Absurd bureaucratic attack on church music in Left-ruled Australian State

When the Reverend Warwick Cadenhead, the minister at Paddington Uniting Church, tallied the costs of hosting live music at the 130-year-old sandstone pile he knew it must be a test. "My God," he said, "There has to be a better system." There is not. For the price of a temporary council-issued place of public entertainment authority - required for any performance on church grounds, even the singing of hymns - there was not much change from $30,000. "We had to pay Sydney Council for the development application, and for acoustic and traffic engineers to conduct reports - it's taken four months," Mr Cadenhead said.

Under the Local Government Act, every NSW church is required to have an authority for live music, which includes singing by congregations and choirs. But councils apply the law inconsistently, and in most cases they require churches to comply only when noise complainants make a fuss. In Balmain the Campbell Street Presbyterian Church, founded in the 1840s, has cancelled a Mother's Day concert planned for tomorrow because a one-off authority from Leichhardt Council could cost more than $5000. The church's minister, the Reverend Ivan Ransom, said the complaints started about a month ago when a new resident moved into the neighbourhood. "There are lots of churches around here that are considering defying the council," he said.

When applying for the last 12-month permit from the City of Sydney, Mr Cadenhead had to lay out more than $200,000 to soundproof Paddington Uniting Church. "I'm not suggesting that churches should get special treatment, but surely this is extreme." However, in pubs and clubs the State Government exempted big screen TVs, jukeboxes and poker machines from needing the authority...."

Source

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

ELSEWHERE



Inquiry sought on 'tipping' of border group locations: "Congressional leaders Thursday called on the Department of Homeland Security to investigate reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has given information to the Mexican government about the locations of U.S. civilian border watch groups. California Reps. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, and Darryl Issa, R-Vista, along with Texas Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, sent a formal letter to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff asking for a full investigation into all circumstances and events related to civilian border observation groups and the Mexican government. The letter was in response to a story published in Tuesday's Daily Bulletin, which reported Border Patrol officials shared civilian groups' locations with the Mexican government when illegal border crossers were detained and at the request of the Mexican consulate, among other things".

Organ socialism: "Congress passed the National Organ Transplantation Act in 1984, making it illegal to buy or sell human organs. That law funded organ procurement organizations, which find organ donors, acquire organs, and ship them to transplant hospitals. It also created the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. It made the Secretary of Health & Human Services responsible for outsourcing OPTN's operation. HHS hired the United Network for Organ Sharing. People who need transplants can only be put on the waiting list by government-approved transplant hospitals, and only if they pay UNOS a listing fee. Transplant patients pay hospitals for the donated organs they get from organ procurement organizations. How's this system working? Over 6,000 people on the transplant waiting list died waiting in 2005. Another 1,800 left the list because they became too sick for surgery. They'll die soon -- if they're still alive. The waiting list has doubled in ten years to over 92,000 people. Most people on the list will die waiting."

U.S. as biggest foreign aid recipient: "Which country receives the most in total foreign aid from all donors? The official numbers show Iraq at the top with $3 to $18 billion in aid (depending on how you define 'aid') and all the other recipient nations of the world at less than $3 billion per year. However, if you look at which nation benefits most from foreign subsidies, the U.S. would come out on top by a very wide margin. Yes, I did just say that the U.S. is the world's largest recipient of foreign assistance. Other countries are not sending official government 'aid' dollars to help the U.S. but are doing things that have the same effect. For instance, China provides the biggest single subsidy to the U.S."

Gas tax a bonanza for state: "Oil companies aren't the only ones raking in the money because of rising prices at the fuel pump. The coffers of state and local governments are seeing big gains as a result of increased revenue generated by the sales tax that consumers pay on gasoline. Sales tax receipts from the gas pumps in the fourth quarter of last year grew by nearly $100 million from the same period the year before , according to the latest figures available. And that was when California's average price for a gallon of gas at the pump, which includes state and local sales tax along with fixed state and federal excise taxes, was at $2.56. Since 2002, sales tax revenues on gas have been growing annually by $300 million to $400 million to reach $2.86 billion in 2005, according to the California Board of Equalization. And with fuel prices at the pump already well above $3, the gas tax boom will likely continue for state and local governments."

Massachusetts gets real on gas taxes: "Motorists in Massachusetts would save 21 cents a gallon for gasoline this summer under a bill filed yesterday by House minority leader Bradley H. Jones Jr. that would eliminate the state gas tax for three months. ... With the summer travel season approaching, the bill, backed by Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey and legislators from both parties, would be in effect from Memorial Day through Labor Day, giving relief to businesses who need tourism dollars to thrive and to working families who want to travel, Jones said. ... Chances of the bill's passage appeared slim yesterday, given the criticism from a key Democratic lawmaker and other observers. The critics said the tax cut would endanger spending on other state initiatives, such as education and healthcare. The supporters estimate the cut would cost the state $187 million in revenue. They propose using up to $200 million of the state's $1.7 billion budget reserves to make up for the loss."

The "Peoples Cube" satirists are having a shot at Muslims now. See here. As with all good satire, it's not far from the truth.

Wicked Thoughts has just put up an exceptionally funny collection of kid stories.

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.

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

LYING DEMOCRAT BOSS MAKES IT EASY FOR THE GOP

It looks like John Kerry has made flip-flopping into the Democrat modus operandi. Not impressive

Democratic chairman Howard Dean mischaracterized his party's platform on gay rights in an interview courting evangelicals, then set the record straight Thursday when an advocacy group called him on it. Dean told Christian Broadcasting Network News that the 2004 Democratic platform declares "marriage is between a man and a woman" - just one of the points he made in reaching out to religious conservatives who are largely hostile to the party. But the platform does not define marriage that way, and his remarks prompted the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to return a $5,000 donation from the Democratic National Committee.

Dean later acknowledged his misstatement, but the group sent back the money anyway. "We need for Governor Dean to demonstrate real leadership on our issues," executive director Matt Foreman said in an interview, "not to equivocate depending on the audience." Dean sought to establish common ground with religious conservatives in the interview on Pat Robertson's network, a tall order considering their opposition to the Democratic Party's positions on abortion rights, gay rights and some other social issues.

More here

Once again we see that Leftist principles are as solid as foam rubber. When they say that there is no such thing as right and wrong they really mean it. As Tibor Machan says:

Do "liberals" care about liberty? "I assume most of those who read this column have heard modern liberals proclaim their the deep concern civil liberties and due process. Among them many tell us they are upset about how President George W. Bush and most of those on his team are willing to sacrifice these so as to carry on with 'the war on terror.' These liberals express earnest concern about how the rights of detainees are violated. They lament how Americans are being subjected to unlawful wiretapping. They are very upset with certain provisions of the Patriot Act and similar measures that they claim violate our rights. These liberals profess real worry about our loss of liberties. I don't believe them. I am convinced they are not at all serious about liberty. They are merely playing power politics"

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

ELSEWHERE

New immigration bill in the works: "Senate leaders reached a deal Thursday on reviving a broad immigration bill that could provide millions of illegal immigrants a chance to become American citizens and said they'll try to pass it before Memorial Day.... Key to the agreement is who will be negotiating a compromise with the House, which last December passed an enforcement-only bill that would subject the estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States to felony charges as well as deportation.... Frist said a "considerable" number of amendments would be debated when the Senate begins debating the bill early next week. That measure absorbed a bill drafted by McCain and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., that called for allowing illegal immigrants to work toward becoming legal permanent residents. President Bush had helped accelerate progress on the bill after meeting with a bipartisan group of senators last month and stating clearer support for allowing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. "Business and labor, Democrats and Republicans, religious leaders and the American people strongly support our plan to strengthen borders, provide a path to earned citizenship for those undocumented workers who are here and put in place a realistic guest worker program for the future," Kennedy said.

Comment from Keith Burgess Jackson: "The president of Iran says that "America is a sinner." Gee, that's what Noam Chomsky and Brian Leiter have been saying. Sometimes I wonder whether these great thinkers realize how ludicrous they sound. Their mantra is "America bad; everyone else good." If this country is so bad, why don't they move to Iran or some other land of liberty, opportunity, justice, and prosperity? I'm serious. Why would you live in a place that you think deeply and irredeemably immoral? Why would you raise your children in such a place? Isn't that a dereliction of parental duty? Chomsky and Leiter want it both ways. They want all the advantages and comforts of living in the United States, but aren't willing to pay any price, bear any burden, or incur any risk to promote its interests. They are leeches."

National security at work: "Bush Administration officials insist they have no idea how a minute-by-minute schedule for the President's trip to Florida landed in a pile of trash, where almost anyone could grab it, hours before the President took off. But the White House does admit the document should have been burned not tossed. The document in question appears to be a White House staff schedule for the President's trip to Florida Tuesday. And a sanitation worker was alarmed to find in the trash long hours before Mr. Bush left for his trip. It's the kind of thing you would expect would be shredded or burned, not thrown in the garbage. Randy Hopkins could not believe what he was seeing. There on the floor next to a big trash truck was a thick sheaf of papers with nearly every detail of the President's voyage. "I saw locations and names and places where the President was going to be. I knew it was important. And it shouldn't have been in a trash hole like this," he said."

More brilliant security: "On April 28, 2006, Eric McCarty was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. McCarty is a professional computer security consultant who noticed that there was a problem with the way the University of Southern California had constructed its web page for online applications. A database programming error allowed outsiders to obtain applicants' personal information, including Social Security numbers. For proof, the man copied seven applicants' personal records and anonymously sent them to a reporter for SecurityFocus. The journalist notified the school, the school fixed the problem, and the reporter wrote an article about it. The incident might have ended there, but didn't. The school went through its server logs and easily traced the activity back to McCarty, who had made no attempt to hide his tracks. The FBI interviewed McCarty, who explained everything to the agents. Then the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles charged the security expert with violating 18 U.S.C. 1030, the federal computer crime law".

More California craziness: "The state has placed more than 20 high-risk sex offenders on parole in hotels and motels near Disneyland, and in some cases moved them from place to place to avoid registering their addresses, a legislator charged Tuesday. This shows 'a total lack of common sense' by top corrections officials, said Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez (D-Norwalk) on Tuesday at an Anaheim news conference. He compared the practice to 'putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.' He cited a recent investigative KCBS-TV report that allegedly showed parole agents moving sex offenders from one motel to another. 'It's a devastating situation,' Bermudez said. 'When you place high-risk sex offenders where children are, you're almost violating the laws by putting children in harm's way.' The Department of Corrections denied Tuesday that any parolee 'shuffling' took place."

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.

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

Hispanic future now set for the USA

Nearly half of the nation's children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, and the percentage is increasing mainly because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly, according to a census report released today. Hispanics are the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority group. They accounted for 49 percent of the country's growth from 2004 to 2005, the report shows. And the increase in young children is largely a Hispanic story, driving 70 percent of the growth in children younger than 5. Forty-five percent of U.S. children younger than 5 are minorities. The new numbers offer a preview of demographic shifts to come, with broad implications for the nation's schools, workforce and Social Security.

One in three Americans is now a member of a minority group, a share that is bound to rise, because the non-Hispanic white population is older and growing much more slowly. The country already is engaged in a national debate about how government should respond to growing immigration, legal and illegal. In some parts of the country, the transformation is more visible than in others. Large swaths of the upper Midwest are still mainly non-Hispanic white. But minorities are a majority of children younger than 5 in the Washington area, according to previously released census numbers. That is also true in Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and other high-immigration regions....

Experts say immigrant families are becoming more concerned with the quality of their children's early education, aware that it can affect their future academic success. That is one reason there is a waiting list at the Child and Family Network Centers, a preschool in Alexandria. The centers, which also operate a preschool in Arlington, provide free and subsidized preschools for about 200 children from low-income families. They serve many immigrants, including those who don't qualify for other programs. The waiting list is 150 children long. Eight out 10 speak English as a second language, and 70 percent are Latino.... Cruz said she has seen a huge difference in children's abilities from when they start the program and when they move on to kindergarten. She pointed at a 5-year-old girl from Mexico who was prattling about butterflies in English: Last year, Cruz said, "she came with zero English -- zero."....

The census figures show that the number of Hispanic and Asian children younger than 5 grew by double-digit percentages since 2000. The number of black children grew more slowly. The number of non-Hispanic white children younger than 5 declined for two years this decade before increasing again. The nation's Asian population growth still is dominated by immigration, the census report shows, but among Hispanics, births added more to the population growth than immigrants did this decade. That means the growth trend among the youngest Hispanics "is only going to accelerate under almost any scenario you can think about, even without immigration," said demographer Jeffrey S. Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center. "As the children age, they are the ones who in 20 years will be having children."

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

Population worries in Russia too: "President Putin offered to pay Russian women to have more children in an attempt to stem a demographic crisis that has shrunk the Russian population by five million since 1991.... Pointing out that his country's population was contracting by 700,000 a year, Mr Putin said: "We have often raised this subject but, to be frank, little has been done," he said. Russia's population has fallen from 148 million when the Soviet Union collapsed to less than 143 million today, because of a low birth rate and a huge number of alcohol-related deaths. Average male life expectancy is only 58.8 years. Experts have said that the population could drop as low as 100 million within half a century, and urged the Kremlin to allow millions of immigrants to supplement the workforce. But nationalists and leaders of the Orthodox Church firmly oppose that, fearing that a flood of Muslim and Chinese immigrants from ex-Soviet republics would corrupt what they see as Russia's Slavic and Christian identity. Mr Putin, an only child and the father of two girls, proposed using some of Russia's oil wealth to lower the mortality rate, increase the birth rate and entice ethnic Russians back from abroad. He said that the Government should increase monthly handouts for a first baby from 700 roubles (14 pounds ) to 1,500 roubles by the end of this year, and start paying 3,000 roubles a month for a second child. He also suggested a one-off payment of 250,000 roubles for each second child.

BBC dishonesty: "The official for the governors of the BBC on its coverage of the Palestine-Israeli conflict found predictably that there was "was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias" but then went on to list a series of measurements by which the BBC could be said to be biased in favour of Israel. This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC's greatest hits - or perhaps misses - remain fresh in the memory. There was the hagiographic send-off for Yassir Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which called him a "hero" and "an icon" and concluded that the corrupt old brute was "the stuff of legends". There was Orla Guerin's unforgettably inventive spin on the story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as "Israel's cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes"...."

Jeb? "US President George W Bush praised his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, as an "excellent" leader who would make a "great president" of the United States, according to news accounts. "I think Jeb would be a great president. But it's up to Jeb to make a decision to run," Bush told reporters today at a roundtable interview in Orlando with several Florida newspapers. "I would like to see Jeb run at some point in time, but I have no idea if that's his intention or not," said the president, in comments published in the St Petersburg Times, and other dailies".

Leftist ego and GWB: "President Bush, by his very persona, triggers the very wellsprings of anger and resentment on the part of the secular fundamentalists who dominate the contemporary Left. A large segment of the American intelligentsia and its hangers-on has found an object wholly outside their framework of affection. People who obtained their status and income partially from the ability to speak articulately, and master a body of learning, find it troubling when one who does not flaunt his reading of books and newspapers and does not wield a large vocabulary of eloquently-spoken words rises above them in status. It is an insult to the personal values they have embraced, and on whose rightness their own sense of self-worth depends."

Tax cap extended: "House Republican leaders are ready to move forward on tax breaks worth $70 billion over five years to investors and some middle-income families now that they've sorted out a disagreement among themselves. The breakthrough Tuesday set up a vote in the House late Wednesday. The Senate is expected to clear the bill Thursday, which would let President Bush achieve one of his top tax priorities and give his GOP allies on Capitol Hill a victory in times of sagging poll numbers. The bill offers a two-year extension of the reduced 15 percent tax rate for capital gains and dividends, currently set to expire at the end of 2008."

Carnival of the Vanities is now up again.

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.

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

ANOTHER DOS ATTACK?

TONGUE-TIED is down again at the time of writing -- apparently because of a DOS attack on the host. The mirror version of TT is still available here.

Brookes News Update

How China's monetary policy drives world commodity prices: Since China's monetary pumping relative to real economic activity has been accelerating while in the US relative pumping has been decelerating, it follows that China's Yuan has to depreciate against the US dollar
The Australian economy and recession: It now looks that recession might be much closer than many economists realise. Combine a monetary flattening with the possibility that China's central bank might tighten credit and things begin to look very gloomy
Michael Kroger's shabby ambition is destroying the Victorian Liberal Party: The unofficial head of the Victorian State Liberal Party is the blue blood Michael Kroger whose arrogance and incompetence is wrecking it. And if he thinks sliming people is a good idea, this headkicker had better think again while there is still a Party. Better still -- throw the grasping cream puff out
Republican answer for alternative energy and cheap gasoline: The US has massive reserves of natural gas easily and safely accessible on its offshore continental shelf and federal lands -- enough for centuries. Energy companies must be allowed to extract it no matter what greens say or do
Another lefty economist who thinks cars and oil are bad for us: `Rising petrol prices are good for us' is the title of an article by Ross Gittins of the Sydney Morning Herald. The title and thinking behind it neatly sums up just how bad economic commentary is in Australia

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

ELSEWHERE

Lesbian genes? "Lesbians' brains react differently to sex hormones than those of heterosexual women, new research indicates. That's in line with an earlier study that had indicated gay men's brain responses were different from straight men ? though the difference for men was more pronounced than has now been found in women. Lesbians' brains reacted somewhat, though not completely, like those of heterosexual men, a team of Swedish researchers said in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A year ago, the same group reported findings for gay men that showed their brain response to hormones was similar to that of heterosexual women. In both cases the findings add weight to the idea that homosexuality has a physical basis and is not learned behavior".

Italy to elect ex-communist as president: "Italy's incoming government is set to elect the country's first former communist president on Wednesday in the face of opposition from most of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's conservative bloc. Prime minister-in-waiting Romano Prodi has vowed to ram through his candidate, Giorgio Napolitano, after two days of wrangling and inconclusive ballots.... Napolitano, an 80-year-old life senator for the Democrats of the Left, failed to gain the two-thirds majority needed in previous voting rounds, but from Wednesday an absolute majority will be enough to elect Italy's 11th post-war head of state... The post of president is largely ceremonial but under the constitution the head of state names the prime minister and dissolves parliament - prerogatives which could be crucial for Prodi as he prepares to form a government."

Murdoch keeping his powder dry: "Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch will host a fundraiser to support New York Democratic US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's re-election bid in November, her campaign office said. The fundraiser by the head of News Corporation, with such media outlets as Fox News cable television and the New York Post, would be held by July, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the story. A Clinton campaign spokesman said her office was not contradicting the report, and a Murdoch source confirmed the fundraiser would take place."

Australia now debt-free: "We have now eliminated the $96 billion of net debt that Labor left the Australian Government when it left office. Our Budget is in surplus for the 9th time in 10 years: in 2006-07 a forecast surplus of $10.8 billion. We have established a Future Fund which has begun to save for the future. With these savings the next generation will be able to meet the challenges of their time. Now the Australian Government is debt-free in net terms. We do not have to collect taxes to pay the Government's interest bill. We are saving over $8 billion per annum in interest payments."

Iraq: Local men gather arms, work shifts to guard families : "As night fell, young men emerged from their homes, pulled a tree trunk across the entrance to their street and took their positions for another shift guarding their families from the armed groups that roam Baghdad. Beside them, in a residential Sunni area in the southwest of the city, lay their weapons. At the moment it is only Kalashnikovs. But they seek more, especially heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. ... 'The groups we are nervous of have many guns and are well-organized. If they come, can we beat them? If not, we would die knowing we fought to save our fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters.' This is neighborhood watch Iraqi-style. ... the U.S. Army in the most troubled spots has started to issue weapons licenses to people guarding their homes."

Blogger beats lawsuit: "The effort to silence Maine blogger Jeffrey Dutson, with a libel suit brought by the advertising firm of Warren Kremer Paino Advertising, ended in ignominious failure. Warren Kremer Paino withdrew its suit, and the Media Bloggers Association, a blogger-defense organization, claimed victory.... A big round of thanks is in order for the lawyers who volunteered their time on Lance's behalf including MBA General Counsel, Ronald Coleman of the Coleman Law Firm, Greg Herbert of Greenberg Traurig and private attorney Jon Stanley. "This demonstrates precisely what we have said all along," said Coleman, "Suits like this are premised solely on the anticipation that there will be no push back from the little guy. Here, there was.""

Antisemitic British academics again: "The largest university and college lecturers union in Britain is likely to decide shortly to recommend that its 67,000 members boycott Israeli lecturers and academic institutions that do not publicly declare their opposition to Israeli policy in the territories. The boycott motion, which was drafted by the southeast region of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), will be brought to a vote at its annual national conference, which will be held May 27-29. It comes about a year after the last boycott by British lecturers."

Surprising! French forces rejoin Operation Enduring Freedom: " The French Navy Carrier Air Wing returned to the coalition fight last week, flying their first missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom since November. "Our main mission while we are here is to support troops on the ground and contribute to reconnaissance efforts as well," said Lt. Col. Gerard Brunel, commander of the French detachment at the Combined Air Operations Center. It is Central Command Air Forces policy not to disclose the specific location of its forward headquarters or the CAOC... "We welcome the return of our French allies to the CAOC," said U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Allen Peck, deputy Combined Force Air Component commander. "With continuing rotations of airpower provided by our allies from around the world, the effort to support our troops on the ground is a truly a coalition operation.""

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.

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

SOME ARTICLES RECENTLY UP ON THINK ISRAEL

ISRAELI AND JEWISH USEFUL IDIOTS: We are so used to blatant distortions and outrageous statements by anti-Israel Jews such as Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or Ilan Pappe, we have ignored the damage that can be done by Jews that Jack Berger calls "useful idiots" -- Jews that appear mild in manner and sound reasonable but damage Israel by omissions and by slanting the truth. And there are those that do Israel a disservice by sugar-coating the truth about Israel's neighbors so that the audience is left feeling good, though unenlightened. "'Useful idiots' are those who try to deny the obvious. Armed with excuses and rationalizations, they have created an art form of telling people what they wanted them to hear rather than what was actually happening."

GREEN TIDE RISING: Philip B. Haney points out that Hamas winning the election to head the Palestine Authority is not surprising. Contrary to what we'd like to believe, they've been much admired in the Arab world for some twenty years. They represent the global Jihadist movement and "at least four generations of Middle Eastern Arab Muslims ... have all been saturated from birth on the liberation theology of Jihad." Using democratic means to gain power, the Middle East Jihadist groups -- Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the clerics in Iran and Saudi Arabia -- have a single objective: to impose Islamic Sharia'ah law on whatever country they control. The similarity between resurgent Islam and Nazi Germany -- their local popularity, their ability to sway crowds and intimidate their neighbors as well as their unabashed desire to conquer the world -- is both frightening and real.

ISRAEL'S NEW WAR: While so many politicians keep denying there is a loose confederacy among the multiple terror groups, their unification has reached the point that Caroline Glick suggests the new Israeli Kadima government rethink its plan to retreat from most of Samaria and Judea. We should take seriously the fact that Hamas is making Gaza into a wall-to-wall terror stronghold and bomb manufactory and the fact that Al Qaeda is sizing up the area as a base from which to attack both Israel and Jordan.

ALLAH BE APPRAISED: Considering that so many people -- including President Bush -- claim Islam is a peaceful religion, Burt Prelutsky finds it remarkable that "... wherever Islam gains a stranglehold, you will find the nightmare of slavery, genocide and female stoning and mutilation, the norm." Of course, the Muslim cult of death may have other causes -- the climate, "... too much sand in one's diet ... sharing one's life with camels, a notoriously nasty beast..."

ISLAM'S IMPERIAL DREAMS: Efraim Karsh explains that Islam's hostility to the West is not a new phenomenon engendered by legimate grievances. To the contrary, he points out that "[t]he last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and world domination has remained very much alive" and has now been adapted by various radical Islamic groups. He also reminds us about historical inaccuracies about past Caliphates that are still current. You'll be glad you read this article the next time someone tells you that some horrible killing by the Arabs was only in response to (an event within the previous week).

ISLAM'S COMING CRUSADE: The theory is that only a few misguided souls are interested in terror and in conducting a jihad to install shari'a throughout the world. This is given the lie by polls that show "that 60 percent of Jordanians, Egyptians and Palestinians want Islamic shari'a law to be the sole source of legislation." There really is a clash of civilizations. ... The clash goes beyond differing interests. Hundreds of millions of Muslims who live alongside us and among us inhabit another mental world."

WAR AND PEACE: Yashiko Sagamori suggests that over much of the world, the choice, vis a vis the Muslims "is not between war and peace, because the war, whose name is jihad, is upon us, whether we are willing to admit it or prefer suicidal denial. Our choice is between fighting it and surrendering." Yet in many cases, people are ignoring the enemy and focusing on Israel as the easy-to-tackle bad guy. England would eliminate Iranian nuclear power, but it also wants to disarm Israel. Blaming Israel can only increase as Muslims take over more of Europe. And "with every passing year, the Europe of an overseas vacationer acquires more and more of the unreal quality of an amusement park. Its attractions are still running, but the place is now under new management." Israel is another place where Islam could be defeated. "The government of Israel has all the means necessary to defeat the enemy, but, along with a large percentage of the population, lacks the will to do so. Trying to avoid displeasing the world at all costs, they prefer to surrender their land and sacrifice their lives to a weak, inhumane enemy." And America will soon have its own struggle with a resident population of Muslims promoting shari'a.

THE FALL OF FRANCE AND THE MULTICULTURAL WORLD WAR: Fjordman is a Norwegian essayist who writes on Scandanavian affairs and Islam. In this essay, he expects that continued unrestrained Muslim immigration and their easily-sparked riots may end in a complete breakdown of French society, with France dominated by the Muslims or becoming an Islamic state, either with or without protracted protest from the natives. He suggests possible scenarios on what this process might mean for the rest of Europe.

CRISIS IN EUROPE: Bruce Bawer writes that most of the countries in Western Europe now have two very separate communities -- secular, liberal populations with a low birthrate and "self-segregating enclaves whose autocratic leaders despised democracy and whose population (thanks to high birth and immigration rates) was climbing rapidly." But few people talk about this division openly or have examined it critically. Bawer brilliantly summarizes the major analyses. Europeans contributed to the problem, because, ironically, out of respect for Muslim traditions, they didn't promote integration or force the Muslim immigrants to work but romantically "pursued ... an approach they saw as humane and multicultural." The Muslims responded with contempt. Conversely, practices sanctioned by the Koran and therefore intrinsic to Muslim society -- slavery, polygamy, oppressive attitudes toward women and infidels -- are antithetic to integration into the greater society. This is an excellent introduction to material on what is a serious problem in Europe.

THE ISLAMIZATION OF AMERICA: Phyllis Chesler focusses on how Muslims bent on islamization use America's tolerance and its freedom of expression against us. We feel virtuous when we admit admitted Jihadists into this country; we defend the right of imams to indoctrinate others with poisonous messages of hate; we welcome rabid hate groups to the campus. But there's no reciprocity. Newspapers are afraid to run cartoons of Mohammad; bookstores are afraid to stock anti-Muslim books; talk shows are afraid to say that all of the terrorists of 911 were Arab; and tracking the funding of the terrorists is a suable offense. Chesler suggests some remedies.

SPEAKING (AND NOT SPEAKING) ABOUT POLITICS, GENDER, AND RACE AT HARVARD: Richard Cravetts tells us about the events that led up to Lawrence Summers' resigning his post as president of Harvard University. Harvard has had a long-standing ban on ROTC on campus, even after 911. "Patriotism," Summers said at the Kennedy School of Government, "might actually be a positive and virtuous emotion for a wounded nation..." Bloing! He tackled a black racist. He rejected a petition to divest Harvard of funds invested in Israel from the "campus Left's campus Left's obsession with the Palestinian cause -- and its contemporaneous and subsequent demonization of Israel ..." Bloing! Bloing! Bloing! And he was finally shafted for daring to suggest that men and women might have built-in differences in mathematical ability. His real crime? Advocating diversity of opinion in an environment that believed in a restricted set of opinions that should not be questioned.

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

ELSEWHERE

An interesting email from a reader in South Africa: "Most people only dream of what they can get out of a socialist society, not what they have to put into it. There was a story here recently about a farm that was purchased for the local itinerants to run for themselves. As a White owned farm, it had an annual turnover of R3m (approx $A640k), mostly mangoes. Now it produces nothing, the farmhouse has been stripped. One of the 'owners' is quoted as saying "Workers cannot work on the farm if they don't get paid". To me, this is the kernel of socialism-he could not get his head around the fact that he now owned the damned farm and that his pay is a result of his own efforts"

Sexual frustration among Iranian footballers? "Iran's hardline Islamic regime has had enough of footballers with long hair and plucked eyebrows. "I will ban athletes with an effeminate look," the head of the country's Physical Education Organisation, Mohammad Ali-Abadi said, told the Etemad-Melli newspaper. "It is really disgraceful for Iran that young people step onto fields wearing make-up," the top official fumed. "When a man enters the field with dyed hair and groomed eyebrows he is disrespecting society."

Leftist lunacy never stops: "Which international leader publicly threatens to blow up his country's oilfields, supports Iran's nuclear programme, says that the Falklands belong to Argentina and believes that Robert Mugabe is a "true freedom-fighter"? The answer is none other than Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, who readily antagonises and hurls insults at the leaders of other nations, including Tony Blair, whom he called an "ally of Hitler". Next week London will have the dubious honour of a visit by Senor Chavez, hosted by none other than its mayor, Ken Livingstone. Emboldened by a huge windfall of petrodollars due to climbing oil prices, Senor Chavez has no shortage of international cheerleaders. He has become the voice and leader of the resentful of our world. From Argentina to the offices of the Greater London Authority, almost every person bearing a grudge against capitalism, free markets, democracy and the rule of law support his "revolution"."

Hooray! Hacker jailed: "A US computer hacker has been jailed for nearly five years for hijacking around 400,000 computers, including military servers, and infecting them with malicious software. Sealing the first prosecution of its kind today, US federal Judge Gary Klausner in Los Angeles sentenced "botmaster" Jeanson Ancheta, 20, to 57 months in jail for taking control of an array of computers he had corralled into his "Botnet". Ancheta had pleaded guilty in January to infecting the computers with software that caused them to send spam, show ads and launch crippling attacks on internet sites. The crime was "extensive, serious and sophisticated," the judge told the court as he handed down the longest-known sentence for someone accused of spreading computer viruses. "Your worst enemy is your own intellectual arrogance that somehow the world cannot touch you on this," the judge told Ancheta."

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 LEFT ARE THE BIGGEST PART OF THE MUSLIM PROBLEM

Islamic beliefs, ideas and intentions as such pose a threat to our civilization and our way of life, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of Muhammad's faith. The elite class rejects this diagnosis, of course, but among reasonable, patriotic, and well-informed citizens the debate on Islam's nature should be long over. Americans did not agonize over communism's "true" nature during the Berlin air lift in 1949, or at Pusan in 1950, but acted effectively to contain it by whatever means necessary.

Yes, back then we had a legion of Moscow's apologists, character witnesses, moles and fellow-travelers, assuring us that the Comrades want nothing but social justice at home and peaceful coexistence abroad. They held tenured chairs, staffed the New York Times' Moscow bureaus, controlled many Hollywood studios, and dominated all smart salons on both coasts. They explained away and justified the inconsistencies and horrifyingly violent implications of the source texts of Marx and Lenin. They explained away and justified the appalling fruits: the bloodbath of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, the genocidal crime of the great famine, the show trials and purges, the killing machine that destroyed millions of innocents known as the Gulag, the pact with Hitler, the works.

Today their spiritual heirs in politics, the academy and the media establishment act as Islam's apologists, character witnesses and fellow travelers. They explain away, with identical scholastic sophistry and moral depravity, the dark and violent implications of the source texts, the Koran and the Hadith, the deeply unnerving career of Muhammad, and 14 centuries of conquests, wars, slaughters, subjugation, decline without fall, spiritual and material misery, and murderous fanaticism.

Much more here

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

ELSEWHERE



Where have I seen those collar patches before?



US sues black activist on voting act violation: "Ike Brown is a legend in Mississippi politics, a fast-talking operative both loved and hated for his ability to turn out black voters and get his candidates into office. That success has also landed him at the heart of a federal lawsuit that's about to turn the Voting Rights Act on its head. For the first time, the Justice Department is using the 1965 law to allege racial discrimination against whites. Brown, head of the Democratic Party in Mississippi's rural Noxubee County, is accused of waging a campaign to defeat white voters and candidates with tactics including intimidation and coercion."

Reason irrelevant to Leftism: "It may well be that socialism isn't dead because socialism cannot die. As Sorel argued, the revolutionary myth may, like religion, continue to thrive in "the profounder regions of our mental life," in those realms unreachable by mere reason and argument, where even a hundred proofs of failure are insufficient to wean us from those primordial illusions that we so badly wish to be true. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs? ... Those who, like Chavez, Morales, and Castro, are preaching the old time religion of socialism may well be able to tap into something deeper and more primordial than mere reason and argument"

Vietnam becoming capitalist: "Today Vietnam is one of the seriously reforming Southeast Asian "tigers," countries that grew rapidly for many years but stumbled for a time after the 1997 economic crisis. Over the past five years Vietnam has had the most consistent growth record of all the Southeast Asian nations: going from a 1999 GDP low of 4.7% (which is still higher than growth rates in most countries of the world), to more than 8% in 2005. This growth has been driven by an increasingly market- oriented perspective that encourages private enterprise, as well as a burgeoning private business sector. This private sector has expanded by about 20% per year in recent years, has created hundreds of thousands of jobs and has become a major force in substantially raising general living standards".

How big is Bush's big government?: "When teaching economics I sometimes find it beneficial to use government budget data to apply the lessons of economics to our current political circumstances. The students tend to be surprised at the size of our government, the amount of tax revenues that we 'pay,' and the amount of government debt. The following numbers get the point across. We, in the United States, live under the rule of the largest civil government, measured in budgetary terms, in history. Federal spending alone in fiscal year 2006 is expected to be over $2.7 trillion, which means the federal government spends $7.4 billion a day or $5.1 million in every minute of the year. This is 815 times the level of federal spending in 1930."

Walter Williams on Disappearing manufacturing jobs: "According to some pundits and political hustlers, free trade has led to a loss of "good manufacturing jobs." Let's look at it, but before doing so, let's first see whether we should work ourselves into a tizzy over other job losses. In 1900, 41 percent of the U.S. labor force was employed in agriculture. Now, only two percent of today's labor force works in agricultural jobs. If declining employment is used as a gauge of an industry's health, agriculture is America's sickest industry. Let's not stop with agriculture. In 1970, the telecommunications industry employed 421,000 workers in good-paying jobs as switchboard operators. Today, the telecommunications industry employs only 78,000 operators. That's a tremendous 80 percent job loss. What happened to all those agriculture and switchboard operator jobs? Were they exported to China and India by rapacious businessmen? Here's my question to you: Should Congress do something to restore all of those jobs lost in agriculture and telecommunications, and what might that something be?"

Migrants to Australia will have to speak English: "Foreigners applying to come to Australia as skilled migrants are to face tougher English tests. The overhaul of the skilled migration program follows a recent call by a prominent government MP for aspiring citizens to sit an English test. Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone announced the changes to the program yesterday after a report found problems with the system. "The key aim of our skilled program is to select migrants who will find skilled jobs quickly," she said. "The evaluation has confirmed categorically that good English and relevant work experience are essential to achieving this result."

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 REAL HISTORY OF CUBA

Just an excerpt:

Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie "The Lost City." He blew it with the mainstream critics, that is. Almost unanimously, they're ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana's last days, which he both directs and stars in, Garcia insisted on depicting some historical truth about Cuba -- a grotesque and unforgivable blunder in his industry. He's now paying the price.

Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it. Now many Latin American countries refuse to show it. The film's offenses are many and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is shown killing people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such nonsense? And just where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the effrontery to portray such things? The man obviously doesn't know his place.

And just where did Garcia get this preposterous notion of pre-Castro Cuba as a relatively prosperous but politically troubled place, they ask. All the Cubans he portrays seem middle class. Where in his movie is the tsunami of stooped and starving peasants that carried Fidel and Che into Havana on its crest, they ask. Where are all those diseased and illiterate laborers and peasants my professors, Dan Rather, CNN and Oliver Stone told me about, ask the critics....

You're better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat-Earth Society, but nonetheless I'll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba still cherished by America's most prestigious academics and its most learned film critics. I'll even stay away from those "crackpots" and "hotheads" in Miami. In place of those insufferable "revanchists" and "hard-liners" I'll use a source generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types: the United Nations.

Here's a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S."

In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933 -- five years before FDR's New Dealers got around to it. Add to this a one-month paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) social democracies of Western Europe didn't manage this till 30 years later.

And get this, Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies: Cuban women got three months of paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the 1930s. Cuba, a country 71 percent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that Birmingham bus and handcuffed. In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S....

Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S. And more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums for oil, and Styrofoam for insulation. None were cherished black market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious liberation while fighting off hammerheads and tiger sharks.

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

ELSEWHERE

Amazing news: Heterosexual elected Episcopal Bishop of California: "The Episcopal Diocese of California has avoided widening a rift over gays in the global Anglican Communion by electing a heterosexual man as its next bishop. More than 1,000 clergy and laypeople packed Grace Cathedral in San Francisco's tony Nob Hill neighbourhood to elect the Rt Rev. Mark Andrus as successor to longtime Bishop William Swing, who is retiring after 27 years. Two openly gay men and one lesbian were among the seven candidates on the ballot. No gay or lesbian cleric has been elected bishop since the consecration of Eugene Robinson in 2003 as bishop of New Hampshire threw the US church and the worldwide family of 77 million Anglicans into turmoil.

Theodore Dalrymple: "What a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom. Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone else; and that, moreover, the world is a giant conspiracy to deprive them of their rightful entitlements. Once someone is convinced of their rights, it becomes impossible to reason with them; and thus the reason of the Enlightenment is swiftly transformed into the unreason of the psychopath."

Business owners get the blame for weak law enforcement: "Anyone convinced that America is suffering from excessive diversity should troll through the seven immigration bills now floating around the Capitol. Traversing the conceptual distance, roughly, between the minds of Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly, Congressmen on both side of the aisle are debating how high the walls should be, how onerous the fines, how long the wait to legality. Amid all this robust debate, one steadfast conviction unites the almost-distinguishable ravings of center-left and center-right: The need to keep closer watch on those radical patrons of social unrest, American business owners."

Immigrant frustration finding an outlet: "State legislatures around the nation are considering hundreds of proposals dealing with illegal immigration, reflecting the exasperation of many local officials with Congress's failure to contend with the millions of undocumented workers who have entered the nation in recent years. Here in Arizona, the House has passed a proposal to set fines and other penalties for companies that hire undocumented workers. The bill, which had regularly failed in previous years, is expected to win Senate approval within days and is only one of many plans under consideration. Others include bills to erect an 80-mile fence and a multimillion-dollar radar system along the Mexican border, designed to slow the nightly flow of migrants across the desert. Another bill would require police to check the citizenship of anyone stopped for a traffic offense."

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 RECENT STUDY SUMMARIZED BELOW WOULD SEEM TO SUGGEST A LINK BETWEEN LEFTISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

Leftists often follow simple rules and generalizations (e.g. "all men are equal") to an absurd degree -- in defiance of all commonsense. The study below shows that schizophrenics do that too

Now, scientists say they have found that the link between insanity and rationality may be more than a fanciful notion. In some situations-limited ones-they have found that schizophrenics have a reasoning advantage over normal people, stemming from their very lack of what we typically call common sense. Schizophrenia, a long-term mental disorder involving delusions and a derailed sense of reality, disrupts people's ability to see the "context" of events, a key part of common sense, said Emmanuel Mellet, one of the researchers. ...

Mellet, of the Universities of Caen and Paris-Descartes in Paris, and a group of colleagues presented a set of logic problems to 26 schizophrenics and an equal number of healthy patients. One type of problem in particular was designed to turn context into a trap; 90 percent of healthy people typically fail it, the researchers said....

There are many more right than wrong solutions possible for such a problem. In this case, an answer would be correct as long as the test-taker put anything but a red square on the left, and anything but a yellow circle on the right. Yet "sane" people usually give wrong answers. For the above problem, they would often put a red square on the left and a yellow circle on the right, quite compatible with the dictum they're supposed to break.

The error results from misplaced use of common sense, according to Mellet and colleagues.... The researchers reported that in their study, 58 percent of healthy participants failed such problems on all eight tries that they were given. Only 19 percent of schizophrenics suffered this failure rate. "We suggest that, thanks to their difficulty in processing contextual information, the schizophrenic patients ignored the elements that misled healthy participants," the scientists wrote....

Mellet and colleagues noted that similar findings came earlier this year from researchers at King's College London.... The finding supported the idea that "decision-making in people with schizophrenia is less influenced by common sense and more influenced by theoretical reason" than in normal people, the researchers wrote in a summary of their findings.

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

NEW FILM ABOUT IRAQ

Press release:

Thanks in part to the skill and dedication of trauma center teams in Iraq, wounded troops have a 90 percent chance of survival - the highest rate of war survivors in U.S. history. Still, 17,124 Americans have been wounded to date, among them 413 amputees, and Operation Iraqi Freedom has claimed 2,313 American lives since it began in March 2003.

"Baghdad ER", an unflinching hour-long documentary that debuts on May 21st on HBO, offers a raw and rare look at the humanity, hardship and heroism of the U.S. military and medical personnel in Iraq. As a result of unprecedented access to the 86th Combat Support Hospital, the Army's premier medical facility in Iraq, 11-time Emmyr-Award winning producer/director Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill, along with an intrepid crew, followed doctors, nurses, medics, soldiers, chaplains, and others in the U.S. Military over a two-month period in 2005.

The documentary gives viewers a taste of daily life in the thick of war, including exclusive frontline rescue footage with the 54th Medical Company Air Ambulance Team, and dangerous missions of soldiers patrolling "IED Alley," the most dangerous road in the world. At times graphic in its depiction of combat-related wounds, BAGHDAD ER is a socially relevant account of war in our time - emotional, devastating and honest. Those caring for the wounded Americans and Iraqis demonstrate focused intensity, selflessness and a unified purpose, which "BAGHDAD ER" juxtaposes against the chaos of war.

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

ELSEWHERE

I liked this parody of Green/Left logic from Taranto: "President Bush is riding high. In just two weeks, his approval rating has skyrocketed to 38% from 33%, according to Fox News/Opinion Dynamics polls. That's an increase of 15%, or five percentage points. If we assume conservatively that his rating will continue increasing linearly (i.e., five points every two weeks), he'll be back at 98% by mid-October. That could give a big boost to Republican hopes of expanding their House and Senate majorities."

Warning to Israel-haters: "US President George W.Bush has used a speech in Washington to declare the US's "unshakeable" commitment to defend Israel from aggression. Mr Bush said the US and Israel were "natural allies" with ties that would "never be broken". The comments, made at a dinner to mark the 100th anniversary of the American Jewish Committee in Washington on Thursday night, were aimed squarely at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and at the recently elected Hamas regime in Palestine. Mr Ahmadinejad has denied the Holocaust and called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" while Hamas refuses to recognise the Jewish state".

GWB is getting it: "US President George W. Bush has said the September 11 revolt of passengers against their hijackers on board Flight 93 had struck the first blow of "World War III". In an interview with the financial news network CNBC, Mr Bush said he had yet to see the recently released film of the uprising, a dramatic portrayal of events on the United Airlines plane before it crashed in a Pennsylvania field. But he said he agreed with the description of David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, who in a Wall Street Journal commentary last month called it "our first successful counter-attack in our homeland in this new global war, World War III". Mr Bush said: "I believe that. I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III."

Whatever happened to self-reliance? "The Senate added money to rebuild a highway in Hawaii; protect riverbanks in California; upgrade a hurricane barrier in Providence, R.I.; and compensate New England shell fishermen for their losses from a red tide outbreak. The Senate also took steps to make farming less risky by offering compensation for virtually any scourge, including drought, flood, wildfires and pestilence."

German City Privatizes Public Housing: "[Dresden Mayor Ingolf] Rossberg reached a deal in March to sell Dresden's entire stock of 48,000 city-owned apartments to an American private equity firm, the Fortress Investment Group, for $1.2 billion. In a single stroke, Dresden wiped out its burdensome public debt."

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.

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

His Eminence on the Koran and on the Greenies

His Eminence, the Cardinal archbishop of Sydney, Dr. Pell, advises reading the Koran as a way of knowing your enemy. He also very reasonably identifies extreme environmentalism as a religion. Muslims and Greenies are fuming, of course. Summary of Dr. Pell's speech below:



Australia's most influential Catholic has said the Koran is riddled with "invocations to violence" and the central challenge of Islam lies in the struggle between moderate and extremist forces as the faith spreads into a "childless Europe". The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, said reading the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, was vital "because the challenge of Islam will be with us for the remainder of our lives - at least".

But in a speech to US Catholic business leaders, Dr Pell said Western democracy was also suffering a crisis of confidence as evidenced by the decline in fertility rates. "Pagan emptiness" and Western fears of the uncontrollable forces of nature had contributed to "hysteric and extreme claims" about global warming. "In the past, pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions."

Dr Pell said the September 11 terrorist attacks had been his personal wake-up call to understand Islam better. He had tried to reconcile claims that Islam was a faith of peace with those that suggested the Koran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims. While there was room for optimism in fruitful dialogue between faiths and the common human desire for peace, a pessimistic response began "with the Koran itself". Errors of facts, inconsistencies, anachronisms and other defects were not unknown to scholars but difficult for Muslims to debate openly, he said. "In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages."...

Dr Pell said every nation and every religion, including Catholicism, had "crimes in their histories". In the same way, Islam could not airbrush its "shadows". Claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities were largely mythical and he wondered about the possibility of theological development in Islam when the Koran was said to come directly from God. "Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited," he said.

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

ELSEWHERE

U.S. economy steams ahead: "Activity in both the vast US services sector and at factories accelerated more than expected, according to data that pointed to fresh economic vigour and the risk of more interest rate hikes. Most economists are expecting economic growth to slow from a torrid first-quarter pace of 4.8 per cent, yet the latest figures showed no hints of slowing and appeared likely to keep the Federal Reserve leaning toward further rate rises. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week a pause in the rate-hike cycle was possible. The Institute for Supply Management's services index rose to 63.0 in April from 60.5 in March, with new orders hitting a two-year high, confounding Wall Street estimates for a slowdown to 59.2. In addition, the government reported new factory orders rose a stronger-than-expected 4.2 per cent in March, beating estimates for a 3.5 per cent gain, as demand for transportation equipment, computers and electronics proved robust."

BNP has a win: "The British National Party (BNP), running on a hardline anti-immigration platform, won 11 seats from the ruling Labour Party in a key east London seat in local elections today. The BNP targeted working-class areas with voters who are dissatisfied with the main political parties. Opponents dismissed the party as a neo-fascist minority group peddling racism and preying on voters' prejudices. But Richard Barnbrook, a winning BNP candidate in the London suburb of Barking and Dagenham, denied being racist and said the party's success at the polls was due to the Labour party's failings on local issues. "This race concern is nonsense, it doesn't exist," Mr Barnbrook said to Sky News television. "It's law and order, education and proper housing." Some Barking and Dagenham voters said they had turned to the BNP because mainstream parties had ignored their concerns over issues such as immigration and housing. The BNP says its policies are not racist but are an attempt to return to "traditional British values". Its manifesto pledges to "stop further attempts to enforce multi-culturalism on an increasingly sceptical and unwilling populace."

Democrat oil hypocrisy: ""[Senator Chuck] Schumer and most of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate-the very crowd shouting the loudest about 'obscene' gas prices-have voted uniformly for nearly 20 years against allowing most domestic oil production. They have vetoed opening even a tiny portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas production. If there is as much oil as the U.S. Geological Survey estimates, this would increase America's proven domestic oil reserves by about 50%. They have also voted against producing oil from the Outer Continental Shelf, where there are more supplies by some estimates than in Saudi Arabia... If [environmentalists have] discovered some new law of economics in which a fall in output with rising demand can cause a reduction in price, we'd love to hear it. The dirty little secret about oil politics is that today's high gas price is precisely the policy result that Mr. Schumer and other liberals have long desired. High prices have been the prod that the left has favored to persuade Americans to abandon their SUVs and minivans, use mass transit, turn the thermostat down, produce less consumer goods and services, and stop emitting those satanic greenhouse gases... So how do the sages on Capitol Hill propose to reduce gas prices? They want to slap a profits tax on Big Oil because of alleged price gouging. Here we have another head-scratcher that seems to defy even junior-high-school economics. Usually when you tax something, like tobacco, you get less of it. But somehow a tax on oil will magically lead to more oil."

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (of Maricopa County Arizona) strikes again: "A posse of 100 volunteers and sheriff's deputies will patrol the Phoenix area and arrest any illegal immigrants, the county sheriff said. The group likely will be deployed across parts of Maricopa County by the weekend, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Wednesday. Volunteers will be drawn from the department's 3,000-member posse, whose members are trained and are often former deputies. "It's important to send the message out to stay in Mexico and don't come roaming around here hoping you're going to get amnesty," said Arpaio, who in years past gained notoriety for putting inmates on chain gangs and issuing them striped uniforms and pink underwear. Arpaio's deputies have already arrested about 120 illegal immigrants using a new state smuggling law. "We're going to arrest any illegal who violates this new law," he said. "I'm not going to turn these people over to federal authorities so they can have a free ride back to Mexico. I'll give them a free ride into the county jail."

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.

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

Brookes News Update

Is free trade destroying manufacturing and exporting jobs?: The trade account deficit and the movement of manufacturers to other countries has been blamed on free trade. But the picture is far more complicated than it looks
Minimum wages and capital accumulation: lefty economists fail again: The Liberal Party's labour reform legislation is taking a pounding from its critics, particularly in the media. So far the Party has been lamentably remiss in its response to these attacks. Unfortunately the situation is going to get worse as the attacks become more sophisticated
Michael Kroger's hatchet men betray Liberal Party member: Treachery comes easily to some members of the Victory state Liberal Party. The Richmond branch wanted Prodos Marinakis as their candidate. Some of the big boys in exhibitions Street didn't like that so they started smearing and arm-twisting. Some of us little people think it's time Peter Kroger had a chat with Julian Sheezel and Tony Barry. Better still -- just sack the jerks
Journalist smears President Bush over Mary McCarthy's treason: I would love to say that Geoff Elliot was the exception to the rule that most journalists are lying leftwing bigots -- but I cannot. If Murdoch had any decency he would have sacked this liar years ago
Michael Kroger gets a savaging while the Victorian Liberal Party crumbles: Peter Kroger and his gang of spineless incompetents are leading the Victorian Liberal Party into a political black hole. If his minions insist on treating Party members like dirt while they themselves treat the Party as a means of furthering their own political ambitions I fear the Party's next motto will be RIP
How the Liberal Party's labour market reforms got stuffed: The HRNS conned the Liberal Party into thinking that it is the expert on labour markets and that the Party need look no further for sound advice. The result has been a disaster for the Libs
Islamofascists want to exterminate Israel -- and guess who will be next: I had became accustomed to sympathetic posters of sadistic Che Guevara and the equally sadistic Fidel Castro. But I'm not ready for films like 'Munich' created by Stephen Spielberg and the self-hating Tony Kushner that give Muslims a platform to justify mass murder
The feminist furor has finally passed: After years of holding America a virtual hostage, old-fashioned radical feminism appears to be just about dead

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

ELSEWHERE

It is well-known that Americans have substantially higher average incomes than Europeans. Leftists say that Americans earn more only because they work longer hours. A recent comparison of the USA and Germany is therefore interesting. It shows that Americans and Germans work virtually the same hours overall but, because of their high taxes, Germans spend a larger proportion of their working time "Doing it yourself". For example, they may service their own car rather than paying a mechanic to do it. Since "Doing it yourself" will usually be much slower and less efficient than getting an expert to do the job, Americans will obviously get more results per unit time spent working.

Blair talks tough: "The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, yesterday unveiled plans to deport foreign criminals automatically, seeking to regain the initiative in a crisis that is threatening to topple a minister on the eve of local elections. During a rowdy session of Parliament, opponents said he was spouting "sound bites" to grab the headlines, adding that laws were already in place to protect the public but ministers were failing to do so. They stepped up calls for the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, to resign over a bungle when a systemic failure meant 1023 foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation were released."

GOP would benefit from stronger immigration stand: "California voted for Republican presidential candidates in nine of the ten elections from 1952 through 1988. The collapse of the California GOP first became evident in 1992, two years before Prop. 187, when Republicans got skunked in California in the presidential election and two U.S. Senate races. In the last dozen major contests for president, governor, or senator there, Republicans have won only the two times they appealed to voter anger over illegal immigration. The ten times they meekly avoided the topic, they quietly went down to defeat."

Mexico goes libertarian: "To the alarm of its northern neighbour, Mexico is to decriminalise the possession of nearly every drug - hard and soft - that the US has battled for decades to keep off its territory. President Fox is to sign legislation that will make Mexico one of the most permissive countries in the world when it comes to narcotics. Users will be able to possess up to five grams of marijuana (the equivalent of about four joints), five grams of opium, 25 milligrams of heroin and 500 milligrams of cocaine - enough for a few lines. Nor will they be prosecuted for possessing a few tabs of Ecstasy, small quantities of amphetamines or magic mushrooms, or even a kilo of so-called indigenous drugs such as the hallucinogenic peyote, a psychotropic cactus still used in shamanic rituals. The Mexican Government says the legislation will allow the authorities to concentrate on fighting the violent drugs gangs that have turned several cities into war zones.

Great stuff! "The Los Angeles Police Department is being sued in connection with its policy prohibiting officers from inquiring about an individual's immigration status, and reportedly restricting them from cooperating with federal immigration officials. The action has been filed by the public-interest group Judicial Watch, and asks the court to prohibit the LAPD from expending taxpayer funds to enforce and maintain "Special Order 40," claiming it violates both California and federal laws and puts American citizens at risk.

"A Day Without Migrants" becomes day without news: "Like most other news professionals in the Valley, I began Monday by monitoring progress of the work stoppages, boycotts and demonstrations for what had been called by organizers 'A Day Without Immigrants.' That is to say, I sat at my desk in The Arizona Republic's nice, air-conditioned downtown offices and looked out on a beautiful expanse of urbanized desert on what looked like, felt like and was a perfectly normal day. ... There were some protesters gathered at a Home Depot and at the site of a company that had been raided by federal immigration officials. There were reports of some businesses that had not opened and others that were operating short-handed. News reporters and photographers blanketed the Valley. The story was all over the news. ... And, most importantly, it was ... zzzzzzzzzz ... all over before it got started."

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.

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