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Blair depends on Scottish and Welsh votes: "The Conservatives won England in the general election, in votes but not in seats. Both the Conservatives and Labour gained more than eight million English votes, but the Conservatives finished more than 50,000 ahead. This trend is worrying for Labour. In 1997 they had a majority in England over the Conservatives of more than 3.5 million votes. In only two elections the whole of that lead has melted away. If the trend is not reversed, the Conservatives will have their own large lead in English votes at the next election. This time, the first-past-the-post system has worked in Labour’s favour, against the Conservatives and against the Lib Dems. In 2005, although they were behind in votes, Labour led in seats by 286 to 193. But there will be comprehensive boundary changes in the course of this Parliament; Labour will not again enjoy such an excessive advantage"

Islamic terrorism draws on European and American thinking: "We know that not every political movement has created a terrorist splinter group, or served as an excuse for terrorism. Actually, terrorism has been the favourite method of extreme socialists only - both of the (left-wing) international, and the (right-wing) national varieties. Since the Jacobins of the French revolution held a "Reign of Terror" in 1794, the international socialists (communists) and national socialists (fascists) have shared a common tendency to use terrorism. Modern terrorism was born within a year, 1967-1968. International socialists (communists) started the fashion all over the world simultaneously, which should make us suspicious about the common roots. National socialists followed suit, turning Marxists of Muslim origin into Islamists of Marxist origin".

David Brooks on "Global governance" nonsense: "The people who talk about global governance begin with the same premises as the world government types: the belief that a world of separate nations, living by the law of the jungle, will inevitably be a violent world. Instead, these people believe, some supranational authority should be set up to settle international disputes by rule of law. They know we're not close to a global version of the European superstate. So they are content to champion creeping institutions like the International Criminal Court. They treat U.N. General Assembly resolutions as an emerging body of international law. They seek to foment a social atmosphere in which positions taken by multilateral organizations are deemed to have more "legitimacy" than positions taken by democratic nations.... We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions. Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy".

Home-ownership should be a GOP priority: "The issue is the proposed transformation of the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, commonly known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those Republicans who say that they wish to "reform" Fannie and Freddie put their party at risk, their own careers at risk, and the American Dream at risk. Yet amazingly, their effort to destroy the ownership-expanding function of Fannie and Freddie is gaining momentum. Their argument is that Fannie and Freddie, as private institutions with implicit public support, are interfering with the pure private free market in home mortgages, because they deliberately subsidize low- and moderate-income home buyers. Greenspan, Baker, and Shelby see such ownership-fostering as the devil's work of too much big government and also as a distortion of the housing market. Beyond those concerns -- to the politico-historical reality that home ownership is public good as well as a private good -- they simply cannot see. Some Republicans, happily, defended the pragmatic idea of widespread private ownership against the onslaught of ideologues. Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, for example, declared, "We must make sure the institutions are financially sound, but we must also make sure that we do not do anything to jeopardize the American dream of homeownership." The American Dream: that's the key idea here".

You lose money when you save: "Today, a typical money market yield (I use the figure for Merrill Lynch Ready Assets Trust) is 2.13%: if you invest $1,000 at 2.13%, you will get $21.30 in interest over the course of a year. But you won't receive the full $21.30. You'll have to pay taxes on that amount. Currently, the marginal federal income tax rate is 35%, which reduces the yield to $13.85. But thanks to persistent inflation, the value of both the interest you earn and the money that you saved declines. Currently, the Consumer Price Index stands at 3.0%, which means that the $1,000 you invest at 2.13% will be $970 at the end of a year, and the $13.85 after-tax income you receive amounts to $13.43. So the $1,000 you saved, with the interest that it nominally earned, has purchasing power at the end of a year of $983.42. Your actual yield is -1.66%. That's right: you lose money when you save."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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CHRISTIANITY AND TOLERANCE REVISITED

A couple of days ago I commented on the preposterous claim by Christopher Hitchens to the effect that Christianity is intrinsically intolerant and that secularism is the path to tolerance. One only needs to point to the wonderful "tolerance" of atheistic Communism to see how absurd that proposition is. What PID says about Christianity and politics set me to thinking about the topic again, however. PID points out that for around a century now the theologically "modernist" churches -- which mostly means the established churches -- have been supporters of the political Left -- including such unsavoury and intolerant Leftists as Communists. So I think one could in fact argue the opposite of what Hitchens does. I think it is the LEFTIST churches that are most intolerant. Like all Leftists, they are would-be dictators and they support authoritarian and control-freak policies with great regularity. For more details, see today's post on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS.

And when we look at history, who is the most raving Christian fundamentalist who has ever had significant political power? I think it would have to be Britain's Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658). And what did he do? Did he ruthlessly destroy all who disagreed with his doctrines? What did he do about the Jews in particular? No group could be a bigger challenge to Cromwell's theology than the Jews. They didn't even accept Jesus as the Messiah, let alone any of the other doctrines of Protestantism. You know what I am going to say, don't you? Far from persecuting the Jews, it was Cromwell who allowed them back into England -- for the first time since Edward I expelled them all in 1290. That nasty intolerant old fundamentalist Protestant!

Cromwell was no saint. He massacred those who opposed him militarily (such as the Irish) but after the holocausts unleashed on Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the aegis of FDR and Truman, I don't think the Left have much room to condemn Cromwell for that.

The basic point I am making is once again the perennial conservative warning about the complexity of human affairs. Simple generalizations (such as "secularism leads to tolerance") just will not do. Those who preach tolerance are often the most tyrannical and those who want to impose minor restrictions -- as Christian conservatives certainly do on things like homosexual marriage -- may nonetheless be the most tolerant overall.

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LOL: "Planned Parenthood has launched a campaign to motivate all of its members and supporters, nominal Catholics and non-Catholics, to send letters to the editor, requesting that Pope Benedict XVI reconsider his "backward views" and change his opinion on sexual morality."

GWB has called the Democrats' bluff: "By embracing the progressive indexing of Social Security benefits, the president has asked us to make a shared sacrifice for the common good. He's asking middle- and upper-class folks to accept benefit cuts so there will be money for the people who are really facing poverty. He has asked us to redistribute money down the income scale. Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks? He has made the hard choices.... So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not. The Democratic leadership has dropped all that shared sacrifice talk and started making demagogic appeals to people's narrow self-interest. ... For two decades they've been courageously saying we need to means-test Social Security, so we can focus our resources on those who need it. Now Bush has embraced their view. Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years."

Democrats discovering free speech: "Something remarkable is happening as a Republican Congress and president move to crackdown on 527 groups like the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Liberals are realizing that something's fishy. Three years after the passage of McCain-Feingold (a.k.a. the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. the End of Free Speech As We Know It), a smattering of Democrats and liberal activists are slowly coming to the conclusion that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to let the government decide who can and cannot engage in political speech."

Conservative law schools growing: "In the past few years, religious conservatives have realized what their liberal counterparts saw long ago: The place where the culture wars are won or lost is in the courtroom. Some religious leaders, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, have set up schools to train their own battalion of lawyers..... the students at these schools were very bright and they were turning down good, well-known -- sometimes Ivy League -- schools to attend these instead..... Both schools seemed determined not to turn into religious ghettos. Rather, they wanted their graduates to really go out into the culture and change it from the inside... schools like Patrick Henry and Ave Maria [are] growing at a very rapid pace (Evangelical college enrollment grew 60 percent between 1990 and 2002, while enrollment at other private and public schools remained stagnant)."

Immigration: Sowell sums it up: "Social Security used to be called the third rail of politics but illegal immigration is the real third rail that both political parties are afraid to touch. Cops who find illegal aliens are under orders not to turn them in to the feds. And the federal government's own border guards have their hands tied by the higher-ups as well. Now that Hispanics are the largest minority in the country, and with the country closely divided politically, neither party wants to risk alienating the Hispanic vote by enforcing immigration laws. Many other Americans may be outraged at the way illegal aliens are handled with kid gloves -- and, in some places, even given rights normally reserved for citizens -- but so long as this outrage is directed at both parties, neither party wants to be the one to risk losing the Hispanic vote."

The Left don't want the poor to get rich: "In recent years, the idea of development - in the sense of economic modernisation - has come to be seen as not feasible, or even desirable. A landmark here was the United Nations Brundtland Report of 1987, which promoted the idea of 'sustainable development' - defined as giving overriding priority to 'the essential needs of the world's poor'. In other words, the sole focus should be on the most basic needs of the poor. Even worse, the report argued that technology and social organisation put limits on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs - so suggesting that the environment places natural limits on development"

Attacks on McDonalds are really attacks on people who eat there: "Some people aren't very sensible or conventional. But of course, the people making a federal case of the McDonald's enthusiasm will not accept this as fact. They need an American villain, some typically American institution, like big business, so they can then denounce not the stupid or peculiar people who are overeating of their own free will but the McDonald's big business people who are, you guessed it, coercing them all to come and eat there."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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ONE CHEER FOR MR. BLAIR

Now that Tony Blair will be in charge of Britain for a few more years, perhaps it behooves us to see where he fits into political history. His situation certainly seems a curious one: His party seems as Leftist as ever but he has always been to the Right of his party. So to what extent is he a conservative?

Many people have pointed to pragmatism and compromise as characteristic of conservatives and that is undoubtedly true as a statement about British political history (Norton & Aughey, 1981; Gilmour, 1978; Feiling, 1953; Standish, 1990) but it would seem to lead to the view that democracy is inherently conservative -- in that any political party wishing to gain power in a democracy has to keep pretty close to the centre.

And a man who hews very much to the centre in his rhetoric is the electorally very successful Tony Blair. So much so, that the chief opposition to many of his policies seems to come from his own Labour party rather than from the opposition Conservatives. This has led some people to describe him as the best Conservative Prime Minister that Britain never had. And that, in a way is the point: A pragmatic centrist is rightly seen as conservative. But the reason why he is in fact the leader of a historically very Leftist political party is instructive. Note his own summary of his thinking here:

"At the heart of my politics has always been the value of community, the belief that we are not merely individuals struggling in isolation from each other, but members of a community who depend on each other, who benefit from each other's help, who owe obligations to each other. From that everything stems: solidarity, social justice, equality, freedom. We are what we are, in part, because of the other. I apply that idea here in Britain. I try to apply it abroad."

I cannot help compare that statement with a similar statement by a very different Socialist:

"The activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good."

And contrast both statements with this summary of historic British Conservative party thinking:

"They distrust general notions such as "the community" and would argue that the despotism of reason may cloak as much sinister self-interest and self-deception as any other tyranny."

The summary of Conservative thinking is by Feiling, an historian of the British Conservative party. The second quote above is from Adolf Hitler.

I have no doubt that Mr Blair is a genuinely compassionate man (something I would say of few Leftist leaders, though it is true of many Leftist followers) but, in good Leftist fashion, he is in love with the community rather than with the individual and that endears him to his party. From the rest of his speech we also note that, also in good Leftist fashion, he sees government as the best way to accomplish his goals, though he also acknowledges the limitations of government -- a rare thing on the Left and something again that marks him out as unusually conservative for a leader of his party.

That a Leftist party can give birth to conservative thinking is probably most clearly seen in the Australian case. Neville Wran, a Queen's Counsel of working class origins, was Labor party Premier of Australia's most populous state (New South Wales) from 1976 to 1986 and during his tenure introduced his party to conservatism (though not under that name of course). The electoral success of his approach was noted on the Federal level and was put into practice on the Federal level with the accession to power of Bob Hawke. Prior to his career in Parliament, Hawke was known as the king of compromises in the field of disputes between unions and business. As Prime Minster (1983-1981) he of course continued that approach and was in addition remarkably pragmatic on economic matters -- largely traceable, no doubt, to his degree in economics. It was he who initiated large scale privatizations of government enterprises in Australia -- very much akin to what Margaret Thatcher did in England.

So whether any given government can be identified as conservative or not is clearly a matter of degree -- a matter of how much the individual person is respected, a matter of how much government is trusted and a matter of how much compromise and pragmatism is resorted to -- but broadly conservative government can clearly arise from parties that are either nominally Leftist or nominally Rightist. In the Australian case matters have progressed to the point where the major choice on offer is between two conservative parties -- though there are of course also various minor parties (Greens, Democrats) that lean well to the Left. In the case of Tony Blair one would have to say that his conservative inclinations have generally led to little in the way of conservative results because of his trust in bureaucracy as a way of achieving his goals.

References:
Feiling, K. (1953) Principles of conservatism. Political Quarterly, 24, 129-133.
Gilmour, I.H.J.L. (1978) Inside right. London: Quartet.
Norton, P. & Aughey, A. (1981) Conservatives and conservatism. London: Temple Smith
Standish, J.F. (1990) Whither conservatism? Contemporary Review 256, 299-301.

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V.D. Hanson has just written another first class article. I have put up a few excerpts on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS and here is another: "The problem with Democrats is that Americans are not convinced that they will ever act in any consistent manner. We can argue about Afghanistan, but if one were to go back and read accounts in October 2001 about hitting back, the news reflected liberals' doubt about both the wisdom and efficacy of taking out the Taliban. Would Al Gore have invaded Afghanistan less than a month after 9/11? If John Kerry were President and China invaded Taiwan, what would he do? What would an administration advised by Madeline Albright, Barbara Boxer, Joe Biden, Jamie Rubin, Nancy Pelosi, or Jimmy Carter do if Iran sent a nuke into Israel, or North Korea fired a series of missiles over the top of Japan? Or, if al Qaeda, operating from a sanctuary in Iran or Syria, took out the Sears Tower, how would a Kennedy, Kerry, or Gore respond? Six cruise missiles? A police matter? Proper work for the DA? Better "intelligence"? Let's work with our allies? Get the U.N. involved? Whatever we think of George Bush, we know he would do something real - and just what that something might be frightens into hesitation - and yes, fear - many of those who would otherwise like to try something pretty awful".

Good for the church: "An American Jesuit who is a frequent television commentator on Roman Catholic issues resigned yesterday under orders from the Vatican as editor of the Catholic magazine America because he had published articles critical of church positions, several Catholic officials in the United States said. The order to dismiss the editor, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, was issued by the Vatican's office of doctrinal enforcement - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - in mid-March when that office was still headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger... In recent years America has featured articles representing more than one side on sensitive issues like same-sex marriage, relations with Islam and whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be given communion. Church officials said it was the publication of some of these articles that prompted Vatican scrutiny.... Catholic scholars and writers said in interviews yesterday that they feared that the dismissal of such a highly visible Catholic commentator was intended by the Vatican as a signal that debating church teaching is outside the bounds".

Christianarchy? "Can a person be a Christian and also an anarchist? A friend of mine who has been reading my STR columns posed this to me recently. While answering his query, I realized that many of my readers might be wondering the same thing, so it seemed as good a time as any to lay out the biblical case for anarchy."

Amusing that a bloggers' conference is now reported in the mainstream media (MSM). Bill Hobbs's blog is here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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FRAUDULENT ATTEMPT TO POLISH THE IMAGE OF JOURNALISTS

"Recent research by Wilkins and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University may provide some vindication for members of a profession that's taken a beating in recent years with high-profile blunders. Wilkins and Coleman surveyed journalists for the first time using a decades-old model for assessing one's morals, a test given to more than 30,000 people representing numerous professions. According to the researchers, journalists are significantly more ethical than the average adult - eclipsed only by seminarians, doctors and medical students. "We did not really think that journalists would come out as high as they did," said Coleman.

Wilkins and Coleman traveled to newsrooms across the country for two years interviewing a sampling of 249 journalists. Using a version of the Defining Issues Test, developed in the 1970s at the University of Minnesota, the professors offered participants six ethical dilemmas, each followed by a dozen questions that seek to determine what motivated a journalist's decision..... "What we're measuring is an ability to work out what ought to be done when you're in a dilemma," said Mickey Bebeau, executive director of the Center for the Study of Ethical Development at the University of Minnesota.

The findings conflict with public perception of journalists. A Gallup poll of 1,015 people taken in November showed that only 23 percent of the public rated the ethical standards of TV reporters as high or very high. For newspaper reporters, it was 21 percent."

The above bit of nonsense depends on you not knowing exactly what their test of moral development does. It is a test deriving from the work of Kohlberg -- who observed stages in the moral reasoning of children as they grow up. His "higher" stages, however, are not observable in normal child development. They are simply Kohlberg's (Leftist) opinion of what a "higher" morality is. All that the research above really showed, then, was that on moral questions, journalists think like Leftists -- which is no surprise at all! It is the public opinion of journalists that was right, not this bit of deceptive "research".

Reference:
Modgil, S. & Modgil, C. (1985) (Eds.) Lawrence Kohlberg: Consensus and controversy Lewes, E. Sussex: Falmer.

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There is a fairly good article here on the Flynn Effect -- the fact that average IQ test scores have been rising for about a century. The explanation that the effect arises from "cognitively demanding leisure" (such as computer games) is quite a good one but is unduly narrow. The effect is best seen as the result of modernization generally. Lots of things have improved over the years -- such as safety and health care (particularly perinatal care) and many barriers to people realizing their full genetic potential have thus been removed or reduced. I note that Jim Flynn is referred to as an American philosopher. He is in fact a New Zealand political scientist.

Donald Luskin on the economy: "We libertarians don't like to think of the government taking even more of our money, yet it seems like good news when he hear that tax collections are running way ahead of estimates, and that therefore federal budget deficit projections are going to get trimmed way down. Oh, and of course we take some perverse delight in imagining Jonathan Weisman's chagrin in having to report this in the Washington Post this morning. He didn't come right out and admit that maybe some of the Bush administration's economic policies are working better than he expected -- but it's the inescapable conclusion of his story."

Media bias in economic news: "Accusations of political bias in the media are often made by members of both political parties, yet there have been few systematic studies of such bias to date. This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of the news reported. Our results suggest that American newspapers tend to give more positive news coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the Presidency than for Republicans. When all types of news are pooled into a single analysis, our results are highly significant. However, the results vary greatly depending upon which economic numbers are being reported. When GDP growth is reported, Republicans received between 16 and 24 percentage point fewer positive stories for the same economic numbers than Democrats. For durable goods for all newspapers, Republicans received between 15 and 25 percentage points fewer positive news stories than Democrats. For unemployment, the difference was between zero and 21 percentage points.... "

The Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) that is up for ratification by the U.S. Senate seems like a pretty bad deal for America and a big gift for the world's most corrupt organization (the U.N.). Nathan Tabor has more.

Free market justice is in the cards: "Nearly everyone takes it for granted that if government did not protect consumers from fraud, no such protection would be provided. The free market, however, protects consumers in countless ways, all without any government intervention. In fact, it does so more efficiently and effectively than the government can. One of the most impressive examples of free-market justice involves something that might be in your pocket right now: your credit card. Through voluntary contractual arrangements -- motivated by nothing more than a desire for customers and profit -- credit-card companies provide an entirely private means of recourse when a merchant wrongs a customer."

What used to be a free country: "A gasoline price war erupted in St. Mary's County last week after one station slashed its price for regular to $1.999 a gallon and spurred three others to follow suit, giving drivers some hope of relief at the pump. But the price dip proved fleeting. Maryland regulators quickly stepped in and told the stations that their prices were too low. They needed to go up by 5 cents."

Shrink-wrapped has a thoughtful post about the vast distortions of what is happening in the world that have now become routine among Leftists. He sees the delusions concerned as providing an excuse for serious Leftist violence and civil disorder: "When your enemies are evil, dangerous fascists who are dedicated to destroying your country, your civil rights, and enslaving and/or killing various innocents, it becomes incumbent on right minded people to act to prevent further horrors. This is the logic of the left, aided and abetted by large parts of the MSM, Academia, and the Democratic Party".

Cafe Hayek mentions just part of the the enduring folly of New York's rent-control system.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ON THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

I suppose many people will be replying to the Hitchens diatribe about Christian conservatives in the WSJ. But since Hitchens ventures into both history and New Testament exegesis -- topics that I presume to think I know a bit about -- I am inclined to make a few observations.

His NT quotation is one of the allegedly "Leftist" quotations from Jesus and I have already dealt with them on my Scripture Blog -- see here and here. Briefly though, what Hitchens and the Left get wrong is mistaking Jesus's spiritual guidance for guidance about how to run this world -- an elementary mistake. Jesus was interested in the next world, not this one. As he said to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36).

The rest of what Hitchens says is also just standard Leftist stuff so its only real novelty is its appearance in the WSJ. His argument simply is that the religious Right is tyrannical and that secularism is needed to avoid tyranny. That is absolute rubbish. For centuries -- including the early 20th century -- Britain was both an almost universally Christian country and also a great beacon of individual liberty and tolerance. Britons in fact had more rights 100 years ago than they do now -- the right to own a firearm for personal protection, for instance. There were of course some restrictions flowing from Britain's Christian assumptions at that time -- such as Jews being barred from Parliament -- but so tyrannous were those restrictions that Britain's Conservatives at that time actually made a Jew (Disraeli) their Prime Minister! He had to profess Anglicanism to observe proper form but he at no time made any secret of his Jewishness and in fact flaunted it repeatedly and floridly! Those nasty old intolerant Christians! The secularist Hitler sent millions of Jews to the gas ovens. The nasty intolerant Christian Conservatives made a Jew their Prime Minister! Which would you prefer if you were a Jew?

And the U.S.A. too has always been a great beacon of liberty and tolerance by world standards and it too was created by men who overwhelmingly were devout Christians. Like the Leftist he once was, Hitchens doesn't let the facts get in the way of a simplistic theory. And is the theory simplistic! In accord with Leftist custom, Hitchens equates Christian fundamentalists with Muslim fundamentalists -- quite ignoring what the two groups are being fundamentalist about. I suppose that to Hitchens Satanic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalist would be the same too. Christian fundamentalists want to bar homosexuals from marrying. Muslim fundamentalists want to stone homosexuals to death. No difference, Mr Hitchens?

Christians have certainly not always in their history been perfectly tolerant but the God of Love they follow has certainly made them more tolerant than any other major group in the Western world that I can think of. I certainly prefer their record to the record of atheistic Communism.

(A shorter version of this post appeared on Blogger News yesterday)

Update

I have just posted on my Scripture Blog an excellent Catholic commentary on the scripture that Hitchens quotes.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

US economy: jobs shift and recession Figures don't tell us very much in themselves. For example, interpreting economic data without the use of a theory not only can be misleading, it can be downright dangerous for economic policy.
Australian economy: dismissal laws and unemployment Once again there has been much misleading talk about the job-destroying effects of wrongful dismissal laws.
The Pope, Donald Rumsfeld and Bunny Champers' secret mission to Rome Dashed good to see that the Micks up at the Vatican have done the right thing and elected a Catholic pope. Now for my secret mission.
US economy: Bush did not accelerate the recession Democrats are still trying to blame President Bush for the recession. Their behaviour reminds me of what a senior fellow and Democrat at the Brookings Institute said.
Why did the Wall Street Journal publish lies about social security? The most liberal front page in America is astonishingly the 'Wall Street Journal'. It quotes more liberal think tanks than any other publication.
Media lies and corruption The agitprop reporters churned out against the pope and President Bush reminded me of the Lionel Murphy scandal that leftist journalists covered up.

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It looks like the Gramscian "long march through the institutions" has invaded Google. This latest story about Google accepting abusive personal advertisements from Leftist advertisers (in breach of their own stated policy) while refusing anything similar from conservative advertisers is not the first evidence of Leftist bias at Google -- as I noted on March 26th.. Google are of course denying bias but Leftists are always trying to pull that skein of wool over people's eyes. The latest episode, however, is a very precise demonstration of how biased they in fact are. In good Leftist fashion, they are being self-defeating about all this, of course. If they become known as GOOGLEFT they risk losing half their users (the conservative ones) to Microsoft's excellent new search facility.

Thomas Sowell's latest version of his "black culture" theory is less contentious than the version he had in the WSJ. He does mention that Southern whites had lower IQ scores than Northern whites in the early 20th century but does not explicitly say that the gap has now closed, which to my knowledge it has. The gap was originally observed with the very early tests ("alpha" and "beta") used in conjunction with U.S. Army recruitment during World War I. Both tests were however essentially the work of Northerners and were biased against Southern culture. Later, less biased tests eliminated the gap for whites but not for blacks. Many have tried to find tests that eliminate the black/white gap but it is always there and is always large.

Reliapundit notes the big lurch to the Left going on in Latin America. New waves of refugees flooding towards the USA soon I guess.

Personal Independence Day seems to be posting fairly frequently again. He is particularly good on political history, something that we normally get a very distorted view of from the educational system.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with much to read.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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CONSERVATISM, WAR AND JOHN PAUL II

A British moral philosopher has claimed that Pope John Paul II was not very conservative because he greatly disliked war and capital punishment, even though he did not rule out either altogether. Ed Feser has some wise and relevant things to say about that claim but I am inclined to be a bit more abrupt. I would hope that nobody in his right mind wants war and any reasonable person must be very reluctant to inflict the death penalty -- if only because miscarriages of justice do occur. And John Paul II was a very compassionate and kindly man so it is certainly to be expected that he would recoil from inflicted death in war or otherwise. But to say that recoiling in that way is not conservative is a great affront to conservatives. It is Leftists who do not recoil from death. Even mass-murder does not bother them -- as we repeatedly saw in the 20th century. It is VERY conservative to defend the rights of the individual and no right is more basic than the right to life. Conservatives and Catholics alike do see occasions where war and capital punishment may need to be turned to but to imply that conservatives LIKE either or are enthusiastic about either is Leftist projection.

And any idea that John Paul's criticism of the Iraq war means that he was not conservative is the height of absurdity. Or is Patrick Buchanan not a conservative either? MANY conservatives are critical of the Iraq war -- though I am not one of them. Conservatives (and Catholics) can and do reasonably disagree among themselves about WHICH war is justifiable but if they ruled out ALL war they would be very odd conservatives indeed. Conservatives are people who can face reality in all its messy complexity and the reality is that war is sometimes needed in a world where tyranny and aggression exist. My own defence of John Paul II as a great conservative is here.

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ELSEWHERE

Britain goes to the polls today with Tony Blair looking like a shoo-in. Harold Wilson looked like a shoo-in back in 1970 too. He lost.

Moral equivalency was the great "liberal" doctrine of the Cold war -- claiming that the stifling and brutal Soviet tyranny was "equivalent" to Western democracy. The implosion of the Soviet Union gave the lie to that but the Left are again polishing up the same tired old act. This time it is Islam and Protestant Christianity that are equivalent. See an example here. A few superficial similartities are seized on by some writer and then the rest of the Leftist lamebrains can proclaim that bombers and beheaders are the same as builders of schools and hospitals. Brilliant! It shows how bereft of ideas the Left are.

More moral equivalence: Interview with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: "Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional 'next world' is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them."

David Limbaugh: "If I didn't know better, I would think liberal politicians and columnists were out to prove the thesis of my book -- that there truly is a war being waged against Christianity and Christians in the United States..... The war against Christians has intensified with the recent controversy over ending the Democrats' (nearly) unprecedented filibustering of judicial nominees. Senate Democrats and their enablers apparently see the Christian right as the main bogeyman in the effort to restore majority rule to the judicial confirmation process.... the overwhelming majority of our Founding Fathers formed this government on Christian principles. Most of our laws, civil and criminal -- from trespassing, to stealing, assault, rape and murder -- are grounded in morality, and it is an astonishing deception to suggest otherwise. This idea that Christians must keep their views to themselves, and that politicians must keep their Christian worldview in a lockbox has caught on even among many Christians. But a Christian inhibits his Christian walk if he places his religion on just one "shelf" of his life. His worldview must inform his politics, just as everyone else's does. What the secular Left wants to do is marginalize Christian conservatives by suggesting they are hell-bent on reserving religious liberty (and presumably other types of freedom) only for themselves. But all we have to do to refute that lie is to point to the history of this great nation, which owes its freedom largely to the religious liberties enshrined in the Constitution by Christians."

Dominionist domination: "There is, in fact, a fringe Christian group of 'Dominionists' or 'Reconstructionists,' who really would like to see an American theocracy, and a return to the death penalty for blasphemy, adultery, sodomy, and witchcraft. The dystopian political program of this utterly marginal, extremist sect has absolutely no traction with anyone of significance. But that hasn't stopped conspiracy mongers on the Left from imagining a murderous Christian plot to destroy America."

Capitalism at work in Brazil: "In an age when airlines are going bankrupt faster than you can say Chapter 11, some might say that starting one in a developing nation like Brazil was a brave decision. But since taking off in January 2001 with just six planes and seven destination cities, Gol Airlines has proven itself a worthy successor to the US and British discounters that founder Constantino de Oliveira Jr. used as templates. The youthful Mr. Oliveira sought to create affordable travel by "taking a bit of Southwest, a bit of Ryanair, a bit of JetBlue, and Easyjet and tropicalizing them for the Brazilian market," he says. The result has been nothing short of the democratization of Brazil's friendly skies, helped out by a partnership with US aircraft-maker Boeing - the first of its kind for a Latin American carrier. "Around 10, 11 percent of our passengers are flying on planes for the first time in their life," says Oliveira, a former race-car driver and onetime head of one of Brazil's largest bus companies. "People think a low-cost airline is for poor people, but it isn't; it's for people who have an eye for competitive prices," he says. The company whose name means "goal" now boasts 31 planes, travels to 41 destinations, and has 22 percent of Brazil's domestic passenger market. It turned a profit of $145 million last year. In a nation where even the 50-minute flight from Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo on the major carriers costs more than the country's $120 monthly minimum wage, Gol charges just $79".

Ratty rabbi rages at Ratzinger: "Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope. As if on cue, they launched a rash of appalling attacks to mark the beginning of Benedict XVI's pontificate. Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of TIKKUN, a befuddled, New-Age magazine, emphasizing interfaith activities, wasn't persuaded by good manners, or by the Holy Father's brilliant mind and beatific smile -- the whole holy package, really -- to withhold his insufferably sanctimonious sermon. Lerner, in whom delusions of grandeur and an atrocious lack of decorum combine, claims to speak (boy, is he windy!) for the entire universe, which is apparently agreed that, 'The New Pope [is] a Disaster for the World and for the Jews.' But then, the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics are not the only people Lerner lectures. A regular busybody, the Rabbi is always poised to remind Israelis, whenever their civilians are blown to smithereens by suicide bombers, to take the blame and turn the other cheek."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

(Tuesday in America -- Wednesday in Australia)

On Dissecting Leftism I argue that it is Leftist culture, not black culture that is responsible for black under-achievement

On Political Correctness Watch I note where a school used police to enforce its homosexual agenda

On Greenie Watch I note that major academic journals are refusing to publish any findings that question global warming

On Education Watch I note a rebellion in France in favour of traditional teaching.

On Socialized Medicine I record the vast irresponsibilty in Queensland government medical services

On Leftists as Elitists I show that Leftists don't want people to think

On Gun Watch I note that gun freedoms are still very limited

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ELSEWHERE

I noted on April 28th. the recent big academic study showing that lower income for black males is mainly (76%) due to lower black IQ. There is an excellent summary of the same study here which notes a point in the study that I had overlooked previously: That black females actually do slightly BETTER than their IQ would lead one to expect -- showing that ability deficit is the main problem for black females and that affirmative action does help them. With black males, however, there are attitudinal problems in addition to the IQ problems so affirmative action does not get them earning at even the low level their abilities would indicate. There are several possible reasons why black women do better than black men and I have mentioned what some of the black male problems are previously in connection with another study that reported similar findings.

Most racial "hate crimes" are now fake: "But hypersensitivity, far from dissolving racial barriers, acts to reinforce them. Racial prejudice will never entirely disappear from college campuses, any more than sloth, lust, greed, envy or any other human vice will ever be eradicated. But when phony hate crimes become more of a problem than real ones, it's time to obsess about something else".

More on British academic antisemites: "British academic moonbats recently decided to declare "academic boycotts" against two Israeli universities... The "boycotters" are motivated by hatred for Israel and Jews, not any desire for peace. They are the pseudo-academic equivalents of pogromchiki. The Moonbrits claim they are simply using the same tactic that was employed effectively against the apartheid regime in South Africa to bring it down. And that is why they are now using it against the only state in the Middle East that is not an apartheid country, against the only country in the Middle East in which academic freedom exists. Professor Mina Telcher, a leading mathematician, was denied the opportunity to put the Israelis' side of the story before the AUT ("the trade union and professional association for over 48,700 UK higher education professionals") ahead of the vote. A bit of pre-boycott boycotting.... Not since 1930s Germany have Jews been the targets of an official boycott in a civilized country.... But no doubt, the most incredible aspect of the affair is the unambiguous condemnation of the boycotters of Israeli universities by... (drumroll) ...a pro-terror Palestinian university! Yes, Al-Quds University in Israeli-liberated eastern Jerusalem has come out against the British academic boycott of Israel.

More Leftist hate-speech against Christians: "Understanding and answering the "religious far right" that propelled President Bush's re-election is key to preventing a "theocracy" from governing the nation, speakers argued at a weekend conference. "The religious right now has an unprecedented influence on American politics and policy," said Ralph White, co-founder of the Open Center, a New York City institution focused on holistic learning.... The United States is "not yet a theocracy," Joan Bokaer, founder of TheocracyWatch.org, said Friday night... She compared the Federal Communications Commission's threatened crackdown on indecency on television with the Taliban, the repressive Islamic rulers of Afghanistan who harbored Osama bin Laden's terrorist network until toppled by a U.S.-led invasion". [Do these fruitcakes think they are going to get the Christian votes they need this way? They are so hate-filled that they are shooting themselves in the foot. Do they think Christians can't read all these hateful things they say? Maybe they do -- their opinion of Christians is so low]

"The poor" are in fact overfed: "The poor are most likely to be fat, but the more affluent are closing the gap. Obesity is growing fastest among Americans who make more than $60,000 a year, researchers reported Monday. 'This is a very surprising finding,' said Dr. Jennifer Robinson of the University of Iowa, whose study was presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association. But it 'underlines the whole complexity' of the obesity epidemic, she said. For years doctors have known that the people most likely to be overweight have the lowest incomes."

There is a big article by David Pryce-Jones (PDF) called "Jews, Arabs and French Diplomacy" detailing the long history of official French antisemitism. (See second article listed).

Britain's IEA has now put online the famous Reader's Digest condensed version (PDF) of Hayek's Road to Serfdom

Jack Wheeler has two novel ways of solving the Social Security problem: Sell some of the huge amount of land that the U.S. government owns and work out a way to use American oil sands to produce oil.

One of my readers has written his own interesting analysis of Leftist motivations. See here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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FOUR GOOD BOOK REVIEWS

Review of Chomsky book: "The Anti-Chomsky Reader is a polemical broadside intended to slam Chomsky into oblivion.... Collier and Horowitz understand well the manufactured reality of political fame, and to dismantle it requires not contrary vitriol or clever rejoinders but direct, fact-based assertions that undermine the authenticity of the image. To that end, the contributors follow a simple procedure: Quote actual statements by Chomsky and test them for evidence and logic. The best contributions to the volume add the effective and timely tactic of citing Chomsky's progressive virtues and revealing how smoothly he abandons them..... Nichols points out that Chomsky's footnotes are red herrings, his numbers exaggerated, and his facts tendentious. For instance, a footnote in Chomsky's World Orders Old and New that purports to demonstrate a point in fact leads only to an earlier Chomsky title, and in that text the relevant passage footnotes still an earlier Chomsky title. But his most damning discovery is broader: that Chomsky lacks a historian's openness to fresh evidence. All historians know that understanding history is an unfolding enterprise, ever subject to revision. And yet not one revelation of the last 20 years has led to a moment's reassessment by Chomsky. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of KGB archives, testimony by dissidents and ex-Communists-nothing alters his outlook."

Keith Windschuttle has a good review of Jim Bennett's book: The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century. Excerpt: "Whatever the outcome, The Anglosphere Challenge is one of the important books of our time. It establishes the centrality of British culture to the economic, technological, and political prospects of the world. The ancient traditions of the British - individual rights and responsibilities, minimal government, and a strong civil society - constitute the most reliable formula for a future that works. Even if that future turns out to be less confined to countries of British descent than Bennett predicts, it is highly likely still to be dominated by their cultural values and traditions."

There is a book review here showing that the envious French hatred of America goes back a long way. Excerpt: "During the German occupation, when French anti-Semitic collaborators had no reason to disguise the real roots of their hatred, it had seemed that a ne plus ultra of crazed invective had been reached: it was then that America's addiction to jazz was explained by "the Negro character inherent in the Jewish race". It would be funny, except that similar obscenities continue to our day. Some are casual, such as a recent film review in Le Monde that, commenting on the ambition of the American film industry to dominate the planet with its images, concluded: "Goebbels said the same thing about German images in his day." And some are sick, like the huge sales of the French book alleging that the Americans had blown up the Twin Towers themselves. Sicker still was the admission by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard after 9/11 of "the prodigious jubilation in seeing this global superpower destroyed... Ultimately they [Muslims] were the ones who did it, but we were the ones who wanted it.""

Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years tries to explain history in terms of environmentalism but it twists the facts: "Another instance of forcing the facts to fit the theory is Diamond's "law of history" asserting that agricultural societies will inevitably come to dominate their non-agricultural neighbors. He ignores the multitude of instances where settled farmers were conquered by nomadic horsemen: the Hittite conquest of the ancient Middle East, (possibly) the invasion of Greece by the Dorians, the successive movements of the Celtic and Germanic people across Europe, the Aryan migration into India, the Turkish conquest of much of the Moslem world that began in the 11th century, and the vast Mongolian conquests of the 13th and 14th centuries. In fact, such examples led both the political theorist Albert Jay Nock and the economist Murray Rothbard to suggest a typical pattern in history nearly the opposite of Diamond's. They hypothesized that states arise when some nomadic people, who have been repeatedly raiding a nearby society of relatively peaceful farmers over an extended period, come to realize that it is more profitable to settle right in the farming community as rulers"

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ELSEWHERE

"Liberals" still like Communists: "Molly Ivins' current argument against John Bolton is that the North Koreans don't like him. To recap: the North Koreans are what we call "Communists," or, "the enemy." Great sentience is not required to grasp that point-unless of course you happen to have served in the Clinton White House.... The election is over, but apparently the affection for Communism hasn't quite subsided. At least that's what Molly Ivins seems to indicate. "After dealing with Bolton," she writes, "the North Korean government called him `human scum' and `a bloodsucker,' and declined to recognize him as an official of the United States." And if any group can judge character, it's the government of axis-of-evil nation North Korea!.... I think it would be useful to figure out where liberals draw the line when it comes to supporting the enemy. We see from Ivins' column that some people think it's okay to let our sworn enemies help formulate our foreign policy. Fine. But what about terrorists? If Osama didn't like Bolton, what would Molly Ivins say? When will liberals map out exactly which enemies they like, and which they oppose? It's not incidental to my point that just as Ms. Ivins was writing her column, North Korea was publicly asserting its nuclear prowess. Liberals get huffy when some guy in Montana buys a pistol for the shooting range, but a Communist nation expanding its nuke arsenal doesn't faze them".

Davids Medienkritik has a big coverage of the moronic propaganda coming from the German Left at the moment. Their chief villain? Global capitalism! Ironic in view of the fact that Germany is one of the chief beneficiaries of global capitalism.

The rubbish that some so-called "scientists" talk! Note this: "The new data, released by the government two weeks ago, confirm that obesity can kill, even if the numbers are squishy, said Dr. David Katz, a Yale University obesity researcher. "Clearly it isn't a license to gorge yourself." The same figures show that only GROSS obesity reduces lifespan. Moderately overweight people live LONGER than slim people!

Readers may note that I rarely say anything about the Social Security debate. One reason is that we already have in Australia roughly what GWB is proposing and it is a non-issue here but the main reason is that Dick McDonald does such a good job of covering all the bases from a U.S. point of view. If you are at all interested in the subject, you should be logging onto Dick's site regularly. He is an accountant by trade so knows what he is talking about.

Right Wing News has the results of a poll to see who the favourite columnists of right-wing bloggers are. My no. 1 pick (Sowell) was way down the list. I guess economists can be a bit specialized but I was once a High School economics teacher so I speak the lingo, as it were.

No Speed Bumps is a new conservative blog with lots of interesting posts.

My latest quote on MARXWORDS is a final summing up of what made Marx tick by Gary North.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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LOTS OF ECONOMICS TODAY

Imports? Never! "Late in 2001 and early in 2002, America's economic mercantilists (who tend to ascribe domestic economic difficulties to all things foreign) were complaining about cheap foreign steel in the U.S. economy. No sooner had the Bush administration slapped higher tariffs on foreign steel than the mercantilists started spinning sky-is-falling tales about Asians selling computer software and medical technology to Americans at bargain basement prices. The latter spawned a media cottage industry around the term, "outsourcing." So what's the mercantilists' 2005 cause celebre? Believe it or not, it's high-priced imports! Oil imports to be specific. Not low-priced imported oil, mind you, but high-priced oil. Apparently, low import prices and high import prices both pack a damaging economic punch, at least for the mercantilists. An economic contradiction? Yes. One of the scenarios has to be wrong.

A powerful case for free trade: "Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same-to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war. Can there be any greater misuse of language than to apply to commerce terms suggesting strife, and to talk of one nation invading, deluging, overwhelming or inundating another with goods? Goods! What are they but good things-things we are all glad to get?"

The British decline: "After years in which the UK actually managed to restrict the growth of government, a period not coincidentally that created the conditions for the best economic performance in a couple of generations, the tax take is set to rise sharply. Within three years, taxes will account for more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product, the highest level in 25 years, and beginning to close the gap again with the levels in sclerotic Western European countries. It will get worse. The Government now backs a more or less open-ended commitment to pouring ever more resources into the demonstrably inefficient bureaucracy of the NHS. Pensions, welfare benefits and education will devour tens of billions more even than current projections suggest."

An excellent response to the customary Leftist ignoring of the facts about poverty here. Excerpt: "Official statistics rely on income data that are misleading. Some low-income households earn money "off the books" either through illegality or because reporting it would cost them taxes or giveaways. Other households go through income droughts, perhaps due to layoffs or college attendance, and tide themselves over with savings or gifts from family. Finally, income data do not count the value of non-cash government benefits, such as Medicaid, public housing, or food stamps. Far more useful are data on consumption, which is one's standard of living. Research has shown that for the households in question, average consumption is as much as 40 percent higher than reported income".

Chinese currency issue is a red herring: "How determined is Congress to make China inflate its currency? Earlier this month the Senate, by a margin of 67 to 33, voted to consider a proposal to impose a 27.5 percent tariff on all imports from China unless it does. While the tariff proposal is not law -- yet -- its consideration bodes ill for U.S. trade policy. Misconceptions have spawned misgivings about trade in the Congress, where too many policy makers view it as an adversarial, zero sum game. The country either wins or loses, and the trade balance determines the score. According to this view, our growing trade deficit (search) means that we are losing, and our record bilateral deficit with China is proof that our toughest opponent is cheating. But this obsession is a fool's errand."

The mouse and the market: "Our society holds up invention as the spearhead of progress. Those who first discover an idea are the ones who receive the Nobel Prizes and earn their places in the history books. But in Man, Economy and State, Rothbard shockingly argues that technological invention is relatively unimportant in the progress of civilization. Instead, capital is the far more important, and limiting factor. In fact, he claims, 'there is always an unused shelf of technological projects available and idle.' Why idle? '. . . in order for the new invention to be used, more capital must be invested.'"

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ELSEWHERE

There is a NYT article here about the Constitution in Exile movement -- which is working to get America's constitution taken seriously, instead of it being it "interpreted" into non-existence by Left-leaning Supreme Court judges. If you can ignore the Leftist slant to the article, there is a lot of detailed information there.

Leftists distort the views of those who want the constitution back: "Professor Rosen makes it appear that the Constitution in Exile folks are dogged absolutists about the US Constitution, whereas in fact they aren't or, more aptly put, need not be. They can insist that certain fundamental principles are stable and lasting (enough) and need only small modification and adjustment as human understanding grows (e.g., about human nature, how children should be understood, the facts of homosexuality or when human existence comes into being during pregnancy). The dogmatism or absolutism charge is, thus, quite unfair. What is objectionable from their viewpoint is to think of the Constitution as entirely malleable, not so much living (which is always guided by principles of the life in question) but cancerous (living out of control)."

Half of practicing Jews voted Bush in '04: "Mellman's study found that Americans of all stripes who attended religious services regularly tended to vote Republican far more often than they voted Democratic. His findings among Jewish voters was not as lopsided as that among Christian voters but still the Jewish vote was split down the middle between GOP and Democrat voters. That split is still an amazing new trend in the Jewish community. In fact, George Bush made advances in every Jewish voter category to one degree or another. Of course, many in the chattering classes on the left have been yelping about the evil "religious right" dominating the Republican Party for a decade now. But they must have been taken aback by this rise in GOP voters among the left's favorite and most reliable voting block, the US Jewish population.... religious Americans are increasingly finding themselves uncomfortable and unwelcome among the lunatic fringe in the Democratic Party"

A ex-Marxist gets one thing right about Britain: "The belief in people having the capacity to come together and change the big things was once a principle on the left. But the right also had a sense of destiny and a belief that history was worth fighting for. Politics was centred on the figure of the active human subject. Now it views us more as passive objects to whom things happen. There are no longer any political parties or movements with roots in society, that could give people a sense of greater things being possible. This is often seen as a shift from the collective to the individual. But it is more than that. The decline of the old collective institutions has not been matched by the rise of any robust self-assured individualism. Instead, the typical citizen of our age is seen as an overwhelmingly vulnerable individual, insecure and in need of ever-greater protection from all manner of supposed threats, a victim waiting to happen".

My latest quote on MARXWORDS is from a contemporary of Marx -- the anarchist Bakunin -- who correctly foresaw the evil that Marx's thinking would lead to.

More amazing government malpractice in my home State of Queensland revealed on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE today.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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

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THE LEFT WERE ONCE MORE CONSERVATIVE

I pointed out at some length a week ago that the further back you go in history the more "Rightist" Leftists appear to have been. Below are some excerpts from a recent essay on the history of the British Labour Party that bear that out. Leftists will use for their own aggrandisement whatever attitudes they see as popular at the time -- from revolution for an angry and much put-upon Russian working class in 1917 to mere sound-good crisis management for the calm and practical British -- though both may be against the long-term best interests of the people concerned. If you think long-term, you are a conservative.

"Patrick Diamond, editor of the recent book New Labour's Old Roots, argues that the germ of New Labour existed from the start. There has been a strong pragmatic streak in the Labour Party, with a succession of modernisers who, like Blair, freely adapted their politics to the needs of the times. The Labour Party was never a hotbed of theoretical analysis, preferring instead those British values of practical application and common sense.

There weren't many hotheaded radicals among Labour's old leadership, most of whom preferred a go-slow, God-fearing version of 'socialism'. 'Socialism.is an excellently conceived and resolute effort to Christianise government and society', judged Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, during the party's radical, formative years in the early twentieth century

Even Clement Attlee's 1945-51 reputedly Labourist 'golden age' was pretty prosaic at heart, playing the primary role of restoring profitability in the British economy. Attlee maintained rations, introduced wage restraint in 1948, sent troops to break strikes and imprison militants, and devalued the pound in 1949. ....

When it came to foreign policy, Labour ministers were at least as gung-ho in defending British interests as were the Tories. The recent speeches made by Labour members in parliament about the party's long-standing anti-war tradition have little basis in fact. Attlee was in power in 1945 when Britain's ally America dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima, and he ordered the development of the British bomb without consulting the cabinet, never mind parliament....

(I have corrected the author's spelling of "Attlee" above. She gave it as "Atlee")

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ELSEWHERE

Surprise, Surprise! I said from the beginning that the "Hobbits" were just pygmies: "Indonesian scientists have found a community of Pygmy people on the eastern island of Flores, near a village where Australian scientists discovered a dwarf-sized skeleton last year and declared it a new human species, a newspaper says. The latest discovery will likely raise more controversy over the finding of homo floresiensis, claimed by Australian scientists Mike Morwood and Peter Brown in September last year. They dubbed the new species "hobbits". Kompas Daily reported yesterday that the Pygmy community had been found during an April expedition in the village of Rampapasa, about 1km from the village of Liang Bua where the "hobbits" were found. The newspaper quoted Koeshardjono, a biologist who discovered the Pygmy village, as saying that 77 families had been found living in the village. Eighty per cent of the Rampapasa villagers were of small stature, with most male adults under 145cm and female adults about 135cm". (A few more details here)

There is a type of deadpan Jewish humour that I really love and Arlene Peck is a very Jewish lady so I enjoyed this snippet from the unexpurgated version of her latest column (which I have just posted here): "Today, we are lazy and without a clue about the subjects that make a real difference. I remember when I lived in Israel and the men there, unlike most of the ones I meet here who are gay, married or dead… sometimes all three, were sexual beings. If they woke up at three in the morning, it was to make love. Today, they’ll get up at 3:00 A.M. to watch a Lakers game". The thought of someone being at once gay, married and dead really cracked me up.

Methodists consult everything but the Bible: "A Methodist court Friday reinstated a gay minister who had been defrocked for declaring to her congregation that she was in a relationship with another woman. The United Methodist Church appeals panel voted 8 to 1 to set aside the December decision by another church court to oust Irene "Beth" Stroud for violating the denomination's ban on "self-avowed, practicing homosexual" clergy. The panel said the ban was "null and void" because the church procedures were not followed when it was adopted."

Franklin Delano Mussolini "So, taking a few pages from Mussolini's fascist reforms in Italy, Roosevelt began to group American industries into cartels. These cartels, called Code Authorities, operated under government supervision and had immense authority. They could set quality, prices, and output quantities for the industry. Lower-priced competition was effectively outlawed. This program's failings are too many to elaborate on here, but John Flynn's book The Roosevelt Myth would be a good start for someone wanting more on this topic. In brief, the cartelization scheme was economic nonsense. ... "Mercifully, this program (run as the National Recovery Administration) was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935.... What Roosevelt had created, Mr. Flynn brilliantly foresaw in 1948, was "that kind of state-supported economic system that will continue to devour a little at a time the private system until it disappears altogether." In a word: fascism (an economic term the appropriateness of which is in no way refuted by the absence of goose-steeping storm troopers in the streets)"

The socialist who admitted he was wrong: "Robert Heilbroner, the bestselling writer of economics, died early this month at the age of 85. He and John Kenneth Galbraith may well have sold more economics books than all other economists combined. Alas, their talents lay more in the writing than the economics. Heilbroner was an outspoken socialist... He was not entirely impervious to new evidence, however. In 1989, he famously wrote in The New Yorker: "Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism." .... Alas, in that same article he went on to say that while socialism might not in fact produce the goods, we would still need to reject capitalism on the grounds of...let's see...I've got it-environmental degradation..... On the big issue of capitalism vs. socialism, though, he did continue his rueful acknowledgment of error. In 1992, he explained the facts of life to Dissent readers: "Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure.... He also noted then that "democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist."

There is an unusual retrospective on the Vietnam war Here that points out important gains for the USA from the Vietnam war. The second biggest lot of criminals (after the Communists) in that war was the U.S. "peace" movement that harried the U.S. Congress into cutting off all support for the South -- thus ensuring a Communist victory. Hundreds of thousands who had fought bravely for their liberty lost their lives as a result.

There is a rather awful story up on Strange Justice at the moment about government child abuse in New York City.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS I note that even Karl Marx's kindly father thought Karl was a bad egg.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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