BIRTH ORDER DOES NOT AFFECT IQ
The study partially summarized below is of considerable interest in its own right but has broader implications as well. It does of course once more show that environmental effects on intelligence which were once thought important are not in fact important but, as well as that, it shows large holes in the research procedures of previous birth-order studies generally. The notorious Frank Sulloway is of course known for his frantic pursuit of the quite absurd claim that birth-order determines your politics. According to Sulloway, my younger brother should be a leftist -- because he is a younger brother. Like another younger brother among my relatives, however, my younger brother is "so far Right he is almost out of sight". But Sulloway did not take all the precautions in his research that have been shown as important below so it is no surprise on those grounds alone that he came to strange conclusions. ALL the existing birth-order research must now be considered to be of negligible worth
A recent study provides some of the best evidence to date that birth order really doesn't have an effect on intelligence. The findings contradict many studies over the years that had reported that older children are generally smarter than their younger siblings. This new study, based on a large, nationwide sample, suggests a critical flaw in that previous research, said Aaron Wichman, lead author of the new study and a teaching fellow in psychology at Ohio State University.
Most previous studies compared children from different families, so what they were finding were differences between large and small families, not differences between siblings, according to Wichman. "Third- and fourth-born children all come from larger families, and larger families have disadvantages that will impact children's intelligence," he said. "In reality, if you look at these larger families, the fourth-born child is just as intelligent as the first-born. But they all don't do as well as children from a smaller family.".....
But then the researchers analyzed the data using a variable that could take into account environmental differences between families. That variable was the mother's age at the birth of her first child. "Mother's age encapsulates many variables that could negatively effect the child-rearing environment. The younger a mother was at the birth of her first child, the lower we would expect intelligence scores to be within a family," Wichman said. That's because younger mothers would tend to have less education, more children, lower income, and other factors that would negatively affect the intelligence of their children. When the researchers controlled for mother's age at first birth, the effect of birth order on intelligence was nearly eliminated.
The results, though, are clear, Wichman said. "Birth order may appear to be associated with intelligence, but that's only because larger families don't have the advantages of smaller families," he said. "When examined within families, there is no evidence of any significant association between birth order and intelligence. It's not your birth order that is important - family environment and genetic influences are the really important factors."
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ELSEWHERE
Blacks protest against illegals: "Some African American groups plan to join members of the Minuteman Project tomorrow to protest illegal immigration, which organizer Ted Hayes called the "biggest threat to blacks in America since slavery." The protest is to start at 1 p.m. today in Leimert Park and is organized by Hayes' Crispus Attucks Brigade and the American Black Citizens Opposed to Illegal Immigration Invasion. Hayes, a homeless activist, said most homeless people in Los Angeles are black and that illegal immigration compounds the problem because African Americans refuse to work for the "slave wages" that many illegal immigrants accept."
Bizarre! Australia welcomes Al Qa'ida fellow-travellers: "Australia has granted asylum to five men who claim their membership of an organisation accused of ties to al-Qa'ida would expose them to persecution in their home countries. The men from Syria, Egypt and India sought protection on the basis of their membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned in Syria and is considered the father of terrorist groups including al-Qa'ida. Osama bin Laden's right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri adopted the organisation. And earlier this month, The Weekend Australian revealed that one of the five asylum-seekers, Ahmad al-Hamwi, who arrived in Australia 10 years ago, was a senior al-Qa'ida bagman linked to 1993 World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef. US terror expert Steven Emerson said the practice of allowing Muslim Brotherhood members into Australia was "extremely dangerous"."
YMCA booted out by HAMAS: "The leadership of a West Bank Palestinian city now controlled by Hamas has warned a local Young Men's Christian Association to close its offices and leave town or face likely Muslim violence, WorldNetDaily has learned. The move highlighted long-standing fears Hamas would use its win in last January's Palestinian parliamentary elections to impose an anti-Christian, anti-Jewish hard-line Islamist regime in the West Bank and Gaza. "The face of the new Hamas government is coming to the forefront now that they finally took over and have a lot more confidence. They want to create a territory free of Christians and Jews," said a Christian leader associated with the YMCA in Qalqiliya, a West Bank town under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority."
Fox news increases the GOP vote: "Using a data set of voting data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News. The results are robust to town-level controls, district and county fixed effects, and alternative specifications. We also find a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican".
Conservative Australian Anglicans thrive: "Moore Theological College, which trains clergy for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, is expanding so quickly it will soon outgrow its Newtown premises. The college's director of property planning, Doug Marr, said the rapid growth in trainee minister numbers had forced a search for new premises. The preferred option is the Lindfield campus of the University of Technology, Sydney. There have been discussions about the college buying it, although it would need to sell its premises on Carillon Avenue. "We've had huge growth in the last 20 years," Mr Marr said. "The number of ministers in training has grown enormously . . . we're running out of space." The number of full-time, undergraduate students this year is 314. That has grown from 303 last year, 287 in 2004 and 235 in 2001. Strong demand for training at the college comes as other denominations find it difficult to attract people to vocations. The state's biggest Catholic seminary, The Seminary of the Good Shepherd, at Homebush, has 42 seminarians"
"Carnival of the Vanities" has been having troubles without Sid's steadying hand on it but the latest edition is just up here
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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.
****************************
Sunday, April 23, 2006
"Racist" party is Leftist
The following letter from Lord Tebbitt about the British National Party appeared in the London "Daily Telegraph". Norman Tebbitt has himself been described as a "hardline rightwinger". He was a Minister in several portfolios under Margaret Thatcher and chairman of the Conservative Party
"Sir - It is of some comfort that the Labour Party at least, even if not yet the Tories, has woken up to the threat posed by the BNP, because it has ceased to understand or listen to its own supporters when they express their concerns about multiculturalism, the levels of immigration and lack of integration that are affecting our great cities.
However, it remains of concern that even The Daily Telegraph (Comment, April 18) persists in so misunderstanding the BNP as to describe it as "an extreme Right-wing party". I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies.
On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to "use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality", to institute worker ownership, to favour workers' co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.
Certainly the BNP poses as a patriotic party opposed to multiculturalism, and it has racist overtones, but there is no lack of patriotic Left-wing regimes; opposition to multiculturalism is now mainstream and racialism was not unknown even in the Soviet Union. So what is "extreme Right-wing" about the BNP?"
The Ku Klux Klan were all Democrats, Hitler was a socialist, Karl Marx was an antisemite, the Soviets persecuted the Jews and the main support for the White Australia Policy was the Australian Labor party -- and it still is!. Any pattern there? Nah!
**********************
ELSEWHERE
BNP winning support: "The British National Party is on course to make significant gains in the local elections in England in two weeks time, according to a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph today. It shows that seven per cent of voters are ready to back the far-Right party and that 24 per cent have considered voting BNP in the past or are thinking of doing so now. In the eyes of almost three-quarters of potential BNP supporters, Britain "almost seems like a foreign country".... The strong showing for the BNP, which has already achieved more success than any other far-Right party, will alarm all the mainstream parties. At the general election last year, the BNP won 4.3 per cent of the vote across the 116 seats it contested. It polled 16.9 per cent in the Barking constituency.... The BNP has said it is putting up more candidates than ever before - 356 - for the local elections. At present it has 15 councillors across England and hopes to win up to 40 seats on May 4.
Pew Survey: Leftists much less moral: "There is a partisan divide in how people judge these behaviors. A majority of Republicans say seven of the ten behaviors are morally wrong; while a majority of Democrats and independents say just three of the behaviors (adultery, underreporting taxable income; drinking excessively) are morally wrong. Independents are the least inclined of the three partisan groups to view the behaviors as morally wrong and most prone to see them as "not a moral issue."" [The ten moral issues were: Married people having an affair; Not reporting all income on taxes; Drinking alcohol excessively; Having an abortion; Smoking marijuana; Homosexual behavior; Telling a lie to spare someone's feelings; Sex between unmarried adults; Gambling; Overeating]
American generosity: "U.S. foreign aid from private sources totaled $71.2 billion in 2004, a sum more than 3? times greater than the foreign aid the U.S. government provided that year, according to a study by the Hudson Institute. "America is often criticized as being stingy in its foreign aid, but that assessment doesn't take into account the extent of private giving," the institute said. The study, titled Index of Global Philanthropy, was presented yesterday at a United Nations conference".
Government Financing Clowns -- Literally: "Fire departments are using Homeland Security grants to buy gym equipment, sponsor puppet and clown shows, and turn first responders into fitness trainers. The spending choices are allowable under the guidelines of the Assistance to Firefighters grant administered by the Homeland Security Department, which has awarded nearly 250 grants since February totaling more than $25 million out of the current spending pot of $545 million."
A vacation to the magical kingdom of capitalism: "On a recent trip to Florida I had the chance to see a good contrast between public works projects and private enterprises. This consisted of traveling through two public airports, Boston Logan and Orlando International and visiting two private entertainment parks, Walt Disney World and Sea World. I could linger long on the deficiencies of the public airports and rail against various aspects of their design, but instead I'd rather focus on the positive aspects of what I saw in the private capitalist dream that is Walt Disney World."
An end run around class action lawsuits: "Alan Kaplinsky is one proud man. For years, the Philadelphia lawyer has been advising financial institutions, leading their defense in class-action lawsuits brought by consumers -- and, more importantly, designing ways to limit such suits by writing arbitration clauses into many credit-card agreements and banking contracts. These clauses, often found in the fine print, have met with mixed results in court, with some judges upholding them, some not. Now, Kaplinsky has found a way to one-up the courts, at least in Utah, where a new law specifically allows these clauses in all consumer loan contracts, including credit-card agreements."
Russia: Surge in race killings as Hitler's birthday nears: "Russia is struggling to contain an upsurge in racist murders and attacks as skinheads in the country prepare to mark Adolf Hitler's birthday. The past week alone has seen a slew of race-hate crimes perpetrated despite condemnation from politicians and threats of heavier jail sentences. Four Roma have been murdered and one Vietnamese man killed, and there have been at least seven 'punishment beatings' of foreigners. Anti-racism activists are warning that Russia's estimated 60,000 skinheads appear to be attacking their victims with increasing impunity and that the problem has spun out of control."
Strange Justice has the latest on the very dubious Duke university "rape" prosecution.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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.
****************************
The following letter from Lord Tebbitt about the British National Party appeared in the London "Daily Telegraph". Norman Tebbitt has himself been described as a "hardline rightwinger". He was a Minister in several portfolios under Margaret Thatcher and chairman of the Conservative Party
"Sir - It is of some comfort that the Labour Party at least, even if not yet the Tories, has woken up to the threat posed by the BNP, because it has ceased to understand or listen to its own supporters when they express their concerns about multiculturalism, the levels of immigration and lack of integration that are affecting our great cities.
However, it remains of concern that even The Daily Telegraph (Comment, April 18) persists in so misunderstanding the BNP as to describe it as "an extreme Right-wing party". I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies.
On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to "use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality", to institute worker ownership, to favour workers' co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.
Certainly the BNP poses as a patriotic party opposed to multiculturalism, and it has racist overtones, but there is no lack of patriotic Left-wing regimes; opposition to multiculturalism is now mainstream and racialism was not unknown even in the Soviet Union. So what is "extreme Right-wing" about the BNP?"
The Ku Klux Klan were all Democrats, Hitler was a socialist, Karl Marx was an antisemite, the Soviets persecuted the Jews and the main support for the White Australia Policy was the Australian Labor party -- and it still is!. Any pattern there? Nah!
**********************
ELSEWHERE
BNP winning support: "The British National Party is on course to make significant gains in the local elections in England in two weeks time, according to a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph today. It shows that seven per cent of voters are ready to back the far-Right party and that 24 per cent have considered voting BNP in the past or are thinking of doing so now. In the eyes of almost three-quarters of potential BNP supporters, Britain "almost seems like a foreign country".... The strong showing for the BNP, which has already achieved more success than any other far-Right party, will alarm all the mainstream parties. At the general election last year, the BNP won 4.3 per cent of the vote across the 116 seats it contested. It polled 16.9 per cent in the Barking constituency.... The BNP has said it is putting up more candidates than ever before - 356 - for the local elections. At present it has 15 councillors across England and hopes to win up to 40 seats on May 4.
Pew Survey: Leftists much less moral: "There is a partisan divide in how people judge these behaviors. A majority of Republicans say seven of the ten behaviors are morally wrong; while a majority of Democrats and independents say just three of the behaviors (adultery, underreporting taxable income; drinking excessively) are morally wrong. Independents are the least inclined of the three partisan groups to view the behaviors as morally wrong and most prone to see them as "not a moral issue."" [The ten moral issues were: Married people having an affair; Not reporting all income on taxes; Drinking alcohol excessively; Having an abortion; Smoking marijuana; Homosexual behavior; Telling a lie to spare someone's feelings; Sex between unmarried adults; Gambling; Overeating]
American generosity: "U.S. foreign aid from private sources totaled $71.2 billion in 2004, a sum more than 3? times greater than the foreign aid the U.S. government provided that year, according to a study by the Hudson Institute. "America is often criticized as being stingy in its foreign aid, but that assessment doesn't take into account the extent of private giving," the institute said. The study, titled Index of Global Philanthropy, was presented yesterday at a United Nations conference".
Government Financing Clowns -- Literally: "Fire departments are using Homeland Security grants to buy gym equipment, sponsor puppet and clown shows, and turn first responders into fitness trainers. The spending choices are allowable under the guidelines of the Assistance to Firefighters grant administered by the Homeland Security Department, which has awarded nearly 250 grants since February totaling more than $25 million out of the current spending pot of $545 million."
A vacation to the magical kingdom of capitalism: "On a recent trip to Florida I had the chance to see a good contrast between public works projects and private enterprises. This consisted of traveling through two public airports, Boston Logan and Orlando International and visiting two private entertainment parks, Walt Disney World and Sea World. I could linger long on the deficiencies of the public airports and rail against various aspects of their design, but instead I'd rather focus on the positive aspects of what I saw in the private capitalist dream that is Walt Disney World."
An end run around class action lawsuits: "Alan Kaplinsky is one proud man. For years, the Philadelphia lawyer has been advising financial institutions, leading their defense in class-action lawsuits brought by consumers -- and, more importantly, designing ways to limit such suits by writing arbitration clauses into many credit-card agreements and banking contracts. These clauses, often found in the fine print, have met with mixed results in court, with some judges upholding them, some not. Now, Kaplinsky has found a way to one-up the courts, at least in Utah, where a new law specifically allows these clauses in all consumer loan contracts, including credit-card agreements."
Russia: Surge in race killings as Hitler's birthday nears: "Russia is struggling to contain an upsurge in racist murders and attacks as skinheads in the country prepare to mark Adolf Hitler's birthday. The past week alone has seen a slew of race-hate crimes perpetrated despite condemnation from politicians and threats of heavier jail sentences. Four Roma have been murdered and one Vietnamese man killed, and there have been at least seven 'punishment beatings' of foreigners. Anti-racism activists are warning that Russia's estimated 60,000 skinheads appear to be attacking their victims with increasing impunity and that the problem has spun out of control."
Strange Justice has the latest on the very dubious Duke university "rape" prosecution.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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.
****************************
Saturday, April 22, 2006
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
Minutemen to build private fence: "Chris Simcox, President of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, today announced plans by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps ("MCDC") to work with local Arizona land owners to build border security fencing on private land along the border with Mexico. At present, six private land owners have partnered with the Minutemen for the commencement of construction of border fencing on their land. Surveillance cameras on the fencing will be monitored via computer by registered Minutemen across the country. Two construction companies to date have offered to inaugurate groundbreaking, coordinate volunteer construction crews and donate the use of the necessary heavy construction equipment. Simcox says those involved in the planning hope to keep costs near $150 per foot."
Illegal alien population CAN be reduced "Proponents of mass legalization of the illegal alien population often justify this radical step by suggesting that the only alternative - a broad campaign to remove illegal aliens by force - is unworkable. One study fancifully suggested that the cost of such a deportation strategy would be $206 billion over the next five years. But mass forced removal is not the only alternative to mass legalization. A third way is to seek attrition of the illegal population through law enforcement, encouraging illegal aliens to give up and leave of their own accord. A new analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies uses a variety of federal government data to demonstrate that such a strategy of attrition, combined with a stronger border security effort such as the administration's Secure Border Initiative (SBI), can significantly reduce the size of the illegal alien population at a reasonable cost. The report, by CIS Senior Policy Analyst Jessica Vaughan, finds that, according to the government's own cost estimates, an attrition strategy could cut the illegal population by nearly half in five years, with an additional investment of less than $2 billion, or $400 million per year - an increase of less than 1 percent of the President's 2007 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security ($42.7 billion)".
GA: Perdue signs immigration bill: "Georgia's governor signed a sweeping immigration bill Monday that supporters and critics say gives the state some of the toughest measures against illegal immigrants in the nation. 'I want to make this clear: we are not, Georgia's government is not, and this bill is not, anti-immigrant,' Gov. Sunny Perdue said at the signing. ... The law requires verification that adults seeking many state-administered benefits are in the country legally."
Some law enforcement happening: "Federal immigration authorities rounded up more than 1,000 illegal immigrants at dozens of sites and charged nine individuals of the firm that employed them, federal law enforcement officials announced Wednesday. Seven current and former managers of IFCO Systems, which has offices in several states, were arrested and charged in connection with the employment of illegal immigrants, said U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby in Albany, New York."
The left splits over immigration: "Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in them a new kind of civil rights movement. They've supported calls to legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right, where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are working against the interests of low-skilled American workers."
Stupid propaganda: "The statistics are quite illuminating. Seventy-five percent of all farm workers in this country were born in Mexico. When one includes farm workers from other parts of Latin America, more than half of these workers (53%) are here illegally. Only 23% of farm workers were born in the United States. ... When it comes down to it this is really a question of supply and demand. Americans love their lettuce. In order to satiate this demand, agricultural employers need to find people willing to pick lettuce in order for it to get to market. But if we are to rely solely on the American labor force to pick our lettuce that demand will not be met. There are simply not enough Americans willing to go to Arizona to work in 100 degree weather on their hands and knees to pick lettuce for $7.25 an hour without health insurance and limited access to clean drinking water." [So how come I can buy all the lettuce I want in Australia for a couple of dollars each even though we have NO illegals to pick it?]
************************
ELSEWHERE
Iran: Police to arrest women in "un-Islamic" dress: "Iran's Islamic authorities are preparing a crackdown on women flouting the stringent dress code in the clearest sign yet of social and political repression under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From today police in Tehran will be under orders to arrest women failing to conform to the regime's definition of Islamic morals by wearing loose-fitting hijab, or headscarves, tight jackets and shortened trousers exposing skin. ... The clampdown coincides with a bill before Iran's conservative-dominated parliament proposing that fines for people with TV satellite dishes rise from 60 pounds to more than 3,000 pounds. Millions of Iranians have illegal dishes, enabling them to watch western films and news channels. ... The new campaign will hold taxi agencies accountable for their passengers' attire, police will be able to impound cabs carrying women dressed 'inappropriately.' Agencies guilty of repeat offences will be closed."
Waco: "Every year the weeks between February 28 and April 19 are a kind of secular Lent for me, a period of being particularly conscious of everything that's wrong with the world. This span of time corresponds to the 51-day siege imposed by federal troops on a religious community near Waco, Texas. Critics try to justify the raid and firestorm on the grounds that the murdered people were cult members, victims of brainwashing. Of course, defining a "cult" is a bit tricky. Maybe David Koresh and his followers had laughable beliefs - but hey, check out what kind of stuff the more popular denominations believe. Most churches are equal opportunity indoctrinators of very peculiar illogic. To pretend that one has cornered the market on validity is nonsense. We have a thing called freedom of religion, and wrong-headedness is not a capital offense. The people of Mount Carmel didn't deserve to be turned into crispy critters because they were spiritual zealots.
Branch Davidian scapegoats finally released: "Thirteen years after the Branch Davidians' armed standoff with federal agents ended in an inferno that killed nearly 80 people, six sect members who were sent to prison are about to be released from custody. Most of those who will be freed over the next two months escaped from the compound near Waco as it burned to the ground on April 19, 1993 -- 51 days after a shootout that erupted when federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to arrest religious leader David Koresh for stockpiling guns and explosives."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
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.
****************************
Minutemen to build private fence: "Chris Simcox, President of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, today announced plans by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps ("MCDC") to work with local Arizona land owners to build border security fencing on private land along the border with Mexico. At present, six private land owners have partnered with the Minutemen for the commencement of construction of border fencing on their land. Surveillance cameras on the fencing will be monitored via computer by registered Minutemen across the country. Two construction companies to date have offered to inaugurate groundbreaking, coordinate volunteer construction crews and donate the use of the necessary heavy construction equipment. Simcox says those involved in the planning hope to keep costs near $150 per foot."
Illegal alien population CAN be reduced "Proponents of mass legalization of the illegal alien population often justify this radical step by suggesting that the only alternative - a broad campaign to remove illegal aliens by force - is unworkable. One study fancifully suggested that the cost of such a deportation strategy would be $206 billion over the next five years. But mass forced removal is not the only alternative to mass legalization. A third way is to seek attrition of the illegal population through law enforcement, encouraging illegal aliens to give up and leave of their own accord. A new analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies uses a variety of federal government data to demonstrate that such a strategy of attrition, combined with a stronger border security effort such as the administration's Secure Border Initiative (SBI), can significantly reduce the size of the illegal alien population at a reasonable cost. The report, by CIS Senior Policy Analyst Jessica Vaughan, finds that, according to the government's own cost estimates, an attrition strategy could cut the illegal population by nearly half in five years, with an additional investment of less than $2 billion, or $400 million per year - an increase of less than 1 percent of the President's 2007 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security ($42.7 billion)".
GA: Perdue signs immigration bill: "Georgia's governor signed a sweeping immigration bill Monday that supporters and critics say gives the state some of the toughest measures against illegal immigrants in the nation. 'I want to make this clear: we are not, Georgia's government is not, and this bill is not, anti-immigrant,' Gov. Sunny Perdue said at the signing. ... The law requires verification that adults seeking many state-administered benefits are in the country legally."
Some law enforcement happening: "Federal immigration authorities rounded up more than 1,000 illegal immigrants at dozens of sites and charged nine individuals of the firm that employed them, federal law enforcement officials announced Wednesday. Seven current and former managers of IFCO Systems, which has offices in several states, were arrested and charged in connection with the employment of illegal immigrants, said U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby in Albany, New York."
The left splits over immigration: "Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in them a new kind of civil rights movement. They've supported calls to legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right, where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are working against the interests of low-skilled American workers."
Stupid propaganda: "The statistics are quite illuminating. Seventy-five percent of all farm workers in this country were born in Mexico. When one includes farm workers from other parts of Latin America, more than half of these workers (53%) are here illegally. Only 23% of farm workers were born in the United States. ... When it comes down to it this is really a question of supply and demand. Americans love their lettuce. In order to satiate this demand, agricultural employers need to find people willing to pick lettuce in order for it to get to market. But if we are to rely solely on the American labor force to pick our lettuce that demand will not be met. There are simply not enough Americans willing to go to Arizona to work in 100 degree weather on their hands and knees to pick lettuce for $7.25 an hour without health insurance and limited access to clean drinking water." [So how come I can buy all the lettuce I want in Australia for a couple of dollars each even though we have NO illegals to pick it?]
************************
ELSEWHERE
Iran: Police to arrest women in "un-Islamic" dress: "Iran's Islamic authorities are preparing a crackdown on women flouting the stringent dress code in the clearest sign yet of social and political repression under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From today police in Tehran will be under orders to arrest women failing to conform to the regime's definition of Islamic morals by wearing loose-fitting hijab, or headscarves, tight jackets and shortened trousers exposing skin. ... The clampdown coincides with a bill before Iran's conservative-dominated parliament proposing that fines for people with TV satellite dishes rise from 60 pounds to more than 3,000 pounds. Millions of Iranians have illegal dishes, enabling them to watch western films and news channels. ... The new campaign will hold taxi agencies accountable for their passengers' attire, police will be able to impound cabs carrying women dressed 'inappropriately.' Agencies guilty of repeat offences will be closed."
Waco: "Every year the weeks between February 28 and April 19 are a kind of secular Lent for me, a period of being particularly conscious of everything that's wrong with the world. This span of time corresponds to the 51-day siege imposed by federal troops on a religious community near Waco, Texas. Critics try to justify the raid and firestorm on the grounds that the murdered people were cult members, victims of brainwashing. Of course, defining a "cult" is a bit tricky. Maybe David Koresh and his followers had laughable beliefs - but hey, check out what kind of stuff the more popular denominations believe. Most churches are equal opportunity indoctrinators of very peculiar illogic. To pretend that one has cornered the market on validity is nonsense. We have a thing called freedom of religion, and wrong-headedness is not a capital offense. The people of Mount Carmel didn't deserve to be turned into crispy critters because they were spiritual zealots.
Branch Davidian scapegoats finally released: "Thirteen years after the Branch Davidians' armed standoff with federal agents ended in an inferno that killed nearly 80 people, six sect members who were sent to prison are about to be released from custody. Most of those who will be freed over the next two months escaped from the compound near Waco as it burned to the ground on April 19, 1993 -- 51 days after a shootout that erupted when federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to arrest religious leader David Koresh for stockpiling guns and explosives."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
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.
****************************
Friday, April 21, 2006
SOME ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION BACKGROUND
An Oregon reader responds to my recent mention of an NYT article about illegal immigrants being pulled up by local rather than Federal police and then being handed over to immigration authorities:
"Back in the seventies and eighties I would get calls, usually in the middle of the night, to help local police book non-English speaking arrestees. Most but not all were Mexicans, and usually they had been picked up for trivial offenses. But the police needed all the pertinent information, such as their street address in Mexico.... Anyway, in those days if someone was illegal they were always handed over to the federal immigration authorities to be deported, but then the practice was abandoned, probably because too many people felt sorry for the poor Mexicans. After all, all they want to do is make a living, right? Wrong. Some certainly do, but in the local crime reports the majority of offenders goes by Manuel or Jesus or Jose. Not long ago a huge methamphetamine-importing gang was busted here - all Mexican, mostly illegal, with a few white trash hangers-on.
What did surprise me was the provenance of the news article, because the New York Times is a leftist rag, and Westchester and Putnam counties, just to the north of the City, are very wealthy liberal enclaves. They were even when I lived there, now 35 years ago. So it says something for the country's mood that the police in such areas are now getting federal immigration into the loop. What most foreigners don't understand about America is that there is no chain of command in law enforcement: local police do not have to cooperate with federal authorities unless they choose to, so when they do there is usually some incentive involved: perhaps a federal grant, or other favors in return. If nothing else, this increase in cooperation could do wonders for local crime rates, too; this may be part of the Putnam county authorities' reasoning".
******************************************
"TO HIM THAT HATH, MORE WILL BE GIVEN HIM"
As most readers here will know, I have seven blogs which I update daily. I may be the only septablogger there is (I just made that word up -- but on good linguistic principles!). But in accordance with the wise words of Christ in the parable of the talents, it appears that I have now become an octoblogger!
After many years of sterling service, the founder of TONGUE-TIED, Scott Norvell, wants to take a backseat from now on. That means that instead of doing around half of the posts there, I will be doing nearly all of them. But, as one person doing the work of two, I need all the help I can get. So I am hoping that readers here will be sending me lots of links to stories that might be of interest to TONGUE-TIED readers. It would be particularly good if readers would keep an eye on their local media for cases of censorship etc. I personally can only possibly keep up with the major media.
************************
ELSEWHERE
Germany ends Nazi secrecy: "Germany's decision to grant access to a massive archive of Nazi Holocaust records means thousands of Australian Jewish families may finally get conclusive information about the fate of relatives. The archives, boxed away in a former Nazi SS barracks in the German town of Bad Arolsen, contain information on 17.5 million concentration camp prisoners, forced labourers and other victims of the Third Reich. In Jerusalem, Holocaust specialist Shlomo Aharonson, a historian at Hebrew University, said the archives were supposed to contain all the names of those who died in World War II, both Jews and non-Jews. Citing privacy concerns, Germany had for decades resisted releasing the records, but yesterday Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries announced the Government had relented. The announcement ends a 20-year effort by the Holocaust Museum, the US, France, Poland and some other countries to pry open the archives. Until now, only the international Red Cross had been permitted to sort through the information, with families and historians denied direct access for the past 60 years".
Australians are rich! (Thanks to a healthy economy): Every Australian is now worth an average of $316,000, with a soaring sharemarket and house prices behind an unprecedented wealth boom. According to a Treasury survey, Australia's private wealth kitty is now $6.5 trillion - the biggest ever, and a rise of nearly 10 per cent in the past year. But while world-leading levels of private share ownership and investment property purchases are two of the reasons behind the wealth boom, experts say the biggest influence is much less personal. Professor Mark Wooden from the Melbourne Institute, a conservative think-tank, said the population naturally grew wealthier as the economy expanded.
Hate-preaching in Britain: "Muslim students training to be imams at a British college with strong Iranian links have complained that they are being taught fundamentalist doctrines which describe nonMuslims as "filth". The Times has obtained extracts from medieval texts taught to the students in which unbelievers are likened to pigs and dogs. The texts are taught at the Hawza Ilmiyya of London, a religious school, which has a sister institution, the Islamic College for Advanced Studies (ICAS), which offers a degree validated by Middlesex University. The students, who have asked to remain anonymous, study their religious courses alongside the university-backed BA in Islamic studies. They spend two days a week as religious students and three days on their university course."
OK to maim babies if you are a Muslim: "A Bangladeshi woman who shook a baby boy so violently that he suffered brain damage walked free from court yesterday because a judge conceded that she did not know how to behave in the West. Rahella Khanom, 24, caused the five-month-old boy in her care to suffer fractures to his breast bone and ribs as she tried to rid him of evil spirits, Southwark Crown Court was told. The injuries inflicted on the child over several weeks had caused one side of his brain to shrink. It was believed that the boy would have been screaming in agony for eight weeks because his injuries went untreated"
BBC blows the people's money on favoured sons: "The BBC suffered a backlash from licence fee-payers yesterday as radio listeners accused stars of failing to provide value for money after learning of their salaries through a series of leaks. Executives are braced for further revelations after Jeremy Paxman was the latest well-known name to find his apparent earnings revealed. He is reported to earn about 800,000 pounds for fronting Newsnight and a further 240,000 for hosting University Challenge on BBC Two. Scotland Yard said that it was ready to assist an internal inquiry by the BBC into the source of the leak, which is suspected to be the work of a disgruntled former employee.... However the figures, not challenged by the traditionally secretive corporation, have disclosed information consistently denied through Freedom of Information requests.... The BBC was also forced to defend an 80,731 pound spend on Christmas parties. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is expected to be asked about the revelations when she answers questions about the BBC's demand for an increased licence fee at a House of Lords committee today.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
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.
****************************
An Oregon reader responds to my recent mention of an NYT article about illegal immigrants being pulled up by local rather than Federal police and then being handed over to immigration authorities:
"Back in the seventies and eighties I would get calls, usually in the middle of the night, to help local police book non-English speaking arrestees. Most but not all were Mexicans, and usually they had been picked up for trivial offenses. But the police needed all the pertinent information, such as their street address in Mexico.... Anyway, in those days if someone was illegal they were always handed over to the federal immigration authorities to be deported, but then the practice was abandoned, probably because too many people felt sorry for the poor Mexicans. After all, all they want to do is make a living, right? Wrong. Some certainly do, but in the local crime reports the majority of offenders goes by Manuel or Jesus or Jose. Not long ago a huge methamphetamine-importing gang was busted here - all Mexican, mostly illegal, with a few white trash hangers-on.
What did surprise me was the provenance of the news article, because the New York Times is a leftist rag, and Westchester and Putnam counties, just to the north of the City, are very wealthy liberal enclaves. They were even when I lived there, now 35 years ago. So it says something for the country's mood that the police in such areas are now getting federal immigration into the loop. What most foreigners don't understand about America is that there is no chain of command in law enforcement: local police do not have to cooperate with federal authorities unless they choose to, so when they do there is usually some incentive involved: perhaps a federal grant, or other favors in return. If nothing else, this increase in cooperation could do wonders for local crime rates, too; this may be part of the Putnam county authorities' reasoning".
******************************************
"TO HIM THAT HATH, MORE WILL BE GIVEN HIM"
As most readers here will know, I have seven blogs which I update daily. I may be the only septablogger there is (I just made that word up -- but on good linguistic principles!). But in accordance with the wise words of Christ in the parable of the talents, it appears that I have now become an octoblogger!
After many years of sterling service, the founder of TONGUE-TIED, Scott Norvell, wants to take a backseat from now on. That means that instead of doing around half of the posts there, I will be doing nearly all of them. But, as one person doing the work of two, I need all the help I can get. So I am hoping that readers here will be sending me lots of links to stories that might be of interest to TONGUE-TIED readers. It would be particularly good if readers would keep an eye on their local media for cases of censorship etc. I personally can only possibly keep up with the major media.
************************
ELSEWHERE
Germany ends Nazi secrecy: "Germany's decision to grant access to a massive archive of Nazi Holocaust records means thousands of Australian Jewish families may finally get conclusive information about the fate of relatives. The archives, boxed away in a former Nazi SS barracks in the German town of Bad Arolsen, contain information on 17.5 million concentration camp prisoners, forced labourers and other victims of the Third Reich. In Jerusalem, Holocaust specialist Shlomo Aharonson, a historian at Hebrew University, said the archives were supposed to contain all the names of those who died in World War II, both Jews and non-Jews. Citing privacy concerns, Germany had for decades resisted releasing the records, but yesterday Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries announced the Government had relented. The announcement ends a 20-year effort by the Holocaust Museum, the US, France, Poland and some other countries to pry open the archives. Until now, only the international Red Cross had been permitted to sort through the information, with families and historians denied direct access for the past 60 years".
Australians are rich! (Thanks to a healthy economy): Every Australian is now worth an average of $316,000, with a soaring sharemarket and house prices behind an unprecedented wealth boom. According to a Treasury survey, Australia's private wealth kitty is now $6.5 trillion - the biggest ever, and a rise of nearly 10 per cent in the past year. But while world-leading levels of private share ownership and investment property purchases are two of the reasons behind the wealth boom, experts say the biggest influence is much less personal. Professor Mark Wooden from the Melbourne Institute, a conservative think-tank, said the population naturally grew wealthier as the economy expanded.
Hate-preaching in Britain: "Muslim students training to be imams at a British college with strong Iranian links have complained that they are being taught fundamentalist doctrines which describe nonMuslims as "filth". The Times has obtained extracts from medieval texts taught to the students in which unbelievers are likened to pigs and dogs. The texts are taught at the Hawza Ilmiyya of London, a religious school, which has a sister institution, the Islamic College for Advanced Studies (ICAS), which offers a degree validated by Middlesex University. The students, who have asked to remain anonymous, study their religious courses alongside the university-backed BA in Islamic studies. They spend two days a week as religious students and three days on their university course."
OK to maim babies if you are a Muslim: "A Bangladeshi woman who shook a baby boy so violently that he suffered brain damage walked free from court yesterday because a judge conceded that she did not know how to behave in the West. Rahella Khanom, 24, caused the five-month-old boy in her care to suffer fractures to his breast bone and ribs as she tried to rid him of evil spirits, Southwark Crown Court was told. The injuries inflicted on the child over several weeks had caused one side of his brain to shrink. It was believed that the boy would have been screaming in agony for eight weeks because his injuries went untreated"
BBC blows the people's money on favoured sons: "The BBC suffered a backlash from licence fee-payers yesterday as radio listeners accused stars of failing to provide value for money after learning of their salaries through a series of leaks. Executives are braced for further revelations after Jeremy Paxman was the latest well-known name to find his apparent earnings revealed. He is reported to earn about 800,000 pounds for fronting Newsnight and a further 240,000 for hosting University Challenge on BBC Two. Scotland Yard said that it was ready to assist an internal inquiry by the BBC into the source of the leak, which is suspected to be the work of a disgruntled former employee.... However the figures, not challenged by the traditionally secretive corporation, have disclosed information consistently denied through Freedom of Information requests.... The BBC was also forced to defend an 80,731 pound spend on Christmas parties. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is expected to be asked about the revelations when she answers questions about the BBC's demand for an increased licence fee at a House of Lords committee today.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
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.
****************************
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Medical research is starting to take account of people's race
Some excerpts below from an article in The Economist. I have left out all the agonizing
Last month researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Mississippi Medical Centre published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. They had studied three versions (or alleles, as they are known) of a gene called PCSK9. This gene helps clear the blood of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), one of the chemical packages used to transport cholesterol around the body. Raised levels of LDL are associated with heart disease. The effect of all three types of PCSK9 studied by Jonathan Cohen and his colleagues was to lower the LDL in a person's bloodstream by between 15% and 28%, and coronary heart disease by between 47% and 88%, compared with people with more common alleles of the gene.
In Dr Cohen's work, the race question proved decisive. Of the 3,363 volunteers who described themselves as "black", 0.8% carried an allele of PCSK9 called version 142X and 1.8% carried one called version 679X. Among 9,524 self-described "white" volunteers, a mere 0.02% carried version 142X and 0.04% carried version 679X. By contrast, 3.2% of white people carried the third allele under study, version 46L, while only 0.7% of black participants did. The researchers found that these relatively rare alleles correlated with low LDL, and did so in both blacks and whites, allowing them to conclude that it was the gene change that was crucial. If the team had ignored race and simply compared those who had heart disease with those who did not, and asked which alleles were linked to the risk, they would probably have missed the clinical significance of the alleles... Ignoring race altogether would be to the detriment of medical knowledge about the very people who might benefit.
In some cases, though, the difference clearly is genetic. A gene called UGT1A1 controls the metabolism of a colon-cancer drug called irinotecan. Approximately 20% of African-Americans, 15% of whites and 1% of Asians have two copies of a non-functional version of this gene called *28. Because individuals lacking functional UGT1A1 are at risk for serious complications if given the standard dose of irinotecan, genetic testing of patients before starting irinotecan therapy has become normal. Yet, while only 1% of Asians have two copies of the *28 allele, which is detected by the genetic test, 2.5% of Asians have another non-functional version called *6 which is not detected by the standard test. Indeed, it does not occur in blacks or whites. Thus, testing Asians for the *28 allele does not provide them with the same quality of care as it does for African-Americans or whites. "Identical treatment is not," as Dr Risch puts it, "equal treatment."
*********************************
ELSEWHERE
Publicity-seeking district attorney pursues evidence-free accusations: "Two 20-year-old Duke University lacrosse players were arrested early Tuesday on charges of raping and kidnapping a stripper hired to dance at an off-campus party.... The alleged victim, a 27-year-old black woman and mother of two children, told police she was attacked March 13 by three white men in a bathroom at a party held by the lacrosse team.... Defense attorneys have urged District Attorney Mike Nifong to drop the case, saying DNA tests failed to connect any of the 46 team members tested to the alleged victim. Nifong has said 75 percent to 80 percent of rape prosecutions lack DNA evidence. According to court records, a medical examination of the woman found injuries consistent with rape. Defense attorneys have said time-stamped photos taken the night of the party show that the alleged victim was injured and impaired before she arrived. The charges come two weeks before Nifong, appointed to the job last year after nearly three decades as a lawyer in the district attorney's office, is up for election. On Monday, he repeatedly declined to comment on the case."
Mark Steyn has a much-linked article here on the importance of stopping the nuclear program of the mad Mullahs of Iran before it is too late.
U.S. army guns no good: "Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the world's most popular assault rifle, says that US soldiers in Iraq are using his invention in preference to their own weapons, proving that his gun is still the best. "Even after lying in a swamp you can pick up this rifle, aim it and shoot. That's the best job description there is for a gun. Real soldiers know that and understand it," the 86-year-old gunmaker told a weekend news conference in Moscow. "In Vietnam, American soldiers threw away their M-16 rifles and used (Kalashnikov) AK-47s from dead Vietnamese soldiers, with bullets they captured. That was because the climate is different to America, where M-16s may work properly," he said. "Look what's happening now: every day on television we see that the Americans in Iraq have my machine guns and assault rifles in their armored vehicles. Even there American rifles don't work properly." Some US troops in Iraq have reportedly taken to using AK-47s in preference to the standard-issue M-16." [The M16 was prone to jamming from the start. But defence procurement always has been a prime example of bureaucratic bungling and corruption]
Australia takes the baby shortage seriously: "John Howard has signalled to low and middle-income families they can expect substantial tax relief in next month's Budget, after identifying the need to help with the costs of raising children as his Government's top priority. The Prime Minister also dampened expectations for significant change at the top end of the tax scale, saying the Government had already done a lot for high income earners, with the number of people paying the top marginal tax rate of 48.5 per cent falling from 14 per cent to 3 per cent in the past three years. Mr Howard said yesterday rhetoric on tax reform meant little without a focus on the pressures facing families. "My Government places the low and middle-income families of Australia squarely in the foreground of our policy lens," he said. "And strengthening the family - helping them with the costs of raising children - is the best way any government can reinforce social cohesion and stability in a changing world."
Dumb and dangerous: "It is no secret that politicians frequently put all of us at risk because of their real or willful ignorance. Most wars are a result of political miscalculations, but so are many recessions, depressions and other economic calamities. What follows are three examples where the political class is putting us in danger because of economic ignorance or worse. U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, have come up with a particularly dumb and dangerous proposal, and that is to place a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese goods if China does not increase the value of its currency. They claim that this is necessary because the Chinese have a big trade surplus with the U.S.... Contrary to what the senators believe, our trade deficit is a sign of strength. Individuals, businesses and countries want to invest in the U.S. because they can obtain a higher rate of return here than they can in their home market, and they believe their money is safer in the U.S. To invest in this country requires having U.S. dollars, and the way to get U.S. dollars is by selling some goods or service that Americans want."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Some excerpts below from an article in The Economist. I have left out all the agonizing
Last month researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Mississippi Medical Centre published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. They had studied three versions (or alleles, as they are known) of a gene called PCSK9. This gene helps clear the blood of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), one of the chemical packages used to transport cholesterol around the body. Raised levels of LDL are associated with heart disease. The effect of all three types of PCSK9 studied by Jonathan Cohen and his colleagues was to lower the LDL in a person's bloodstream by between 15% and 28%, and coronary heart disease by between 47% and 88%, compared with people with more common alleles of the gene.
In Dr Cohen's work, the race question proved decisive. Of the 3,363 volunteers who described themselves as "black", 0.8% carried an allele of PCSK9 called version 142X and 1.8% carried one called version 679X. Among 9,524 self-described "white" volunteers, a mere 0.02% carried version 142X and 0.04% carried version 679X. By contrast, 3.2% of white people carried the third allele under study, version 46L, while only 0.7% of black participants did. The researchers found that these relatively rare alleles correlated with low LDL, and did so in both blacks and whites, allowing them to conclude that it was the gene change that was crucial. If the team had ignored race and simply compared those who had heart disease with those who did not, and asked which alleles were linked to the risk, they would probably have missed the clinical significance of the alleles... Ignoring race altogether would be to the detriment of medical knowledge about the very people who might benefit.
In some cases, though, the difference clearly is genetic. A gene called UGT1A1 controls the metabolism of a colon-cancer drug called irinotecan. Approximately 20% of African-Americans, 15% of whites and 1% of Asians have two copies of a non-functional version of this gene called *28. Because individuals lacking functional UGT1A1 are at risk for serious complications if given the standard dose of irinotecan, genetic testing of patients before starting irinotecan therapy has become normal. Yet, while only 1% of Asians have two copies of the *28 allele, which is detected by the genetic test, 2.5% of Asians have another non-functional version called *6 which is not detected by the standard test. Indeed, it does not occur in blacks or whites. Thus, testing Asians for the *28 allele does not provide them with the same quality of care as it does for African-Americans or whites. "Identical treatment is not," as Dr Risch puts it, "equal treatment."
*********************************
ELSEWHERE
Publicity-seeking district attorney pursues evidence-free accusations: "Two 20-year-old Duke University lacrosse players were arrested early Tuesday on charges of raping and kidnapping a stripper hired to dance at an off-campus party.... The alleged victim, a 27-year-old black woman and mother of two children, told police she was attacked March 13 by three white men in a bathroom at a party held by the lacrosse team.... Defense attorneys have urged District Attorney Mike Nifong to drop the case, saying DNA tests failed to connect any of the 46 team members tested to the alleged victim. Nifong has said 75 percent to 80 percent of rape prosecutions lack DNA evidence. According to court records, a medical examination of the woman found injuries consistent with rape. Defense attorneys have said time-stamped photos taken the night of the party show that the alleged victim was injured and impaired before she arrived. The charges come two weeks before Nifong, appointed to the job last year after nearly three decades as a lawyer in the district attorney's office, is up for election. On Monday, he repeatedly declined to comment on the case."
Mark Steyn has a much-linked article here on the importance of stopping the nuclear program of the mad Mullahs of Iran before it is too late.
U.S. army guns no good: "Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the world's most popular assault rifle, says that US soldiers in Iraq are using his invention in preference to their own weapons, proving that his gun is still the best. "Even after lying in a swamp you can pick up this rifle, aim it and shoot. That's the best job description there is for a gun. Real soldiers know that and understand it," the 86-year-old gunmaker told a weekend news conference in Moscow. "In Vietnam, American soldiers threw away their M-16 rifles and used (Kalashnikov) AK-47s from dead Vietnamese soldiers, with bullets they captured. That was because the climate is different to America, where M-16s may work properly," he said. "Look what's happening now: every day on television we see that the Americans in Iraq have my machine guns and assault rifles in their armored vehicles. Even there American rifles don't work properly." Some US troops in Iraq have reportedly taken to using AK-47s in preference to the standard-issue M-16." [The M16 was prone to jamming from the start. But defence procurement always has been a prime example of bureaucratic bungling and corruption]
Australia takes the baby shortage seriously: "John Howard has signalled to low and middle-income families they can expect substantial tax relief in next month's Budget, after identifying the need to help with the costs of raising children as his Government's top priority. The Prime Minister also dampened expectations for significant change at the top end of the tax scale, saying the Government had already done a lot for high income earners, with the number of people paying the top marginal tax rate of 48.5 per cent falling from 14 per cent to 3 per cent in the past three years. Mr Howard said yesterday rhetoric on tax reform meant little without a focus on the pressures facing families. "My Government places the low and middle-income families of Australia squarely in the foreground of our policy lens," he said. "And strengthening the family - helping them with the costs of raising children - is the best way any government can reinforce social cohesion and stability in a changing world."
Dumb and dangerous: "It is no secret that politicians frequently put all of us at risk because of their real or willful ignorance. Most wars are a result of political miscalculations, but so are many recessions, depressions and other economic calamities. What follows are three examples where the political class is putting us in danger because of economic ignorance or worse. U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, have come up with a particularly dumb and dangerous proposal, and that is to place a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese goods if China does not increase the value of its currency. They claim that this is necessary because the Chinese have a big trade surplus with the U.S.... Contrary to what the senators believe, our trade deficit is a sign of strength. Individuals, businesses and countries want to invest in the U.S. because they can obtain a higher rate of return here than they can in their home market, and they believe their money is safer in the U.S. To invest in this country requires having U.S. dollars, and the way to get U.S. dollars is by selling some goods or service that Americans want."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
SEETHING LEFTIST HATRED AGAIN
Excerpt below from an interesting report. That a Leftist who cannot be honest with herself about her own motivations should be dishonest about other things should be no surprise
Journey through the mind of a liberal to understand how pure, naked hate defines the political agenda. A brief glimpse of what passes for gray matter would confirm the worst suspicions of the harshest critics of liberalism. John Morganelli knows better than most that they are motivated by venom instead of virtue..... On Tuesday, Morganelli got more than he asked for. Robin Mekonnen, who hinted she was a lawyer and stated she was an employee of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, started sending e-mail using the court's domain name. Ms. Mekonnen wrote,
"Why don't you talk a little about the effects upon the economy by your fellow slices of white bread with regard to the Timothy McVeighs and the anthrax senders? Your enemies look more like you than you care to believe, but you chose skin color or nationality in lieu of self-hatred. Watch out for the white man. He lies, cheats, steals, murders, rapes, kidnaps, more than anyone else in the world. Get therapy. You're in denial."
A surprised Morganelli responded that she was the racist and the statistics on his site that she questioned were accurate. Mekonnen wrote back that,
"And no, I'm not a racist. In fact I'm an anti-racist. I emphasized that you are white to you so you can confront your own demons. See racism as self-hatred and psychopathology. You want a repeat of what we did to Native Americans, Chinese and Japanese. Why don't you consult a real impartial authority ... before you create a supremacist Web site? I was forwarded your website from an anti-racist government watchdog list server."
Morganelli told Mekonnen he would alert her employers at the Supreme Court about her e-mail.... The court e-mailed back a statement: "Today, we learned that a graduate student, with whom we contracted on a short-term basis ... apparently has made unauthorized use of (the court's e-mail) ... issued to her solely for the conduct of her temporary contractual assignment. The individual's actions were in no way connected with her temporary work ... ." It also said it suspended her contract with the intention of terminating it -- and that she was not an employee. The state bar association also had no record of her.
More on Leftist hate here. Leftists are always accusing conservatives of hate to mask how much they themselves are moved by it. See also here for their latest spew at Michelle Malkin
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Some immigration law-enforcement happening: "Serious criminal charges once typically reserved for drug traffickers and organized-crime figures are increasingly being used to target businesses that employ illegal immigrants, a strategy highlighted last week when three Maryland restaurateurs pleaded guilty to federal offenses and agreed to forfeit more than $1 million in cash and property. The little-publicized approach, which can include charging such employers with money laundering and seizing their assets, amounts to a strategic shift in the enforcement of immigration law in the workplace. As a result, investigations into the employment of illegal immigrants, known as worksite enforcement, resulted in 127 criminal convictions in 2005 nationwide, up from 46 the previous year, according to figures from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE."
Bankers scared of Wal-Mart: "Wal-Mart Stores is learning there is a downside to vanquishing your rivals and leaving them in your wake: You attract a lot of attention when you try to enter a new market. That was clear enough from Monday's rare public hearings on the retail giant's application to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for deposit insurance so it can set up a banking arm, known as an industrial loan company (ILC). Wal-Mart vows that it won't enter branch banking and says it merely wants the charter so it can trim the processing costs of various credit card, debit card and electronic check transactions. But the community banking lobby-supported by consumer advocates-thinks it is only a matter of time before the retailer intrudes on the banks' turf. And the chief objection is that Wal-Mart would give them a run for their money. "There's plenty of competition out there," observed Kenneth J. Redding of America's Community of Bankers. "We don't need Wal-Mart to further the competitive disadvantage we already have."
Arab is murdered for selling to Jews: "An Arab man accused of selling his property in the fiercely contested region of east Jerusalem to Jewish settlers was buried in a traitor's grave yesterday after Palestinian police found his body riddled with bullets in a burnt-out car. Israeli police believe that Muhammad Abu al-Hawa, 48, whose body showed signs of torture, was murdered by Palestinians outraged by the sale to Jews of the three upper floors of a four-storey property on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem".
B'nai B'rith draws the obvious conclusion from the Tel Aviv bombing: "B'nai B'rith International has condemned today's terror bombing at a falafel restaurant in Tel Aviv in which at least six were killed, not including the bomber, and at least 75 were wounded - 15 of them seriously. Responding to media reports that the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) government called the bombing a legitimate response to Israeli "aggression," B'nai B'rith International President Joel S. Kaplan charged, "Anyone who thinks that Hamas is willing to change - or that it is even capable of changing - or who believes that Hamas understands the responsibilities inherent in governing, is simply thinking irrationally."
One solution to German unemployment: "While the construction industry in Germany is stagnating as World Cup 2006 projects reach completion, it is booming in Britain, with 30,000 new homes a year planned in the course of the next 20 years and an Olympic site in East London set to be created. Now German craftsmen are being instructed in how to attack the British labour market. Bettina Hansmeier, a spokeswoman for the German Master Craftsmen's Group, a lobby representing skilled building workers in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which includes Duesseldorf, said that a number of websites had been set up to advise workers on how to get jobs in Britain."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Excerpt below from an interesting report. That a Leftist who cannot be honest with herself about her own motivations should be dishonest about other things should be no surprise
Journey through the mind of a liberal to understand how pure, naked hate defines the political agenda. A brief glimpse of what passes for gray matter would confirm the worst suspicions of the harshest critics of liberalism. John Morganelli knows better than most that they are motivated by venom instead of virtue..... On Tuesday, Morganelli got more than he asked for. Robin Mekonnen, who hinted she was a lawyer and stated she was an employee of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, started sending e-mail using the court's domain name. Ms. Mekonnen wrote,
"Why don't you talk a little about the effects upon the economy by your fellow slices of white bread with regard to the Timothy McVeighs and the anthrax senders? Your enemies look more like you than you care to believe, but you chose skin color or nationality in lieu of self-hatred. Watch out for the white man. He lies, cheats, steals, murders, rapes, kidnaps, more than anyone else in the world. Get therapy. You're in denial."
A surprised Morganelli responded that she was the racist and the statistics on his site that she questioned were accurate. Mekonnen wrote back that,
"And no, I'm not a racist. In fact I'm an anti-racist. I emphasized that you are white to you so you can confront your own demons. See racism as self-hatred and psychopathology. You want a repeat of what we did to Native Americans, Chinese and Japanese. Why don't you consult a real impartial authority ... before you create a supremacist Web site? I was forwarded your website from an anti-racist government watchdog list server."
Morganelli told Mekonnen he would alert her employers at the Supreme Court about her e-mail.... The court e-mailed back a statement: "Today, we learned that a graduate student, with whom we contracted on a short-term basis ... apparently has made unauthorized use of (the court's e-mail) ... issued to her solely for the conduct of her temporary contractual assignment. The individual's actions were in no way connected with her temporary work ... ." It also said it suspended her contract with the intention of terminating it -- and that she was not an employee. The state bar association also had no record of her.
More on Leftist hate here. Leftists are always accusing conservatives of hate to mask how much they themselves are moved by it. See also here for their latest spew at Michelle Malkin
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Some immigration law-enforcement happening: "Serious criminal charges once typically reserved for drug traffickers and organized-crime figures are increasingly being used to target businesses that employ illegal immigrants, a strategy highlighted last week when three Maryland restaurateurs pleaded guilty to federal offenses and agreed to forfeit more than $1 million in cash and property. The little-publicized approach, which can include charging such employers with money laundering and seizing their assets, amounts to a strategic shift in the enforcement of immigration law in the workplace. As a result, investigations into the employment of illegal immigrants, known as worksite enforcement, resulted in 127 criminal convictions in 2005 nationwide, up from 46 the previous year, according to figures from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE."
Bankers scared of Wal-Mart: "Wal-Mart Stores is learning there is a downside to vanquishing your rivals and leaving them in your wake: You attract a lot of attention when you try to enter a new market. That was clear enough from Monday's rare public hearings on the retail giant's application to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for deposit insurance so it can set up a banking arm, known as an industrial loan company (ILC). Wal-Mart vows that it won't enter branch banking and says it merely wants the charter so it can trim the processing costs of various credit card, debit card and electronic check transactions. But the community banking lobby-supported by consumer advocates-thinks it is only a matter of time before the retailer intrudes on the banks' turf. And the chief objection is that Wal-Mart would give them a run for their money. "There's plenty of competition out there," observed Kenneth J. Redding of America's Community of Bankers. "We don't need Wal-Mart to further the competitive disadvantage we already have."
Arab is murdered for selling to Jews: "An Arab man accused of selling his property in the fiercely contested region of east Jerusalem to Jewish settlers was buried in a traitor's grave yesterday after Palestinian police found his body riddled with bullets in a burnt-out car. Israeli police believe that Muhammad Abu al-Hawa, 48, whose body showed signs of torture, was murdered by Palestinians outraged by the sale to Jews of the three upper floors of a four-storey property on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem".
B'nai B'rith draws the obvious conclusion from the Tel Aviv bombing: "B'nai B'rith International has condemned today's terror bombing at a falafel restaurant in Tel Aviv in which at least six were killed, not including the bomber, and at least 75 were wounded - 15 of them seriously. Responding to media reports that the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) government called the bombing a legitimate response to Israeli "aggression," B'nai B'rith International President Joel S. Kaplan charged, "Anyone who thinks that Hamas is willing to change - or that it is even capable of changing - or who believes that Hamas understands the responsibilities inherent in governing, is simply thinking irrationally."
One solution to German unemployment: "While the construction industry in Germany is stagnating as World Cup 2006 projects reach completion, it is booming in Britain, with 30,000 new homes a year planned in the course of the next 20 years and an Olympic site in East London set to be created. Now German craftsmen are being instructed in how to attack the British labour market. Bettina Hansmeier, a spokeswoman for the German Master Craftsmen's Group, a lobby representing skilled building workers in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which includes Duesseldorf, said that a number of websites had been set up to advise workers on how to get jobs in Britain."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
ANOTHER NAUGHTY CARTOON
"The editor of an Italian monthly has apologized for any offense to Muslims over a humorous caption for a drawing showing the Prophet Muhammad in hell, Italian news reports said Sunday. The journal Studi Cattolici (Catholic Studies), which offers a variety of opinions on cultural issues, ran the caption and drawing in its March issue. Italian news agencies on Sunday quoted the journal's editor, Cesare Cavalleri, as "apologizing, as a Christian," for any offense.
Milan daily Corriere della Sera said that the journal had run a humorous caption next to the drawing, which was inspired by Dante's depiction of Muhammad in hell in his "Divine Comedy." The Union of Italian Islamic Communities said it had protested the caption. The organization's secretary, Roberto Piccardo, declined to comment on the reported apology.
Cavalleri was quoted as saying the vignette "was interpreted as being anti-Islam when, if anything, it was a denunciation of a cultural identity crisis in the West," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Cavalleri as saying. "In any case, if, contrary to my and the author's intentions, someone felt offended in his religious feelings, I willingly apologize as a Christian.""
More here
In the cartoon, famous Italian poet Dante is asking the Roman poet Virgil: "That man divided in two from his head to his feet - isn't that Muhammad?" Virgil replies: "Yes, it is him and he is in two because he has divided society - while the man next to him with his arms down represents Italian politics towards Islam."
*****************************
A GOOD RANT ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION
Nebraska has just passed a law that resegregates some of its shools -- a law that prominent blacks argued for. I noted the matter on EDUCATION WATCH under the heading "SEGREGATION IS GOOD FOR BLACKS -- APPARENTLY". A reader who is a teacher in Hawaii has responded as follows:
"Numerous lines of evidence indicate:
1) as institutions take from parents the power to determine for their own children the course of instruction and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance (as measured by standardized test scores or, inversely, arrest rates) falls, and
2) political control of school harms most the children of the least politically adept parents ("Well, duh!" as my students would say). Across the US, the correlation between mean district size and NAEP 4th and 8th grade Reading and Math scores is negative. The correlation between the fraction of a State's total enrollment assigned to districts over 20,000 and NAEP test scores is negative. Smaller is better.
There is an interesting exception: the mean score of children of college-educated white parents is slightly positively correlated with mean district size and with the fraction of total enrollment assigned to large districts. There is an instructive exception to the exception: In Hawaii, which maintains a single State-wide school district of 180,000 students, the mean score of white students (NAEP 8th grade Math) is the lowest in the US. The mean score of children of high-school educated black parents is the lowest in the US. Asians dominate the DOE bureaucracy and the State legislature.
This does not yield high performance for Asian students (the mean score of the top one-third of schools in Hawaii is lower than the mean score of three States' bottom one third of schools), but the system harms most the children of the least politically adept parents. Segregation is good for blacks? I would say: "parent control of education is good for everybody except bad teachers, politically-connected construction contractors, and NEA thugs"."
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Drug addiction linked to genes: "New research involving DNA samples from 700 cocaine abusers and 850 non-users in Brazil found people who carried two copies of a gene variant were 50 per cent more likely to become addicted to the drug. Cocaine acts to inhibit the action of a protein, known as DAT, that controls the removal of the chemical dopamine in the brain. The result is a "high" feeling when nerve cells in the brain are overloaded with the good-mood chemical. The study, by a team of British and Brazilian researchers, including geneticist Gerome Breen from the Institute of Psychiatry at London's Kings College, found people who had two copies of the variant that influenced the amount of the DAT protein were at greater risk of addiction. "What seems to be happening is that once someone with this variant is exposed to cocaine they start to produce less of this dopamine transporter protein than they had before and this has a knock-on effect in the brain and knocks the system out of kilter," Dr Breen said".
Hard to change a leopard's spots: "It was a story that touched the hearts of Minnesotans. But now it has taken a surprising turn, in Boston. A homeless, 22-year-old, undocumented immigrant from Mexico was found secretly living inside a Twin Cities high school last year, using the showers and foraging for cafeteria food. Francisco Javier Serrano's story captivated the news media there and moved a wealthy developer to provide him with money, an immigration attorney, and a rent-free apartment overlooking downtown Minneapolis. But immigration officials ordered Serrano back to Mexico. Officials believed that he boarded a plane for his home country Jan. 5, and it seemed to be a closed case. Then, two weeks ago, a tenant in Boston's North End heard a sound inside his apartment. A man with a knife had broken in. The tenant struck the intruder with a kitchen pan, and police responded to find Serrano and the tenant in a struggle, authorities said. Now, Serrano sits in Suffolk County Jail facing charges of home invasion."
Is the US sugar problem solvable? : "The United States' sugar policy has a long history of supporting sugar producers, and the current system has its roots in the agricultural programs of the Great Depression. The policy has been widely criticized both at home and abroad for supporting a relatively small group of sugar producers at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, sugar-using industries, and the environment. The program relies on restricting sugar imports to keep domestic prices high, which especially hurts those developing countries that are low-cost producers of sugar. The artificially high price also provides incentives for domestic sugar producers to increase production into environmentally sensitive areas."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
"The editor of an Italian monthly has apologized for any offense to Muslims over a humorous caption for a drawing showing the Prophet Muhammad in hell, Italian news reports said Sunday. The journal Studi Cattolici (Catholic Studies), which offers a variety of opinions on cultural issues, ran the caption and drawing in its March issue. Italian news agencies on Sunday quoted the journal's editor, Cesare Cavalleri, as "apologizing, as a Christian," for any offense.
Milan daily Corriere della Sera said that the journal had run a humorous caption next to the drawing, which was inspired by Dante's depiction of Muhammad in hell in his "Divine Comedy." The Union of Italian Islamic Communities said it had protested the caption. The organization's secretary, Roberto Piccardo, declined to comment on the reported apology.
Cavalleri was quoted as saying the vignette "was interpreted as being anti-Islam when, if anything, it was a denunciation of a cultural identity crisis in the West," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Cavalleri as saying. "In any case, if, contrary to my and the author's intentions, someone felt offended in his religious feelings, I willingly apologize as a Christian.""
More here
In the cartoon, famous Italian poet Dante is asking the Roman poet Virgil: "That man divided in two from his head to his feet - isn't that Muhammad?" Virgil replies: "Yes, it is him and he is in two because he has divided society - while the man next to him with his arms down represents Italian politics towards Islam."
*****************************
A GOOD RANT ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION
Nebraska has just passed a law that resegregates some of its shools -- a law that prominent blacks argued for. I noted the matter on EDUCATION WATCH under the heading "SEGREGATION IS GOOD FOR BLACKS -- APPARENTLY". A reader who is a teacher in Hawaii has responded as follows:
"Numerous lines of evidence indicate:
1) as institutions take from parents the power to determine for their own children the course of instruction and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance (as measured by standardized test scores or, inversely, arrest rates) falls, and
2) political control of school harms most the children of the least politically adept parents ("Well, duh!" as my students would say). Across the US, the correlation between mean district size and NAEP 4th and 8th grade Reading and Math scores is negative. The correlation between the fraction of a State's total enrollment assigned to districts over 20,000 and NAEP test scores is negative. Smaller is better.
There is an interesting exception: the mean score of children of college-educated white parents is slightly positively correlated with mean district size and with the fraction of total enrollment assigned to large districts. There is an instructive exception to the exception: In Hawaii, which maintains a single State-wide school district of 180,000 students, the mean score of white students (NAEP 8th grade Math) is the lowest in the US. The mean score of children of high-school educated black parents is the lowest in the US. Asians dominate the DOE bureaucracy and the State legislature.
This does not yield high performance for Asian students (the mean score of the top one-third of schools in Hawaii is lower than the mean score of three States' bottom one third of schools), but the system harms most the children of the least politically adept parents. Segregation is good for blacks? I would say: "parent control of education is good for everybody except bad teachers, politically-connected construction contractors, and NEA thugs"."
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Drug addiction linked to genes: "New research involving DNA samples from 700 cocaine abusers and 850 non-users in Brazil found people who carried two copies of a gene variant were 50 per cent more likely to become addicted to the drug. Cocaine acts to inhibit the action of a protein, known as DAT, that controls the removal of the chemical dopamine in the brain. The result is a "high" feeling when nerve cells in the brain are overloaded with the good-mood chemical. The study, by a team of British and Brazilian researchers, including geneticist Gerome Breen from the Institute of Psychiatry at London's Kings College, found people who had two copies of the variant that influenced the amount of the DAT protein were at greater risk of addiction. "What seems to be happening is that once someone with this variant is exposed to cocaine they start to produce less of this dopamine transporter protein than they had before and this has a knock-on effect in the brain and knocks the system out of kilter," Dr Breen said".
Hard to change a leopard's spots: "It was a story that touched the hearts of Minnesotans. But now it has taken a surprising turn, in Boston. A homeless, 22-year-old, undocumented immigrant from Mexico was found secretly living inside a Twin Cities high school last year, using the showers and foraging for cafeteria food. Francisco Javier Serrano's story captivated the news media there and moved a wealthy developer to provide him with money, an immigration attorney, and a rent-free apartment overlooking downtown Minneapolis. But immigration officials ordered Serrano back to Mexico. Officials believed that he boarded a plane for his home country Jan. 5, and it seemed to be a closed case. Then, two weeks ago, a tenant in Boston's North End heard a sound inside his apartment. A man with a knife had broken in. The tenant struck the intruder with a kitchen pan, and police responded to find Serrano and the tenant in a struggle, authorities said. Now, Serrano sits in Suffolk County Jail facing charges of home invasion."
Is the US sugar problem solvable? : "The United States' sugar policy has a long history of supporting sugar producers, and the current system has its roots in the agricultural programs of the Great Depression. The policy has been widely criticized both at home and abroad for supporting a relatively small group of sugar producers at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, sugar-using industries, and the environment. The program relies on restricting sugar imports to keep domestic prices high, which especially hurts those developing countries that are low-cost producers of sugar. The artificially high price also provides incentives for domestic sugar producers to increase production into environmentally sensitive areas."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Monday, April 17, 2006
WHAT LEFTISTS HATE AND WHY
Some excerpts from a great list by Chris Weinkopf
These are the things that most infuriate "progressives," followed by a brief explanation of why. The mere mention of these words will cause the typical left-winger to see (even more) red:
Cars - especially SUVs; the bigger and safer the vehicle, the worse. For leftists, cars are a polluting, annoying expression of individual freedom - a painful reminder that the longstanding efforts of social engineers to herd Americans into mass transit remain unfulfilled.
Guns - and the irritating insistence of "gun nuts" (anyone who owns a gun legally) to look after their own safety rather than trust in the benevolence and capabilities of the all-protecting state.
Suburbs, AKA "sprawl" - and the selfish desire of so many Americans to own their own homes with their own garages and their own backyards.
Straight white men - especially the dead ones that once dominated classroom curricula, and any institutions where they once flourished, such as military academies, prep schools, and fraternal organizations.
Jokes about sexual orientation, race, or gender - unless they're about straight, white men.
Jokes about most anything else - except for the items on this list.
Traditional families - Heather's mommies both deserve full health benefits now, but married couples ought to be penalized with higher taxes until they either die or divorce.
Abstinence - and for that matter, all traditional sexual mores and anyone so backward as to demand them of their children, politicians, or clergy.
Religious "zealots" - that is, adherents of any faith that that makes claims on truth, especially Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, and Evangelical branches of Christianity (but not Islam).
The rich - anyone who has earned a lot of money no doubt did something wretched to obtain it and deserves to have it forcefully taken away. (Rich leftists excluded.)
Vouchers - a threat to unions, social engineers, and the government monopoly on public education.
Home-schooling - a threat to unions, social engineers, and the government monopoly on public education - and a favorite among the religious zealots.
Standardized testing - or, for that matter, educational standards of any kind.
McDonalds - for selling fatty foods containing red meat and marketing them to minors, and for doing what socialism never could: feeding billions and billions on the cheap.
Pharmaceutical companies - for spending billions developing new, life-saving drugs, then charging money for them.
Successful businesses - they must be ripping off their "stakeholders."
Failed business - they must be ripping off their "stakeholders."
***************************
ELSEWHERE
Blair losing the working class: "White, working-class Britons feel so furious about immigration that they are deserting Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party for the far right, a key Blair ally told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. Employment Minister Margaret Hodge said that 80 per cent of white people in her east London constituency of Barking were threatening to vote for the British National Party (BNP) in the May local elections. Former voters for Mr Blair's governing centre-left party were angry about a lack of affordable housing and blamed their worries on Labour neglect and immigration, she told the weekly broadsheet. "They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry," Ms Hodge said. "When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many, eight out of 10 of the white families, say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before. "Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not." Asylum and immigration is a sensitive topic in Britain, with popular newspapers regularly calling the system "chaos".
Brainless and heartless British bureaucracy at work: "A bailiff was sent to an 80-year-old gran's council home to demand rent arrears of just FIVE PENCE. Alice Nelson was left "terrified" after the official called on her without warning. She has lived at the same address for 45 years and has never knowingly been behind with her rent. The bailiff told Alice, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, she had to hand over the 5p there and then. And the shaken and confused gran, who had received no prior letters about the demand, gave him a coin without knowing if she really owed it.... The bailiff, who gave Alice a potty receipt, was sent by Wigan and Leigh Housing, which manages council homes on behalf of the local authority. A spokesman said yesterday: "We apologise for any distress but we are currently having a strong push to reduce both the amount of rent arrears and the actual number of people in arrears. "In terms of how our performance is measured it's also important to reduce the number of people in arrears, whatever the amount." But the Help The Aged charity said: "It beggars belief that debt collectors can bother a woman of this age for such a measly amount of money."
Gunshops as churches!: "A dreary, five-hour House debate on technical aspects of eminent domain law Wednesday turned into a battle over gun rights and the propriety of research on early stem cells. The issues arose as House members grappled with what limits the legislature should put on the government's ability to take private property when government officials think buying the property is in the public interest. Rep. Belinda Harris, a Hillsboro Democrat, proposed an amendment to prohibit the government from using the power of eminent domain to force the sale of any house of worship. The amendment was approved, 154-0. That prompted Rep. Mike Frame, a Eureka Democrat, to propose exempting any property used as a gun shop. He said such an exemption befitted businesses protected by the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Rep. Shannon Cooper, a Clinton Republican who owns a gun store, said gun shops were not equivalent to churches and should not be placed in a special class exempt from rules that apply to all other businesses."
Coffin finally in his coffin: "The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., a civil rights and anti-war campaigner who sought to inspire and encourage an idealistic and rebellious generation of college students in the 1960s from his position as chaplain of Yale University, then reveled in the role of lightning rod thrust upon him by officials and conservatives who thought him and his style of dissent dangerous, died Wednesday at his home in Strafford, Vt. He was 81. The cause was congestive heart failure"
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Some excerpts from a great list by Chris Weinkopf
These are the things that most infuriate "progressives," followed by a brief explanation of why. The mere mention of these words will cause the typical left-winger to see (even more) red:
Cars - especially SUVs; the bigger and safer the vehicle, the worse. For leftists, cars are a polluting, annoying expression of individual freedom - a painful reminder that the longstanding efforts of social engineers to herd Americans into mass transit remain unfulfilled.
Guns - and the irritating insistence of "gun nuts" (anyone who owns a gun legally) to look after their own safety rather than trust in the benevolence and capabilities of the all-protecting state.
Suburbs, AKA "sprawl" - and the selfish desire of so many Americans to own their own homes with their own garages and their own backyards.
Straight white men - especially the dead ones that once dominated classroom curricula, and any institutions where they once flourished, such as military academies, prep schools, and fraternal organizations.
Jokes about sexual orientation, race, or gender - unless they're about straight, white men.
Jokes about most anything else - except for the items on this list.
Traditional families - Heather's mommies both deserve full health benefits now, but married couples ought to be penalized with higher taxes until they either die or divorce.
Abstinence - and for that matter, all traditional sexual mores and anyone so backward as to demand them of their children, politicians, or clergy.
Religious "zealots" - that is, adherents of any faith that that makes claims on truth, especially Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, and Evangelical branches of Christianity (but not Islam).
The rich - anyone who has earned a lot of money no doubt did something wretched to obtain it and deserves to have it forcefully taken away. (Rich leftists excluded.)
Vouchers - a threat to unions, social engineers, and the government monopoly on public education.
Home-schooling - a threat to unions, social engineers, and the government monopoly on public education - and a favorite among the religious zealots.
Standardized testing - or, for that matter, educational standards of any kind.
McDonalds - for selling fatty foods containing red meat and marketing them to minors, and for doing what socialism never could: feeding billions and billions on the cheap.
Pharmaceutical companies - for spending billions developing new, life-saving drugs, then charging money for them.
Successful businesses - they must be ripping off their "stakeholders."
Failed business - they must be ripping off their "stakeholders."
***************************
ELSEWHERE
Blair losing the working class: "White, working-class Britons feel so furious about immigration that they are deserting Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party for the far right, a key Blair ally told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. Employment Minister Margaret Hodge said that 80 per cent of white people in her east London constituency of Barking were threatening to vote for the British National Party (BNP) in the May local elections. Former voters for Mr Blair's governing centre-left party were angry about a lack of affordable housing and blamed their worries on Labour neglect and immigration, she told the weekly broadsheet. "They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry," Ms Hodge said. "When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many, eight out of 10 of the white families, say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before. "Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not." Asylum and immigration is a sensitive topic in Britain, with popular newspapers regularly calling the system "chaos".
Brainless and heartless British bureaucracy at work: "A bailiff was sent to an 80-year-old gran's council home to demand rent arrears of just FIVE PENCE. Alice Nelson was left "terrified" after the official called on her without warning. She has lived at the same address for 45 years and has never knowingly been behind with her rent. The bailiff told Alice, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, she had to hand over the 5p there and then. And the shaken and confused gran, who had received no prior letters about the demand, gave him a coin without knowing if she really owed it.... The bailiff, who gave Alice a potty receipt, was sent by Wigan and Leigh Housing, which manages council homes on behalf of the local authority. A spokesman said yesterday: "We apologise for any distress but we are currently having a strong push to reduce both the amount of rent arrears and the actual number of people in arrears. "In terms of how our performance is measured it's also important to reduce the number of people in arrears, whatever the amount." But the Help The Aged charity said: "It beggars belief that debt collectors can bother a woman of this age for such a measly amount of money."
Gunshops as churches!: "A dreary, five-hour House debate on technical aspects of eminent domain law Wednesday turned into a battle over gun rights and the propriety of research on early stem cells. The issues arose as House members grappled with what limits the legislature should put on the government's ability to take private property when government officials think buying the property is in the public interest. Rep. Belinda Harris, a Hillsboro Democrat, proposed an amendment to prohibit the government from using the power of eminent domain to force the sale of any house of worship. The amendment was approved, 154-0. That prompted Rep. Mike Frame, a Eureka Democrat, to propose exempting any property used as a gun shop. He said such an exemption befitted businesses protected by the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Rep. Shannon Cooper, a Clinton Republican who owns a gun store, said gun shops were not equivalent to churches and should not be placed in a special class exempt from rules that apply to all other businesses."
Coffin finally in his coffin: "The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., a civil rights and anti-war campaigner who sought to inspire and encourage an idealistic and rebellious generation of college students in the 1960s from his position as chaplain of Yale University, then reveled in the role of lightning rod thrust upon him by officials and conservatives who thought him and his style of dissent dangerous, died Wednesday at his home in Strafford, Vt. He was 81. The cause was congestive heart failure"
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Sunday, April 16, 2006
THOSE PESKY INBORN DIFFERENCES AGAIN
More race differences: "The highly charged discussion about what role, if any, race plays in medicine has taken a quiet but significant turn. The pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough has begun testing a hepatitis C drug, codenamed SCH 503034, and has specifically excluded African-American patients from the Phase 2 trial - the stage that attempts to find the right dosage. The exclusion has led two patient groups to accuse the company of racism. For reasons unknown, black patients have a lower response rate than whites to standard therapies for hepatitis C. Schering-Plough says the exclusion will make the drug trials "more prudent and scientifically valid", and that African-Americans can come on board as the study advances (and as the law requires)."
Another difference between male and female brains: "A key part of the brain involved in processing emotionally influenced memories acts differently in men and women, even in the absence of stimuli, University of California, Irvine researchers have found. Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, and Lisa Kilpatrick, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory, have found that the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found on both sides of the brain, behaves very differently in males and females while the subjects are at rest. In men, the right amygdala is more active and shows more connections with other regions of the brain, even when there is no outside stimulus. Conversely, in women, the left amygdala is more connected with other regions of the brain. In addition, the regions of the brain with which the amygdala communicates while a subject is at rest are different in men and women."
Genes and aging: "In 2003, Nir Barzilai and Gil Atzmon, who study aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered that people with a certain polymorphism of the cholesterol-influencing gene CETP lived longer than those without it (ScienceNOW, October 2003). Now the researchers have identified another part of the longevity code. In a study reported in this month's issue of PLoS Biology, Barzilai and Atzmon examined the genetic makeup of 213 centenarians. All were Ashkenazi Jews, a group with a relatively uniform genetic pool in which differences tend to stand out. The researchers also compared the centenarians' children with a control group comprised of individuals whose parents died before reaching 85. They found that 25% of the centenarians carried a particular variation of the gene APOC3, which helps determine cholesterol levels. The same variation was found in 20% of their children but only 10% of the control group, suggesting that long life runs in families. Those with the polymorphism were 15% less likely to have high blood pressure and had a significantly decreased risk for cardiovascular disease or diabetes".
Another physical basis for IQ: "Fast language learners have more white matter and less symmetrical brains, a new scanning study has revealed. The results among the first to link brain differences to language learning aptitude in healthy people, says Narly Golestani at University College London, UK. "The bigger picture is that we're starting to understand that brain shape and structure can be informative about people's abilities," she says. Those in the study who were quickest to hear subtle differences in sounds from a foreign language were found to have the greatest amount of white, fatty tissue in a brain region responsible for sound processing. "It could be that this translates into greater efficiency in the brain," comments Adam Brickman, who researches brain structure the Columbia University Medical Center in New York".
*****************************
ELSEWHERE
There is a carefully-worded article in the NYT about illegal immigrants being pulled up by local rather than Federal police and then being handed over to immigration authorities. The whole tenor of the article is about how unfair it all is to the poor illegals that they can be pulled up over "trivial" matters and then get deported over it. To the NYT, lawbreaking should apparently be condoned. No word of what the illegals concerned cost the U.S. taxpayer.
Very troubling if true: "The key plotters behind the July 7th 2005 London bombings planned to trap and drown tens of thousands of innocent people ... A team of terrorists with a fifth bomb - intended to explode in the tube network directly under the River Thames - was arrested the night before. The arrests were made when uniformed officers in police patrol cars stopped the terror gang, apparently by fortunate accident. Within minutes of their notifying their superiors they were `swamped' by plain-clothes police, Special Branch and/or MI5 officers and the whole affair was taken out of their hands. They were ordered to tell no-one about the incident and several who have since tried to find out what happened to the small group of Islamics they arrested have been unable to do so. The men have vanished without trace".
What BS! Premature babies feel pain-but fetuses don't: "Do unborn children feel pain? Two new reports in research journals shed light on some of the latest scientific thinking on the deeply charged question, an ever-present part of the debate over abortion rights. One paper is a study finding that prematurely born babies feel pain. Anti-abortion activists immediately cited this to support their contention that fetuses, too, feel pain. But a second report dismisses this notion, claiming the true experience of pain can arise only after birth".
NBC fails to entrap NASCAR fans: "NBC News baited the hook, but netted nothing in its "sting" attempt to find anti-Muslim sentiments during the Martinsville race weekend.... The inference is that NASCAR fans are bigots, and NBC News was hoping to bait fans into making insensitive remarks to the Muslim/Arab people it had planted at the track. Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications, said Wednesday that no instances of unrest were reported. "No one bothered them," Poston said. It's hard to imagine that NBC News would try to entrap fans in a ploy to make its Dateline segment juicier. But apparently the network did just that; NBC did not deny its actions when confronted by NASCAR...." (HT Newsbusters)
Bush's October surprise -- it's coming: "One hears not an encouraging word about US President George W Bush these days, even from Republican loyalists. Yet I believe that Bush will stage the strongest political comeback of any US politician since Abraham Lincoln won re-election in 1864 in the midst of the American Civil War. Two years ago I wrote that Bush would win a second term as president but live to regret it. Iraq's internal collapse and the president's poll numbers bear my forecast out. But Bush's Republicans will triumph in next November's congressional elections for the same reason that Bush beat Democratic challenger John Kerry in 2004. Americans rally around a wartime commander-in-chief, and Bush will have bombed Iranian nuclear installations by October."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
More race differences: "The highly charged discussion about what role, if any, race plays in medicine has taken a quiet but significant turn. The pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough has begun testing a hepatitis C drug, codenamed SCH 503034, and has specifically excluded African-American patients from the Phase 2 trial - the stage that attempts to find the right dosage. The exclusion has led two patient groups to accuse the company of racism. For reasons unknown, black patients have a lower response rate than whites to standard therapies for hepatitis C. Schering-Plough says the exclusion will make the drug trials "more prudent and scientifically valid", and that African-Americans can come on board as the study advances (and as the law requires)."
Another difference between male and female brains: "A key part of the brain involved in processing emotionally influenced memories acts differently in men and women, even in the absence of stimuli, University of California, Irvine researchers have found. Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, and Lisa Kilpatrick, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory, have found that the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found on both sides of the brain, behaves very differently in males and females while the subjects are at rest. In men, the right amygdala is more active and shows more connections with other regions of the brain, even when there is no outside stimulus. Conversely, in women, the left amygdala is more connected with other regions of the brain. In addition, the regions of the brain with which the amygdala communicates while a subject is at rest are different in men and women."
Genes and aging: "In 2003, Nir Barzilai and Gil Atzmon, who study aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered that people with a certain polymorphism of the cholesterol-influencing gene CETP lived longer than those without it (ScienceNOW, October 2003). Now the researchers have identified another part of the longevity code. In a study reported in this month's issue of PLoS Biology, Barzilai and Atzmon examined the genetic makeup of 213 centenarians. All were Ashkenazi Jews, a group with a relatively uniform genetic pool in which differences tend to stand out. The researchers also compared the centenarians' children with a control group comprised of individuals whose parents died before reaching 85. They found that 25% of the centenarians carried a particular variation of the gene APOC3, which helps determine cholesterol levels. The same variation was found in 20% of their children but only 10% of the control group, suggesting that long life runs in families. Those with the polymorphism were 15% less likely to have high blood pressure and had a significantly decreased risk for cardiovascular disease or diabetes".
Another physical basis for IQ: "Fast language learners have more white matter and less symmetrical brains, a new scanning study has revealed. The results among the first to link brain differences to language learning aptitude in healthy people, says Narly Golestani at University College London, UK. "The bigger picture is that we're starting to understand that brain shape and structure can be informative about people's abilities," she says. Those in the study who were quickest to hear subtle differences in sounds from a foreign language were found to have the greatest amount of white, fatty tissue in a brain region responsible for sound processing. "It could be that this translates into greater efficiency in the brain," comments Adam Brickman, who researches brain structure the Columbia University Medical Center in New York".
*****************************
ELSEWHERE
There is a carefully-worded article in the NYT about illegal immigrants being pulled up by local rather than Federal police and then being handed over to immigration authorities. The whole tenor of the article is about how unfair it all is to the poor illegals that they can be pulled up over "trivial" matters and then get deported over it. To the NYT, lawbreaking should apparently be condoned. No word of what the illegals concerned cost the U.S. taxpayer.
Very troubling if true: "The key plotters behind the July 7th 2005 London bombings planned to trap and drown tens of thousands of innocent people ... A team of terrorists with a fifth bomb - intended to explode in the tube network directly under the River Thames - was arrested the night before. The arrests were made when uniformed officers in police patrol cars stopped the terror gang, apparently by fortunate accident. Within minutes of their notifying their superiors they were `swamped' by plain-clothes police, Special Branch and/or MI5 officers and the whole affair was taken out of their hands. They were ordered to tell no-one about the incident and several who have since tried to find out what happened to the small group of Islamics they arrested have been unable to do so. The men have vanished without trace".
What BS! Premature babies feel pain-but fetuses don't: "Do unborn children feel pain? Two new reports in research journals shed light on some of the latest scientific thinking on the deeply charged question, an ever-present part of the debate over abortion rights. One paper is a study finding that prematurely born babies feel pain. Anti-abortion activists immediately cited this to support their contention that fetuses, too, feel pain. But a second report dismisses this notion, claiming the true experience of pain can arise only after birth".
NBC fails to entrap NASCAR fans: "NBC News baited the hook, but netted nothing in its "sting" attempt to find anti-Muslim sentiments during the Martinsville race weekend.... The inference is that NASCAR fans are bigots, and NBC News was hoping to bait fans into making insensitive remarks to the Muslim/Arab people it had planted at the track. Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications, said Wednesday that no instances of unrest were reported. "No one bothered them," Poston said. It's hard to imagine that NBC News would try to entrap fans in a ploy to make its Dateline segment juicier. But apparently the network did just that; NBC did not deny its actions when confronted by NASCAR...." (HT Newsbusters)
Bush's October surprise -- it's coming: "One hears not an encouraging word about US President George W Bush these days, even from Republican loyalists. Yet I believe that Bush will stage the strongest political comeback of any US politician since Abraham Lincoln won re-election in 1864 in the midst of the American Civil War. Two years ago I wrote that Bush would win a second term as president but live to regret it. Iraq's internal collapse and the president's poll numbers bear my forecast out. But Bush's Republicans will triumph in next November's congressional elections for the same reason that Bush beat Democratic challenger John Kerry in 2004. Americans rally around a wartime commander-in-chief, and Bush will have bombed Iranian nuclear installations by October."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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.
****************************
Saturday, April 15, 2006
GOOD FRIDAY
Anne was determined that we were going to go to a church service on Good Friday. Unfortunately, I had had a rather sleepless night the night before so I woke up a bit after 8am. But when I did, there was Anne hovering over me all dressed up for an outing -- complete with red sandals. So I knew it was going to be a happening morning.
Most churches have their Good Friday services at a rather unearthly hour from my point of view but somewhere deep in the ratlike recesses of my brain was a conviction that the Prebyterians would be more humane about such things. So after a good face-washing, a hot-cross bun and a cup of tea we headed out in the direction of the Ann St Presbyterian church, which is for both of us our old church.
I had hoped for a 9.30 am service but it was unfortunately a 9 am service so we were a few minutes late in arriving. As we were walking from the car to the church however I sang the Doxology by myself -- so that got us started in proper form. I sang it in full voice so it is lucky the streets were fairly empty at that hour. Anne of course is used to my eccentricities. We arrived about half way through the opening hymn, "There is a green hill far away", so I was a bit peeved at missing the whole of such a good hymn.
Much to my surprise the old church was packed and we had to do that which all churchgoers avoid -- sit up the front. Sitting up the front meant however that I noticed a few things I had not noticed before. In particular, I was a little surprised to see a plaque beneath the pulpit bearing the legend: AMDG. I thought that to be a bit "Popish" for a Presbyterian church but I suppose Latin is the property of all humanity. It is of course an ancient ecclesiastical abbreviation for "Ad Majorem Gloriam Dei", or "To the Greater Glory of God".
The congregation was of course mostly elderly but it was pleasing to see some young people there too. There were even a few babies! And there was one lady wearing a rather impressive big black hat. It is amazing how hat-wearing seems to have gone out of style among women in congregations these days -- from Catholics to Jehovah's Witnesses. Very strange in the light of 1 Corinthians 11:13. The minister, Archie McNicol, wore his academic gown throughout of course -- though supplemented by a large and attractive royal-blue stole. Wearing an academic gown is of course an expression of the traditional Scottish reverence for education.
Mr. McNicol gave the expected long opening prayer in his delightful Edinburgh accent. There was rather a lot in it that I liked. His petition that people be saved from the "delusions of the Devil" certainly made it clear that we were not in an Anglican church. There is plenty of that sort of lsanguage in The Book of Common Prayer but it is not heard from any Anglican pulpits these days that I know of. Though perhaps you would hear it in the Sydney diocese. Mr McNicol also very traditionally prayed for blessings on the Queen and the members of the Royal family and prayed also for divine guidance for the "authorities that rule over us" -- An allusion to Romans 13: 1, of course. Particularly pleasing however was that he prayed for members of the armed forces overseas who were fighting "for freedom and liberty" -- A genuine appreciation of reality that one expects from a conservative Christian.
You will note that I refer to the minister as "Mr". That is the Presbyterian way. Presbyterianism is a very democratic form of Christianity -- with the congregation and its elders being supreme rather than the minister.
Being Easter, it was of course a Communion service and in the modern way all were invited to partake. But although I have much more appreciation of traditional Christian culture than most atheists do, I did not. I am not that much of a hypocrite. Nor did I join in the recitation of the Apostle's creed or the Lord's prayer. I certainly joined in the hymns however, and our final hymmn -- "Rugged Cross" -- was one of my favourites.
Rather oddly, throughout the service, the organ was supplemented by a solo violinist and, instead of an organ voluntary at the close of the service, the violinist played "He was despised and rejected" from Handel's Messiah -- which was great to hear.
When we got home, Anne cooked us some smoked haddock for a late breakfast, which was at least very Scottish, though not, of course, to everyone's taste. We had it with toast, Rotkohl and pickled cucumbers.
Afterwards we put on Bach's Passio secundum Mattheum, with Fischer-Dieskau singing baritone. You can't get better Easter music than that. When we got to the great aria "Mache dich mein Herze rein" ("Make my heart pure") I was moved to tears as I usually am when I hear it. The combination of supreme Bach music rendered in the incomparable voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is just too perfect.
And so began our day.....
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ELSEWHERE
A narrow escape from British Fascism: "The Government has backed down over the so-called “dictatorship Bill”, which would have allowed ministers to bypass parliamentary scrutiny. This comes after trenchant criticism from a cross-party group of MPs, peers and senior lawyers, including six Cambridge law professors, who gave warning in a letter to The Times that it would allow the Government to rewrite almost any Act. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government said would help to cut red tape, also provoked a grassroots revolt when nearly 2,000 people signed up to a Save Parliament campaign. Jim Murphy, the Cabinet Office Minister responsible for the Bill, has now indicated that he will amend the legislation to make clear “beyond doubt” that it will be used only to tackle red tape, known as better regulation. The Bill was drawn up to give ministers the power to reform legislation or introduce recommendations of the Law Commission, which suggests updates to the law, “by order”.
U.S. Army recruiting: "First, there is the myth that recruiting is down, or as many opponents of the war in Iraq like to say, "Bush can’t find enough high school graduates to send to Iraq." The fact is recruiting is up. If we look at four of the past five years, the Army – which usually struggles more than the other services in terms of recruiting – has met and exceeded its goals for active-duty recruits. But that fact is often ignored because it runs counter to the myth that young Americans, who might have considered military service as a viable career option, are avoiding service like the proverbial plague... The Army’s actual numbers tell a different story. For fiscal year 2004, the Army’s recruiting goal for active duty recruits was 77,000. That number was met and exceeded by nearly 600. The Army’s active duty goal for 2005 was then upped to 80,000 – an increase of 3,000 over the previous year’s goal. And with 73,373 new recruits for 2005 – granted, less than 2004 and 92 percent of 2005 – the actual numbers were still high, and no one was lowering numbers to try and make goal".
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and 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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Anne was determined that we were going to go to a church service on Good Friday. Unfortunately, I had had a rather sleepless night the night before so I woke up a bit after 8am. But when I did, there was Anne hovering over me all dressed up for an outing -- complete with red sandals. So I knew it was going to be a happening morning.
Most churches have their Good Friday services at a rather unearthly hour from my point of view but somewhere deep in the ratlike recesses of my brain was a conviction that the Prebyterians would be more humane about such things. So after a good face-washing, a hot-cross bun and a cup of tea we headed out in the direction of the Ann St Presbyterian church, which is for both of us our old church.
I had hoped for a 9.30 am service but it was unfortunately a 9 am service so we were a few minutes late in arriving. As we were walking from the car to the church however I sang the Doxology by myself -- so that got us started in proper form. I sang it in full voice so it is lucky the streets were fairly empty at that hour. Anne of course is used to my eccentricities. We arrived about half way through the opening hymn, "There is a green hill far away", so I was a bit peeved at missing the whole of such a good hymn.
Much to my surprise the old church was packed and we had to do that which all churchgoers avoid -- sit up the front. Sitting up the front meant however that I noticed a few things I had not noticed before. In particular, I was a little surprised to see a plaque beneath the pulpit bearing the legend: AMDG. I thought that to be a bit "Popish" for a Presbyterian church but I suppose Latin is the property of all humanity. It is of course an ancient ecclesiastical abbreviation for "Ad Majorem Gloriam Dei", or "To the Greater Glory of God".
The congregation was of course mostly elderly but it was pleasing to see some young people there too. There were even a few babies! And there was one lady wearing a rather impressive big black hat. It is amazing how hat-wearing seems to have gone out of style among women in congregations these days -- from Catholics to Jehovah's Witnesses. Very strange in the light of 1 Corinthians 11:13. The minister, Archie McNicol, wore his academic gown throughout of course -- though supplemented by a large and attractive royal-blue stole. Wearing an academic gown is of course an expression of the traditional Scottish reverence for education.
Mr. McNicol gave the expected long opening prayer in his delightful Edinburgh accent. There was rather a lot in it that I liked. His petition that people be saved from the "delusions of the Devil" certainly made it clear that we were not in an Anglican church. There is plenty of that sort of lsanguage in The Book of Common Prayer but it is not heard from any Anglican pulpits these days that I know of. Though perhaps you would hear it in the Sydney diocese. Mr McNicol also very traditionally prayed for blessings on the Queen and the members of the Royal family and prayed also for divine guidance for the "authorities that rule over us" -- An allusion to Romans 13: 1, of course. Particularly pleasing however was that he prayed for members of the armed forces overseas who were fighting "for freedom and liberty" -- A genuine appreciation of reality that one expects from a conservative Christian.
You will note that I refer to the minister as "Mr". That is the Presbyterian way. Presbyterianism is a very democratic form of Christianity -- with the congregation and its elders being supreme rather than the minister.
Being Easter, it was of course a Communion service and in the modern way all were invited to partake. But although I have much more appreciation of traditional Christian culture than most atheists do, I did not. I am not that much of a hypocrite. Nor did I join in the recitation of the Apostle's creed or the Lord's prayer. I certainly joined in the hymns however, and our final hymmn -- "Rugged Cross" -- was one of my favourites.
Rather oddly, throughout the service, the organ was supplemented by a solo violinist and, instead of an organ voluntary at the close of the service, the violinist played "He was despised and rejected" from Handel's Messiah -- which was great to hear.
When we got home, Anne cooked us some smoked haddock for a late breakfast, which was at least very Scottish, though not, of course, to everyone's taste. We had it with toast, Rotkohl and pickled cucumbers.
Afterwards we put on Bach's Passio secundum Mattheum, with Fischer-Dieskau singing baritone. You can't get better Easter music than that. When we got to the great aria "Mache dich mein Herze rein" ("Make my heart pure") I was moved to tears as I usually am when I hear it. The combination of supreme Bach music rendered in the incomparable voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is just too perfect.
And so began our day.....
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ELSEWHERE
A narrow escape from British Fascism: "The Government has backed down over the so-called “dictatorship Bill”, which would have allowed ministers to bypass parliamentary scrutiny. This comes after trenchant criticism from a cross-party group of MPs, peers and senior lawyers, including six Cambridge law professors, who gave warning in a letter to The Times that it would allow the Government to rewrite almost any Act. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government said would help to cut red tape, also provoked a grassroots revolt when nearly 2,000 people signed up to a Save Parliament campaign. Jim Murphy, the Cabinet Office Minister responsible for the Bill, has now indicated that he will amend the legislation to make clear “beyond doubt” that it will be used only to tackle red tape, known as better regulation. The Bill was drawn up to give ministers the power to reform legislation or introduce recommendations of the Law Commission, which suggests updates to the law, “by order”.
U.S. Army recruiting: "First, there is the myth that recruiting is down, or as many opponents of the war in Iraq like to say, "Bush can’t find enough high school graduates to send to Iraq." The fact is recruiting is up. If we look at four of the past five years, the Army – which usually struggles more than the other services in terms of recruiting – has met and exceeded its goals for active-duty recruits. But that fact is often ignored because it runs counter to the myth that young Americans, who might have considered military service as a viable career option, are avoiding service like the proverbial plague... The Army’s actual numbers tell a different story. For fiscal year 2004, the Army’s recruiting goal for active duty recruits was 77,000. That number was met and exceeded by nearly 600. The Army’s active duty goal for 2005 was then upped to 80,000 – an increase of 3,000 over the previous year’s goal. And with 73,373 new recruits for 2005 – granted, less than 2004 and 92 percent of 2005 – the actual numbers were still high, and no one was lowering numbers to try and make goal".
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here and here). I also post several times a week on TONGUE-TIED. There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
**************************
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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