iran or North Korea far harder to advance to Western public opinion. This would have been true even if Iraq, post invasion, was now a land of peace and plenty. The final tragedy is that while many will prosper within Iraq over the next three years, the price of inept peacetime policies between 2003 and 2005 is that there will be no more Iraqs in the foreseeable future. To that extent, the Stop the War coalition, assisted, ironically, by the Pentagon, will be satisfied. And what does this mean in practice? It means no more sadistic totalitarian dictators removed from office. It means no more free and fair elections for those who have never had them. It means no more openings for civic and religious liberty. It means no more chances of a cultural reawakening. Democracy might well progress in parts of the Middle East but, alas, mostly in the states that were most benign to begin with. There is little reason to suppose that the ruling elites in Damascus, Tehran or Tripoli have the cause for fear that they must have briefly felt three years ago. Nor have the people under their yoke any reason for optimism that they might yet escape servitude."

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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'g' AND ITS MEASURES

I am one of those awful people who mention IQ in public from time to time so I thought a few quick words of background on it might not go astray:

IQ tests exist because 'g' (general intelligence) exists. It just is a fact that people who are good at solving one sort of problem tend to be good at solving lots of other different problems. Some problems, however, are particularly good at detecting people who are generally good at solving problems. Researchers speak of such "good-predictor" problems as ones that "load highly on 'g'". And, pesky though it may be, the problems that load most highly on 'g' (i.e. the ones that are the purest measure of general intelligence) are also the ones that differentiate blacks and whites most strongly. As Charles Murray explains:

"As long ago as 1927, Charles Spearman, the pioneer psychometrician who discovered 'g', proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern: the size of the black-white difference would be "most marked in just those [subtests] which are known to be saturated with g." In other words, Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory.

A concrete example illustrates how Spearman's hypothesis works. Two items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as "forward digit span" and "backward digit span." In the forward version, the subject repeats a random sequence of one-digit numbers given by the examiner, starting with two digits and adding another with each iteration. The subject's score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-backward works exactly the same way except that the digits must be repeated in the opposite order.

Digits-backward is much more 'g'-loaded than digits-forward. Try it yourself and you will see why. Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder. The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward. It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income, or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant. Reluctance to "act white" is irrelevant. Motivation is irrelevant. There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting".

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Leftists still dreaming: "Evoking other cities transformed by revolutionary leaders, like Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979, or Havana 20 years before that, Caracas is attracting students and celebrities, academics and activists, grandmothers and 1970's-era hippies - a new generation of Sandalistas, as some call them. Some, including many Americans, have come to stay. But others come for a new brand of revolutionary tourism organized by the government or by private groups. Venezuela welcomes them all"

What a world without U.S. power looks like: "At places like Davos and Harvard, the world's sages rarely stop fretting about the dangers of a too powerful America. Well, if you want to know what the world looks like without U.S. leadership, Exhibit A is Darfur in Sudan. Today's leading authority on Darfur is the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who prophesied a world "nasty, brutish and short." At least 200,000 civilians have been killed in the past three years and two million more have become refugees. The source of the problem is the Arab rulers in Khartoum, who have pursued an ethnic cleansing campaign against black Muslims in western Sudan. They've equipped the Janjaweed Arab tribesmen to do the dirty work, and that militia is now attacking civilians across the border in Chad, creating 20,000 more refugees."

Brave new world of New Zealand (Leftist government, of course): "The Government is examining a proposal to have children tagged and numbered in a central database to stem abuse and failure at school. Personal details of every New Zealand child, including welfare and health concerns, would be entered into the database, to be shared by schools, social agencies and health authorities. It would be similar to Scottish and British initiatives, with a single ID number issued for each child, enabling authorities to be alerted to potential problems."

The myth of water privatization failures: "Water distribution and sanitation have traditionally been a public responsibility. Currently, 97 percent of water distribution in developing countries is in the hands of governments. So the responsibility for above-described failures and fatalities lies with incompetent and negligent governments. And yet, in the few cases where the private sector has been given a role in water distribution, there have been large and sometimes violent outcries against privatization."

Zoning is theft: "Zoning is theft, pure and simple. In his fantastic introduction to the Austrian School, Economics for Real People, Gene Callahan correctly identifies eminent domain as a form of property theft, especially noting the use of government condemnation in order to secure rightfully owned property for commercial development. It is easy to see government as the crowbar that influence-seekers use to jimmy locks and force private property owners from their land. Here we have the clear picture of Ma and Pa Kettle and clan fighting the law and 'progress' armed only with shotguns, corn squeezing, chewing tobacco and shear grit. The flip side to eminent domain, zoning, is not so easily seen. But as Bastiat revealed, the unseen is as important as the seen."

Polygamy : "The closet is now empty. Newsweek runs a story on polygamy, "Polygamists Unite!" In the wake of the gay-marriage movement, polygamy is making its move. "'Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle,' says Mark Henkel, who, as founder of the Christian evangelical polygamy organization TruthBearer.org, is at the forefront of the movement. His argument: if Heather can have two mommies, she should also be able to have two mommies and a daddy." Charles Krauthammer has a few unsatisfying thoughts on this, once called, polygamy diversion, by so-called gay rights advocates. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...you know the rest..."

A good article on Hollywood Leftism here. Excerpt: "To this day, Hollywood still clings to the myth of martyrdom on the Left-a Left that defended Communism and today soft-pedals the terrorist threat-as Billingsley put it-"while earning, substantial fortunes in the very country they attacked as repressive and fascist." In Hollywood's land of dreams, as author Richard Grenier once said, "Capitalism is evil except for the three-picture deal with Paramount, the Malibu mansion, the swimming pool, the tennis court, and the Mercedes Benz." To which Billingsley adds, "Or, as Marx himself might have framed it: From each according to his credulity, to each according to his greed."

LOL. This link will test your sense of humour!

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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FEMINISM BACKFIRES

The excerpt below is from an article that made my day (I know that's bad of me!). It notes that feminist-inclined admissions officers at elite colleges now feel obliged to discriminate AGAINST women! Read on:

The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today's accomplished young women. I know this well. At my own college these days, we have three applicants for every one we can admit. Just three years ago, it was two to one. Though Kenyon was a men's college until 1969, more than 55 percent of our applicants are female, a proportion that is steadily increasing. My staff and I carefully read these young women's essays about their passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place....

Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions. Last week, the 10 officers at my college sat around a table, 12 hours every day, deliberating the applications of hundreds of talented young men and women.... The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men. We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement?

The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers. Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.

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UK: Peers inflict fourth ID card defeat on government : "The government suffered another defeat in the Lords today over its plans for identity cards. Peers voted by a majority of 36 to keep the scheme voluntary until 2011, after the next general election. It is the fourth time the government has been overruled by the Lords on the issue of linking ID cards with passport applications from 2008."

UK: ID cards a "present" to terrorists: "A national identity card scheme will be a 'present' to terrorists, criminal gangs and foreign spies, one of Britain's most respected former intelligence agents has told ministers. The warning from Daphne Park, who served for 30 years as a senior controller for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, came as the parliamentary power struggle over the identity cards bill dragged on. ... The House of Lords once again defeated the government last night. Peers backed a joint Conservative and Liberal Democrat amendment that would prevent ministers making identity cards compulsory until at least 2011. ... At issue is the 'voluntary' nature of the proposed card. Labour ministers insist that the cards will be optional, but also want to create a rule meaning that anyone renewing a passport after 2008 must also buy an identity card. Opponents argue that is 'compulsion by stealth' and question Labour's mandate for the scheme. The Labour manifesto at last year's election promised the cards would be 'voluntary at first.' ... While ministers have hinted at using the Parliament Act to force the ID cards bill through the Lords, peers insist they will continue to resist. The former MI6 agent will be a key part of that resistance."

Sounds like Spitzer is right for once: "New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has filed a lawsuit accusing a company of selling email addresses in what he described as the largest deliberate breach of privacy in internet history. The suit against web site operator Gratis Internet alleges that the company sold personal information obtained from millions of consumers under a strict promise of confidentiality. "Unless checked now, companies that collect and sell information on consumers will continue to find ways to erode the basic standards that protect privacy in the internet age," Mr Spitzer said. Gratis internet is best known for promising free iPods, televisions and DVDs to users willing to sign up for promotions offered by partners such as Citibank and Blockbuster. The promotions required a registrant to sign up five others into the program - a process which drew criticism for being nothing more than a glorified pyramid scheme. While many did receive a free iPod, they also ended up with inboxes stuffed full of junk marketing mail. Contrary to the company's assurances of privacy, Spitzer's lawsuit accused Gratis owners Peter Martin and Robert Jewell with selling access to lists of millions of Gratis customers to three independent email marketers".

Nutty Frog: "President Chirac stormed out of the first session of a European Union summit dominated by a row over French nationalism because a fellow Frenchman insisted on speaking English. President Chirac and three of his ministers walked out of the room when Ernest-Antoine SeilliŠre, the leader of the European business lobby UNICE, punctured Gallic pride by insisting on speaking the language of Shakespeare rather than that of MoliŠre. When M SeilliŠre, who is an English-educated steel baron, started a presentation to all 25 EU leaders, President Chirac interrupted to ask why he was speaking in English. M SeilliŠre explained: "I'm going to speak in English because that is the language of business." Without saying another word, President Chirac, who lived in the US as a student and speaks fluent English, walked out, followed by his Foreign, Finance and Europe ministers, leaving the 24 other European leaders stunned. They returned only after M SeiliŠre had finished speaking. The meeting was furnished with full interpretation services, and anyone in the room could speak or listen in any of the 20 official EU languages. Embarrassed French diplomats tried to explain away the walk-out, saying that their ministers all needed a toilet break at the same time.

Lying Leftists again: "A new study by Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer charges that the "Israel lobby" has distorted the foreign policy of the United States to the point of serious damage to U.S. interests. Perhaps anticipating that their claims might be controversial, the authors attempt to reassure any who might doubt them: "Some readers will find this analysis disturbing, but the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars". In fact, even a cursory examination of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy reveals that it is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in "serious dispute." In other words, a student who submitted such a paper would flunk.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 Pages are here or here or here.

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THE LATEST BIT OF PSEUDO SCIENCE FROM BERKELEY

I suppose I should comment on the latest version of an old Leftist tune -- summarized here for the general reader.

Starting in 1950, psychologists have been trying to prove that conservatives are psychologically maladjusted --an effort that was summarized by Jost et al. and demolished here. They never give up trying, however, and the study of 95 children from Berkeley, California by Jack Block and his wife is the latest episode. It's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to demolish the "research" concerned so I will just mention a few basics.

What the authors found was that Berkeley children who were rated as unhappy in their kindergarten years turned out as adults to be conservatives. So what do we conclude from that? Do we conclude that conservatives are intrinsically unhappy people? Hardly. The opinion polls repeatedly show conservatives to be the happiest (e.g. here). So what DO we conclude? How about saying that conservatives in ultra-Leftist Berkeley feel uncomfortable in that environment and pass on some of that discomfort to their children? But the children (as most children do) grow up to share their parents' politics so they turn out conservative in later life too. So conservative parents who were SITUATIONALLY unhappy have conservative children -- big deal!

But that is actually putting the best face on the study. It is not nearly as good as that:

1). The children concerned were not a representative sample of any known population. They may not even have been representative of Berkeley, let alone anywhere else. And if you don't sample, you can't generalize.

2). The correlation between personality and ideology was often very weak (e.g. .27 or 7% shared variance for the rating "Is self-reliant, confident") so there were nearly as many confident children who turned out Rightist as Leftist. The reported correlation could in fact have turned on the responses of just one child. That certainly weakens ALL causal inferences from the study. And many of the stronger correlations involve obvious value judgments. For instance "Is visibly deviant from peers" is said to characterize conservatives but why not turn the value judgment around and conclude that conservatives tend to be independent?

3). The measure of conservative ideology is suspect. Block does not list the actual attitude statements he used but, as I have shown elsewhere, Leftist psychologists in general don't have a blind clue what conservatism is -- and what they regard as a measure of conservatism is usually a caricature of the real thing -- generally a collection of ignorant and aggressive statements that very few real-world conservatives would assent to. That it was a caricature in this case is suggested by the fact that it showed conservatives as less intelligent. In the general population it is Leftists who are less intelligent.

I could go on to mention the Rosenthal effect etc. but what's the point? Michelle Malkin has links to various other comments on the study.

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ELSEWHERE



There is an incredible outpouring of Hillary mockery here. A small excerpt: "Listening to Hillary's views about Israel is like reading Hitler's email. Consequently she has made herself as welcome in Tel Aviv as a Scud missile. Any Jew that supports her for President is road testing the next generation of gas ovens. The inestimable W. Somerset Maugham said, "Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a full-time job". Remarkably, Maugham diagrammed that judgment without ever having met Hillary Clinton, in whom hypocrisy is more profound than just characteristic. It is her signature. She ricochets from one false image to another - wife, mother, do-gooder. Doting liberals are always enraptured when they receive a syrupy Christmas card with a picture of the Clintons gathered at the hearth with Hillary reading excerpts to Chelsea from A Girl's Life of Ilse Koch. None of this masks the essential Hillary. As a colleague observed of her - if it walks like a bitch and talks like a bitch, it's not a duck".

Bureaucracy under attack: "Corporate executives, faced with greater regulatory scrutiny and demands in the wake of corporate scandals like Enron, have for some time moaned that new compliance rules are costing them profits and manpower, as well as cumbersome and probably not that effective. Now a new lawsuit's adding another criticism: They're unconstitutional.... "Sarbanes-Oxley is a classic example of government overreaction," said Mallory Factor, chairman of the Free Enterprise Fund which recently hired former special prosecutor Kenneth Star as one of its attorneys. "We don't have a problem with transparency but we've created a class of people that are just professional bureaucrats that want a larger bureaucracy that's extraordinarily expensive and cuts down innovation." A recent study conducted by the Securities Industry Association estimated that the cost of compliance has nearly doubled in the past three years to an estimated annual total of more than $25 billion in 2005, up from $13 billion in 2002.... Factor said costs associated with Sarbanes-Oxley are prohibitively high for small and mid-sized companies that are trying to compete with larger players, creating a barrier of entry for these firms."

Some Muslim intellectuals get it: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We -- writers, journalists and public intellectuals -- call for resistance to religious totalitarianism. Instead, we call for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values worldwide. The necessity of these universal values has been revealed by events since the publication of the Muhammad drawings in European newspapers. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the arena of ideas. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations, nor an antagonism of West versus East, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats."

One size does not fit all in diplomacy : "Hooray, I finally found something on which I can agree with the Bush administration: The 'nucular' cooperation deal signed recently with India. In cutting the deal, the administration displayed some uncharacteristically nuanced thinking: A one-size-fits-all nuclear policy isn't sustainable in today's world, and when it comes to nuclear arms, India is not the same as Iran and North Korea, or for that matter, Pakistan. As someone of Indian origin, I probably don't surprise you with my thinking on this."

No Muslim dress privilege in Britain any more: "A young Muslim girl yesterday failed in her two-year legal battle to force every school in Britain to allow pupils to decide their own dress code according to their religious belief. Britain's highest court ruled to uphold the right of all schools to set uniform rules provided that they consult their local community. The Law Lords ruled that the human rights of Shabina Begum had not been breached when her school refused to allow her to wear a full-length Islamic dress to class and that Denbigh High School had not acted unlawfully. The ruling, which overturned a previous Court of Appeal decision, was welcomed by head teachers.

An interesting piece of hate-speech here from a "defender" of homosexuality.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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)

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A BIRTHDAY CONCERT

Last Tuesday (21st.) was the birthday of J.S. Bach -- of whom I am a great afficianado. So Anne and I went to an organ concert at a nearby Lutheran church to celebrate the occasion. Both the organ and the organist were excellent and Bach's ringingly self-confident music grabbed me from the very first notes.

The thing that inspired this post however was the prominence of East Asians on the occasion. The man selling tickets at the door was Chinese in fact. It reminded me that I have often read that the great Western classical music has a proportionately much bigger following in China and Japan than it does in the West.

I am very grateful for that. It could well be that Western culture is now decadent and much of our glorious cultural heritage stands in danger of being largely lost. I was for instance horrified to find out that, at the end of his high school years, my son had never heard of such great English poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. I promptly sat down and read him some of course. The only introduction to poetry that his school gave him was to a very minor black poet! I happen to have known the black poet concerned (Kath Walker) and can tell you that she was essentially a Leftist whiner and little more.

So our kids are being de-educated and de-acculturated and it seems possible that there will one day be very few of our own people left who will know enough to carry on the knowledge and appreciation of past cultural wonders and attainments. That Asians may keep alive what we do not is therefore some comfort to me. While there is life there is hope.

When I first heard the music of Bach at age 13 (It was a performance of the Toccata and fugue in D minor) it was an electrifying experience for me. It would be sad indeed if the generations to come never got the exposure that would introduce them also to our crowning musical achievements. But I think that lack of exposure is probably already happening in far too many cases. So if Asians keep alive our great cultural traditions it will all be to the good.

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