Religion and theology

Theology is an attempt by religious people to construct a version of their faith that they can intellectually assent to. There are many oddities in Christianity (such as the paradox of evil) and not everybody can simply ignore them.

I notice that with Rudolf Bultmann (1884 – 1976), a noted Lutheran theologian. He is something of a villain to traditional Christians because of his dismissal of Bible stories as essentially fairy stories. Yet if you read of his life and works you can see that he was a deeply religious man. He was not aiming so much to attack Christianity as to make it something that he could believe in.

I think that I am an instinctively religious person too. I was certainly religious in my now-distant teens. But in the end I cannot do as Bultmann did. I cannot construct a version of Christianity in which I can have faith. So I remain a sympathizer with Christianity but not a Christian myself. I sometimes wish it were otherwise but rationality intervenes and I remain an atheist.

I am reminded in that connection of a relative of mine who in his youth was an Assembly of God minister. But you don't have to have much in the way of qualifications to be an AOG minister. You just have to have the spirit. For those who don't know it, the AOG is a very fundamentalist group.

After a while however he decided that he needed to study theology. So I said to him: "Don't or you will lose the faith". But he did and he did. He is a very knowledgeable academic now.

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Israel as an example to a decadent West

In his thought-provoking book The Lucifer Principle [1], Harold Bloom, relying on years of zoological research, points out how “a strange thing happens when humans and other animals are cornered by the uncontrollable. Their perceptions shut down, their thoughts grow more clouded, and they have a harder time generating new solutions to their problems.” This kind of syncope can manifest itself in a number of different ways: a feigned lack of interest when presented with a threat, as when a once-dominant ape pretends to focus on a banana peel rather than respond to the challenge mounted by a formidable claimant to his throne, or when a rat frustrated by its powerlessness before an intimidating rival will attack a lesser member of the pack.

This description, then, of animal and primate behavior has profound implications for the trajectories of entire societies, cultures and civilizations, that is, “superorganisms.” As they rise to the top of the international or global “pecking order,” they experience a “testosterone surge” of power, confidence and exploratory vitality, which impacts the very psychology of its constituent “cells” or members—individual human beings. They do not feel the need to apologize for their triumphs, expanding economies and higher standards of living. They move into the future with flexed assurance and a proud conviction of their civilizing mission and justified ascendance.

However, when these larger groupings intuit that they are slipping from their privileged position above the common ruck and are beginning to slide inexorably down the scale of power and preference, they proceed to espouse various delusionary measures to evade the shock of recognition. Rather than struggle to preserve or regain their pre-eminence, they concentrate on the banana peel, as it were, pretending that no challenge is being posed to their fading hegemony.

Or they turn upon their own, whether individuals, groups or nations, whom they blame for their evident discomfiture and, indeed, for their unadmitted but darkly sensed weakness. They may even begin shilling for the enemy, whom they profess to see as an equal, a potential benefactor, a friend in the making or a collaborator in some noble cultural initiative. As Bloom reminds us, “In a world where some cultures elevate violence to a virtue, the dream of peace can be fatal.” Moreover, so ignominious a surrender tends, ironically, to strut under the banner of “peace, freedom and justice.”

And this, I fear, is precisely what is happening in the contemporary West. “Peace” means that we are no longer willing to fight for the principles and traditions that have raised us to the top of the dominance hierarchy and that we are ready or eager to submit to a clear ideological foe. “Freedom” means that we have accepted the growing likelihood of defeat and comparative servitude. And “justice” means the acknowledgment of the “rights” of our adversaries to game the social, political and legal systems of their host countries to their advantage, in other words, to insinuate their norms of conduct and cultural presuppositions into a way of life we have long taken for granted and are now prepared to surrender piecemeal to the claims of the “other.”

The symptoms of capitulation are unmistakable... As Bat Ye’or has shown [2], the dhimmification of Europe is well under way and is probably irreversible. And now the pathology of appeasement and submission has begun to infect the collective psyche of America itself, especially its current leadership, the left-liberal media, the majority of public intellectuals who have come to act like cheerleaders for the other team, and far too many of our academics who inhabit the dank mausoleum of the modern university.

The moribund walk to their second extinction. As James Lewis remarks [3], “American liberals and European socialists…happily collude in their own subjection and degradation.” A recent book by Wells Earl Draughon, While America Sleeps [4], meticulously corroborates the peril we face and reads like a death sentence we have little time to repeal. Its message might awaken us from our dogmatic slumber, alerting us to the avoidance syndrome that guarantees our eventual eclipse.

This is where a wide-awake Israel comes into the geopolitical equation. It is no secret that Israel is the only legitimate democracy in the Middle East, that it is a loyal compatriot of the United States, that its structural roots are planted in European soil, that it is a vigorous, advanced and technological and scientific leader among the nations, and that it is surrounded by bellicose and regressive Islamic states that wish to erase it from “the page of time [5],” to cite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are the same Islamic states that have embarked on a virulent offensive against the democratic West through the exercise of terror or the prosecution of “stealth jihad,” or both.

And yet, unable or unwilling to grasp that Israel is perched on the frontier of a world-historical conflict, exemplifying the values and usages of the West and coming under almost daily attack from a common enemy, so-called “freedom loving” nations have turned against the Jewish state, defamed it in the corridors of power, vilified it in the media, acquiesced to the corrupt and slanderous assaults on its moral and physical integrity via the offices of the United Nations, pursued boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns, winked at Israel Apartheid Weeks suppurating on our campuses, imposed coercive measures to restrict building projects and the establishment of secure borders, and both subsidized and glorified the terror-sponsoring cartels that go by the name of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas-ruled Gaza. It is as if Western-oriented Israel and not extremist, Western-hating Islam has come aberrantly to be perceived as the West’s nemesis and scourge.

There is no sensible way to explain such counter-intuitive and destructive behavior unless a potent, subliminal motive is at work, which is not particularly hard to detect. Israel stands as a perpetual rebuke to the craven and obsequious West that strives to accommodate and even to ingratiate itself with the forces marshaled against it. (Of course, there is a fiscal component as well; Western nations have succumbed to what we might call a condition of petrofaction.)

Israel, on the contrary, has stood its ground, defending itself with martial courage and refusing to concede to an alien imperium. As such, it represents a searing condemnation of Western compliance and servility before a determined assailant, a J’accuse which Europe in general and influential elements in the United States cannot honorably answer or evade.

The treatment meted out to Israel is the most obvious specimen of standard biohistorical practice. The “superorganismic” West, sensing that it is canyoneering down the global “pecking order” and incapable of summoning the resources to reassert its erstwhile paramountcy, has fallen back on the classic maneuver of all faltering collectives, namely, abusing a smaller member of the parietal community as the ostensible cause of its embarrassment.

In the case of Israel, however, the smaller constituent is not only a convenient target for social and political shame and frustration but, even more intolerably, it is at the same time the most resolute, meritorious and valiant part of the greater collective. The stigma of disgrace is thus compounded and results in even harsher treatment of the presumed but innocent malefactor.

In sum, the West, like the ape and the rat, has adopted its own “endorphin strategy” to meet the predicament that confronts it. It engages in “perceptual shutdown,” denying that it is under attack and directing its attention elsewhere, say, the banana peel of multicultural “outreach” and ethnic harmony with its more ominous immigrant communities.

The choice facing the Jewish state is, for all its palpable difficulty, paradoxically a very simple one. It is, in fact, an inescapable binary. Israel can accede to near-universal opprobrium and to its own left-wing fifth column and go down with the West before a triumphant Islam. In so doing, it raises the white flag of “peace, freedom and justice,” which in Orwellian fashion translates for its bearers as persecution, bondage and iniquity.

Or it can remain stalwart and impenitent, rejecting the condition of dhimmitude that the liberal West is “progressively” and feverishly embracing. In so doing, it raises not the rag of surrender but the torch of both dignity and survival.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Top Muslims Condemn Ground Zero Mosque as a ‘Zionist Conspiracy’!: "In a recent PJM article, I argued that the Ground Zero mosque is counterproductive to Islam. The following day, on August 5, the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm reported that none other than Al Azhar — one of Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institutions — agrees, as shown by the following translated excerpt: "A number of Al Azhar ulema expressed their opposition to building a mosque near [where] the events of September 11 [occurred], convinced that it is “a conspiracy to confirm a clear connection between the strikes of September [11] and Islam.”

Nicaragua: Return of the contras?: "Hidden somewhere in the rugged mountains of Esteli, in northern Nicaragua, a former contra commando with CIA training says he’s organizing an armed rebellion against President Daniel Ortega. Jose Gabriel Garmendia, a former counterrevolutionary special forces commander known by the codename ‘Comandante Jahob,’ is reportedly leading a group of rearmed contras that promise to ‘remove Ortega from office with bullets’ if the president tries to sidestep the constitution to get himself reelected next year. US-backed counterrevolutionary forces, or ‘contras,’ battled the left-wing Sandinista government in decade-long civil war in the 1980s, which claimed more than 36,000 lives. When Mr. Ortega and the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990, tens of thousands of contras — including Jahob — handed in their weapons and tried to return to civilian life.”

Support builds for boycotts against Israel: "In May, rock legend Elvis Costello canceled his gig in Israel. Then, in June, a group of unionized dock workers in San Francisco refused to unload an Israeli ship. In August, a food co-op in Washington state removed Israeli products from its shelves. The so-called ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ movement aimed at pressuring Israel to withdraw from land claimed by Palestinians has long been considered a fringe effort inside the United States, with no hope of garnering mainstream support enjoyed by the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa of the 1980s. But in recent months, particularly after an Israeli raid on a flotilla delivering supplies to Palestinians, organizers are pointing to evidence that the movement has picked up momentum, even as Israelis and Palestinians are moving toward a new round of peace talks.”

God not needed for natural rights: "Let me start with the first point Mr. Silver raises, namely, that human rights used to be dubbed natural rights and were as such thought to be God-given. Yet, as the term ‘natural’ clearly suggests, these rights were believed — for example by John Locke — to be based on an understanding of human nature. Human beings may have been regarded by some natural rights theorists as God-created but their basic rights were alleged to be derivable from their nature as free and independent moral agents. That is how John Locke saw it, rightly or wrongly. So what matters here is whether there are human beings as a class of living entities in the world and whether they have attributes that imply that they have certain rights once they find themselves in human communities.”

DEA seeks Ebonics experts to help with cases: "Federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of undercover drug investigations. The Drug Enforcement Administration recently sent memos asking companies that provide translation services to help it find nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics, Special Agent Michael Sanders said Monday.”

Philadelphia wants to tax bloggers: "If you’re a blogger in the city of Philadelphia, get out your checkbook. Just like everyone else, Philadelphia is struggling to get through the tough economy, and city officials want bloggers to do their fair share and pay up. There’s no specific blogger tax, as some media outlets reported today. But the cit[y] does have a business tax that covers any Philadelphia-based bloggers who are now making any money from their online efforts. Maura Kennedy, a spokesperson for the city, told Computerworld that officials want money-making bloggers to register their business and start paying the tax.”

Occupational licensing: "There really isn’t a more accurate example of democratic failure than occupational licensing. It is public choice economics at its most concise. A small group of people stand to gain financially from a very narrow policy action, and passionately advocate for it. A large group of people stand to be harmed very marginally from that same issue and so don’t care about it enough to spend time and effort becoming informed and fighting back. Politicians measure the gains for them to be made from satisfying the small group (campaign contributions, union support, etc.) versus the fallout from harming the larger group (there’s generally no fallout), and — voila! — an entire industry becomes regulated with a few votes and the stroke of a pen, while the only person who shows up to complain about it is some jerk like me.”

Scrap the minimum wage: "It’s time to abolish the minimum wage. Yes, I want to see pay and conditions improve for the lowest-paid workers just as much as anyone else. But it is now obvious that the minimum wage is keeping out of work those — like younger people, unskilled workers, women and ethnic minorities — who need job opportunities the most. Of course, there is an economic downturn going on, so jobs are harder to get and unemployment is higher. But where is it highest? Yes, precisely among these groups.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Socialized medicine in wonderful Sweden (1)

Something for Americans to look forward to, thanks to the Democratic Party and President Emptyhead

A 32-year-old took the needle into his hands when he tired of the wait at Sundsvall hospital in northern Sweden and sewed up the cut in his leg himself. The man was later reported to the police for his impromptu handiwork. "It took such a long time," the man told the local Sundsvall Tidning daily.

The man incurred the deep cut when he sliced his leg on the sharp edge of a kitchen stove while he was renovating at home.

"I first went to the health clinic, but it was closed. So I rang the medical help line and they told me that it shouldn't be closed, so I went to emergency and sat there," the man named only as Jonas told the newspaper.

After an hour-long wait in a treatment room, he lost patience and proceeded to sew up his own wound. "They had set out a needle and thread and so I decided to take the matter into my hands," he said.

But hospital staff were not as impressed by his initiative and have reported the man on suspicion of criminal dispossession (egenmäktigt förfarande) for having used hospital equipment without authorization.

While Jonas admitted to the newspaper that he has no prior experience of sewing up himself he sought to play down the fuss that his handiwork has caused, arguing that "through the ages people have always sewn themselves up".

SOURCE

NOTE: Sundsvall is a major government hospital serving the entire region in which it is located

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Socialized medicine in wonderful Sweden (2)

More for Americans to look forward to, thanks to the Democratic Party and President Emptyhead

NURSES asked a mother to clean her own room two days after she gave birth by C-section because they were short staffed, Swedish media reported.

Over-worked nurses asked mother-of-two Elin Andersson to strip the sheets from her own hospital bed and tidy up before she was discharged from a hospital in Sundsvall, northern Sweden, local newspaper Sundsvalls Tidning said.

The request was among a list of problems Ms Andersson had at the hospital. She said had to call nurses every time she needed her medicine because nurses forgot to give it to her. And her partner was also asked to help care for her while she was in hospital because nurses had other patients to deal with.

Ms Andersson said the final insult came when she decided to go home: ”That was when the midwife said I had one final task to perform. Then she went and got a big white laundry bag and asked me to clean out the room and the bed where I had lain.”

Two midwives at the Sundsvall hospital ward admitted that Ms Andersson's claims were true. Midwife Gunnel Westerlund said: ”She describes precisely those bits that we don't have time for. Medical safety always comes first and you can't leave (another) mother while she's giving birth.”

SOURCE

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The Professional Left vs. the Amateur Right

Excerpt only

Of all the slips of the tongue and unintentional admissions by this administration, Robert Gibbs' "Professional Left" comment may well be the one they wish they could squeeze back into their collective windpipe the most:

I hear these people saying (Obama) is like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested. ... I mean, it's crazy. ... The Professional Left ... will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.

The term "Professional Left" denotes a growing industry that specializes in converting other people's money into an ideological product, while making a good living out of it in the process.

The term "Professional Left" hasn't been in open circulation before, but it deserves to stick. The casual way in which Gibbs dropped the phrase suggests that it is part of the inner circle's jargon, and that the White House residents are fully aware of its meaning, function, and implication: there is a class of people with radical leftist views who have made it their job - with the help of abundant grants, foundations, and trusts - to carry out propaganda campaigns, indoctrinate, subvert, and plant the seeds of the leftist worldview in people's minds through the arts, media, education, blogging, and street protests. For many it's the only income they've had in years. As with most professional enthusiasts, after a while the pre-paid idealism gives way to cynicism, and the quest for truth turns into a mechanical repetition of talking points.

Observe how many Professional Left organizations spawned in the years of Bush's presidency, when tax cuts ushered in economic prosperity. Immediately, they started working on bringing the economy down. The most prolific hatching, of course, occurred in the wake of the hate-Bush political flotilla.

These creatures always give themselves benevolent, kind names. Common Dreams, for example, hatched in the good year of 1997, when the Republican majority in Congress was steering the country into prosperity. Among other things, the name "Common Dreams" adequately describes the Professional Left's collective ambition to attach themselves to a "progressive" think tank, with the feeding tube connected directly to the deep pocket of George Soros or his equivalent.

In contrast, there's no such class of people on the right. Those employed in the several right-leaning think tanks are too few to make up a class, or even a guild. The same applies to a handful of magazines and newspapers, one Fox News channel, and a few dozen local and national radio talk show hosts.

They are not living off public subsidies, leeching off charities, or smuggling in a fringe ideology wrapped in a mainstream format, which is what the Professional Left does. Unlike their ideological opponents, these people openly state their beliefs, make a living through legitimate advertising, and run honest, sustainable businesses. They may be a force, but there aren't enough of them to fill a large auditorium.

What we have is the Amateur Right: a loose amalgamation of free-roaming conservatives and libertarians who engage in political activism in their spare time - and on their own dime.

The Amateur Right's favorite pastime is listening to talk radio and fighting a battle of wits on political blogs and discussion forums. They are frequently accused of being corporate sellouts by their leftist opponents. A typical presumption is that no one would defend capitalist free markets unless they were paid to do so by a shady deep-pocketed entity. (That happened to me more than once and I've heard similar stories from others.) When the Amateur Right finally protested in the streets as tea partiers, the Professional Left and the Democrat leaders similarly accused them of being Astroturf laid down by insurance companies.

The accusations are telling. The astroturfing itself is a patented invention of the Professional Left - complete with union-sponsored buses full of uniformed "activists" with identical pre-printed signs. Many leftist bloggers are getting paid for building up the visibility of their causes on the Internet. Assigning these traits to the Amateur Right appears to be a projection, shaped by a narrative that measures success in dollars received from grants, charities, government funding, and salaries within the ranks of the Professional Left.

Even the wildly popular Tea Party Express must run its own independent fundraising to maintain the buses and the small staff of operatives. No money for them will be coming anytime soon from charitable foundations, whose fortunes were made through capitalist enterprise but whose programs invariably benefit opponents of capitalism.

Remember John Lennon's Imagine? As a mental exercise, try playing it in your head while imagining the Ford, Gates, Kellogg, or Rockefeller Foundations, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the rest of the usual NPR contributors giving money to cultivate the ideals of capitalism, individualism, and republicanism - or to promote the virtues of free enterprise and private property in poor urban areas. All you'll get is a headache and a bad case of cognitive dissonance. Tea parties need not apply. The charitable cup of tea tilts leftward by design. And so do the money bags.

Obama's entire career has been about organizing, sustaining, and advancing the Professional Left and their operations. One such undertaking involved the processing of $50 million given by the conservative Annenberg Foundation to reform Chicago public schools from 1995 to 2001.

In this Obama was assisted by Bill Ayers, the former Marxist terrorist turned professor, who develops and teaches the methodology of advancing leftist dogmas in the classroom. If you think Obama and Ayers designed a reform to improve test scores, think again: the academic performance remained as poor as it ever was. But guess what? The ideological indoctrination of students skyrocketed, along with the numbers of public school teachers turned into Professional Left operatives. Mission accomplished - conservative money was successfully converted into leftist ideology.

The abuse of the Annenberg Challenge wasn't the only example of conservative funding being hijacked by the Professional Left and used to destroy conservatism. It's how the Professional Left make a living. Converting other people's money into hot air is their raison d'ˆtre; everything else is a side effect.

It would be half as bad if they only processed the money given to them voluntarily. But the Professional Left has learned how to extract money designated for non-political purposes, and developed a variety of techniques that allow them to leech off society through government grants and endowments, union dues, and even church donations.

From 1994 to 2009, ACORN received at least $53 million in federal funding, of which they stole five million for themselves, and converted the rest into radical left-wing action to subvert America's political institutions.

Obama once worked with ACORN as a community organizer, processing other people's money into ideology, and later as a lawyer, defending their right to such activities. In the first year of Obama's presidency, ACORN was poised to receive up to $8.5 billion more tax dollars through the stimulus bill, despite being under investigation for voter registration fraud in a dozen states. That same year, their "common dreams" were shattered when Congress finally withheld their funding. However, what tipped the scale was not the fact that ACORN was a home of professional subversives, but an unrelated scandal that was hardly ideological in nature and involved underage prostitution.

The Professional Left's appetites go far beyond government coffers. Even after you've paid your taxes and saved some cash for personal spending, part of it will still be sucked into the Professional Left's omnipresent and hyperactive proboscis through movie tickets, cable and newspaper subscriptions, college, and other tuition fees. You can roughly measure how much by the amount of ideological hot air coming from the screens, news columns, and your school curricula.

Every time you buy a corporate product or service - a computer from Hewlett Packard, a cell phone from Verizon, cereal from Kellogg, jeans from Levi Strauss, cosmetics from Liz Claiborne, or medicines from Merck - you also feed the Professional Left. All of these, and most other big companies have donated to leftist groups and causes, as well as conducted "progressive" seminars with employees - paying Professional Left instructors. This money is included in the price of their products and services.

The same goes for your investments and saving deposits. JP Morgan, Chase, Wachovia, Bank of America, US Bank, Citibank, PNC Bank, Provident Bank, and others have been giving money - voluntarily or otherwise - to ACORN and other branches of the Professional Left's ideological-industrial complex.

Guess who is best positioned today to appropriate billions of tax dollars in stimulus slush funds, and to process them into organic, locally made hot air? Even without ACORN there remains a well-trained, hungry army of looters and moochers collectively known as the Professional Left. No doubt each and every one of them has already been counted and added to the list of "three million jobs saved or created" by this administration. Their job description? To spend as much of your money as possible to strike at America's foundations, demonize your values, indoctrinate your children, and destroy your way of life.

President Obama is proactively doing just that on a national scale, converting the American economy into a gigantic ball of ideologically sound hot air, while making a nice living for himself and for all those who assist him in that activity. If that does not describe him as the ultimate mover and shaker of the Professional Left, I don't know what else does.

Slowly but surely, the Professional Left's complex has diversified and expanded its frontiers to include professional educators, filmmakers, entertainers, lawyers, writers, clergy, journalists, politicians, government workers, and now also members of the president's cabinet and even the president himself. And given the proverbial revolving door in their membership, they can all move freely from one field to another without ever stepping outside the common hot air bubble, staying in touch with the others trough a common, members-only mailing list. One of such mailing lists, recently discovered and analyzed by the Daily Caller, was used by specialists in various sectors of the Professional Left to share thoughts on the many ways they can spend your money, shove their ideology down your throat, and bamboozle you into voting Obama into the White House.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Analyst: US turning into USSR: "There’s a lot of talk these days about America being an empire in decline. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, goes a step further, arguing America is following a similar path as the former Soviet Union. ‘While the many glaring differences between the two political systems have been exhaustively publicized — especially in the U.S. — the glaring similarities [go] unnoticed,’ Celente writes in The Trends Journal, which he publishes.”

Britain trying to tax its most successful industry out of existence: "France and Germany are trying to break the dominance of the City of London by offering tax breaks lasting for up to 20 years to the world's biggest investment banks, The (London) Sunday Times reported. The latest threat to the City [financial sector] comes amid mounting fears that Britain's coalition Government will impose another tax on banker bonuses this year. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, has also raised the prospect of further taxes being imposed on the wealthiest in society - a move that would be viewed as a direct attack on the City. Almost 4000 senior financiers left the City in the first six months of 2010, according to data published over the weekend by IMAS, the corporate finance advisory firm."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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

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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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As each day passes, I appreciate George W. Bush all the more

By "Rick"

Yes... I had some problems with his policies. Yes... he, at times, was not the conservative we expected him to be. Yes... he embraced the left too many times for my liking.

But as we continue to hear about the number of golf rounds played, the number of vacations taken, the number of Muslims bowed to, the number of times Israel has been disrespected, the number of times America's enemies have been embraced, the number of taxes that are being and will be raised, the death panels that are sure to come, the health care that is sure to be rationed, the defense cuts that are being promoted, the social programs that are being buttressed, the redefining of terms, the dismissal of American exceptionalism, the aristocracy of those currently in charge, the racism being charged wrongly against those in opposition, the racism being ignored by the Department of Justice, the stimulus dollars that are nothing more than a slush fund for allies, the corruption in high places, the appointment of radical cronies to positions of influence, the apology tour, the incompetence during the BP oil disaster, the lack of transparency despite all the promises and more... and I'm sure there's more but this is what has rattled quickly off the fingerprints... the more I miss W.

To underscore the point, I bring you two videos. Ponder them silently and miss the man along with me.

SOURCE. (Videos at link)

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Gates and Buffett Take the Pledge

Wealthy businessmen often feel obligated to 'give back.' Who says they've taken anything?

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett announced this month that 40 of America's richest people have agreed to sign a "Giving Pledge" to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. With a collective net worth said to total $230 billion, that promise translates to at least $115 billion.

It's an impressive number. Yet some—including Messrs. Gates and Buffett—say it isn't enough. Perhaps it's actually too much: the wealthy may help humanity more as businessmen and women than as philanthropists.

What are the chances, after all, that the two forces behind the Giving Pledge will contribute anywhere near as much to the betterment of society through their charity as they have through their business pursuits? In building Microsoft, Bill Gates changed the way the world creates and shares knowledge. Warren Buffett's investments have birthed and grown innumerable profitable enterprises, making capital markets work more efficiently and enriching many in the process.

Other signers of the pledge, like Oracle's Larry Ellison and eBay's Pierre Omidyar, have similarly transformed the way people all over the world exchange information and products. They have democratized the transmission of ideas and goods, creating opportunities for people who never would have had them otherwise.

Successful entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists typically say they feel a responsibility to "give back" to society. But "giving back" implies they have taken something. What, exactly, have they taken? Yes, they have amassed great sums of wealth. But that wealth is the reward they have earned for investing their time and talent in creating products and services that others value. They haven't taken from society, but rather enriched us in ways that were previously unimaginable.

More HERE

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Heavy Regulation? Or Job Growth?

Rich Tucker

Bad news abounds. Claims for new jobless benefits jumped by half-a-million last week. The unemployment rate hovers near 10 percent, and isn’t expected to decline any time soon. President Barack Obama reacted in knee-jerk fashion, by calling for more federal intervention in the economy.

“Small businesses and community banks that loan to small businesses have been lagging behind,” he said. “If we want this economy to create more jobs more quickly, we need to help them.” He wants to provide some $12 billion in tax breaks to small businesses and $30 billion to small banks.

Yet the federal spending is piling up, and seems to be doing little except running up the national debt.

Earlier this month, lawmakers returned from vacation for a day so they could pass a $26 billion measure that would supposedly “save” the jobs of 300,000 teachers. The joke’s on them: The New York Times reports that many school districts plan to bank the bailout money instead of hiring teachers back for this school year. Los Angeles, for example, “laid off 682 teachers and counselors and about 2,000 support workers this spring and was not sure it would be able to hire any of them back with the stimulus money,” the paper reports.

This particular batch of spending, we’re told, was paid for. Lawmakers have promised to trim tens of billions from food stamps in the year 2014. We’ll just have to hold our breath to see if those cuts actually happen.

All this comes on the heels of the $800 billion (and counting) “stimulus” bill. Obama promised that bill would keep unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. These days, Vice President Joe Biden’s been reduced to complaining that $800 billion simply wasn’t enough.

Yet if, in fact, federal spending can boost the economy, it ought to be in overdrive by now. It’s not. So what’s holding things back? It could be death by a thousand cuts. Or, to be more specific, death by thousands of pages of regulations.

This year alone, Obama has signed a massive health care bill and a financial regulation bill. Nobody knows exactly what’s contained in those thousands of pages -- not even the people who voted for them.

“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explained before the health care measure passed in March. On the financial front, “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works,” Sen. Christopher Dodd explained before the Senate passed his financial reform measure. How reassuring.

It’s no surprise to learn that Dodd’s bill contains measures that will make it more difficult to hire workers.

One provision “pushes all federally regulated financial firms that do business with the government and their subcontractors to hire more women and minorities,” the McClatchy news service reported recently. The only jobs this provision will create are federal jobs at a new Office of Minority and Women Inclusion to be included in each federal regulatory agency.

Meanwhile, a “largely overlooked provision of the law gives federal agencies expanded powers to write regulations dictating pay at financial firms,” The Washington Post adds. “How they choose to use these powers could have a major impact on whether banks pursue excessive risks.”

These are just a couple of the regulatory time bombs tucked into the financial bill. Rest assured many more will come to light in the years ahead. The same holds true for the 2,000-plus page health care bill. President Obama got angry at Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Vir., for bringing a copy of that bill to the health care summit in February.

But Cantor wasn’t bringing a “prop,” he was bringing a copy of the law we’ll all have to live under for years to come (unless it’s repealed). It’s unlikely that anyone has read and understands that entire measure. But we’ll be learning about expensive, job-killing aspects of it as they arise through the years ahead.

Over-regulation doesn’t work. Remember Sarbanes-Oxley, passed in the wake of the Enron scandal? It was supposed to protect Americans against financial shenanigans. But it didn’t prevent Bernie Madoff from looting customers for billions. Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t protect us, either, even though they should have known about Madoff.

Uncertainty makes business leaders (and all of us) tentative. Our country can have heavy regulation, or it can have steady job growth. It’s time to choose which path to pursue.

SOURCE

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President Obama & Union Leaders Continue To Advocate For Job-Killing Legislation

In spite of the fact that our nation's economy is struggling and talk of a meaningful recovery has halted, both President Obama and Big Labor bosses continue to advocate for the Employee 'Forced' Choice Act (EFCA), legislation economists believe would result in massive job loss and seriously harm our nation's top job creators, small businesses.

Due to the burdens and restrictions it would place on employers, EFCA would result in 600,000 lost jobs in one year alone, while at the same time, saddling small businesses with debts and liabilities forcing many to close their doors or move overseas.

As a result, for well over a year, nearly every major business organization in the country has been calling on the Obama Administration and Congress to table the job-killing legislation and focus on measures that will grow the economy and stimulate hiring.

Unfortunately, Big Labor's millions appear to have more influence with politicians in Washington, D.C. than do the voices of their constituents.

President Obama recently re-stated his support for EFCA telling the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) Executive Council that "we are going to keep on fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act."

Understanding there is not sufficient bipartisan support in Congress to pass legislation that will cost America even more jobs, Obama went further saying, "[t]here is a reason why we nominated people the National Mediation Board ... We're going to make sure that the National Labor Relations Board is restored."

President Obama is advocating for agencies stocked with Big Labor's cronies to execute administratively what the Congress has been unwilling to do.

This leads one to ask, why would the President say in one breath job creation is his top priority and in the next espouse having bureaucrats enact job-killing policies? The answer is simple, "payback."

Obama owes these same union bosses for having helped elect him in 2008 when Big Labor spent nearly half a billion dollars to propel him into office. And these same bosses have said very clearly and on the record, they expect a return on that investment and have put politicians on notice that they had better hold up their end of the bargain.

Shortly after the President made his comments on EFCA, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pledged to secure a vote on the Employee 'Forced' Choice Act. He has repeatedly voiced hope for EFCA, legislation that removes workers' right to a secret ballot vote and puts the government in control of small businesses dictating employee salaries and benefits. Trumka declared, "I think you'll see the Employee Free Choice Act come up again [in Congress]. I think you'll see it probably before the end of the year."

With Congress in recess and many members visiting their hometowns and districts, it should be made clear to them where the American people stand - which is in direct conflict with what Mr. Obama and Trumka are trying to promote.

SOURCE

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Muslim medical care

Mohamed Fathy, a brilliant journalist and a talented writer, recently went on holiday to Alexandria with his two children, his wife and her sister Nashwa. They all had a wonderful time and then suddenly an unfortunate incident took place. A speeding car hit Nashwa as she was crossing the road and she suffered serious injuries and fractures, her clothes were torn and she lost consciousness. Because she was alone at the time of the accident some passers-by took her to a government hospital in the centre of the city.

What happened after that is beyond imagination. Nashwa and dozens of other injured people were dumped into a place which bore the name “Emergency Unit” and she stayed there for two hours without any first aid or treatment and without any doctor examining her. Mohamed Fathy arrived at the hospital and found Nashwa on death's door. He asked for a doctor to examine her but nobody paid any attention. With the passage of time and the apathy of the hospital staff, Fathy lost his temper and started shouting at everyone he met: “We need a doctor … I beg you … The patient is going to die.”

After intensive contacts Mohamed Fathy managed to get in touch with the director of the hospital, Dr Mohamed el-Maradny, who appeared extremely upset at the idea that anyone might contact with him about patients. Dr Maradny said: “Delays with scans are quite normal. Even if you're in a private hospital and you pay the doctors' fees scans can be delayed.”

The hospital director was trying to remind Fathy that Nashwa was receiving free treatment so her family did not have the right to complain about anything. Fathy spoke to the director at length about humaneness and the doctor's duty to tend the sick, and after a long conversation between Fathy and the director, he did order scans for Nashwa.

At this point a new problem arose. A janitor came up to Nashwa, whose condition had greatly deteriorated, and was about to carry her in his arms to the scans department. Mohamed Fathy objected, arguing that carrying patients with fractures required a trained medic because moving the patient's body carelessly could lead to death. The staff at the hospital ridiculed Fathy's idea, which seemed very strange to them. “What do you mean, medic? We don't have that kind of thing here. Either this man carries her or we leave her where she is,” they said. The janitor gave Nashwa a violent yank and her screams resounded throughout the hospital.

After all this negligence, which was close to criminal, it would have been natural for Nashwa to die in the government hospital, but luckily she survived and almost miraculously Mohamed Fathy managed to move her to a private hospital where she underwent an emergency operation which saved her life.

More HERE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Israel, India, China and IQ

It has always been a puzzle that Israelis tend to score BELOW the Western average on IQ. Israel is such a brilliant nation scientifically and technologically, that the finding almost seems to invalidate IQ tests. India presents a similar puzzle. Indians do very well wherever they migrate but on average seem to have low IQs back home in India.

As is common, however, the problem would seem to arise from generalizations that are too sweeping and fail to look closely at the populations concerned. I will say a bit more about India below but what needs to be noted is that both nations are NOT ethnically homogeneous. High caste Indians are a lot different from "Dalits" and Israeli "Ashkenazim" (Jews of Northern European recent origin) are VERY different from Israelis of Middle Eastern origins.

And MOST Israelis are of Middle Eastern origins. They are mostly the Jews that were kicked out from Muslim lands after the foundation of modern Israel. Hitler got most of Europe's Ashkenazim West of Moscow, leaving NYC as the great remaining Askenazi centre, and NYC is too comfortable for many Jews to leave.

And at least since the story of Ruth, Jews have never been very endogamous, and Yiddisher Mommas grieve over that to this day. One way or another, Jews have tended to become genetically assimilated into the population within which they live. So many Lithuanian Jews look just like Lithuanians and many Middle Eastern Jews look just like Arabs. Sadly, however, it is not only Arab looks that many Israelis share but also Arab IQ, which is low.

So yes. The Sephardim and Mizrachim of Israel are a bit dumb (though it is VERY incorrect to say so), but the Ashkenazim are very bright and it is they who make Israel an intellectual powerhouse.

Although there are similarities, India is not quite the same. The Northern and Southern Indians do appear to be at least partly of different racial origins and the Northerners seems to be descended in part from lighter-skinned conquerors from somewhere North of India. The conquerors were probably relatively few in number, however, as all Indians are pretty brown.

Indians generally are pretty keen endogamists, however, so the Brahmins are relatively fair of skin and are probably the most closely related to the original Northern invaders. And it is of course the Brahmins who run India. So it is the IQ of the Brahmins and other high castes that is crucial and I know of no studies that have separated out Indian IQ by caste.

And even in India some exogamy does happen. In India, you can generally tell how rich a man is not by his skin colour but by the skin colour of his wife. A rich brown Indian will generally have a fairer-skinned wife. So over the centuries capable Indians from all castes will have worked their way up the status tree and contributed higher IQs to the upper ranges of that tree.

But there is clearly a second influence at work in India: The rural effect. For various reasons a rural background tends to go with a lower IQ. You see that even in South Africa. The Afrikaners (whites of Dutch origin) have a lower average IQ than whites of British origin, even though there is no difference between the parent populations in Europe. And the Afrikaners have always been predominantly farmers.

So the current average IQ of the Indian population is undoubtedly held down by its overwhelmingly rural character. And when even Indians of a relatively low caste move elsewhere, that disadvantage seems to be lost and they prosper -- as in Fiji or South Africa, for instance.

A canny critic might at this point say: "But what about China"? The Chinese are mostly rural and their average IQ is high. Again, however, the very word "China" is an oversimplification. There are many distinct nations within China with their own languages and traditions and a generally low opinion of other such linguistic groups. The picture-based written language of China is not so much an anachronism as a necessity. It's the only way many Chinese can communicate with one another.

And from what I can gather most of the IQ testing has been done on Chinese from the coastal cities. Deep inland in rural China the IQ picture will probably be much different.

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Palin rattling the Donks

If Sarah Palin runs for president in 2012, she'll have the building blocks of a coalition that extends beyond her star power - and even Democrats have taken notice.

From her list of endorsements, to her Mama Grizzlies' campaign-style video in July, to her Facebook message Wednesday commemorating the 90th anniversary of women's suffrage, Palin is courting female voters, the so-called "soccer moms" that have swung to Democrats in recent campaign cycles. The former Alaska governor is already eliciting responses from Democrats, who, through a series of initiatives this week, revealed some fear that she might be making an impact.

On Tuesday, EMILY's List launched a new effort, "Sarah Doesn't Speak for Me." A press release announcing the launch warned, "Sarah Palin has predicted a rising tide of mothers and women voters will support her so-called ‘Mama Grizzly' candidates. Today, we call upon women - and men! - to let their voices be heard and to reject Palin's reactionary candidates and backward-looking agenda. We're asking Democrats, Independents, and moderate Republicans who have no home - to join us in our new campaign." On the same day, the Democratic National Committee blasted an e-mail to supporters noting the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment and reminding voters all that Democratic lawmakers have contributed to the women's movement.

Palin made her own splash on the subject Wednesday with a lengthy Facebook post about the suffrage movement. She weaved in seven more endorsements of female candidates, including four Republican women running for competitive House seats against incumbent Democrats, two women running for attorney general in swing states and another running for secretary of state in Alabama.

Mary Anne Marsh, a Boston-based Democratic strategist, noted that Democrats have begun to lose the support of independent voters, and that many women are independent voters, especially suburban women. "She's making a clear swing at them," Marsh said of Palin.

"The lion's share of independents are women," she said, adding, "you can't win without them." And looking ahead to the 2012 elections, she noted that EMILY's List and the other Democratic groups are pressing hard for women because, "you can't start soon enough to get them back."

Gregg Keller, who served as national coalitions director for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, noted, "During the span of the Obama administration, you've seen the Democrats lose some of their coalition groups one by one." He explained that Democrats first lost moderate Republicans after passing big-ticket items like health care reform, then lost single-issue voters like those supportive of gun rights, and then started to shed moderates like small business owners. "Now that their electoral prospects are worsening, they're starting to lose more of their base coalitions," he said.

Keller added, "That's why you're seeing Democrats get so nervous and skittish about losing their base coalitions like women. It would be a political apocalypse in November for them if they continued to lose women."
Beyond the 2010 elections, Palin's efforts could have an impact on her own electoral prospects if she launches a White House bid some time next year.

In her book, "Notes from the Cracked Glass Ceiling," Washington Post reporter Anne Kornblut writes that Hillary Clinton's adviser, Mark Penn, counted on Clinton securing 94 percent of young female voters in the primary without courting them. In a piece summarizing her book, Kornblut concludes: "Clinton erred strategically early on, ceding college campuses -- including college women -- to Obama. She also struggled with whether to portray her campaign as ‘historic,' debating the idea of a speech on gender for months. Focused on proving her toughness, she missed out on key endorsements from women, including Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy."

Palin has so far taken the opposite route by selling gender with her politics. None of her potential rivals for the GOP presidential nomination have made similar efforts in courting women specifically, and all of them happen to be men.

Marsh noted that the success rate of each presidential candidate's endorsees misses the point. Instead, she said, the candidates who lose - including the women she supported - will continue to assist Palin if she launches a bid.
Both Marsh and Ralph Reed, a longtime Republican strategist who's now leading the Faith and Freedom Coalition, pointed out that simply because Palin could be the only female in a field of males doesn't guarantee electoral success.

But, Reed noted, "she won't just be a big fish in a small pond. She'll be a whale in a bathtub." He added, "If every Republican who's looking at running runs, she would have a shot at making an appeal based on the rather obvious fact that she's running against a bunch of white guys." He suggested that gender-based appeals might not work in a GOP primary the way he believes they might in a Democratic field.

Nevertheless, Reed argued that Palin is offering a new style of feminism that could ignite a new coalition of conservative, professional women. "I'm fascinated by what that could mean for the future of American politics," he said.

SOURCE

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Tea party movement shows ‘wisdom of crowds’

By: Mark Tapscott

It may not please New Yorker magazine’s James Surowiecki to hear this, but the tea party movement could be the clearest evidence yet of the growing relevance of his landmark book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” and its application in politics.

Surowiecki’s fundamental insight is this: The aggregate knowledge, experience, analytical prowess and inductive powers of a group are often greater than those of any one of its members. This observation isn’t always and everywhere true or evident, but compelling demonstrations of its operation in daily life are plentiful.

With everybody connected to everybody else via the Internet, new means of uncovering the wisdom of crowds become possible. The political implications therein remain rather murky, though.

I was reminded of Surowiecki earlier this week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and his tea party co-conspirator, Freedomworks.org President Matt Kibbe. The Journal piece coincided with publication of their new book, “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto,” published by HarperCollins.

Armey and Kibbe wrote that the tea party movement “has blossomed into a powerful social phenomenon because it is leaderless — not directed by any one mind, political party or parochial agenda,” resulting in the creation of “a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics.”

This “beautiful chaos” is analogous to the “spontaneous order” Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek said results from the proper operation of free markets, according to Armey and Kibbe.

The clincher here was their noting that the tea party movement reminds Americans that “decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge.”

But if Armey and Kibbe are right, if the tea party movement is indeed sparking new ideas, innovative tactics of social and political organization, greater personal freedom and enhanced opportunities for individual expression, why is its mere mention certain to inspire frothing, spittle-spewing fury in your typical liberal, aka “progressive”?

The answer is, as Armey and Kibbe tell us, “the big-government crowd is drawn to the compulsory nature of centralized authority. They can’t imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge — someone who knows better. Big government is audacious and conceited.”

Put otherwise, the right believes in freedom from the bottom up, the left loves contemporary expressions of the Guardians, Plato’s race of philosopher kings.

Once you get your mind around that reality, it clears up many of the apparent anomalies about the current state of American politics. Here’s an example: Less than two years after winning the presidency, Barack Obama said, “After 18 months, I have never been more confident that our nation is headed in the right direction.”

That sentiment puts Obama at dire loggerheads with two-thirds of his fellow citizens, who think he’s taking the country off the deep end.

Obama is reaching so far to the left, toward political centralization, a top-down command-and-control economy, and a Washington-knows-best regulatory mentality, that he’s becoming a fringe voice alien to most Americans who believe government authority must be decentralized and individuals thereby empowered to act voluntarily from their local communities.

The tea party movement is the heart of the 70 percent of the citizenry who fear Obama has gotten the country seriously off the right track. They want fundamental change and they won’t settle for more Washington, D.C., double-talk, backroom dealing or broken promises.

Tea party activists are the vanguard of a revolutionary renewal of the American founding. And that’s why they inspire such irrational hatred and fear in so many of the precincts of the left.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

The American taxpayer is now subsidizing luxury apartments in Manhattan: "Obama is all about restoring a government for the people, he says. And folks in million-dollar condos in Gramercy Park are people, too: The Federal Housing Administration agreed in March to insure mortgages for apartments at the 98-unit Gramercy Park development, known as Tempo. That enables buyers to make a down payment of as little as 3.5 percent in a building where apartments are listed at $820,000 to $3 million. “It’s a government seal of approval,” said Gollinger, a director at the Developments Group of New York-based brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “We need as many sales tools as we can have these days, and it’s one more tool.”

Do women have the right to control their own bodies?: "The problem I have with most pro-abortion people is that they are stunningly hypocritical. While they speak from one side of their mouths about a woman’s right to control her own body when she wishes to get rid of an unwanted fetus, from the other side they deny her the right to control her own body in a thousand other circumstances. If a woman’s body belongs to her, then she has the right to exchange sexual favors for money, she has the right to be photographed however she likes, she has the right to either take or refuse any drugs, medicines, vitamins, and foods (natural or unnatural) that she chooses.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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An incompetent President

Pollsters and pundits across the political spectrum are having a field day analyzing the Obama administration's plummeting popularity -- and the likely consequences for the midterm elections less than 80 days away. These "experts" suggest all manner of reasons that the O-Team in particular and Democrats in general are in such serious trouble. The kindest explanations offered by Freedom Concert fans run the gamut from "Obama has the attention span of a fruit fly" to "they are wearing blinders and earplugs."

This shouldn't come as a surprise to members of the president's party. His radical agenda may have been carefully disguised during the 2008 campaign season, but it became amply evident once he was in office. His anti-Israel foreign policy, the never-ending "grand apology tour" of world capitals and commitments to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan alarmed pro-defense Democrats right from the start. Then, aided and abetted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he whipped members of his party into supporting costly bailouts, government seizure of businesses, so-called "stimulus" spending bills and a dramatic restructuring of American health care that threatens to bankrupt our children.

None of this has helped create new private-sector jobs, and the American people know it. And in case anyone needed a reminder, this week we were treated to a staggering 500,000 new claims for unemployment -- the highest number in nine months. So much for jobs being the Democrats' "No. 1 focus in 2010."

What is astonishing is how inept Obama and his supposedly "self-disciplined" and "thoughtful" administration have proved to be at capitalizing on opportunities. Their incompetent handling of everything, from their plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to their trying radical Islamic terrorists in Manhattan to their response to the Gulf oil spill, has become part of the opposition mantra. The president's decision to bring a federal lawsuit against the state of Arizona for attempting to secure its border with Mexico and his support for building a mosque in New York City just a few hundred yards from ground zero are but the latest gaffes that will redound to the disadvantage of his party's candidates.

More HERE

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Dismantling America: Part IV

Thomas Sowell says do-gooders and Leftist educators are destroying America

How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but very different values and ways of governing?

It is not just evil people who would dismantle America. Many people who have no desire to destroy our freedoms simply have their own agendas that are singly or collectively incompatible with the survival of freedom.

Someone once said that a democratic society cannot survive for long after 51 percent of the people decide that they want to live off the other 49 percent. Yet that is the direction in which we are being pushed by those who are promoting envy under its more high-toned alias of "social justice."

Those who construct moral melodramas-- starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil-- are ready to disregard the Constitution rights of those they demonize, and to overstep the limits put on the powers of the federal government set by the Constitution.

The outcries of protest in the media, in academia and in politics, when the Supreme Court ruled this year that people in corporations have the same free speech rights as other Americans, are a painful reminder of how vulnerable even the most basic rights are to the attacks of ideological zealots. President Barack Obama said that the Court's decision "will open the floodgates for special interests"-- as if all you have to do to take away people's free speech rights is call them a special interest.

It is not just particular segments of the population who are under attack. What is more fundamentally under attack are the very principles and values of American society as a whole. The history of this country is taught in many schools and colleges as the history of grievances and victimhood, often with the mantra of "race, class and gender." Television and the movies often do the same.

When there are not enough current grievances for them, they mine the past for grievances and call it history. Sins and shortcomings common to the human race around the world are spoken of as failures of "our society." But American achievements get far less attention-- and sometimes none at all.

Our "educators," who cannot educate our children to the level of math or science achieved in most other comparable countries, have time to poison their minds against America.

Why? Partly, if not mostly, it is because that is the vogue. It shows you are "with it" when you reject your own country and exalt other countries.

Abraham Lincoln warned of people whose ambitions can only be fulfilled by dismantling the institutions of this country, because no comparable renown is available to them by supporting those institutions. He said this 25 years before the Gettysburg Address, and he was speaking of political leaders with hubris, whom he regarded as a greater danger than enemy nations. But such hubris is far more widespread today than just among political leaders.

Those with such hubris-- in the media and in education, as well as in politics-- have for years eroded both respect for the country and the social cohesion of its people. This erosion is what has set the stage for today's dismantling of America that is now approaching the point of no return.

More HERE

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Both Islam and the Left wish destruction upon us

As demonstrated by the actions of President Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress over the last one and a half years, socialism (with fascist trappings) adheres to its purpose of destroying all existing political, social and economic orders as a prerequisite for any further improvement. This is and continues to be the goal of Obama’s “hope and change.”

As demonstrated by the alleged “extremists” of Islam, and by their “non-violent” brethren, Islam likewise seeks to destroy all existing political, social, economic, and religious orders as a prerequisite for any future improvement, which is a global caliphate in which all men submit to Islam, one way or another, or die..

These two ideologies have, for the moment, set aside their differences to work together until the common enemy, the West, is disabled, conquered, emasculated, and beaten. In the United States, it means to vitiate the Constitution, abandon the republican form of government, and institute some form of “pure” democracy. Under the secular brand, this would mean the manipulated (and bogus) rule of the “poor” and “needy” of all stripes and categories. Under Islam, it would mean ruling a subservient and obedient class of Muslims and a sub-class of conquered non-believers.

Islam is no stranger to socialism. In fact, as Daniel Pipes and other observers have noted, Islam has made common cause with communism and socialism in the past. Islamic scholars and intellectuals have endorsed socialist trends in countries they wished to see Islam triumph. The phenomenon of America’s liberal/left making cause with Islam is just another episode of that on-again and off-again alliance.

If socialism wins, Islam is no worse off. It can exist in a socialist political/economic environment and bide its time, unless totalitarian measures are taken by the state to eradicate Islam as a rival ideology. The Soviet Union for decades suppressed both Christianity and Islam and all manner of other religions. Under socialism, everyone, including Muslims, would need to acknowledge the state or some personification of it (e.g., “Big Brother”) or some other prominent person and advocate of collectivism as the “true” God or “savior, and Karl Marx or Mao or Lenin as the “prophet.” Opposition to or digression from such deference and worship in any form would be deemed heresy, or blasphemy, and be punished with repression, imprisonment, or death.

If the West is sundered and vanquished, the two species of totalitarianism will fight savagely over the carcass, just as Hitler and Stalin fought over the carcass of Eastern Europe. That, of course, would be the beginning of a new Dark Age. Let us not forget the hundreds of thousands of “illegal” Catholic Mexicans pouring into this country. Will they convert to Islam or put up a fight? The totality of Islamic totalitarianism means just that: everyone and everything. Let us not forget America’s “native Americans,“ or the Indians, and Catholic South America, and Australia and New Zealand, and the whole of the African continent. Islam is committed to a global caliphate. That means everyone and everything coming under its rule. If the West collapses, it will be a bloody and horrendous Dark Age.

What are the commonalities of secular statism (or socialism) and Islam? What premises do they share? What are their shared ends? Are those ends similar or dissimilar or radically divergent?

The chief commonality between socialism and Islam is the deep-seated hatred -- and I would say is the fundamental motive of both socialism and Islam, its desiderative essence -- of the West, specifically of capitalism, of individual rights, and of freedom of speech. And particularly of America.

What is it about those three hallmarks of Western culture that arouses the shared animosity? They are the requirements of an independent, unobstructed, free-to-act, selfish, value-driven, and life-affirming man. They are the descriptive attributes that cannot be permitted in a totalitarian society. They are diametrically opposite of what secular statism and Islam require to function. They are the unified, integrated nemesis of collectivism. They do not describe the “ideal” man in either ideology. Such a man must be eradicated, destroyed. And once destroyed, such a man in either system cannot be permitted to come into existence.

More HERE

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Saving Jobs Means Saving Us from Prosperity

A most pernicious fallacy

One of the most pernicious fallacies in popular economic discussions is that we should adopt policies designed to save jobs. What was once just language used by those with a special interest in particular jobs (such as unions calling for import quotas as foreign cars became more popular) is now part of the Obama administration’s defense of its counterproductive “stimulus” program. “Jobs created or saved” has become the standard of an economic program’s success. There is so much wrong here, it’s hard to know where to start.

Let’s make the obvious point first: Creating jobs is easy, but it’s nothing to be proud of. In fact, destroying jobs is the real path to wealth.

To use an example I’ve used before: One way to create jobs on a big construction project is to take away the machines that dig out the foundation, and limit the workers to shovels. Or better yet, spoons. That will create lots of jobs. But that is not progress. Using more labor than needed to get the job done costs wealth. Better to use the machinery and free up all the shovel- and spoon-toting workers to produce output in addition to the foundation. By the same logic, we could create lots of jobs by destroying all the farm machinery. Surely, though, we would not be richer for doing so.

The rhetoric of saving jobs is as misguided as the rhetoric of creating jobs. We want jobs to disappear – that’s how we define progress! Think of all the jobs that weren’t saved over during the twentieth century. Agriculture employed about 40 percent of Americans in 1900. Today it’s less than 2 percent. Are we really worse off for not having saved those jobs?

Saving jobs means slaving away in manure-laden fields under the hot sun and brutal cold for 12 or 14 hours per day to feed your own family, with a little left over to buy a few necessities — rather than jobs with far better working conditions and far better pay and hours, jobs that afford most Americans the ability to pay other people to cook and serve their meals several times a week.

Saving jobs means putting the engine of human creativity in neutral if not reverse. The healthiest economies are those that consistently destroy jobs by inventing new and better ways to satisfy existing human wants with less and less labor, while freeing other labor to satisfy new and not-yet-dreamed-of wants.

Whenever you hear politicians talk about the jobs they’ve saved, just think of your ancestors scraping out a living on the land, and then think about how much better off we are because no one bothered to save those jobs.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Mosquerade: "Perhaps for the first time since Grover Cleveland, a Democratic president is championing private property rights, states’ rights and a limited federal government. Barack Obama endorsed the right of Muslims ‘to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan in accordance with local laws and regulation.’ Has Obama, of all people, flipped through the Constitution and achieved a clearer understanding of the first, ninth and tenth amendments? No, it is merely a mask.”

Happy public union news from New Jersey: "Here’s a change of pace from the usual doom-and-gloom news on municipal-worker relations: a number of towns in New Jersey have been reaching agreements with their local police unions that cut costs while avoiding layoffs. Last week, the Newark Star-Ledger reported on at least six towns where unions agreed to give-backs in exchange for a no-layoff promise. This is a good trend, but state lawmakers — and those elsewhere in the country — can do more to expand it.”

Government subsidies for bloggers?: "I almost choked when I read Lee Bollinger’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal advocating public financial support of the mainstream media. This is the Lee Bollinger who is the president of Columbia University and was recently named deputy chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The article says more about the writer and the mainstream media than it does its subject matter. It is unbelievable and irresponsible that anyone in his position should seriously advocate subsidies for the press.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Obama's hostility to business is keeping joblessness high

Just as FDR's hostility did during the Great Depression

Businessmen just don't know what is coming down the pike from Obama and his minions ("Green" taxes and levies, exploding healthcare costs, new regulations on anything that moves) so they are playing safe and not expanding their activities until they feel some certainty about what environment they are going to be working in.

Obama's extremist EEOC, for a start, would make anybody nervous about new hires. The only safe hire right now would be a black and if you can't find a black with the right skills and attitudes, you'd be wisest not to hire at all -- JR

Obamanomics has done more than just keep unemployment high during a modest recovery. It may also be keeping high joblessness permanent by raising the costs to businesses of hiring new workers.

July's 9.5% unemployment level was bad enough. But the real problem is that the private-sector jobs machine, which is usually going full tilt at this point in a recovery, now seems to be broken.

To many, it's becoming clear that if President Obama's radical job-killing agenda stays in place, job growth will be nonexistent.

One of America's great advantages has always been its flexible, private-sector labor markets. From 1985 to 2008, U.S. unemployment averaged 5.6%. For the six largest economies in the European Union, the average rate was 34% higher, at about 7.5%.

Yet many of those countries now have jobless rates lower than ours. Why? They've been dropping Keynesian stimulus as a strategy and moving more toward cutting spending and, in some cases, cutting taxes.

Not Obama. He and Congress remain wedded to an outdated economic model that replaces the private sector's animal spirit and dynamism with the dead hand of government bureaucrats and their unions as the main economic forces in our country.

That's what last week's $26.1 billion state "bailout" was all about. We were told it was to keep teachers from being laid off and "for the children." In reality, it was a cynical taxpayer-funded payback to teachers' unions, which gave Obama and his party enthusiastic support and millions in donations in the last election.

This is Obama's New America — a government-run economy, with special benefits for unions and plenty of government jobs, but few private ones.

Businesses today face rising burdens — from ObamaCare, the financial overhaul, the expiration of tax cuts for entrepreneurs, the threat of new energy taxes or the surge in growth-strangling regulations on business — that discourage hiring.

"The real threat to a robust recovery on the labor side," Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, warned recently, "has come from employer and entrepreneurial fears that once the economic environment improves, a Democratic Congress and administration will pass pro-union and other pro-worker legislation that will raise the cost of doing business and cut profits."

It's never been costlier to hire and keep a worker employed. And as ObamaCare kicks in and Bush's tax cuts expire — not to mention the huge tax hikes that will be needed to make Social Security and Medicare solvent — businesses will simply quit hiring.

In this new system, the government will continue to raid the private sector for money to hire more federal workers and to support its union base. And businesses, rather than invest their $1.8 trillion in idle cash to hire workers, will continue to cut jobs.

Already, government is where the action is. Since the recession began, federal employment has jumped 10%. Private sector employment has fallen 6.8%. As USA Today recently reported, government workers in 2009 earned $123,049 in pay and benefits, twice the $61,051 earned in the private sector.

This Keynes-on-steroids model has been tried before, in Europe. It didn't work. It led to permanently high levels of joblessness — what economists call structural unemployment.

A recent peer-reviewed study in Sweden found that for every 100 new jobs government creates, 114 are destroyed in the private sector. Similarly, a French study of data from OECD countries from 1960 to 2000 discovered, on average, "creation of 100 public jobs may have eliminated about 150 private sector jobs."

In short, it was a disaster that the U.S. is now duplicating. The next Congress should have no greater priority than reversing it all.

SOURCE

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There are very few Christian churches where you will encounter the real power of the New Testament

Bob Burney

I have through the years developed a deep distaste for “religion.” A couple of fresh examples are rolling around in my head.

I just returned from a wonderful trip to the country of Moldova in Eastern Europe. It was my privilege to be the speaker for an incredible youth camp ministry. The camp is located deep in a remote area of the Moldovan countryside outside a village founded in the mid 1400s. For several years now, hundreds of young people come to this camp and have their lives transformed by the power of Christ. Kids hooked on drugs and sex are wonderfully delivered. Young people lost in a poverty-stricken culture find meaning and hope.

Over the course of 17 years, over 22,000 young people have come to Christ! Now, who could oppose such a life-changing ministry? Answer—religion. Just up the road from this phenomenal youth camp is a regional center for a particular “Christian religion” and every year these “Christians” do all they can to hassle, harass and destroy the work going on at the camp.

One afternoon while I was at the camp a zealous group of young people decided to go into some of the nearby villages and tell people (in a non-threatening manner) about Jesus. They were so excited about what they had discovered that they simply wanted to tell others. As they began to share their faith—a local priest tried to run them over with his car and told them they should “all be killed.” Yes, Anne, I quit that kind of religion too!

On the return trip to America, I had an overnight layover in Vienna. It has got to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world with some of the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe. Although I had seen it before, I had to make a visit to St. Stephens Cathedral in the heart of the city. Standing for over 800 years, its architecture is truly breathtaking. When you enter you experience sensory overload: Stained glass, rich wood, gold. There are priceless works of art everywhere. You cannot help but stand in awe realizing that this structure was built without any modern technology or machinery. There are so many adjectives and superlatives that I could use to describe the visual spectacle that confronts you. It is beautiful, magnificent and opulent—but it is also dead. It is more museum than church—a relic of ritual and tradition, filled with tourists, empty of worshippers.

As I stood in the midst of the medieval grandeur I thought back a few days before to the rustic camp in a remote region of Eastern Europe’s poorest country … teenagers singing so loudly about their love for Christ that it could be heard for miles … singing, not in a cathedral, but an outdoor tabernacle. No stained glass, no walls, primitive benches made out of discarded chairs and lumber. A magnificent cathedral, a simple camp “tabernacle.” In St. Stephens we see a symbol of religion; in the Moldova camp a living testimony of the power of a personal relationship with Christ.

My decision didn’t make international headlines, but I resigned myself from religion a long time ago. But it’s not about religion. It really is about relationship. There is nothing wrong with Biblical Christianity. The real problem is religion masquerading as Christianity.

SOURCE

In support of Bob Burney's words above, note that in my Scripture blog I have pointed out at length how greatly mainstream Christianity departs from the New Testament. Maintaining the day of the Sun as a holy day rather than the Jewish sabbath is for a start pure paganism, to say nothing of Christmas and Easter and the doctrine of the Trinity. I could go on....

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Liberal Claims to Altruism are a fraud

Ben Shapiro

Democrats, as we can see in virtually every bill, are more concerned with sending taxpayer cash to their political allies than they are in sending cash to those who need it. That's because for every dollar they send to their political allies, they receive a substantial portion back in the form of campaign donations. It's an easy trade: pretend to care about the poor, grab money from the taxpayers to pay off your buddies, let your buddies pay you back, rinse, wash and repeat.

It's no wonder that this week alone, we found out that a new housing program designed to help the unemployed will in fact go to the benefit of the banking system from which Obama received millions, and that heavy-spending unions were poised to receive billions of dollars more from government -- dollars that come from cutting food stamps. If Democrats were advocates for the poor, it would be nice if they would act like it rather than simply using the poor as a convenient political bloody flag.

Until the liberal politicians put their money where their mouth is and actually start promoting programs that help the poor rather than raiding the rich for their own personal benefit, their class warfare should be dismissed out of hand. It's posturing, pure and simple, and it's ugly posturing at that.

More HERE

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BrookesNews Update

President Obama's nightmare economy : It doesn't matter how low interest rates are, if there is too much political uncertainty about making profits then investment and spending will be severely curbed. Unfortunately the dismal expectations of business regarding Obama's policies are founded entirely on reality. There is no escaping the fact that the Democrats are about to strike the US economy with a blizzard of costly regulations and a barrage of high taxes causing business to batten down the hatches
Is deflation really bad for the economy? : A fall in the money stock on account of the disappearance of money out 'of thin air' is great news for all wealth generating activities since the disappearance of this type of money arrests their bleeding. Since a fall in the money stock undermines various non-productive activities it slows down the decline of the pool of real savings and thereby lays the foundation for an economic revival
Exports cannot save the Obama economy : Expanding exports are neither a panacea nor a palliative. The real cure for the US economy is an economic policy based on a respect for free markets. And this just ain't going to happen under the leftwing Obama
The Greens' policies would destroy the Australian economy : Australian Senator Bob Brown has emerged as a destructive parasite. A green fanatic living at the public trough whose economic wish list would destroy the Australian standard of living, which is exactly what they are intended to do. Not only has the media overlooked just how elitist and loony Brown's green economics really are so have our rightwing
On Cuban television, Castro predicts nuclear war and the MSM yawns : The Cuban missile crisis is another event that should live in infamy. This was when Jack Kennedy and his Ivey League advisors sold out the Cuban resistance to the Soviets. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba
The US is facing an Argentina-like economic crisis : Most Americans still do not realise how dangerous economic conditions really are. The situation has even imperiled the survival of the political class. Eventually, anything that extends their rule will be tried. It is not concern for you or the economy that is driving policy, but the preservation of power of an increasingly wounded power elite. Their survival is now driving policy. Unfortunately, what benefits them is generally harmful for the economy
The two Great Classes in contemporary America : "There really are two America's: the ruling class and the country class (aka the patriotic class). The ruling class views the patriotic class as ignoramuses who are vicious, violent, racist, religious, irrational, unscientific, backward, generally ill-behaved, and incapable of living well without constant, detailed direction by their betters who — as Abraham Lincoln would have put it — need to be "ridden" for their own good

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ELSEWHERE

The Obamacare disaster: "The bottom line is that you will lose your health care under this legislation, if not your job, your country as they bankrupt America, and maybe ultimately your life or the life of a loved one. All that to make dreamy, emotionalized, liberals happy, even though many of them are not happy because the socialism in the bill is not overt enough. Moreover, the promises made to the American people to pass the bill are shown in the study to be thoroughly false.”

The surprising Mr. Cameron: "It has been decades since any attempt was made to reverse the growth of government in developed countries. To the extent that leaders have shown reformist zeal, it has usually emerged at the local level — for instance, the commendable crusade by Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system, against the education bureaucracy. Given the long-standing reformist drought in rich countries, Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts in Britain deserve attention.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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

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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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