CURRENT GREENIE NONSENSE

Some establishment scientists who back the baseless Greenie ban on DDT seem to be getting a bit rattled by repeated revelations that the ban has caused millions of deaths from malaria in the Third World. They of course disclaim responsibility for the deaths. They get a pointed reply here from Ted Lapkin -- who is one of those who have pointed out recently the holocaust caused by the ban. Lapkin's original article on the subject is not online but there is a mention of it here

Latest from former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore: "Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner...But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists' campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has clearly exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. By adopting a zero tolerance policy toward a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they have lived up to Schwartz's predictions. They have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals, and internationalists. It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position.."

From "Inside the Beltway" of February 3, 2004: U.S. military training in the war against terrorism has been curtailed and even canceled so as not to "harass" marine mammals. "Vague" language of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, amended last year in the National Defense Authorization Act, has had a "damaging effect" on military training, according to the president of the Navy League, causing "exercises at night and in shallow waters to be canceled or conducted under unrealistic conditions ... to ensure that marine mammals were not 'harassed.' " .... Meanwhile, the deployment of a vital submarine-detection system - Surveillance Towed-Array Sensor System, Low Frequency Active - was delayed, the league president tells Congress, because special-interest groups claimed its sound emissions posed a risk to marine life. The system is considered a centerpiece of the Navy's quest to guard against quiet diesel-electric boats deployed by North Korea and Iran. The Navy already funded a $10 million independent research program, conducted in part by Cornell University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which found the system could be employed with "minimal risk" to marine mammals. Nonetheless, special-interest groups sought intervention of the courts, and last October, a U.S. District Court in Northern California issued a permanent injunction restricting military operations of the sensor system. The Justice Department has filed a notice of appeal.

The elitist Greenie people-haters: "An old Chinese curse goes, 'may you live in interesting times.' Well, these happen to be interesting times for the Sierra Club. A small chunk of its membership is worried about what it calls 'impact of mass immigration on the environment and quality of life for future generations' of Americans. These dissidents want the Club to promote public policy that will restrict America's future population growth." Immigration control is perfectly reasonable but the Greenies just want to stop immigration altogether as part of their usual anti-people attitude. Conservatives, on the other hand, think SOME immigrants are OK. Immigration is after all an historic American and Australian tradition. But Greenies dislike all immigrants equally. Both Greenie and Leftist ideology is too simplistic to differentiate between different types of people -- though Leftists and Greenies certainly do plenty of differentiation in their personal lives. How many Greenies and Leftists marry blacks, for instance? Equality is for other people, obviously.

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With the U.S. Presidential race heating up, and Kerry bringing up Bush's military service record, John Moore's blog has become a major debating place on the subject. See Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry

A remarkable WSJ article about how GWB applies his intelligence in getting to know and understand people rather than in concentrating on intellectual abstractions. That certainly fits well with the characteristic conservative respect for the individual and is the ideal qualification for a job where delegation of tasks to others is important. And in what job could delegation be more important than President of the United States?

Hmmm... It sounds like Australia's new "Leftist" leader is pretty conservative on social issues to do with families too. If he wins the next election, it looks like Australia will have a Prime Minister just about as conservative as our present conservative Prime Minister. Australian politics are very centrist and the centre seems to be moving further right all the time. See also here

Leftists have enormous problems accepting reality but one Israeli Leftist seems to have had it forced upon him. From Opinion Journal: "Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center reports on the recent "World Social Forum" in Bombay, India: "An Israeli backpacker added: "I am a good Israeli. I accept the Palestinian right to violent resistance." He was crushed by the response of Faisal from Tullkarm: "I know better Israelis; they are dead."" Proof again that Islamic fanaticism cannot be negotiated with. Islam originated as a religion of the sword and the sword (or its modern equivalents) is all that gets through to its more fanatical adherents to this day.

Here is another list of quotes proving that the President lied about Iraq having WMDs -- Only the President concerned is of course William Jefferson Clinton. One quote: "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

I have just put up some more of Chris Brand's recent postings here -- on talking parrots, mad Muslims, the BBC and Zimbabwe.

The Wicked one says that foeign investment is good -- whether you are giving it or receiving it.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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A GREAT LOSS

An Email just received from a reader:

"Greenhouse sceptic John Daly yesterday passed away after a heart attack. During college he was my electronics teacher and generally a great man. I looked up to him as the only teacher (indeed the only person at that time) to challenge the 'politically correct' interpretation of global warming. I hope as time progresses someone else will rise to the legacy of John Daly and show the world that something as complex as our climate can not be reduced to simplified leftist slogans. As far as I have read, no one -- and I mean no one -- has ever come close to arguing successfully against the work of John Daly. There must be good reasons for that."

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THE NAZIS WERE THE FIRST MAJOR "GREEN" PARTY

A good email from a reader:

"Great job infiltrating the Nazis. You are definitely not a cloistered ivory tower academic.

If you remove the nationalism and racism from the party platform of the National Socialist German Workers Party of Hitler it becomes virtually identical to the modern Greens. Here is a partial list of the common positions:

National socialist health care
Strict government oversight of corporations
Extreme labor rights versus employers
High taxes
Big government
Strict gun control
Deification of nature
Aversion to Judeo-Christian theology

If a complete analysis was done I believe you would find many more common policies with very few differences.
I believe you could devise a sociological experiment that laid out the Nazi party platform minus the racism and nationalism and asked people what party had that platform. Most would say the Greens. They would be shocked to find out it was the Nazi platform. I have done this a few times informally with educated leftist friends. It always leaves them confounded and upset with me that I could dare compare the two."

There is already considerable documentation of the Nazi/Green similarities here. See also here. Some historians try to dodge the similarities by saying that the Greenies of today are NOT like the Nazis of history in that the modern Greenies do not have an overt racial agenda (though the Greenies DO think that the poorer countries of the world should stay poor). That misses the point, however. Of course history never repeats itself exactly. Racism and eugenics were very popular among Leftists in Hitler's day. Hitler was being a perfectly orthodox socialist in having those beliefs. Since then, however, the Left have switched sides and now make just as big a play of being anti-racist as they once did of their "racial hygeine" (eugenic) beliefs. And the Greenies follow suit. But they are all still Leftists with the same desire to tell everybody else what to do. And Hitler showed where those desires lead if the people concerned actually get power.


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An amazing fuss about a partially-exposed breast. Since it seems to be a matter of such great interest I thought I might mention the probable psychological cause of the event: The breast concerned is obviously an augmented one and it is quite common for women (though not all women) who have had implants to be very keen to display their new assets. Connect the dots.

Lots of people now seem to be waking up to how Leftist psychology works: If you want to know how Leftists tick, just listen to what they say about how conservatives operate and treat it as a confession about the Leftists themselves. From Opinion Journal: "The critics of America and the coalition seem to be engaging in what psychologists call "projection"--attributing their own deficiencies to others. A case in point is Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who claimed the government of Tony Blair had "sexed up" information on Saddam Hussein's weapons. Now that the charge has been investigated, it turns out--and we said it way back in July--that it was Gilligan's report that was up-sexed. The BBC itself reports that Gilligan tendered his resignation Friday, following two Beeb executives out the door."


Bad principle, good politics but peanuts anyway: "Despite a ballooning deficit and objections from members of his own party, President Bush announced that he would increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. It was Laura Bush who confirmed on Thursday the $18 million boost in the federal contribution to art programs around the country.

"The Soviet Union was, of course, the first country to adopt all-round socialized medical care -- the dream of most of America's modern politicians."

The Wicked one is a bit cynical about GWB's recently announced spending cuts.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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LEFTIST STEREOTYPING DEMOLISHED AGAIN

The most successful "big lie" of the 20th century is undoubtedly the Leftist myth that Nazism is just a more extreme form of conservatism. Leftists really hate it when you point out that it was the Conservative Winston Churchill who was Hitler's most unrelenting foe and that Hitler and Stalin were allies until Hitler tried to grab Russia. That conservatives did and do oppose Nazism as much as they oppose any other form of socialism or totalitarianism just cannot be fitted into the Leftist worldview. From the Marxist psychologist Adorno onwards (writing in 1950), the Leftist line has always been to ignore the socialist nature of Nazism and to assert fervently that Nazis and conservatives are allies, not enemies.

As an outspoken conservative myself, I too have obviously been the target of such dishonest accusations. Any outspoken conservative (including of course President Bush) will get called a "Nazi" by Leftists sooner or later and I have certainly been called that many times. I am inclined to think that such accusations are in fact a badge of honour: they show that you are an effective opponent of the Left. And a couple of Australian Leftist bloggers have repeated that old accusation about me recently and been rather competently demolished in reply by Sam Ward. And I have also myself replied to similar criticisms years ago.

In fact, however, I have been more of an enemy of Nazism than most people. Leftists just sit in their armchairs and condemn Nazism in order to make themselves feel good without actually doing anything practical about it. I, on the other hand have actively tried to combat and undermine Nazism. Part of that effort has been in the academic journals for over 30 years -- my sociological observations of Australian neo-Nazis -- in which I went out and got to know lots of actual real-life neo-Nazis in order to describe and analyse what they are really like and what motivates them (see here and here). The first step in combatting something is to understand it and I put a lot of time and effort into understanding what makes modern-day Nazis tick in the hope that it might help me understand Nazi Germany better. The usual Leftist explanations of Nazism are rendered worthless by their perverse determination to identify it with conservatism. And all my work on the subject was published in Jewish academic journals, as it happens. So the occasional Leftist claim that my work was sympathetic to Nazism is the height of absurdity.

Until recently, however, I have kept my mouth shut about another very active way I have combatted Nazism -- my role as a police agent reporting on them. My sociological studies of Australian neo-Nazis yielded not only information of psychological and sociological interest but information of interest to the police too. And I gladly supplied that information to the police -- in order to assist the police in preventing any Nazi thuggery. Since over 30 years have now passed since that time, however, I think any need for secrecy is at an end and I have recently gone VERY public about my police role by telling all to Brisbane's Sunday newspaper. The reporter who interviewed me seemed to know a lot about the matters concerned and I was able to give him enough detailed information about my police and Nazi contacts to enable him to authenticate what I said.

So, far from being a Nazi, I have done far more to combat REAL Nazism than any Leftist I know. But that just makes me a good conservative -- contrary to what the Leftists would have you believe. And, in case anybody thinks that studies of Nazism/Fascism are irrelevant to the modern-day world, they should have a closer look at how things are going in Russia.

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Good to see that the social-worker busybodies are at last being held accountable somewhere. These generally Left-leaning know-alls have done enormous harm to innocent people with their false claims of child abuse and some at last are being taken to court over their malicious accusations and prosecutions.

French corruption again: "President Jacques Chirac passionately defended today his former prime minister and long-time political partner, Alain Jupp‚, convicted last Friday in a corruption scandal dating from the days when the two men served together in the City Hall of Paris"

Steve Forbes says new property rights reforms in Egypt may help lead the middle-East out of its current mess

Two good points in an email from a reader: 1). "What was called "Communism" in Russia turned out to be an example of the very thing it claimed to hate: Monopoly Capitalism. Indeed, under the Soviet Command economy everyone and everything was owned by Joseph Stalin. Stalin ruthlessly persecuted his rivals.... 2). To those Leftists who say that there never has been a True Communist society, one could counter that there has never been a True Laissez Faire Capitalist Society either. Laissez Faire means a system of "hands off", where the Government does not regulate Big Business"

The history of education in the UK and USA shows that national levels of literacy at least as high as those of today were achieved through private schools BEFORE "free" and compulsory State education was introduced. And the degree of cultural sophistication in the population at large seems to have been higher then too. The E G West Centre has lots more on the topic. Clearly it is a myth that education without the state would be for the rich only.

George Will says that big government may have to be accepted as inevitable and that the key to the Left/Right divide is really HOW government power is used -- to free up the individual or to promote artificial equality at the expense of the individual. I think he has a good point there. NOTHING seems to stop the growth of government. Too many people are always ASKING for government intervention -- with conservative farmers and businessmen not the least of them.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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GREENIE CORNER

The latest twist in the wind-power farce: "An Iowa farmer is at the center of a legal battle that could have far-reaching effects for the future of wind-generated power in the United States. The dispute is over whether people who put up wind turbines have the right to connect them to the power grid and sell excess electricity back to utilities". Next thing my local supermarket will be taking me to court to get an order saying that they have a right to sell me their groceries.

No moderation and realism from the Greenies: "The realistic assessment says that global warming is happening, it is probably insignificant and we will be able to adapt to it. If the only counter to that argument is extreme or worst case scenarios, then they should be exposed for the tiny risks they are... Recent weeks have provided a couple of excellent examples of how the environmental alarmist movement works. Emphasis on "extreme scenarios" is still at the forefront of its tactics."

What a dilemma for the Greenies! A flower that detects landmines. What could be greener than that? But wait! It has been produced by a BIOTECH company. Horrors! "A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect landmines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years."

"Is the climate really warming? Weather satellites measuring atmospheric temperatures day in and day out from pole to pole report only a minute rise that extrapolates to about half a degree Centigrade by 2100. Is this rise caused by human activities, like the burning of coal, oil, and gas? That's difficult to tell -- climate varies naturally both up and down, so it could be partly non-human."

Global warming alarmists are the ones filled with hot air: "What we know is that the earth's average temperature has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century. The National Academy of Sciences reports on their website: 'This warming has been particularly strong during the last 20 years, and has been accompanied by retreating glaciers, thinning arctic ice, rising sea levels, lengthening of growing seasons for some, and earlier arrival of migratory birds.' ... If you stopped reading there -- as most of the knee-jerk, junk scientists do -- you'd be terribly misled."

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Fun! I got a bit of a write-up yesterday as part of a story in one of the local tentacles of the Murdoch empire (owners of Fox News). See here. It would be good sport if one of our Australian Leftist bloggers tried to find something detrimental to me in it. Rather to my surprise, the newspaper reporter did quite a fair job of reporting what I said. He sounded like one of the old school and clearly had a personal recollection of some of the events described so that may explain it.

In response to my post of two days ago about Americans being anything but stupid, Wallace, from Texas emailed me: "Thanks......and well said. Although most of us let these kinds of things roll off of our backs, it's good to hear a cheery word. What does upset many of us is the total lack of acknowledgement of the good things the US does overseas. I think as a people we have to be among the tops in generosity in aid both in money and personal effort". My reply was to the effect that Americans are undoubtedly the most generous nation the world has ever seen, so no wonder they are hated: They make the rest of the world look so bad by comparison.

Report from a Louisiana reader about Louisiana Public Broadcasting: "Tonight, they showed a 'nature show' - some island where the foxes were dying - more attention to the foxes than people. But then - switched to dolphins - and this "chick" said - I kid you not - "MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS THE DOLPHINS". Years ago, a friend from Gainsville Fla had a story this "chick" would just love - This guy said that "People just don't understand alligators" - so he swam among them - with the obvious result."

An educational policy of a Leftist State government in Australia: "A flying squad of talent-spotters will work through West Australian high schools identifying and helping students who have the potential to get to university, under a landmark plan announced yesterday."

Some interesting research here on the complex relationship between religion and wealth. It looks like being religious will tend to make you richer -- as long as you are not too fanatical about it.

The collapse of "Theory" in literary studies is amusing. These guys actually think they matter. I have never thought that literary studies of any kind mattered myself. I have never needed someone else to tell me how to enjoy a novel or a poem. I know slabs of Chaucer by heart in the original Middle English not because I ever did a course on him but because I like it. And I think there is no other lyric poet who even approaches Robert Burns but study of him seems very rare in English literature courses as far as I am aware. I guess he is "too popular". What an indictment -- not of Burns but of the puffed-up elitist ignoramuses who see popularity as a negative.

There is an excellent set of comments on this German blog (written in English) about why there is such huge anti-Americanism in Germany. There are lots of good points there but I myself think the main reason for most anti-Americanism everywhere is envy. Envy is after all a major driver of (Leftist) politics generally.

A good article here to make people more relaxed about the rise of China as a economic force. The bottom line is that even while they make cheap things which compete with some of our industries, they also buy things that we make or produce, and as they get richer the will buy a great deal more. Various other common fallacies about China are also debunked.

The Wicked one has a post about anti-gun nuts -- noting that facts don't seem to disturb them.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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ARE "IS" AND "OUGHT" STATEMENTS DIFFERENT?

Keith Burgess Jackson has a thoroughly admirable account of what ideology does and how he himself escaped from it here. He makes some basic points about argument there that cannot be repeated too often. He shows by example what clear thinking on political matters is like and I found his article a joy to read. So how's that for a recommendation?

To my knowledge, however, there have never been two philosophers who agree on absolutely everything so I do have a quibble about one point he makes. He relies at one point on David Hume's famous contention that there is an unbridgeable gap between "is" and "ought" statements -- so that you cannot justify "ought" statements by "is" statements. Yet that is precisely what people normally do. An "ought" statement always commends some course of action and when people ask WHY that course of action is commended the reply is often in terms of "is" (empirical) statements (e.g. the commendation of X can be explained as: "X leads to generally desired consequences" or "X leads to consequences that you would like" or "I like X" or "X is the prevailing rule in this culture"). So in my view the fact that an "ought" statement can be explained in that way shows that it is an empirical statement to begin with. Statements in general have all sorts of influences on people (for example, if someone said to me: "Your son has just died", it is clearly an empirical statement but it would also have an enormous influence on me if true. It would cause me to take many actions that I would not otherwise take) and an "ought" statement is an empirical statement with what is expected to be one particular sort of influence -- a commendatory influence. So an "ought" statement is often simply a shorthand (compressed) "is" statement that can be promptly expanded if desired.

As I have shown here, however, "ought" statements are used in a variety of ways rather than in one single way. They always commend but they are not always empirical statements. Sometimes they are in fact very incoherent statements (at best pseudo-empirical statements) and I think Hume's difficulty arose out of a determination to find meaning in incoherent uses of "ought" statements (i.e. when "ought" statements are elaborated as being or emanating from timeless and universal rules that are "known" only in some mysterious and untestable way -- typically expressed by saying "X just IS right", with no further explanation given) and I simply regard that quest as a fool's errand. The world is awash with incoherent gibberish and baseless assertions so there is no reason to be either disturbed by it or interested in it when such assertions occur in moral discourse. When I encounter it, my usual response is to point out its incoherence and untestability and then refuse to have any further truck with such things (as I did here). I expand a little further on my view of what "ought" (moral) statements do here

Being primarily a psychologist, I am of course interested in WHY what I have called incoherent uses of moral terminology arise and I find the explanation given by philosophical psychologist John Maze persuasive: That they are a conscious or unconscious attempt at fraud -- an attempt to persuade by saying that immutable and peculiarly moral properties exist and that they have some claim on us because of that. Maze's work is not online but if you have access to a university library, you can find it in: Maze, J. (1973) "The concept of attitude". Inquiry, 16, 168-205. Maze also had a book published in 1983 called The Meaning of Behaviour which I have not read but which almost certainly would contain similar arguments.

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Sowell on the Democrat primary 'debates': It's funny that leftists only protest about light weight intellectual rhetoric when it comes from conservative politicians: "Senator John Edwards, for example, has included among his rhetorical flourishes poor children going to bed hungry at night in America. In reality, obesity is even more common among low-income people than among high-income people.... "

Neil Cavuto has a good reply to the Democrat hatred of "the rich". One excerpt: "You know, not once in my life has a poor person hired me. Rich guys, or at least richer guys, did. Trust me, they weren't all saints, but all the ones I've known were willing to give this Italian-Irish kid from working-class roots a chance . . . whether it be scooping ice cream in a shop or churning out perfume in a factory. Poor people get their breaks from rich people... "

A good article here that points out: "The Democratic presidential hopefuls have been crossing the country this week promising to drive "special interests" and "influence peddlers" out of the White House" and the article then goes on to show that the hopefuls themselves are captive to special interests and influence peddlers -- typical Leftist hypocrisy and non-existent principles.

A good comment from a reader: "Today, the NY Times forbid its reporters from carrying guns in Iraq: Mindless - moral superiority above life itself. Would be a great assignment for Jayson Blair".

Is this how the Iraq invasion has "stirred up" the Muslim world? "Saudi Arabia's top cleric called on Muslims around the world Saturday to forsake terrorism, saying those who claim to be holy warriors were an affront to the faith".

Heterophobia is coming out of the closet in the UK: "But the determination of our new public servants to embrace homosexuality is all too obvious, if at times unfortunately expressed: the document explains that Manchester City Council has a 'bottom-up' approach to gay consultation... "

Interesting that the Hutton report which vindicated what Blair and Bush said about Iraq and shook the BBC to its roots would have been ignored by the major American media except for Fox News publicizing it. Pretty disgraceful.

Not before time: "Yesterday, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved Rep. Ric Keller's (R-FL) 'Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act' (H.R. 339). Keller's bill would protect restaurants from the increasing number of greedy lawyers looking to soak them on behalf of portly plaintiffs who don't know when to put down their forks.... these lawsuits unfairly force restaurants to spend millions defending themselves, and those expenses are ultimately passed on to consumers."

The Happy Carpenter is pretty scathing about minimum wage laws.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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AMERICANS STUPID?

Although I am an Australian, one thing that really annoys me is the constant refrain among non-Americans to the effect that Americans are stupid. How did a stupid people get to be one of the most prosperous on earth? How did a stupid people get to be the world's only superpower? How did a stupid people avoid ever having their cities bombed flat? How did a stupid people produce military equipment so advanced that no-one else can hope to match it? The Iraqi army put up a tenacious fight against the Iranian army but it just went home when a much smaller American military force arrived. How did a stupid people come to dominate the world with its cultural products? Ever heard of Hollywood or American popular music? And even Italians now make "Western" movies. How did a stupid people get to dominate the world with its products and business systems? Ever heard of Coca Cola, McDonald's or KFC? How did America get to dominate the world with its intellectual products? Ever heard of Microsoft or IBM or Intel or all the American Nobel prize-winners? How did a stupid people get to integrate successfully within their ranks large numbers of people from every country in Europe? South America and North America are both large continents well-endowed with natural resouces so how come there is no South American equivalent of the USA? How come prosperity stops at the U.S.-Mexico border? And how come it is Europe that invented both Communism and Fascism and that it was America that had to rescue them from both?

The truth is that Americans are a very wise and sophisticated people who very often affect a folksy style -- such as the style we see the high-achieving President George W. Bush or in the incredibly high-achieving investor Warren Buffett. But the REALLY stupid people are those who cannot see past the folksy style to the hard-working, dedicated, careful-thinking people beneath it. Only people as stupid as most Europeans could mistake style for substance. Really smart people would try to understand Americans rather than condemn them for having their own ways. They would see the folksiness as a sign of a less elitist and more democratic society rather than as a sign of stupidity.

And it is not only Americans who affect folksiness. Australia's most popular Prime Minister in the last 50 years was "Bob" Hawke -- a conservative in most ways but the leader of Australia's major party of the Left. Although he was so thoroughly bourgeois as to be the son of a Protestant clergyman and brilliant enough win a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford university, he normally spoke during his political career with a broad working-class accent. He certainly wasn't stupid but Australia too is a very egalitarian country where people of all classes are treated with respect.

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Keith Burgess-Jackson has a good link to an insider's story about the kneejerk Leftism in most of the American media.

I haven't had the stomach to find out what "The Vagina Monologues" -- so beloved on the feminist Left -- are all about but Mike Tremoglie has braved it and reports: "It stereotypes males and Christians -- not to mention the fact that it's crude and arguably pro-pedophilia. Most disturbing about the play is the fact that it features the seduction of a female minor by an adult woman, legitimizing predatory sexual behavior". Charming!

Just like Saddam did: "Cuban President Fidel Castro vowed on Friday to die fighting "with a gun in my hand" if the United States invaded Cuba to overthrow his communist government".

Great stuff: "Two anti-war protesters who scaled the Sydney Opera House last year to paint "No War" on its tallest sail have been sentenced to jail and fined more than $150,000. Activists Will Saunders, 42, and David Burgess, 33, attracted international attention when they defaced the icon on March 18 - the day John Howard committed Australia to the war in Iraq."

In the area of taxation, there is probably nothing that drives Democrats crazier than when they hear Republicans praise John F. Kennedy's tax cut and compare their tax cuts to his. Unfortunately, Democrats keep running up against Kennedy's own statements and actions, which show a clear parallel to Republican tax policies since 1980.

National Center for Public Policy research demolishes some Leftist myths about how economic progress is not helping "the poor". One excerpt: "The poverty rate for children of single mothers fell from 50.3 percent in 1995 to 39.8 percent in 2001".

Flat, fair and forever: "Every profession has its unofficial list-of-things-you-don't-say, and politics is no exception. A leading entry: Never call for a tax increase. At least, not by name. Instead, do what the Democratic presidential candidates do: Cloak your increase in the reassuring moniker 'tax reform.' ... In other words, the reform they favor is a tax increase. Even if they were candid enough to admit it, though, their policy is misguided. There are two things we should do this year: Make the previous tax cuts permanent, and begin to fix the entire tax code to make it flatter and fairer."

Third World sweatshops: "At the heart of all this is a confusion between the vagaries of fate and the sins of man. All of us wish that workers in Costa Rica and Cambodia, not to mention other poor countries, were able to earn higher pay and live better lives. But wishing will not make it so and causing them to lose their jobs will not help."

Frank Vogelgesang says that the recent deregulatory changes in Germany are small but may be a sign that the dam of regulation is cracking under the weight of unemployment.

"Number Watch" has a send-up of the animal rights group PETA. "Number Watch" has "PERV": People for the Ethical Regard of Vegetables

Some sanity in Taxachusetts: "The state's highest court refused yesterday to block the use of the MCAS exam as a graduation requirement, dealing a blow to high school students who are suing to abolish the controversial test. The Supreme Judicial Court denied a request for an injunction to stop the state from giving the high-stakes exam pending the outcome of a lawsuit, saying an injunction 'would undermine educator accountability and hinder education reform.'"

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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A SLIPPERY LEFTIST ARGUMENT

A Leftist analysis of the justice system: "Since the 1970s, in any case, the humanistic veneer has been scraped off, and we have returned to what Foucault, and Nietzsche before him, might consider a much more forthright reckoning of how we really feel about all those ne'er-do-wells: the rapists and the murderers and the bank robbers; and the petty drug dealers and the petty drug users and the poor. And in the United States we now have a penal system undergoing rapid growth, whose primary mission is to separate ne'er-do-wells from the rest of society and, to the extent possible under vestigial humanistic laws, to make this experience unpleasant."

Notice how "the poor" get slipped in alongside rapists and murderers! Rigorous thinkers, those Leftists! And they accuse conservatives of simplistic, black-and-white thinking! But it is only by such sloppy writing and thinking that they can make any case for their views at all, of course. What is wrong with giving rapists and murderers a taste of their own medicine? There should be more of it!

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ELSEWHERE

It's going to be slow as turning an ocean liner around but it looks like the New York Times is TRYING to take an interest in conservative thinking.

Despite frantic Leftist efforts to twist the story, a general realization is slowly dawning that the Kay report shows clearly that GWB did NOT lie or deceive about Iraq's weaponry. Jeff Jacoby sums it up well. Mike Tremoglie has a very clever and amusing article on the subject too.

This article makes the point that the American Left too believes in Demons as an explanation for evil. But their Demons are the Christian Right!

Despite the recent audiotaped messages allegedly from him, Osama B.L. is probably dead: "Prior to Tora Bora, videos of him were the norm. What happened?... The tape was a recording of one of Osama bin Laden's sons, who was deliberately trying to sound like his father. This is, in my mind, the most likely hypothesis."

Seattle schools learn money doesn't buy grades "Seattle school officials are learning a valuable but surprising lesson -- throwing money at schools doesn't always help kids achieve. And spending more money on some students rather than others does little more than cause trouble. Under Seattle's weighted student formula, schools with kids who are poor, not fluent in English or have special needs get more money to help them compete. Only it doesn't seem to work. 'If money is the only thing we need to make better schools ... then we would have seen that by now,' said Lynn Harsh of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based group that focuses on state budgets and tax policy, welfare reform, health-care reform, education and governance issues. 'Instead we're seeing the opposite results.'"

Socialized medicine at its best: "Compulsory drug testing for Scottish nurses is being considered by the country's largest nursing union amid fears that staff may be under the influence of illegal substances on hospital wards. Screening of nurses for drugs or alcohol at work is being put to the vote by the Royal College of Nursing Scotland, and a pilot project to gauge the scale of substance abuse may follow. Previous attempts to study the level of the problem in Scotland broke down amid concern that checks could make it harder to recruit nursing staff."

The Misanthropyst has a report about a U.S. public school deliberately deleting advanced classes for more able students in favour of "equality". In other words, the very bright and the very dumb all now get put into the same class -- to the obvious detriment of both. The bright students will be so bored that they will just misbehave to entertain themselves and the dumb ones will not get the special attention they need. And no doubt the people who have instituted the new system consider themselves "humane"! That they really hate their students and wish them ill is obviously what is really going on. Deeds speak louder than words. Leftists hate ordinary people in general. They consider themselves to be an elite and that they alone should have rights and privileges. It's what they did in Russia and they constantly show that the same thing is the ideal of Leftists everywhere and everywhen.

An excellent article from a Leftist about why a sincere Left WOULD have supported the Iraq invasion.

Arlene Peck thinks that Israel's recent release of hundreds of Palestinian terrorists is totally insane. I agree. It just encourages the terrorists to kidnap Israelis and will soon make impossible the holding of any terrorists as prisoners.

Like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, Brazil's President Lula Da Silva does seem to have come from the Left to end up very pro-capitalist: "In an all-out bid to attract foreign investment, Brazil's energetic president and members of his Cabinet met with more than 200 executives Thursday to promote their country as a prime site for building factories and opening businesses"

Gene Berman has a great essay on what drives the Left and why the Left will always be with us.

The latest Carnival of the Vanities is now up with its usual big range of stories.

I have just put up some more of Chris Brand's recent postings here. He has a big coverage of the current British debate about eugenic infanticide.

The Wicked one says there is more economic freedom in Ireland than in the United States.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

The US economy losing its manufacturing base? Although most economists and economic commentators have rationalised the shift from manufacturing into services as a natural process brought about by increased living standards, it should be noted that this view is merely an opinion presented as economic analysis.
The balance of payments myth Dr Shostak exposes some of the myths behind much comment of our so-called balance-of-payments problems, and argues that government foreign debt is the only type of debt that should concern us.
Technology, investment, risk and state interference Now that Carmen Lawrence, Australia's foremost economic thinker, has been appointed the Australian Labor Party's national president, it's time to revisit the intellectual pretensions of this would-be central economic planner.
The Left and the corruption of language and thought Once language is corrupted, the whole process of thought is corrupted too. George Orwell made this point painfully clear in his 1984. It is our responsibility to never allow the left to get away with the kind of language that corrupts and distorts our thinking.
Hanson's medianomics Pauline Hanson's One Nation's got its economics from its left-wing media critics, the very same ones who mocked her as an economic illiterate.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

An interesting comment from a reader on my post yesterday about a brilliant black who is not allowed to teach High School: "Yes - there are Racists in Atlanta - racists who just don't want their Black students to have good role models - most likely the under achievers at the school - not the students, but the teachers and administrators who just can't stand someone that looks like them being a hell of a lot smarter". I think that may have hit the nail on the head.

The "gender" divide in education: Maybe a comeback of same sex schools is needed -- or maybe less feminist teachers -- or maybe males have been more rebellious against the Leftist and Greenie propaganda that so often passes for education these days: "The women's movement has taught us many things, one of the more surprising being that boys are not performing in school as well as they might... In the late 1970s more girls than boys began to enroll in college, and the disparity has since increased. Today women make up approximately 56 percent of all undergraduates, outnumbering men by about 1.7 million. In addition, about 300,000 more women than men enter graduate school each year." Given the meaninglessness of a lot of the credentials concerned, it may just mean that men have found better things to do -- like go into business.

David's Medienkritik is having fun with the official British Inquiry into bias at the BBC by Lord Hutton. He says that not only the BBC but the German media too have got a black eye out of the report findings.

Documents from Saddam Hussein's oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Starbucks in Paris: "The great attraction of Starbucks is: It's different! This monster of American homogeneity breaks the mold of the homogenized French cafe. Starbucks is, dare I say it, cool here". Another teeth-grinder for the French elite. Must Americans win ALL the time?

"The great paradox of the civil rights revolution is that instead of enforcing and expanding equality before the law, the revolution created differential rights based on race, gender and, any day now, sexual orientation. The great liberal revolution, centuries in the making, that brought forth equality in law has been overthrown. In its place we see rising a new feudal legal order of status-based rights." -- Paul Craig Roberts (Via The Federalist)

A new wave of young traditionalist clergy are emerging within the Catholic Church. And the older, more Leftist priests are a grumpy and unhappy lot. More unhappy Leftists. How unusual!

Against new wave protectionism: "The case for free trade is as strong as ever. Worries about the "flight" of service-sector jobs out of the United States are largely overblown"

Hmmm... "A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by descendants of slaves against corporations they say profited from slavery, saying the plaintiffs had established no clear link to the companies they targeted. The court still left the door open for further litigation. "

John Moore was a military reservist in his younger days and is hopping mad at the way the Left deride GWB for having been a military reservist too. As a former military reservist myself, I am glad to see John put the record straight about what military reservists do and what GWB's record actually means.

Lying in Ponds is an interesting site devoted to the idea that anyone who finds no fault with his own political party but heaps of faults with the opposing party is being dishonest. I am inclined to agree. I do post approving comments about the Australian Labor Party leadership (see yesterday, for instance) and, like many conservatives, was appalled by GWB's steel tariff, for instance. I can't remember finding anything to praise in the current U.S. Democrats, however. Anger and hate seem to be their only message. I have always thought of Clinton, however, as a moderate who did quite a lot of good -- particularly with the budget. But don't start me on Waco! I still am moved to tears by the fate of all those young Christian women and their children. I cannot imagine how their families must feel.

I have just put up some more of Chris Brand's recent postings here -- on postmodernism, IQ, Muslims, the Fascist Left and much more besides.

The Wicked one has a post on privacy and ID cards that will not please everyone.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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GREENIE CORNER

Enviro-imperialism: "International environmentalists finally are being held accountable for the havoc they are wreaking around the world. On Jan. 20, the Congress of Racial Equality -- a 62-year-old, New York-based civil rights group -- and the Women's National Republican Club convened a Manhattan teach-in to begin educating the public on what they call 'eco-imperialism.' Countless Third Worlders still plunge into darkness every dusk. After they fall asleep, they dream about such things as lights, running water and the defeat of diseases Westerners cannot even remember. Then these Third Worlders awaken ... to none of the above. American and European environmentalists help maintain this grim status quo, even as they claim to pursue the best interests of black, yellow and brown people the world over. Meanwhile, these First World citizens enjoy refrigerators, indoor plumbing, Internet access and CAT scans. This toxic hypocrisy is the core of eco-imperialism".

Wind farms in the gun again: The low frequency sound from them makes people sick who live anywhere near them. Ban them! They were once of course the Greenie solution to just about everything.

The "Wizard of Id" on Global Warming -- great cartoon.

The far Left is deep Green. The facts don't matter to them there either: "No doubt trying to distract attention from the recent Bush-Hitler ad controversy and its sponsorship of an event where B-list celebrities used the F-word to describe Republicans, the liberal organization MoveOn.org hosted an event on global warming recently in a freezing New York City. The speaker was a man whom few associate with cursing, former Vice President Al Gore. Yet, ironically for an organization called MoveOn, Gore's speech was very much stuck in the past."

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ELSEWHERE

An absolutely amazing article here. A brilliant young black was refused a High School teaching job because he was too high an achiever. It was felt that he would set an "unrealistic" example for his students. Can you get a clearer message than that? Blacks are supposed to be dumb and not rise above their "station" in life and teachers of blacks are not expected to be very bright. The affirmative action era and the Jim Crow era have a lot in common!

An Australian Leftist leader who is more conservative than most conservatives? "A federal Labor government could ask courts to order parents to undergo parenting classes if they failed to adequately discipline their children, Opposition Leader Mark Latham said today. In his Australia Day address to a citizenship ceremony in his electoral base of Campbelltown, Mr Latham said a federal Labor government would support the introduction of 'parental responsibility' contracts and orders. Under the scheme, parents of troubled teenagers would be encouraged to sign voluntary contracts, obliging them to take stronger action and responsibility for their childrens' behaviour. The process would allow the local courts, when all else failed, to impose a 'parental responsibility order' on parents of children at risk." Latham is conservative in being business and free-market oriented too -- though some elements in his party are discontented over that one.

A nasty one for the Leftists: Poverty does NOT cause terrorism: "Krueger and Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in the gross domestic product of the region and found that the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved. On the eve of the Intifada that began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was falling, and the Palestinians thought that economic conditions were improving. The same economic conditions existed at the time of the 1988 intifada. Terror did not spread as the economy got worse but as it got better."

Margaret Thatcher talks about religion and individual liberty. One excerpt: "Freedom is a moral quality. It comes from the Old Testament and the New. It's definitely a part of Judaism and Christianity. The talents that we have are God-given talents, therefore we have a right to use them. But, of course, you can only exercise that right under the rule of law of the state. But in the last analysis, each of us is accountable for the way in which we live our lives."

An oldie but goldie: There is a very feisty but anonymous collection of conservative attitudes here that make a lot more sense than most of the mealy-mouthed stuff we read in the media.

National Center for Public Policy Research has a good article here on pay equity for women. It points out that there already IS pay equity once everything is taken into account. See also their blog for further comment.

European Latino immigrants: A good email from a regular U.S. reader: "We are starting to see many more immigrants in the U.S. from the South of S. America. Most of them are white, which confounded a reporter in our local paper who went to interview one of these new immigrant families. She could not get over the fact that they were not little brown people! I informed her that there are millions of Europeans in S. America, and that Argentina, where this family that she interviewed came from, is 97% white. This reporter is typical of those on the Left who are always looking to talk to the downtrodden minorities, but she got a shocking lesson in population demographics, and the fact that things are not always as they seem after her visit with a poor, but well educated family of German descent!"

Not all immigrants are equal -- despite what the Leftists would like to think: Apparently the Indians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin who went to the UK are now one of the highest per capita income groups in the UK. They were entrepreneurial, with strong middle class ambitions and had received a traditional British-style education.

Rubbery Leftist "principles" again: "It goes without saying that the mantra of The New York Times Editorial Pages is 'All the Leftist Propaganda That's Fit to Print.' But sometimes the newspaper's transparent knee-jerk liberalism shocks even us. Take, for example, the Gray Lady's political hypocrisy when it comes to appointment of federal judges...." The Times previously said: "Clinton rightly moved to address _ the refusal by Congress to consider judicial nominees with reasonable dispatch." -- But Bush cannot do the same thing, apparently.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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IQ SUDDENLY ORTHODOX AGAIN

Wow! I don't know whether to be pleased or disappointed but it seems that mainstream psychology is catching up with what psychometricians such as myself have been saying for years: That IQ is highly general, highly central, highly hereditary and of overwhelming importance in determining people's life-chances. Even a few years ago any claim to that effect would be very marginal within psychology and would expose anyone making it to all sorts of nasty accusations.

But you can now read it all not in some obscure academic journal or some Rightist source but in the latest issue of the American Psychological Association's most widely-circulated journal -- the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Article after article there sets out the importance of IQ. And for social psychologists to be taking an interest in such evidence is really amazing. Psychometricians have known all that stuff for years. It is the social psychologists who have been most resistant to such ideas. I fear that I have suddenly become mainstream! I guess that even an organization as Leftist as the American Psychological Association has to come to terms with the evidence eventually. I would never have predicted it, though.

The madness of the 60s must be waning at long last. Before the 60s the central importance of IQ was uncontroversial introductory textbook stuff in psychology but the radical takeover of the universities from the 1960s onward and its inevitable accompanying baggage about "all men are equal" caused the whole idea of IQ to be marginalized for many years.

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