BRITISH POLICE

A reader writes:

You regularly criticise the British system of Justice in DISSECTING LEFTISM, Peter Hitchens has some ideas on what went wrong with the police force, which in per capita manpower terms is larger now than ever. See here and
here. Quote:

"....When they patrolled on foot and were among us, our police used to belong to us, enforcing laws we supported, sharing our views, taking our side against trouble. ..Now they are a distant and politically correct service belonging to the liberal elite, which puts the human rights of criminals above the rights of the rest of us to live in peace, and which even now has no idea of the scale of the disaster it has caused...."

Hitchens is the author of A BRIEF HISTORY OF CRIME

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ELSEWHERE

Another feminist myth goes up in flames???
"....Between a fifth and a quarter of those executed for witchcraft were men. This is not news to historians; they just don't want to know about it...."

Under the heading: "The Mind of George Bush", Richard Brookhiser has a good short biography of the President. I liked his comment that one of the benefits of GWB going to Business School was that it meant that he did not go to Law School.

The Wicked one has a good post on the wastefulness and stupidity of bureaucracy.

Chris Brand reviews what we know about the psychology of politics.

Michael Darby has a story about a leftist who finally saw through it all.

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EXLAINING THE WAR TO LEFTISTS -- BRIEFLY

I recently sent the following email to some Leftists. I HOPE it is in terms that will get through to some of them. One can only try.

Why the US is taking out Saddam:

Simple: Once both Saddam and the Taliban are gone other Muslim leaders will get the message loud and clear that they must co-operate in the fight against terror or else. Simple and rational and highly desirable.

If it was about oil why did the US intervene in Kosovo? No oil there. They intervened there for purely humanitarian reasons. If it was about oil they would have taken over Saudi Arabia. It produces more oil, has an army of only about 7,000 men and could be taken over in an afternoon. Which is why the Saudis try to be friendly of course.

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FRENCH SOFT ON ANTISEMITISM

French Synagogues are regularly attacked and individual Jews are regularly assaulted. And the French government response? They acknowledge verbal assaults only and pretend a booklet will cure it!

France's education ministry last month launched a campaign to stamp out anti-Semitism and other types of racism in schools. Education Minister Luc Ferry acknowledged that verbal insults are becoming common..... He introduced 10 measures to combat the problem, including the creation of a monitoring committee in Paris, the appointment of a team of mediators for the worst cases and the publication of a booklet

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The "worst cases" get only mediation? As Cronaca says: "Apparently protecting the victims and punishing their attackers would be an unacceptably simplistic approach.

But I am sure they will publish a most tasteful booklet! And a monitoring committee in Paris will certainly be good for some long lunches if nothing else.

Just for contrast let us see what Jacques Chirac says about SMOKING in schools:

"I want to insist on one priority: the war on tobacco. The law will be applied without exception, notably in public places. We have got to ensure respect for the principle of tobacco-free schools," the president said.

Summary: You can beat up Jews but don’t DARE smoke!


(Crossposted on Israpundit)


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SOME BRITISH REALISM

Britain’s Daily Mirror is a Leftist rag in general but their columnist Tony Parsons seems to be a man of sound instincts. This column from 6 months ago in which he praises the enormous restraint and decency of the United States is very alien to anything else you will ever read from Leftist sources. And this extract from his latest column (March 24th.) is good too. Commenting on the recent upsurge of support for the war in Britain, he says:

"War is never the answer," we are still being told. But, of course, sometimes war is the only answer. Especially when a war has begun. There were people cheering Tony Benn's speech on Saturday who would be against war if the Waffen-SS were gang-raping their granny. It is no longer the dwindling peace marchers who seem to hold to the high moral ground. It is the British soldier and his American allies. We seem to be bending over backwards to make this a good and righteous war. Civilian casualties are being kept to a minimum. Our soldiers are not allowed to raise their country's flag in victory. They are told to treat the Iraqi people with dignity and respect. The realisation is dawning that those who were against this war were, quite simply, wrong. The Iraqi people seem bloody delighted to see British and American troops. They seem fantastically relieved to know that Saddam's days are numbered.

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ELSEWHERE

The US ambassador to the United Nations walked out of a debate on Thursday after Iraq's ambassador accused the United States of trying to exterminate the Iraqi people. Let’s hope for more such walkouts.

Under the heading “America the Liberator” Jeff Jacoby has a good summary of the war so far.

"We are all anti-war -- and American troops in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf represent the kind of protest that terrorists can understand." --Thomas Sowell via The Federalist

Michael Darby reminds us about the “other” China.

Chris Brand summarizes the issues in the psychology of ethnic and racial differences.

The Wicked one has a hint about avoiding telemarketers.

In this academic paper from my past I deal with a common theory among psychologists to the effect that intolerance of ambiguity is a bad thing. I point out that the evidence for this is so poor that you have to be very intolertant of ambiguity to accept such a theory!

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GREENS AS A MESSIANIC SECT

A reader writes:

I get the feeling that as the Limits to Growth forecasts have proven to be wrong, ...and even later 'follow up' reports from the Club of Rome were generally more optimistic, ...that the global warming models of the IPCC were "taken over" to provide new justification for the same agenda by the faithful.

There are of course parallels with millennialist sects which make confident predictions of the end of the world, and when it fails to happen, shift the date out, after a new revelation. Like the millennialists, there is also some "wishful thinking" in their end of the world predictions. They are really quite keen to see the sinful old world go. When greenhouse sea-level concerns first made a splash, there were predictions of the inundating of coastal cities, melting ice caps etc.

Although they still argue that sea levels are going up, most of the scientific greenhouse people have, in recent years, substantially lowered the expected increase. When the newer figures came out, many greens seemed a bit disappointed, as if sinful industrial man 'deserved' ecological punishment. Similarly if you mention to greens, the advances in carbon sequestration or the Tom Gold hypothesis that petroleum may be abiotic and thus may be much more abundant than previously thought, ...their first reaction is almost of disappointment. They so much wanted to impose sackcloth and ashes on everyone. Energy conservation or recycling to many of them is not so much a policy option that may or may not make sense, so much as punishment and penance. "Save energy, save a soul".

As Lewis Carroll, wrote in Alice in Wonderland "No! No! Sentence first - verdict afterwards!" Just as energy use is 'bad', trees are 'good'. Evidence is not required. So we hear the mantra that tree planting, old growth forests and paper recycling are "good for greenhouse".

I like trees and forests too, but only young rapidly growing plants actually absorb atmospheric CO2 and even then only temporarily. See here. If you wanted to use trees (why not bamboo?) to fight greenhouse, you would plant new trees, chop down old ones, turn them into paper, ban recycled paper and require that all paper waste be buried in poorly designed landfills (or kept in attics) to prevent biodegradation. Arizona garbage archaeologists (!) have shown that newspapers buried that way are good enough to read decades later. See here

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AUSTRALIA’S REPRESENTATIVES OF THE RELIGION OF PEACE

WITH bottles and knives in their hands and hate in their hearts, a mob of violent troublemakers yesterday ambushed a student anti-war rally to lead a vicious rampage through Sydney streets. A group of young men, described by police as "Middle Eastern males", created havoc by throwing chairs, rocks, bottles, eggs and golf balls at police and media during several hours of chaos in the CBD.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

The “Carnival” is up again with lots of good reading at Dancing with dogs

Good to see that there are some decent Canadians who appreciate the generous giant to their South.

Jim Ryan’s comment on recent events:
“I don't speak of the shame of the French and Germans. They are shameless, and there is no point speaking about shame in their connection. They are morally dysfunctional societies.”

Limbic nutrition has an excellent extract showing that Leftists NEED their current antisemitism to prop up their worldview.

Opponents of the "Greenhouse" theory have always said that any climatic fluctuations on earth are due to fluctuations in solar output. There has long been indirect evidence of fluctuations in solar output from geology and other sources but this article reports direct measurements of fluctuations in solar output in recent times.

One of my readers has also been reading up on history. He writes:
"What people tend to forget about the German Nazis is this: not only did they appeal to AntiSemitism and Racism, yet they also appealed to the grievances of the Working Class. If one reads their propaganda, one finds that it is chock full of references to the evils of International Finance Capital and Banking Cartels. In this respect, the Nazis, strangely enough, resembled their Communist enemies!"

Chris Brand looks briefly at the literature on social class and has a quiet laugh at low Leftist sociologists both need and abjure the concept.

Michael Darby looks at the heroic optimism of the Zimbabwe opposition.

The Wicked one has a rather non-feminist joke.

China hand is most impressed at the range of furniture available for sale in his area of China. Luxury and economy are equally available.

In this academic paper from my past I respond to an alleged proof by Leftist psychologists showing that Leftists are more morally mature than conservatives. I point out that they get such a result only because they define moral maturity in a Leftist way.

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SOCIALIZED MEDICINE JUST GOBBLES MONEY

A good quote from Peter Cuthbertson: "Scotland's spending on healthcare, for example, is the same as the European average, and this goes largely unprotested by the electorate. So clearly many Britons are willing to pay the price - but equally clearly, given the fact that Scotland's health service is worse than England's, paying this price does not bring a better state sector at all."

It is hard to imagine anything worse than the English National Health but there you have it. The English even have to export a lot of their patients across to Europe in order to get them treated. That fact is presumably why the article Peter was responding to claimed that Europe does socialized medicine better than Britain does.

That may still not mean much however. I know an older woman here in Australia who had dental implants (artificial teeth) to form permanent new front teeth in lieu of dentures. Dental services are almost wholly private in Australia so it was simply one of the options she was offered. Whilst on holiday in France, however, she fell and broke one of her implants. She wanted to get it fixed immediately of course and had traveller's insurance which would have paid for it. But she was told: "We don't yet do that sort of work in France". She had to wait until she could get back to Australia to have the work done that the French could not. It would seem to take capitalism to provide the most advanced medical services.

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HOMEBIRTH AND PERINATAL CHILD ABUSE

In response to my academic paper on homebirths (mentioned yesterday) , a reader (a medical specialist) writes:

Concerning home births - there is just no place for them outside of the most remote areas. With helicopters, women can be transported to hospitals from far away; those who deliver on the way probably don't need doctors. Briefly, every pregnancy is a high risk pregnancy - something goes wrong about 5-10% of the time, and when things happen, they happen fast. Rapid access to surgery, drugs, anesthesia, is essential; there simply isn't time to act from "home births". Those who crusade for them are simply stupid and/or greedy.

To demonstrate just how serious this is, rapid bleeding often occurs during difficult deliveries - the patient can die in minutes at home - and many have.

The idiots who quote infant mortality in the US don't tell the whole story. The system is good - but the same low IQ people who score poorly on tests and commit most of the crime don't take advangtage of it - those with drug and alcohol problems damage their child before they are born, and afterword; and then some bleeding heart liberal says we "owe" the child because its mother neglected it. Just nonsense.

Recently, some liberal female pediatrician claimed her study showed that cocaine in pregnancy wasn't so bad - because the post birth environment caused most of the damage. How could you separate out this scientifically? It just can't be done. In cases like this, you just have to believe basic science and common sense. Rats and dogs and monkeys that are given drugs don't produce healthy babies; why should people be different? I believe that these "coke moms" need a good dose of their own medicine - incarceration for child abuse.

In South Carolina, a group of "coke moms" filed a suit (with the help of a liberal NYC female attorney) against the Charleston Hospital District for reporting these "coke moms" for incarceration if they refused rehab; they sued for "violation of their privacy" in abusing their babies.

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ELSEWHERE

Funniest bit of Muslim propaganda yet: "Iraqi peasant shooted an american helicopter with a gun when he saw US Navi soldiers raping his goat". Via Limbic nutrition

A final gift from Saddam to his people: Mines. COALITION forces are doing their best to de-mine the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr to break a bottleneck delaying badly needed humanitarian aid efforts, the White House has said.

There was a comment about the asteroid threat on this blog yesterday saying: "It is fascinating that many Greens are quite hostile to the idea of taking the impact threat seriously. Maybe this reveals their anti-technology bias." Marc Miyake emailed me this comment: Actually, I think it reveals their anti-human bias. If their beloved 'Nature' sends an asteroid our way, we 'deserve' to die. I can't help but think of the Greens who have praised disease for its ability to decimate human populations.

Charles Wickwire has the latest on the 9/11 memorial that was vandalized by Leftists in La Habra, CA. Apparently the owner of the property is now being prosecuted for not having the proper permits for the memorial!

Aaron the Liberal Slayer is starting a movement for everyone to join NRA and buy a gun as their personal answer to the lying and odious Michael Moore.

The Wicked one has an interesting post under the heading: "No more Golliwogs".

Michael Darby has some news about the dramas of electioneering in Zimbabwe.

Chris Brand has some observations on sex differences and feminism.

In this academic paper from my past I point out the illogic of some Leftist psychologists who recognize the universality of racism but also believe that psychologists should be immune from it.

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THE PEACENIKS JUST FEEL SUPERIOR

A reader writes:

If the UN okayed it and if Clinton ran it, they would probably support the war as 'humanitarian' (as in Serbia, Somalia, E Timor). This seems to me to be a very shallow and superficial basis for rejection of the present war. It is almost if the only good wars are the ones where there is no national interest at stake.

I know you think that they are just anti-American but I think that they are a bit like the ancient Greeks: They didn't like technology or even experimentation, as that was 'hands on' i.e. slave work. It is as if we now have a social class who believe that the marketplace and national interest are menial work best delegated to a lower order to do all the work, pay the taxes and take the risks. The Leftist protestors will just air their superiority from the sidelines and claim the lion’s share of the rewards.

When those who carry the burden protest, the Leftists accuse them of selfishness, bigotry etc!

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DISEASE AND DISASTERS IGNORED BY GREENS

A reader writes:

Ron Bailey makes the point that we may be facing a "tragedy of the commons" with disease. In the long run, this is probably a bigger threat to globalization than terrorism. There have certainly been examples in history where expanding international trade and cooperation, and the population growth it sustains, was brought to a halt by plague.

It is fascinating that disease, a threat that has been shown time and time again to endanger the lives of millions draws less concern than the more nebulous and much less certain threats of climate change, something that is not inherently lethal. Many climate activists do of course argue that changing climate may induce the spread of tropical diseases. Their solution is to throw money at schemes like the Kyoto Accords which even to it's advocates can merely delay the feared warming for a few years. This is a pretty roundabout way of dealing with a problem. Why not just invest in fighting the disease?

Similarly the threat of asteroid impact. This is 'new' but planetary scientists have proven that impacts are common in the solar system and have happened many times on Earth. We even witnessed the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter. The risk is small but the consequences dwarf climatic change, something the Earth and even man has seen and survived many times.

See this article by Richerson (PDF file) for a detailed background on paleolithic man's experience with 'natural' climate change.

It is fascinating that many greens are quite hostile to the idea of taking the impact threat seriously. Maybe this reveals their anti-technology bias. This site has some discussion attempting to assess the actuarial risk of impacts and tries to guess what premium we should pay to prevent impacts.

That item from Richerson is quite interesting. He argues that climatic change was so common and extreme the Paleolithic (approx 1.5m to 10,000 before present) that agriculture was nearly impossible. Then in the Holocene (10,000bp to now) we had a period of benign climatic stability.

What is the 'norm'? Sometimes I think the Holocene stable patch may be "gamblers luck in a climatic casino": Just as "the gamblers fallacy" is to assume that past results (good or bad) will determine future results. Maybe we assume that past climates (as determined over a small baseline of a few thousand years) are normal and natural and any variation must be abnormal, unnatural and artificial (ie human induced). But the big picture says change is the norm, with or without human or industrial influences.

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INTELLIGENCE IN THE FORMER EAST GERMANY

Some excellent data here on the general usefulness and heritability of high intelligence from the former East Germany -- a country with the usual Commuinist devotion to “equality”. Definitely not a nasty capitalist plot:

From 1963 to 1971 about 2.8 million East German school children participated in nine nationwide mathematical competitions. The 1329 most successful participants were selected for further study. In 1970/71 and in two follow-ups in 1983 and 1993, data on 23,000 relatives of these children were gathered. The data indicated the existence of a strong relationship between mathematical-technical giftedness in school and achievement in life. There was evidence from the distribution of high professional achievement among the relatives that such achievement needs not only nurture but also an appropriate genetic background, which seems to be transmitted as a simple Mendelian trait, now open to investigation by molecular genetics.

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ELSEWHERE

Fun! I have just received another email from the Marxist who wrote to me previously claiming that Stalin was not a Leftist! He has now accused ME of being a liberal! He also says that Bill Clinton is a war criminal -- presumably because Bill rescued the admittedly rather undeserving Kosovars. Here we see once again an almost total loss of reality contact in a Leftist. In psychiatry, of course, loss of reality contact is the prime symptom of psychosis. You can read the email in full here.

Ex-Iraqi and Assyrian Christian, Sam Shalalo writes about how the Iraqi people have had "enough of Saddam and people like him" and why the war is "just and legal". See his piece here

Michael Darby has a letter from a group of Zimbabwean women that should stir sincere feminists to anger and protest. But will it? I think we know the answer.

Chris Brand has some thoughts on the psychology of ageing.

In this academic paper from my past I argue that the decline in homebirths has improved the intelligence of the population.

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A POLITICALLY INCORRECT WAR?

A U.S. reader writes:

My mother (who wishes to remain anonymous because she fears for her job) just returned home from work at Home Depot in Waltham, MA. She called me with disturbing news. The employees' lunch room has a television. It previously had been tuned to the news to allow employees to follow the war. Today, all day, the television was tuned to "Home Depot TV". Additional, there was a metal bar locked across the television in order to prevent the channel from being changed. When my mother inquired about the situation, she was told that a Muslim employee had complained to HR that he was offended by the war coverage. This is a complete outrage.

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DOWN WITH THE EU -- UP WITH THE ANGLOSPHERE!

There is a great article by David Frum in today's UK Daily Telegraph (Requires free registration) headed Blair must find the courage to turn his back on the EU which argues that Britain should move away from the EU and build closer ties with the USA instead. Some excerpts:

After the war, Mr Blair's prestige will if possible rise even higher in America..... Instead of using his transatlantic clout to help others, Mr Blair could use it for the benefit of Britain..... After five decades of European integration, Britain still wields more military power than all the rest of Europe combined.... Britain continues to prove itself the most dynamic large economy in the continent.... Britain doesn't need the EU to be powerful. The EU does need Britain. Doesn't that suggest that it is France and Germany that should be left to mend the fences - while Britain seeks instead to institutionalise its renewed military alliance with America? .... The great geopolitical lesson of the Iraq war is that America, despite its strength, does not wish to be a unilateral power...... Britain should work to develop and renovate institutions that offer the Anglo-American alliance multilateral legitimation .... America is often glibly accused of imperialism. The accusation is not very convincing: would the Romans ever have permitted the Gauls or the Cappodocians to do to them what the French and the Turks have done scot-free to the United States?.... America craves partners - and of all potential partners, Britain is both the most capable and the most reliable.

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SCOTS = JEWS?

The book The Mirth of Nations by Christie Davies has been reviewed a few times since its release (See for example the review by "Theodore Dalrymple") and its salient point that the Scots and the Jews make an interesting comparison has generally been picked up.

A point that I found most interesting, however, was that both the Jews and the Scots have historically been very prone to theological divisions. They have both had numerous sects of their religions (Judaism and Protestantism) in nitpicking and verbally fierce dispute with one-another:

"It is the questioning, disputing, argumentative quality of Judaism and of the Christian religion in Scotland and the corresponding requirements of literacy and study that have led both to the secular intellectual achievements of the Scots and the Jews."

And as Arthur Herman in his book How the Scots Invented the Modern World points out, the intellectual achievements of the Scots have indeed been great. I do not think the Davies thesis explains all about either the Jews or the Scots but I find it of some personal relevance. I have always been rather philo-Semitic and I did also have a lot of Scots Presbyterian influences in my upbringing.


(Crossposted on Israpundit)



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THE MEIN KAMPF OF AL QAEDA

There is here a lengthy summary of Al Qaeda's "Mein Kampf" and it's author Sayyid Qutb. It takes the view that Qutb is a powerful intellectual with a valid criticism of the emptiness of modern Western civilization. He says we have disconnected God from our daily lives. The article concludes that we need to wage a propaganda war to assert our democratic and tolerant values in the Arab world as a counterweight to that critique. I would however have thought that any exposure to Western media would have given Muslims some message along those lines. They can certainly see that our civilization works a lot better than theirs does.

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MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

My mirror site for this blog seems to be working out well. It is definitely not as pretty but seems to load more quickly and more reliably than this blogspot site. I have therefore adopted the practice of posting my stuff on the mirror site first (up to an hour before I post here) so I would recommend in general that people make my mirror-site their first port of call rather than this site. Now that I have said that, I suppose the mirror site too will develop bugs .... I hope not. I have kept it simple to limit the scope for bugs as much as possible.

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ELSEWHERE

Michael Darby looks at who supports the USA in its Iraq policy and looks at a probable aftermath of the war.

The Wicked one has a good peacenik joke.

Chris Brand looks at the possibility and the morality of psycho-social engineering.

A paper here (Post of 22nd) from my archives of academic writing looks at an unusual finding to the effect that a program of training designed to ward off heart disease also reduces racism. A simple explanation for the finding is suggested.

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