FASCISTS WERE ACTUALLY AMONG THE GOOD GUYS

The recent slanging match in the EU parliament between German socialists and Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi is a bit reminiscent of some events back in the 1930s. The Italian Prime Minister at that time -- Benito Mussolini -- derided another German socialist -- Adolf Hitler. The Left have always tried to persuade us that Mussolini and Hitler were two peas in a pod but that is far from the truth. Mussolini got pretty unprintable about Hitler at times and did NOT support Hitler’s genocide against the Jews. As it says here: “Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives — far more than Oskar Schindler.” Let’s see that again: ITALIAN FASCISTS SAVED FAR MORE JEWISH LIVES THAN OSKAR SCHINDLER. Isn’t there a lot that the Left never mention?

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ELSEWHERE

Black Racism: “Accusing General Powell, the US Secretary of State, of doing the bidding of his white masters, Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper, The Herald, branded him an “Uncle Tom” who was “despised by people of colour throughout the world”.

Tinpot Hitlers at work: "Two Northwest Airlines passengers praying aboard a flight bound for Boston were handcuffed by air marshals and questioned by state police when the plane landed at Logan International Airport yesterday. The pair were praying when they were cuffed, WBZ-TV reported. Authorities would not confirm if they were praying."

Well deserved: “An Oklahoma man, arrested on suspicion of beating his wife, faced a year in prison and a fine. But when he spat in an arresting officer's face, he got a life sentence instead”

There’s no doubt that the old system was ridiculous: “Such a workday is not unusual for young doctors, particularly surgical trainees like Regenbogen, who frequently work from 100 to 120 hours a week. But starting tomorrow, it will be against the rules."

Congress voted for a huge expansion of Medicare that enriches pharmaceutical companies, fleeces taxpayers with billions in new spending, and forces millions of seniors to accept inferior drug coverage. Conservatives might ask themselves whether this is what they had in mind when the party of 'limited government' gained control of the House, Senate, and White House."

The guardians of the Constitution have clearly become its destroyers: "When the Constitution says that no state may 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,' it apparently means that Michigan can discriminate in favor of African- Americans, Hispanics and Native-Americans who would like to enroll in the state's taxpayer-funded university. That's how the U.S. Supreme Court reads the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment -- with the evident approval of President Bush .... Translation: Under the guise of seeking a more 'diverse' educational climate, the Constitution may be treated as so much tissue paper."

How to increase unemployment in one easy lesson: "Santa Fe is a well known and fashionable New Mexico desert city and largely in the hands of a bunch of meddlesome lefties.... Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Santa Fe recently enacted an ordinance that mandates a minimum wage of $10 that every employer must pay. There is no opportunity to come to terms with potential employees -- the politicians have taken things over."

My academic posting here (or here) is very relevant to the old Leftist claim that they are non-racist. They have to hide the fact that Hitler was a socialist to make that claim but make it they do. What I show is that Leftist sympathizers in the community at large are no less racist than anybody else. What Leftist intellectuals and agitators say is not what ordinary Leftists say.

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VIETNAM

Paul Sheehan has an opinion piece that opposes the usual interpretation of the Vietnam War. He says: “The US military campaign in Vietnam defeated the Vietcong and decimated the North Vietnamese army but lost the propaganda war... many conscripts from North Vietnam were chewed up by the conflict - more than 1 million communist soldiers were killed.... In the broader sweep of history, the US crushed Vietnam as a regional power. Since 1975, the US has become the world's dominant superpower while Vietnam has become a political, military and economic backwater”

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THE “WESTPHALIA” DOCTRINE

I have just posted here a historically well-informed email from a moderate Leftist in support of the Iraq war. He refers to the treaty of Westphalia of 1648 in which various European States recognized one-another’s sovereignty not on any legal or moral grounds but simply because, like Mt Everest, they were there. Before the Iraq war, many Leftists referred to this dubious old doctrine to defend Saddam. They argued that because he was there he should be left alone. Fortunately, the successful U.S. invasion of Iraq would seem now to have knocked that notion on the head for good. A good point that the writer makes is that for Britain and the British Commonwealth both World War I and World War II were also pre-emptive wars. They declared war on Germany rather than the other way around. And he thinks that the pre-emptive attack on Iraq was equally well-justified.

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ELSEWHERE

That pesky global warming! “Moscow saw its coldest June in 62 years this year, with the average temperature ringing in at a chilly 13 degrees Celsius, a top meteorologist said Monday”

Asking Leftists to give up their public spending habit is like asking a drug addict to give up his drugs: “California officially went broke on Tuesday after failing to pass its annual budget.... While a host of other US states also stagger under the weight of burgeoning deficits ... California's case is by far the most dramatic with... a budget deficit larger than those of all other US states combined”

Fascinating: “A French company is ready to launch a device that lets television viewers watch any channel on earth, and may open another front in the battle over digital copyright. Nexedi SARL's "TV Brick" effectively turns the internet into the world's longest antenna lead.”

Serves them right: A local authority took an unfortunate company to court over some Greenie scare and got a damages settlement of $400,000. But it cost the authority $800,000 in legal fees!

Another sensible editorial in USA Today -- this time about mandatory sentencing for crime.

That constant hunger for attention at any price: "Around 30 people have staged a naked protest against GM food. The protesters spelled out 'no GM' with their bodies in a meadow at Forest Row, East Sussex .... Organiser Mike Grenville said he hoped it would send a message to the Government of people's concern, particularly over commercial planting of GM crops."

Hasn’t the USA done enough already?: "Pressure built Monday on the United States to contribute to a peacekeeping force in Liberia, with West African leaders asking for 2,000 U.S. troops

It doesn’t pay to insult people: “French wine sales to the US, once French winemakers' most promising market and now one of their greatest competitors, are going down the drain... Because of the greater competition during a global glut, France turned 9.5 million litres of unsold beaujolais into industrial alcohol last year. There is so much on the market that some French table wine is now cheaper than expensive mineral water.”

It takes an Italian Prime Minister for a fiery response to insults! When a German socialist questioned his honesty, Berlusconi replied: “"Mr Schulz, I know there is in Italy a man producing a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I would like to suggest you for the role of Kapo. You'd be perfect." Italians don’t have good memories of German socialists.

Arlene Peck’s latest article is here. She points out how indifferent mainstream U.S. newspapers are to Jewish deaths while at the same time agonizing over Palestinian deaths. Pretty disgraceful.

China Hand has been blogging up a storm lately -- with some amusing stories from his trip to Manila.

There is a post on PC Watch showing that it is now a legal hazard to offer anybody free drinks!

I have recently exchanged emails with Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknoll Organization on the subject of priestly celibacy. He has an interesting defence of it. I have posted the emails here

I put up a link yesterday to my academic article “Towards a more pragmatic penal system”. After it was originally published in a Criminology journal some years ago, it attracted a number of critical comments from other academics. My published reply to those comments is here (or here). The reply gives a shorter and simplified version of my original argument about how imprisonment should be used if we are to prevent crime.

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HITLER A MONSTER?

There is a review here of the recently-released film “Max” -- which is a portrayal of the early life of Adolf Hitler as a frustrated artist. The review makes a great point of saying how Hitler must be portrayed as a monster -- as something apart from ordinary humanity. That he was a horrible character is obvious but this talk of him being a monster apart from normal humanity is bunkum. He was a fairly normal hate-filled socialist in most ways -- very little different from other mass-murdering socialists like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all their lesser “revolutionary” brethren around the world. And whatever else one might say about socialists, they ARE (regrettably) a part of normal humanity. Envy, hate and murder are all too human and mass-murder is common throughout human history. So this endeavour to portray Hitler as something apart is just more Leftist deception -- deception designed to camouflage the fact that he was in his day a fairly conventional Leftist. Even his nationalism and antisemitism were in his day common among Leftists (see here or here). Only his persuasiveness set him apart and millions of ordinary Germans idolized him. He was a political con-man and there are still plenty of con-men of all sorts around. If anybody really thinks that Hitler was a monster it is only because they do not WANT to understand what he really was.

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ORWELL IN CONTEXT

An Australian reader writes:

“It is interesting to contrast the left's desire to kick Orwell for reporting what he believed to be 38 "crypto-communists and fellow travelers" to the Foreign Office months before his 1950 death with how they seem intent on whitewashing members of the traitorous "Cambridge Four" spy-ring. The Four may have been responsible for hundreds of deaths, but are now being lauded as slightly misguided anti-Fascist idealists. Everybody seems to have forgotten that Stalin was still very much in charge in Russia in 1950. So it was bad for Orwell to betray Stalinists to the West but good for the “Cambridge Four” to betray the West to Stalin?? But of course the Leftists don't want to acknowledge that Stalin was at least as bad as Hitler.

Even the usual and rather bogus Leftist smear of "McCarthyism" is anachronistic. Joe McCarthy's career peaked 1954, less than a year after Stalin's death. And Orwell's reports were made within a year of the first Soviet atomic test, an achievement that is now known to have been made easier and faster due to extensive Soviet spying. So Soviet spying really was a problem. And Orwell, unlike Senator McCarthy, had long standing and intimate knowledge of Communist-front tactics from his career as a socialist activist and anti-Franco volunteer. It is certainly possible that Orwell may have made some mistakes in his list but how would the left today treat someone with (say) inside knowledge of a Nazi spy ring in 1939? Would they still counsel silence in deference to the civil liberties of the suspects?

One of the best retrospectives of Orwell's career comes (surprisingly) from Robert Manne. Manne is a former editor of the Rightist Quadrant who, despite involvement with anti-Communism in the 1960s has recently swapped alliegiances for the left in opposition to 'economic rationalism' and conservative government attempts to reform the welfare state.”

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MY ACADEMIC POSTINGS

I have just put up a paper here (or here) that gives the detailed results of a survey of what South African whites thought of blacks during the Apartheid era. They generally thought well of blacks. I doubt that they would hold the same opinions today given the fact that they are all now frantic to get out of the country.

There is also a link here to a rather popular paper of mine: “Towards a more pragmatic penal system” in which I argue that protecting the community should always be the first goal of any criminal justice system and that no other goal should interfere with that (PDF file).

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ELSEWHERE

An interesting article here on the current state of the Iraqi economy. It seems that essentially ALL Iraqis are looters. They had started looting even before U.S. forces took over.

Good to see that GWB is pushing for school vouchers. It might help get more kids out of the grip of the NEA and its drumbeat of Leftist propaganda.

More on those good old, unbiased, fair-minded teachers: In House and Senate races, 'we may find some right-wing Republicans that we can take out,' said Randall J. Moody, the NEA's federal policy manager, at workshops to outline the group's political strategy."

The British government is in a turmoil over fox hunting again. The refusal to compromise on the part of most of the British Labour MPs could be good news -- meaning that there will end up being no ban of any sort! Tony Blair did not vote for the outright ban and when the Lords again reject it, he is likely simply to take no action to override the veto by the Lords.

The Wicked one has another instance of the old truth that minorities themselves are often intolerant.

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THERE WILL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

I have just put up here a further volley in the battle to free England from domination by the Scots and the Welsh by giving England its own parliament (which Scotland and Wales already have).

To be a bit frivolous about it, one could say that there is in fact a way in which the present situation is normal in English history. Those pesky Scots and Welsh were after all responsible for both the Tudors and the Stuarts -- and as well as the Scots and Welsh at the top there have been the Norman Plantagenets and the German Hanoverians. The English have hardly ever had a look-in at ruling their own country. And don't forget those enormously influential consorts -- the Dutch King Billy and Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha. So if the English have survived all that in reasonably good shape, perhaps they will survive the present Celtic domination in reasonable shape too! Seriously, however, since 1649 it is parliaments that have mattered in England and the present parliament at Westminster would be very different without its big contingent of almost uniformly Leftist Scottish and Welsh members.

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SHOULD THERE BE MORE BASTARDS?

Chris Brand looks at the biology of it and writes:

"Bastardy may have been a rather good idea in the past, when more of it was done by highly successful men: see here; (Begins: "The failure of successful men to have plenty of bastard children is one problem the West is up against today. In the past, English kings on average sired more bastards than they had legitimate offspring. In Sweden of 1850, fully 50% of births were to unmarried women. Today, however, Western men are letting breeding with adolescent girls be done largely by spotty and drunken youths of distinctly mediocre IQ.").

Since 25% of American women now stay childless -- doubtless the brighter ones even if their brains have been addled by feminism -- we should perhaps arrange for girls to get pregnant by rich and bright men before they go to college -- for the attractiveness and viability of age-gapped partnerships, see here“

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ELSEWHERE

Intellectual antisemitism: "An Oxford University professor is facing disciplinary action after rejecting an Israeli student's application to work with him because he had a "huge problem" with his country's "abuses on the Palestinians""

The champion of Chappaquiddick sure has a neat turn of phrase: "I'm not sure where Arnold [Schwarzenegger] gets his political instincts. People often say that for Kennedys, it's in the water."--Sen. Ted Kennedy, quoted by the Associated Press, June 27

The British Tories really HAVE lost the plot. Instead of applauding Campbell's attack on the Leftist bias in the BBC, they are attacking him!

Encouraging: "China called Monday for a Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons and urged a diplomatic settlement to the North Korean nuclear crisis."

Surprise! The Left Coast goes soft on Leftist thugs "The district attorney's on-again, off-again pursuit of charges against protesters who shut down the city as the war in Iraq began is off again. Prosecutors decided Friday to drop cases against 407 people charged with traffic violations for blocking city streets during the first days of fighting. Police in riot gear arrested 2,300 demonstrators who brought San Francisco to a standstill. Prosecutors still plan to pursue charges against 20 people allegedly involved in acts of misdemeanor violence or vandalism, Assistant District Attorney Mike Menesini said."

"In just five years, a demographic tidal wave will begin that will forever alter the federal government. The large baby boom generation will start retiring and cause the costs of Social Security and Medicare to explode. Unfortunately, Congress seems blissfully unaware of the coming crisis as it works to create another elderly entitlement in the form of a $400 billion Medicare prescription drug benefit."

Globalization, multinationals and poverty: The figures show the anti-globos are wrong. "Evidence supplied by the World Bank and United Nations strongly suggests that multinational corporations are a key factor in the large improvement in welfare that has occurred in developing countries over the last forty years...."

Spiked-Online says the risk of vehicle accident by mobile phone distracted drivers is exaggerated.

Surprise! Lesbianism is often hormonal: “Doctors there noticed a "staggering" number of lesbian women, who, on investigation, were found to be suffering either from polycystic ovary syndrome, or a less serious but related condition ... polycystic ovarian syndrome... is linked to an excess of male sex hormones in the bloodstream.”

The Wicked one has some "funny but true" stories about announcements on aircraft

In my latest academic posting here (or here) I try to disabuse my Leftist psychology colleagues of their simplistic notions about economic achievement. They think that poor nations are poor simply because the people there are not ambitious enough! I show that it is in fact affluent populations who are relatively unambitious. People in poorer countries are in general VERY motivated to better themselves materially.

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THE LEFT'S "THIRD WAY" IS A VERY OLD IDEA

Some interesting thoughts from an expert on the history of Fascism: "Every now and again, as I wander about town, my mind drifts from Mussolini and Fascism, the subject in hand, to another matter: Tony Blair and New Labour. Odd, but I cannot help noticing that Blair and Mussolini have rather a lot in common. I am not saying that Blair has consciously copied Mussolini. But Blair, probably without even realising it, does seem to have imbibed quite a few things from the Duce. ... For a start, Blair extols the virtues of the Third Way, which was the phrase coined by the Fascists, no less, to describe their alternative to capitalism and communism..... Indeed, despite all the uncanny similarities between the two leaders, there are, of course many differences, not the least of which is that Blair is in many ways more right-wing. Mussolini, for example, founded Italy's welfare state. Presumably, most people would agree that such a move was fairly left-wing. Blair, on the other hand, is doing his best not just to hack away at the welfare state but also at workplace rights"

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ROMAN CATHOLIC ABSURDITIES

The Vatican says that it is not going to change its rule of priestly celibacy. They might have to rethink soon or they will find themselves with no priests to be celibate about. In the Australian State of Queensland -- population about 2 million -- there will be only ONE new priest ordained this year. And the average age of existing priests is over 60. But maybe the RC church does not really need priests. Given the Roman devotion to "miraculous" apparitions, perhaps a stain on the wall would do just as well.

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ILLEGAL FISHING

Australia has a big illegal fishing problem to its North. The Indonesians have fished out their own waters so their fishermen are continually intruding into Australian waters to fish there. The Australian navy does catch them and tow their boats into Broome harbour at times but this email just passed on to me says that such measures are no deterrent:

We had talked to the crew of HMAS Arunta when it brought another Indonesian boat in. They said they just about knew most of the Indonesians by name because the fishermen didn't really mind being caught - they got good food and were paid $5 a day in temporary detention until the Broome magistrate found them guilty and they were flown home at our expense. $5 a day was more than they earned in a month as fishermen, and made them relatively rich when they got back to their kampongs, especially if the magistrate had lots of business on his hands and they had to stay in detention a while. And they were taught English to boot! A real ticket to a better life. The boss lost the boat, of course, unless he/she paid compensation (which was hardly ever, because they were not very sophisticated boats - most were just burnt). Some of the fishermen had been caught eight times!

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby is scathing about the “benefits” of race-based admissions to universities.

Apparently there are some people in the Church of England and in Anglican churches worldwide who still accept the authority of the Bible. So the “gay bishop” controversy looks like splitting them off from other Anglicans. In a typical Anglican way it will not be a formal schism, but it seems that parishes will soon start choosing which bishop they acknowledge rather than accept the one given to them. The “primate” of the new faith-based faction looks like being the Archbishop of Sydney. Sydney is a very big and prosperous Anglican diocese with lots of committed young people in its churches and seminary.

There is a rather sad story here by an idealistic Leftist from South Africa who has recently returned there after many years in England teaching at Oxford University. He seems to have decided to stay in Africa now but from the tale he tells about how everything is collapsing there and how everyone who can (black and white) is leaving, he is one hell of a masochist. The only good thing he can find about the place is the scenery. Even the initial presence of a large white minority seems to have done nothing to prevent South Africa from following the other countries of Africa rapidly downhill. Clearly, anti-racism has converted the whole of Africa from a reasonably well-run place into a deadly shambles.

"Exploiting junk science is great for re-election campaign coffers. Thus, one of Sen. Hillary Clinton's first major crusades after she took office was to whip up public health hysteria on Long Island, where some activists have blamed slightly elevated breast cancer rates on everything from pesticides to power lines to planes. ... Red Queen Hillary and her courtiers' expert conclusions notwithstanding, _there is no shred of legitimate scientific evidence connecting breast cancer on Long Island to chemicals or other environmental causes."

A win against hysteria at last: "A federal appeals court told the Tennessee Valley Authority that for now it's 'free to ignore' Environmental Protection Agency orders to clean up pollution at several of its coal-burning power plants. The decision from a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta came in a test case challenging an initiative by the Clinton administration and states to reduce smokestack emissions from aging coal-fired power plants."

The Left think George Orwell must have gone ga ga when he handed a list of Communist sympathizers to the British authorities! I would have said that he was backing his anti-Communist words up with deeds.

A REAL Feminazi: Rwanda's genocide was planned by a feminist

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ENGLISH LIBERTIES IN HISTORY

Much of English history is to a large degree also the history of modern-day Americans and Australians so I think there is a lot of interest in this historical vignette showing that the English attitude to civil liberties and the power of the State has always been different:

Background: We all know how Elizabeth I was famous for her tolerance in religious and other matters. Her statement that she did not want to make a "window into men's souls" is best known in that connection but she also at one stage reproached that great bureaucrat and religious tyrant, King Philip II of Spain, by asking him -- as any modern-day libertarian might have -- "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?" She also respected Parliament and when Parliament was getting heated about the sales taxes of the day (government-granted monopolies), she abolished most of them -- making probably the first big tax cut in English history.

When she died, however, she was succeded not by an English king but by the Stuart King of Scotland, James I. And note that the attitude of the Scottish Stuarts towards the relationship between the individual and the State differed from traditional English views from the very outset. Note this report of an incident on the initial journey to London of James I:

He ordered a pickpocket to be hanged straight away without trial. The prudish English were too dainty for 'Jedburgh justice', which hanged Border robbers out of hand. They muttered tiresome objections about their Common Law, and Sir John Harington, that privileged wag, proclaimed loudly: 'If the new King hangs a man before he is tried, will he then try a man before he has offended?'

(Quoted from p. 172 of That Great Lucifer: A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh by Margaret Irwin [Bungay, Suffolk: Reprint Society, 1960])

So the fact that the son of James I (Charles I) eventually got into such trouble with Parliament that they beheaded him was more than a personal mistake. It reflected a deep culture clash between English individualism and the much more tyrannical rule that was accepted as normal by others. Not much has changed since.

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A NEW FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT DAWNING?

An interesting post from Chris Brand:

WATCH OUT WEASELS! France saw the rise and rise of beautiful neo-rightist, political science student Sabine Herold, 21. Fed up with union domination of France and the paralyzing strikes of June, Sabine, a real babe (long eyelashes, light blue mascara), aimed to roll back the state, rein in the unions, cut welfare dependency and to claim the freedom to work as well the freedom to homosexualize, take drugs and work in the prostitution industry. Altogether her bag sounded rather like that of the late neoliberal Pim Fortuyn (see above) in Holland, and, hinting at her attitude to mass dullard immigration, she certainly supported the Anglo-American Crusade against towelhead fanatics and Madman Insane in Iraq. Of rightist Monsieur Le Pen, she had bravely denied that he was a “fascist” -- “Ca ne sert à rien de gueuler que Le Pen est un fasciste. Il ne l'est pas. C’est son programme liberticide qui est dangereux”. Miss Herold had been nicknamed “the Joan d'Arc of the liberals” by “Le Figaro” and, by the London Times “Mademoiselle Thatcher”. She was “Rédactrice en chef” of the Paris-based free-market association “Liberté j'écris ton nom”. On June 15 she addressed a crowd of 200,000 fans in Paris. She favoured Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek and classic English liberalism. She was attending the prestigious Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris and had links to the liberal organization, Centre for a New Europe.

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ELSEWHERE

Australia’s token antigun laws. A .38 sixgun is still legal! “The states will ban a range of small handguns, handguns with a calibre above .38 and those with a magazine capacity exceeding 10 rounds.”

We all know that there are some morons in the world but how did this guy get to be an air-traffic controller? Frightening. “A Swiss air traffic controller jokingly put an "al-Qaeda" label on a French helicopter that strayed into restricted air space during the Group of Eight summit, nearly leading to a shooting down of it by the French air force.”

There is a good article in the WSJ about the implications of the recent U. Mich. affirmative action decision by the U.S. Supreme court. It says that American institutions know that blacks can never be equal in achievement so also know that they need racial preferences to look good. It also explains anti-Americanism as a “holier than thou” attitude.

I think they are pretty right about this: “The Dept. of Defense ... just announced the launch of a new advertising campaign that links military values with success in life. The military believes the values soldiers learn through military service to be a key to success in civilian life as well. The primary goal of the ads? To encourage adults to to advocate military service to the young people in their lives."

Disturbing: "Even without a prescription drug benefit, the cost of Medicare will double as a percentage of GDP by 2040. The program's unfounded liabilities are more than $13.3 trillion, dwarfing even Social Security's massive debt. ... a more courageous or sensible Congress might have tried to reform this deeply troubled program and bring some restraint to its escalating costs. Instead, Congress decided that what Medicare really needed was a brand new entitlement estimated to cost at least $400 billion over the next 10 years ..."

The Wicked one has an email from a U.S. medical specialist about the incredible red-tape being generated by subsidized prescription drugs.

My latest academic posting: “AUTHORITARIANISM AND ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION IN INDIA” can be found here or here. I find that the Indians are a submissive but ambitious lot.

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