Yesterday and Today (a list)

By Evan Sayet

"At the end of the previous administration we were in a recession. Today we are in what is known as a "Golidlocks" economy -- "just right" for sustained, longterm growth.

At the end of the previous administration America was still reeling from murderous attacks on our embassies, buildings and warships -- with 9/11 already planned and moving into place. Today America has gone almost four years without a single successful attack on America -- or an American interest outside the Middle East!!!

At the end of the previous administration taxes were high across the board. Today everyone who pays taxes keeps more of their income.

At the end of the previous administration Afghanistan was ruled by the vicious Taliban and was home to the terror training camps and organizational center of al Qaeda. Today Afghanistan is a democratic ally fighting and defeating the terrorists.

At the end of the previous administration Syria was continuing its vicious occupation of Lebanon. Today Lebanon is free.

At the end of the previous administration the horrific terror tactics of the Palestinians was devastating the tiny democracy of Israel. Today terror against our democratic ally is down by over 90 percent.

At the end of the previous administration Pakistan was a nuclear armed enemy of the United States, aiding and abetting the Islamic fascist terrorists behind 9/11 and other murderous attacks upon our civilians. Today Pakistan is an ally of the United States fighting and defeating the terrorists.... "

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

Oh Dear! IQ is not only real but we are now finding where it is in the brain: "Highly intelligent people use slightly different brain circuitry to solve IQ test problems than their less gifted peers, some new studies have found.... "Where in the brain is intelligence? Are we getting close to an answer?" Richard J. Haier of the University of California at Irvine, who has conducted many studies on individual differences in intelligence, asked rhetorically. "I think we are." One new study has found that although people show increased activity in several brain regions while taking IQ tests, gifted people show even greater activity in these regions. This difference was especially pronounced in a zone called the posterior parietal cortex, at the top-back of the head, the researchers found, suggesting further study of this area might give insights into how intelligence works. The researchers-Kun Ho Lee at Seoul National University in Korea, and others at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and other institutions-published the findings in the Aug. 22 early online edition of the research journal Neuroimage.... However, at least one previous study did find a special role for this region, as Lee did. Also, Lee and colleagues noted, this area was enlarged in Einstein's brain.... One variable that has confounded IQ-test studies is that some of them actually find lower, not higher, brain activation among gifted people. This fits neatly with a hypothesis proposed by Haier-that more intelligent brains work more efficiently, so that brain circuits unnecessary for the task at hand aren't used".

Astounding news: "Scientists have created "miracle mice" that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals. The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail. And when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate, the US-based researchers say. Their discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine. Details of the research will be presented next week at a scientific conference on ageing titled Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, at Cambridge University in Britain. The research leader, Ellen Heber-Katz, professor of immunology at the Wistar Institute, a US biomedical research centre, said the ability of the mice at her laboratory to regenerate organs appeared to be controlled by about a dozen genes. Professor Heber-Katz says she is still researching the genes' exact functions, but it seems almost certain humans have comparable genes".

Hugo Chavez meets Katrina and the waves: "Two nights ago the Discovery Channel broadcast a segment on the recent 'Si' vs. 'No' referendum concerning Venezuela's Marxist President Hugo Chavez. From a production point of view the show was excellent. Journalistically it was balanced to a high degree of fairness. Of course as one might expect, those opposing Chavez stood in the light, while Chavez's supporters were sometimes misguided and even violent. They wore red -- the colors of North Korea, North Vietnam, COSATU, Red China and the now defunct Soviet Union. They said things like, 'There are only two possibilities in this election. Chavez stays or there will be war.' So much for democracy and pluralism; this is the face of fascism, red style."

Chez Joel has found some really strange stuff on a site devoted to Hugo Chavez, that great revolutionary hero of Venezuela.

Amazing good news on the U.S. economy. Could GWB be doing something RIGHT?: "The nation's unemployment rate dipped to a four-year low of 4.9 percent in August as companies added 169,000 jobs, a sign that the labor market continued to gain traction before Hurricane Katrina struck."

Logical Meme says that new layers to the “Bush-Caused-Katrina” meme and the “Bush-Doesn’t-Care-If-Blacks-Die” meme are taking shape within the MSM. The unfolding events, and the inevitable Congressional Hearings to follow, provide an excellent opportunity to watch how media bias, the politicization of a hurricane, and the conspiratorial grievance mindset of the "civil rights movement" unfold.

The Hurricane: In 1977, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, environmentalist lawsuits sank a 25-year plan designed to protect New Orleans from a Cat 5 hurricane. So it's Bush's fault. See here and here for lots of background.

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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SOME RECENT EXCELLENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

Women Are Their First Prey
Phoenix from the Ashes?
Defamation ruling: Holocaust is undeniable
In a Ruined Country
First they came for the Jews!
Cartoon: "T" is for Freedom Fighter
Israel's days of infamy
Ronaldson demands deportation
Denial is scourge of Islam
The protocols of the elders of the BBC
United Nations bankrolled latest anti-Israel propaganda
Adjournment Debate
Critique of Leadership
O'Loughlin spins for the Palestinians
Radical Islamists challenge govts efforts at control
Muslim leaders in feud with the BBC
How to watch the TV news
WHAM! CRUNCH! KAPOW! TAKE THAT, RUSSELL BALDING!
Into the underworld
A New Chapter In The Sorry Book Of The Palestinians.
Why Tolerate the Hate?
Ideas will be crucial to victory

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ELSEWHERE

Interesting comment from "Theodore Dalrymple": "My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s, and I remember such authors as Plekhanov and Maurice Hindus and Edgar Snow. It was always clear that my father's concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov.... I think the great disjunction between my father's expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement".

Poll: 64% favor teaching both creationism, evolution: "In a finding that is likely to intensify the debate over what to teach students about the origins of life, a poll released Tuesday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools. The poll found that 42 percent of respondents hold strict creationist views, agreeing that 'living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.'"

Bush does what he can about gas prices: "President Bush raised the possibility Wednesday that Hurricane Katrina will lead to even higher gasoline prices and shortages in some areas, even as his administration moved to release oil from an emergency government stockpile and to temporarily ease pollution standards on gasoline and diesel fuel. 'Our citizens must understand the storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and distribute gasoline,' Bush said in a Rose Garden speech after meeting with top officials to discuss the crisis."

Turkey: Islamic openness and honesty on display: "One of Turkey's best-known novelists has been charged with insulting the country's national character and could face a prison sentence. Orhan Pamuk is scheduled to go on trial on 16 December and could face up to three years in prison for comments on Turkey's killing of Armenians and Kurds, his publisher, Tugrul Pasaoglu, said yesterday. 'Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,' Pamuk said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper in February."

The entrepreneurship engine : "A remarkable new survey by ACNielsen International Research finds 724,000 Americans use eBay, the online auctioneer and general marketplace, for their primary or secondary income. That figure is up from 430,000 in a similar 2004 survey. ... So eBay can properly be viewed as America's No. 1 generator of, not just businesses, but jobs. As David Faber of CNBC said recently, 'If eBay employed the ... people who earn an income selling on its site, it would be the nation's No. 2 private employer, behind Wal-Mart.' But eBay doesn't employ them. They employ themselves. Their own cash and reputations are on the line. They innovate, they compete, they work hard. What eBay and other online sites provide is the platform: a storefront that's electronic, not brick and mortar; a market of 157 million registered users worldwide; plus help in expediting payments, shipping packages and detecting fraud."

An old conundrum: "The sickeningly obvious truth here is that if we want an intelligent President and Congress we will need intelligent voters to elect them. A uniform national literacy test that is, race, gender, age, and financially neutral is the obvious solution. Then, an election would be an intelligent democratic exercise rather than a popularity contest among illiterates fought with handshakes and 30 second TV commercials. Of course, the Democrats object. If they can get elected with votes from criminals, illiterates, and those selling their votes for entitlement money, well, that's a good enough democracy for a modern Democrat. Yes, the Democratic strategy is slowly subverting our democracy, but, more importantly, it is an immediate threat to national security. Our Southern border remains wide open to nuclear, biological, and chemical, terrorists. Why? Because the Democrats profit most electorally from the constituency that wants the border open. It's just that simple: votes and the power that comes from them matter more than anything to a Democrat."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big range of reading.

I have just put up a post about the parasitical "Art" establishment on Leftists as Elitists

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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Brookes News Update

US economy, commodities and China : Rising commodity prices have been explained largely in terms of rapid growth in the US and China. But some think that it is "excess money" that is really driving commodity prices rather than growth
Australia, recession and our boom: The Australian economy is displaying all the symptoms of a classic boom at its peak. Is this a question of not if but when?
Ralston Saul: Nonsense from an anti-market ideologue: Ralston Saul is an anti-market ideologue who speaks with an authority that he has not earned. His intellectual shallowness was exposed by his silly assertion that a truly intelligent person never uses words like inevitable, fact or truth
Australia, free trade and consumers' well being: A favoured criticism of some Australian commentators is the issue of free trade. It is argued that this policy leads to a flood of cheap imports that destroy our industrial base and cause unemployment and economic misery
Israel withdraws: What's done....is done: Gaza, as horrific as it has been, is just a preview of what is to come, thanks to Sharon, Condi and Dubya. By all means, let's appease genocidal terrorists, and hope they won't take advantage of our societies
Believe it or not: Abortion causes illegal immigration: Who will 12 million aborted Americans? Most likely, 15 million more foreign-born Hispanics with a propensity for hard work and a burning desire to reclaim the American Southwest for Mexico

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ELSEWHERE

Poverty. A good email from a reader: "The poverty statistics in the US are fraudulent. They are produced by bureaucrats who have a vested interest in exagerrating the number. Case in point is myself. I am considered to be living in poverty despite being a homeowner and business owner with a 6 figure net worth. For the past year I have been involved in a new business venture and haven't yet turned a profit or taken a salary so my income last year fell below the poverty line. The poverty figures are based on income exclusively hence I am "living in poverty". Half of all Americans "living in poverty" are homeowners. The reality is that less than 1% of Americans are living in true poverty. True poverty is being homeless and/or not having enough to eat. Most Americans who are "living in poverty" have more than enough food to eat and a home to live in".

There is a furious response in Spiegel, Germany's major noewsmagazine, about the general German response to hurricane Katrina, Excerpt: "Hurricane Katrina has cost the lives of hundreds and devastated the US Gulf Coast. But instead of aid donations and sympathy, the Americans have heard little more than a haughty "I told you so" from Germany. It's another low point for trans-Atlantic relations -- and set off by a German minister. How pathetic.... It's not the American people's fault that the storm hit and they couldn't have stopped it. The Germans, on the other hand, could have done a lot to prevent World War II. And yet, care packages still rained down from US troops." Some American responses to the German attitude here

Disasters unlimited: "When disaster subsidy zones are created, disasters proliferate and tragedies continue. Almost one thousand years ago in England a subtle lesson in the limits of public authority was offered by King Canute who, when implored by fawning courtiers to demonstrate his regal powers by commanding the ocean waves to halt their assault of the shores, waded into the surf, held up his hand in mock gesture, and permitted all to observe his royal drenching. Canute could not avoid the force of Nature. Today, government intrusion into these areas produces a severe loss of individual responsibility and leads to the prospect of an all-powerful government attentive to special interests."

Good point from Michelle Malkin: "Bean-counting government bureaucrats are free to take race, ethnicity and gender into account when doling out public funds to non-white-male contractors. But God help law enforcement officers, air marshals and border agents who try to use those same factors to combat terrorism and protect American lives."

Good quote from Wizbang: "The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers. When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden's safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn't irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community."

Good comment from Robert Bork: "Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the Court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal."

There is a big list here of military bloggers -- good for first-hand reports not filtered through a hostile mainstream media.

I am afraid that my taste in visual art is as shallow as my committment to music is deep. As I am writing this I am listening to Sir Edward Elgar's "Where Corals Lie", sung by Dame Janet Baker -- and it is moving me to tears, as it always does. But in visual art I must confess that the only prints I own are by Namatjira. My only consolation for such a plebeian taste in paintings is that the Queen has some Namatjiras in her collection. So I was most interested to read this article by Ernest Gombrich, a great art historian and critic, which praises the paintings of Winston Churchill. I had always thought that Winston was just a senile old dabbler. But I bow to greater expertise.

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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ANOTHER CASE WHERE THE "ANTI-ZIONIST" MASK SLIPS

Rod Liddle knows antisemitism when he sees it

Sometimes things are altogether more simple than we wish them to be. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the eminent chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, recently refused to attend the Holocaust memorial day. When asked why this was so, he muttered something about how lots of people had been killed all over the place, not least the poor Palestinians and why shouldn't we remember them, etc., etc. In the liberal press, extravagant excuses were made for Sacranie and his ludicrous chef de cabinet, Inayat Bunglawala. But I suspect that the simple answer, the one we didn't want to hear, is the most accurate: Sacranie and Mr Bunglawala don't like Jews. They are both unequivocal anti-Semites. You do not refuse to grieve for one bunch of people because another, much smaller, bunch of people have been murdered as well. Nor should you automatically equate Jews with the right-wing Zionism of Ariel Sharon: that would be like equating all black Zimbabweans with Robert Mugabe.

It's a racist thesis, isn't it? Those people who are opposed to Israel's policies are usually at pains to point out that they are not being anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist. It is not the Jews to whom we are opposed, they say - it's the Zionists. In which case you'd expect them to be happy to spend two minutes in silence commemorating those six million Jews, those non-Israeli citizens by definition, murdered by the Nazis. But Sacranie and Bunglawala wouldn't even cross the road to attend such a memorial. It wasn't because there are altogether too many of these sorts of commemoration these days, to the extent that they have become almost meaningless. It was because the commemoration was for the Jews; ergo, in my book, they're anti-Semitic. They're Jew-haters. I thought as much at the time and think it even more so now.

(Article originally here. Reprinted here and here)

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ELSEWHERE

German wisdom: "You won't believe this: In an article in Frankfurter Rundschau, a leading left-wing daily, Germany's environmental minister Juergen Trittin holds U.S. president George Bush responsible for hurricane Katrina. Yes, that's right. The hurricane Katrina that killed dozens of people, that destroyed countless homes, flooded parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, that left millions without electricity - it's all Bush's fault, according to a leading member of the German green party, who happens to be environmental minister in chancellor Schroeder's cabinet. Never mind that statistics don't show any particular increase in the frequency of hurricanes in the U.S. in the last decades."

More on Wal-Mart: "Yet the fear that an enormous corporation like Wal-Mart could send smaller retail stores out of business while creating a hostile, anti-competitive environment is enough to mobilize union labor against an unfair, working environment. Yet at the end of the day, consumers still flock to Wal-Mart by the millions to buy merchandise that is considerably cheaper, regardless of how much better the store down the street treats their workers. So far regulators have been able to prevent Wal-Mart from acquiring banks or industrial loan corporations. Perhaps if you do not shop regularly at Wal-Mart you may one day be able to open up a banking account with them, or apply for a credit card with a low interest rate that you can go use somewhere else. The future is anyone's guess."

"Poverty line" is all a matter of definition: "Census Bureau tomorrow will release the latest statistics on poverty in the United States, the income level of an average household and the number of Americans still lacking health insurance. ... Perhaps no statistic has more critics than the poverty rate, which in 2003 stood at 12.5 percent, the latest Census data available. University of Chicago economist Robert T. Michael, who chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel tasked to update poverty statistics a decade ago, called the current poverty data "truly awful."... Officially, the poverty rate has drifted upward since 2000, from 11.3 percent to 12.5 percent in 2003. But a more sophisticated measurement that the Census also publishes, which accounts for variable costs of living, rising medical expenditures and more accurate price inflation, shows the official rate has consistently understated poverty. By that alternative measure, the percentage of Americans below the poverty line has risen from 12.8 percent in 2000 to 14.2 percent in 2003. Using such measurements, last year the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee found poverty rates nearing 16 percent in the late 1980s".

Interesting snippet here (from "Playboy", of all places) about the improper use of dogs by police to sniff out drugs. There is a good article on the civil liberties implications of the matter here

Do-gooder ethics: "Federal authorities are investiing records to find out if some of the Medicaid identification numbers that D.C.-based Voice of Social Concern Association Inc. submitted to the government for payment belonged to recipients who were deceased, records obtained by The Washington Times show. In addition, documents filed in U.S. District Court show authorities are questioning a pattern of billing for rides that coincided with major holidays and with a three-day stretch in February 2003 when blizzardlike conditions paralyzed the D.C. area."

The French "social model" at work: "Should we stick a nightstick in their faces and force les femmes to ride ze bus? That's one bus company's basic idea. The company is taking some former passengers to court. Why? Because those commuters got off the bus and started taking a car. See, it's a car-sharing 'scheme.' A nefarious plot. And the court has set a date to hear this case. It's France. Who's doing the suing? Transports Schiocchet Excursions ... let's call it TSE so you don't have to hear what passes for my French any more. TSE has a route from France to Luxembourg, which is where a group of French cleaning ladies works. TSE says the cleaning ladies are guilty of -- hold on, let me double-check to make sure I'm getting this right -- ah yes, 'an act of unfair and parasitical competition.'"

Mark Kleiman has a stinging rejoinder to the attempted defence of himself by the contemptible Prof Juan Cole -- whom I have already mentioned a couple of times.

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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AMERICA NEEDS FEWER BUT BETTER IMMIGRANTS

Both Australia and America are countries founded on immigration and both remain to this day friendly to immigration. But WHAT SORT of immigrant do we want? Both Australians and Americans generally seem to agree that skilled and educated immigrants are a benefit to our society but only Australia has had the guts to put that policy into action. American politicians, by contrast, just run around like headless chooks not knowing what to do about the fact that they are largely getting the OPPOSITE sort of immigrant to what any rational person would want.

So what has the USA done about the problem? Severely RESTRICTED the immigration of skilled and educated immigrants! You couldn't make this stuff up. You can have heaps of Mexican criminals and welfare clients strolling into the good old USA without any significant restriction but you MUST NOT have Indian and Chinese engineers and computer programmers. As the WSJ says:

"What this effectively means is that any number of fields dependent on high-skilled labor could be facing worker shortages: science, medicine, engineering, computer programming. It also means that tens of thousands of foreigners--who've graduated from U.S. universities and applied for the visas to stay here and work for American firms--will be shipped home to start companies or work for our global competitors.....

And let's not forget that these immigrant professionals create jobs, as the founders of Intel, Google, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Computer Associates, Yahoo and numerous other successful ventures can attest. The Public Policy Institute of California did a survey of immigrants to Silicon Valley in 2002 and found that 52% of "foreign-born scientists and engineers have been involved in founding or running a start-up company either full-time or part-time."

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ELSEWHERE

I had a post on 25th. about loopy Leftist history professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan -- the one who thought Iraq was on the Mediterranean. If you read here you will see that the wacky Prof. Cole does not even know that a large part of what is the USA today was taken from Mexico! Leftism corrupts everything it touches -- including scholarship.

Hawaiian fruitcakes: "People are not happy about this latest round of gas price increases; and, not surprisingly, they are demanding answers -- and 'solutions' -- from the wrong people: the political classes. At the cutting edge is Hawaii, where gas prices will soon be controlled by law, not markets. Hawaiians are about to find out in the near future that the 'solutions' they have supported are going to have the opposite effect of what supposedly was intended. People in the Aloha State pay more for gasoline than anyone else in the United States, and anyone with even a basic understanding of economics understands why this is so."

Spooked by the obvious : "If you suddenly learned the government had reduced taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains, would you save and invest more or less? Most people would say more, because saving and investing would be more profitable with lower tax rates. As obvious as this seems, much of the Washington establishment is shocked the deficit is falling rapidly due to surging tax revenues, despite the 'massive' Bush tax cuts."

There is a wonderful article here about how much the life of women has improved in Russia AFTER the downfall of Communism. One excerpt: "They are highly educated, and have plunged rapturously into the ocean of literature now being published in Russia--those famous books by which the world lived in the 20th century and which have only now come to us. These women study with merciless obstinacy, hours and hours every day. Each knows several languages. In spite of their youth, they have already visited the great capitals of Europe, as if realizing the dream (so recently unattainable) of their grandmothers and grandfathers".

What Leftists close their eyes to: "Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income-and disproportionately black-phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal-one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American."

Getting the fox to mind the henhouse: "A Muslim accused of anti-Semitism is to be appointed to a government role in charge of rooting out extremism in the wake of last month's suicide bombings in London. Inayat Bunglawala, 36, the media secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain, is understood to have been selected as one of seven "conveners" for a Home Office task force with responsibilities for tackling extremism among young Muslims, despite a history of anti-Semitic statements. Mr Bunglawala's past comments include the allegation that the British media was "Zionist-controlled".

Fireman abuses cat up tree . A lovely bit of satire: "The firefighter (who happened to be male, but could just as easily have been female) abridged the rights of the cat to determine for itself where it wanted to walk, climb, or rest, and inflicted his own value judgements in determining that it needed to be 'rescued' from its chosen perch. In callous disregard for the well-being of the environment, and this one tree in particular, he thrust the mobility-disadvantaged unfriendly means of ascent known as a 'ladder' carelessly up against the tree, marring its bark, and unfeelingly climbed it, unconcerned how his display of physical prowess might injure the self-esteem of those differently-abled. He kidnapped and unjustly restrained the innocent feline with the intention of returning it to the person who claimed to 'own' the naturally free animal".

I have just put up a couple of amazing postings on EDUCATION WATCH and there is a new, rather disgusting posting on Leftists as Elitists too -- about those great champions of equality, the British Left. And on Tongue-Tied, you can find out why you must not use the "G word"! Bet you can't guess what it is!

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

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

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Dissecting Leftism I explain what IQ is and why it matters

On Tongue Tied I comment on the latest feminist gospel, adding some personal observations.

On Majority Rights I note Charles Murray's essay rejecting the idea that all groups are equal

On Greenie Watch I note the real story of Easter Island -- unlike the Greenie nonsense Jared Diamond peddles

On Political Correctness Watch I note the new Leftist Puritanism in Britain

On Education Watch I note the meaningless of British High School qualifications, where everyone is a winner

On Socialized Medicine I note how bureaucratic indifference undermines supposed health safeguards

On Gun Watch I tell of a clergyman who shot up some villains

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ELSEWHERE

I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists a dissection of one of Australia's leading Leftist intellectuals -- noting his typical Leftist disregard for facts and accuracy

Total proof that Leftist "principles" are a sham. All they have is hate: "Politics makes strange bedfellows. Stranger still when the odd couple are fundamentalist Islam and the secular Left. The evolving Black-Red alliance is growing in France, Germany and Belgium. But, based on the successful British model, it is now going global to declare war on the war on terror.... If Iraq was the catalyst for the Black-Red alliance, the Stop the War coalition provided the cauldron in which the union was consummated. The result is a pure gestalt: the coalition allows its constituent parts to pack a far greater collective punch than they could have dreamt of on their own. Putting a million people on to the streets of London is not, after all, small potatoes. The steering committee of the Marxist-Islamist alliance consists of 33 members - 18 from myriad hard-Left groups, three from the radical wing of the Labour party, eight from the ranks of the radical Islamists and four leftist ecologists (also known as `Watermelons' -green outside, red inside). The chairman is Andrew Murray, a leading light in the British Communist party; co-chair is Muhammad Aslam Ijaz, of the London Council of Mosques".

If you think most lawyers are only a small step above prostitutes, here's another reason why: "The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans... When the United States Supreme Court endorsed race-conscious admissions policies in 2003, it based its decision on the importance of ensuring the representation of diverse viewpoints in the classroom. Law schools that take race into account in admissions decisions, the study says, "open themselves to charges of intellectual inconsistency" if they do not also address the ideological imbalances on their faculties".

Australian Leftists want power at all costs: How surprising!: "The best way to get ahead in the NSW Labor Party is to become a friend, lover, wife or number-cruncher for the dominant right-wing faction known as the Terrigals, a leading Labor academic says. Professor Peter Botsman launched a blistering attack on the Terrigals last week, saying they were killing party democracy and causing rank-and-file members to leave in droves. "They have no respect for tradition, seniority, the rules of the party, common human courtesies or the customs of democracy," he said. "They live for one thing: becoming a minister or a premier in the shortest possible time".

Democrat decay: "I have some shocking statistics to report. Between 1952 and 2004, inclusive, there have been 14 presidential elections. The Democrat candidate received at least 50% of the votes in only two of them: 1964 (61.1%) and 1976 (50.1%). During that same period, the Republican candidate received at least 50% of the votes in seven elections: 1952 (55.2%), 1956 (57.4%), 1972 (60.7%), 1980 (50.7%), 1984 (58.8%), 1988 (53.4%), and 2004 (50.7%). Republicans have won nine of the past 14 presidential elections. (Each party won an election with fewer popular votes than the other party: the Democrats in 1960 and the Republicans in 2000.) Democrats are in trouble. Their coalition may seem large, since it's composed of many distinct groups (labor unions, abortionists, teachers, trial lawyers, blacks, homosexuals), but in terms of overall appeal, it's failing. Repeatedly. Embarrassingly".

The reputation of another do-gooder bites the dust: "The nun adored by the Vatican ran a network of care homes where cruelty and neglect are routine. Donal MacIntyre gained secret access and witnessed at first hand the suffering of "rescued" orphans.... Earlier in the day, young international volunteers had giggled as one told how a young boy had peed on her while strapped to a bed. I had already been told of an older disturbed woman tied to a tree at another Missionaries of Charity home. At the orphanage, few of the volunteers batted an eyelid at disabled children being tied up. They were too intoxicated with the myth of Mother Teresa and drunk on their own philanthropy to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading..... I saw children with their mouths gagged open to be given medicine, their hands flaying in distress, visible testimony to the pain they were in. Tiny babies were bound with cloths at feeding time. Rough hands wrenched heads into position for feeding. Some of the children retched and coughed as rushed staff crammed food into their mouths. Boys and girls were abandoned on open toilets for up to 20 minutes at a time. Slumped, untended, some dribbling, some sleeping, they were a pathetic sight. Their treatment was an affront to their dignity, and dangerously unhygienic."

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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I've got such a lot of stories that I want to draw people's attention to today, that I am not going to put up a leading post first

Australians more culturally confident than the French?: This is a bit of an old story now but I am mentioning it because it has some personal relevance. Despite Eastern Europe now being in the EU, French police arrest and lock up Eastern European musicians and conductors who dare to give concerts in France. One of the ensembles arrested was led by Volker Hartung, a German from Cologne. Volker Hartung also tours Australia. I have myself enjoyed one of his excellent concerts of Baroque music. Funnily enough, all he got in Australia was generous applause. No sign of police anywhere!

Bolton brings a breath of fresh air to the U.N.: "An international alliance will confront US President George Bush to salvage as much as possible of an ambitious plan to reshape the United Nations and tackle world poverty. The head-to-head in New York tomorrow comes after the revelation that the US Administration is proposing wholesale changes to crucial parts of the biggest overhaul of the UN since it was founded more than 50 years ago. A draft of that plan had included a review of progress on the UN's millennium development goals — poverty eradication targets set in 2000 for completion by 2015 — and the introduction of reforms aimed at repairing the damage done to the UN's reputation by Iraq, Rwanda and the Balkans. But it was revealed this week that Mr Bush's new ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, was seeking 750 changes to the 36-page draft plan to be presented to a special summit in New York on September 14-16. Mr Bolton's amendments, if successful, would leave the plan in tatters".

California Conservative thinks that Australian conservative politicians have got more guts in speaking out about Islamic issues than American politicians do. I am inclined to agree.

The BBC recently ran a programme that was (gasp!) critical of Islam. The Muslim Council of Britain fired back with claims that the programme was biased and inaccurate. The BBC program is defended at length here by an Islamic expert. The transcript of the BBC programme is here

Write Wing is a good blog for brief links to lots of interesting news stories -- with particular emphasis on immigration/multiculturalism.

Rationality triumphant: Australian Leftists want to CUT taxes on the "rich": "The top rate of tax should be cut and the entire system overhauled to help middle- and low-income workers earn more, the Opposition finance spokesman, Lindsay Tanner, said today. Mr Tanner said Labor would promise voters tax cuts during the next election campaign as part of a policy to make tax fairer for everybody. He said he was in favour of slicing the top marginal tax rate of 47 cents in the dollar as part of major reforms to the taxation system. "We don't have a problem with the idea of cutting the top marginal tax rate provided the overall balance is fair," Mr Tanner told the Ten Network."

The troops see Iraq as no Vietnam: "Iraq war skeptics and critics have been invoking Vietnam almost from the day the fighting began.... But of all the ways in which the Iraq war is not like Vietnam, perhaps the most telling is the attitude of the troops. "When I was in Vietnam," retired Army Colonel Jack Jacobs, a 1969 Medal of Honor recipient who had just returned from a fact-finding trip to the Sunni Triangle, told NBC News in May, "if you asked anybody what he wanted more than anything else in the world, he'd say: to go home. We asked ... hundreds of soldiers, low-ranking soldiers, in both Afghanistan and Iraq ... the same question. And the response, to a man and a woman, was, 'To kill bad guys.' ... The morale is just over the top -- just really, really enthused about what they're doing. And I think the reason is they perceive that they're making progress. Success will do a lot to morale." Indeed it will, as the "Today" show's Matt Lauer discovered when he visited Baghdad last week. He tried valiantly to coax some Vietnam-style disillusionment out of the soldiers he met, but as NBC's transcript makes clear, the troops weren't having any of that"

The Sheehan stunt is orchestrated, like most Leftist stunts: "Cindy Sheehan kneels before a cross with her son's name on it, touches his picture, wipes her tears. It's an outpouring of emotion that is part of a scheduled news event organized daily for the television, radio and print reporters who crowd in to capture a mother's grief. Cindy Sheehan: "I'm never going to see him again, I'm never going to hold him again, I'm never going to hear his voice again." Sheehan's message hasn't changed since she got here, but the support staff interested in getting that message out to the world has grown considerably. Organizers are set up in a house trailer. Their meetings closed to reporters. Leading the group is Fenton Communications employee, Michele Mulkey, based in San Francisco. Fenton specializes in public relations for liberal non-profits. Their bills are being paid for by True Majority, a non-profit set up by Ben Cohen -- of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream fame."

High oil prices not slowing economy: "Wal-Mart noted that July results actually "came in stronger than expected." Retail sales are rising briskly across the board. The economy is not coming to a screeching halt because of oil. In fact, the real story is that oil prices are having so little impact. Oil is up 40 percent a barrel this year, and natural gas, used in electricity generation, is up about by about two-thirds. Prices at the pump for premium gas are exceeding three bucks a gallon. It's the minimal effect of these higher oil prices that is so annoying to doomsaying politicians and journalists. The single best indicator of an economy's performance, GDP, the output of all goods and services, is currently about 3.5 percent, and it's not slowing. It's accelerating. The U.S. has created 1.2 million new jobs in the past six months. The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.0 percent from 5.4 percent. Compare those figures with Europe's, where energy conservation through taxation is the norm. In France, GDP growth is an anemic 1.2 percent, unemployment 10.1 percent. In Germany, GDP has flatlined, and unemployment is 11.6 percent".

U.S. policy working: "According to the massive Pew Global Attitudes Survey, views of the United States have been improving. We're not exactly back to the days when Kuwaiti babies were being named George Bush, but the trends are in our favor. The share of people with a favorable view of America went up in Indonesia by some 23 points, in Lebanon by 15 points, and in Jordan by 16 points. Trends in France, Germany, Russia and India have been moving our way, too. But the news gets even better. Support for terrorism and Osama Bin Laden has been plummeting across the Arab and Muslim world (save for in Jordan, where the large Palestinian population plays a big role). Support for democracy, meanwhile, has improved. According to Pew, "nearly three-quarters of Moroccans and roughly half of those in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia see Islamic extremism as a threat to their countries."

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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MORE ON FEMALE IQ

A couple of days ago I made a few brief comments about findings showing that there are far more men than women in the top ranges of IQ. I also put the post up on Tongue-Tied, where I am guest-blogging at the moment. I got a lot of emails about it from "Tongue-Tied" readers and to help answer the emails I have just put up another post on "Tongue-Tied" which I also reproduce below

My post on female IQ got me a heap of emails so, although the subject is a bit off the regular track for "Tongue-Tied", I feel I should comment on the concerns that readers have expressed. In a way, the topic is VERY appropriate for "Tongue-Tied" because it is the unmentionable nature of IQ research that has enabled so many misunderstandings about the subject to flourish. So I think I should spend a bit of time in telling you what nobody else is likely to. Let me start with one well-expressed email that I received:

"As a woman, I don't have a problem with the IQ findings. I tend to believe it, as my personal experience has shown that men tend to be more analytical than women. My issue is with the way IQ is measured. My opinion is that IQ tests place a lot of emphasis on analytical abilities, but not much on "other types" of intelligence, such as creativity, multi-tasking, musical genius or whatever. For example, women tend to be a lot more perceptive than men, especially when it comes to relationships. They also can have more agility of mind; that is, they can do more than one thing at the same time, and do it well (better known as multi-tasking). Everyone has his or her own strengths, which leads me to believe that IQ tests are mostly useless. Instead, instructors/employers should be trained to identify individuals' strengths and how to capitalize on them.

Most of what the lady says is right. There are ways in which women tend to do better than men -- and multi-tasking is certainly one of those ways. What the lady does not know is that the abilities measured in IQ tests are NOT just some arbitrary selection of puzzles. The whole notion of IQ arose from an OBSERVATION: the observation that people who tend to be good at solving one sort of puzzle also tend to be good at solving lots of other seemingly unrelated puzzles. In other words, what Binet discovered in the 19th century was that problem-solving is GENERAL. There is such a thing as general problem-solving ability (often abbreviated as 'g'). So over a hundred years have gone by since Binet's discovery and most people still don't know of it! If that is not a truth that has been thoroughly tongue-tied, I don't know what one would be (actually, I can think of a couple of others but I will save them for another day). So IQ tests are simply collections of different puzzles that do in fact go together. Success on one does tend to predict success on all the rest.

And what that means is that IQ tests are VERY useful. For instance, if you are hiring for a job that requires a lot of problem-solving, you can use an IQ test to predict which applicant will be best at that job -- no matter what the problems may be in the job you are hiring for. And IQ tests are also very predictive of educational success. If you have a high IQ it is much more worthwhile to spend up big on a university education than if you have a low IQ.

As an example of how ability generalizes, take mechanical aptitude: I am very good at all sorts of academic things so lots of people would think I must be hopeless at practical things like mechanics. And it is true that any time my car needs fixing I hand the job over to an expert. But I like fixing locks. I am an amateur locksmith. Locks are just another puzzle to me. So one day, I was at a small gathering where some ladies were having trouble with the deadlock on their front door. So they took it off and opened it up. And immediately, bits and pieces went "SPROING" everywhere. They were of course completely stumped by that and did not for a moment think to ask a hopeless academic like me to help. So I said: "Maybe I can help". They looked at me with great skepticism. But in ten minutes I had it back together and all working properly. I hope they learnt something about 'g' from that episode.

Now I have just used an example above to illustrate what I am saying. But the example is NOT the proof. The proof is the gazillion times researchers have found that problem-solving generalizes. One of my other readers of my post yesterday made that mistake. She said that men got all the Nobel prizes because good education has become available to women only fairly recently. But that was not the point at all. The researchers who wrote the article in The British Journal of Psychology that I referred to yesterday relied for their conclusions on hundreds of studies with IQ tests. The bit about Nobel prize-winners was only an illustration, much like my locksmithing illustration above. Examples prove nothing by themselves. They just help you to understand how generalizations work out in practice.

Incidentally, creativity is NOT like IQ. It does not generalize much. People who are highly creative in one field are usually pretty uncreative in other fields. For instance, I am extremely good at writing articles for scientific journals. And that is a highly creative field. In that field you are creating new knowledge and understanding about something. And I have had hundreds of such articles published. But I could not write a novel for nuts! So even in the single field of writing, there can be different types of totally unrelated creativity!

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ELSEWHERE

An unusual perspective on Israel's rights: “The so-called occupied territories are really disputed territory, gained due to acts of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. There was no Palestinian State in 1967 when the territories were captured. What kind of morality is it, then, to return territory to the aggressor? And where’s the precedent? It rewards aggression — and guarantees it’ll reoccur. If anything, by returning land to the aggressors — the Sinai first — Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor.”

Some uncommon-sense from Australia: "The Centre for Independent Studies, in a report into income tax levels, said there was overwhelming evidence to support deep tax cuts for high income earners because of the benefits that would bring to the economy. It follows criticism of the Government's $22 billion worth of tax cuts announced in the May budget. Average wage earners have already received a $6 a week tax cut under the package, but people on higher incomes - including those earning more than $100,000 a year - will get substantially more. But Dr Sinclair Davidson, an associate professor at RMIT University, said in a paper for the centre that there was far more scope for the Government to go further with its tax cuts. He said the Government could cut taxes further without a reduction in revenue. In fact, an economy buoyed by larger tax cuts would actually lift the amount of money flowing to the Government".

Arabs mostly marry cousins: "Just as modern medicine recognizes genetic sources of many physical illnesses, modern psychology recognizes genetic components in many psychological problems including criminality. Presumably, a region where inbreeding is rife-and reinforced through successive generations-should also have a greater frequency of such mental ailments. Though, not surprisingly, there seem to have been no studies in that regard given the delicacy of the subject, the high levels of social pathology, violence, and terrorism in the Arab world suggest that inbreeding is one of the causes."

I have just put up here the latest article by Arlene Peck. She notes how Israel's voluntary withdrawal from Gaza has won it no credit from Leftists at all. Excerpt: "Already, the rabidly anti-Semitic Los Angeles Times is publishing its ‘editorials': “Israel Leaves but Gaza is Hardly Free!" and articles decrying “...how isolated they are in Gaza now, from the outside world, (not to mention the West Bank and Jerusalem) and as subject to Israeli domination as before”.

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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AN EXCELLENT ANALYSIS OF LEFTIST ACADEMICS

"Many academics are inclined to favor redistribution of income. Some economists like Krugman argue forcefully that people care more about relative position than their absolute status. I have been reluctant to accept this position as being very important, perhaps because envy is so foreign to me. I do not resent Bill Gate's billions; I wish I had them. I would be happier if Bill Gates gave them to me, but I certainly wouldn't be happier if Bill Gates lost them. In fact, I think that resenting the wellbeing of others is a pretty strong character flaw. However, at some point, one must accept the fact that many people like Paul Krugman are deeply concerned with status.....

I think academics are inclined to attack the privileges of wealth, because the existence of wealth lowers the relative status attributed to intellectual achievements. If the very pursuit of wealth can be reduced to a zero-sum struggle for status, then wealth loses some of its status. Academics gain status at the expense of businessmen and other high income professions.

Academics of all levels would see their relative status rise, if wealth is besmirched. A professor at a local community typically has a high level of educational attainment but only modest social status given their average level of income.

I think that it is no accident that many of those who are most fervent about redistributing income spend so much time bemoaning the chase for status. This chase is very real for them. As Jane Galt has observed, academics are probably more status obsessed than the typical person. The attack on wealth is one dimension of their chase for status".

More here

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Destructive British socialism: "Tony Blair's claims to have extended "social justice" were undermined last night by official figures showing the gap between rich and poor has widened by 90 pounds a week since Labour came to power. A report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also showed that Labour has failed to narrow the gap in achievement levels between parents from working- and middle-class families.... The report, Focus on Social Inequalities, compared average weekly incomes of families in the top 10 per cent of incomes (those now earning more than 658 pounds or more a week) with those in the lowest 10 per cent (those earning 164 pounds or less a week). It found that since the mid-1990s disposable income for both groups had risen by over a fifth. "However," it added, "these increases resulted in a rise of 119 pounds per week for those near the top of the income distribution compared with a rise of 28 pounds per week for those near the bottom. This shows that the absolute difference in the average weekly income has continued to widen."

More privatization in China: "China on Wednesday freed more than 1,300 largely state-owned companies to gradually sell shares of stock now controlled by the Communist Party government, putting nearly $270 billion worth of state assets on the trading block. This unprecedented wave of privatization is aimed at lifting domestic stock markets and furthering the country's transition toward capitalism... The move is "a huge deal," said Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai and author of the book "Exit the Dragon?," which examines China's privatization. "The state-owned shares have been an albatross around the neck of the market. This is a pretty good sign that they're serious about reform".

A corrupt bureaucracy? How amazing!: "A federal judge in Texas, calling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. a "corrupt agency with corrupt influences on it," awarded a Houston financier $72 million to cover his legal fees in a decade-long suit involving a failed savings and loan and the government's efforts to take control of a stand of endangered California redwood trees in the 1990s. The FDIC, a regulatory agency that insures deposits at banks and savings and loans, filed suit against Charles E. Hurwitz in 1995, seeking to collect more than $800 million because Hurwitz indirectly controlled a Texas S&L that failed in 1988. The FDIC, after a series of legal setbacks, dropped its suit against Hurwitz in 2002. Hurwitz then asked the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case, Lynn N. Hughes, to order the FDIC to pay his legal expenses, arguing that the FDIC should never have brought the case in the first place".

Disgusting disrespect for brave men: "The Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the current home of hundreds of wounded veterans from the war in Iraq, has been the target of weekly anti-war demonstrations since March. The protesters hold signs that read "Maimed for Lies" and "Enlist here and die for Halliburton."" [The Left are just so full of hate that they know no decency]

Some Iraq experts think the new Iraqi constitution is great: "The Bush administration finally did something right in brokering this constitution," Galbraith exclaimed, then added: "This is the only possible deal that can bring stability. ... I do believe it might save the country."

Failure of a liberal foreign policy: "If you've ever wondered how a President Kerry foreign policy would have turned out, look no further than the state of play with the two axis states who weren't dealt with in the "Bush unilateral way" - Iran and North Korea. President Bush has been following the Democrats' multilateral route with those two. He's allowed the Europeans to take the lead in dealing with the mullahs and has been working with Asian countries in negotiating with Kim Jong Il. Both tracks have failed, but you wouldn't know that from the silence of the Democrats. After deriding President Bush for "going it alone" and "not working with our allies" against Iraq, there is little for them to say when he follows their policy and it fails".

Historian Prof. R.J. Rummel has some excellent quotes from Hitler and other Nazis showing how socialist Nazism was. I liked this one from Hitler: "In 1919-20 and also in 1921 I attended some of the bourgeois [capitalist] meetings. Invariably I had the same feeling towards these as towards the compulsory dose of castor oil in my boyhood days. . . . And so it is not surprising that the sane and unspoiled masses shun these 'bourgeois mass meetings' as the devil shuns holy water."

There is a BIG reply to the gross claim that the US Army are "mercenaries" here

Chris Brand's news site is down again so I have put up his latest postings here

Below is a good cartoon about how the mainstream media see the world:



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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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FEMALE IQ FINDINGS: O VAST INCORRECTNESS!

"The Times" of London is a highly recommendable paper for its straight-down-the middle accounts of most things (unlike a certain New York publication). The fact that it is a Rupert Murdoch publication (think Fox News) probably has something to do with that. But I think even "The Times" was a bit courageous to print the following story (excerpt):

"A study claims that the cleverest people are much more likely to be men than women. Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for "tasks of high complexity", according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded. They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees. When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, said that he was uncomfortable with the findings. But he added that the evidence was clear despite the insistence of many academics that there were "no meaningful sex differences" in levels of intelligence".

Source

Before all my female readers delete their bookmarks to this site, let me explain. I am a psychometrician by trade so I do know a little about this. First, let me point out that British Journal of Psychology is Britain's top academic psychology journal. So it needs to be reckoned with. What it reports, however, has in fact been known to psychometricians for about 100 years. And that is that men and women have the same intelligence ON AVERAGE but the scatter of intelligence differs between the sexes. Female intelligence clusters much more closely around the average -- so there are fewer very dumb women and fewer very bright women. And that, I am afraid, is how the cookie crumbles. The geniuses tend to be men but so do the dummos. And I am sure most women have met plenty of the latter.

Update:

For those who want to look at the male/female ability question more closely, there is an exhaustive (and exhausting) coverage of the question here -- and that's just covering the mathematical ability component of IQ.


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ELSEWHERE

What utter unscientific garbage! "A medical student who has worked for an abortion rights group and the director of a clinic that provides abortions were among authors of a report on the highly charged issue of fetal pain published Wednesday. The report, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, concluded that fetuses probably don't feel pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy". Premmie babies born long before that stage are complete human beings!

Dr Weevil has a nice put-down of that vast ego known as Brian Leiter. In case anybody misses it, the curculionidaceous one (Weevil) heads his post "Hybris in action". "Hybris" (more usually rendered in English as "hubris") is ancient Greek for "overweening pride" or "the pride that comes before a fall" -- pretty apt for Leiter. Keith Burgess-Jackson generally describes Leiter more simply -- as "nuts". Both descriptions have much truth in them.

Bush gives in (maybe) to pressure over illegal migrants: "The Bush administration has signalled a big policy reversal on illegal immigration, telling a worried public that it is "rightly distressed" about the nation's porous borders. The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, made what amounted to a U-turn on immigration policy after months of rising pressure from congressmen and law enforcement officials.... Announcing a series of measures, Mr Chertoff said he would build camps for illegal migrants, speed up deportations by providing more judges and lawyers and raise the number of officers tracking down fugitives ignoring expulsion orders.... Most polls indicate that more than 80 per cent of Americans believe border protection is too lax.... The American immigration system is close to collapse. This year, the federal authorities have caught almost 500,000 illegal migrants, with 142,000 from countries other than Mexico. That has forced officials to release many before they reach deportation hearings.

Vast British muddle: "Islamic extremists boasted of how they would never be thrown out of Britain yesterday as a promised crackdown by the Government turned into a shambles. The hardliners taunted Home Secretary Charles Clarke after he promised action 'within days' to start deporting dozens of foreign preachers of hate living in the UK... Al-Siri's defiance came as Mr Clarke's plans were attacked by leading lawyers and moderate Muslims. They warned the deportations policy would breach international law, create massive confusion and turn Muslims against the Government.... Mr Clarke said the measures were necessary to counter the 'real and significant' terrorist threat facing the country after the suicide bombings in London on July 7. But legal experts said that, under human rights laws, he could not send anybody back to countries where they could face torture or death.... The deportations are likely to be tested in the Court of Appeal, House of Lords and, ultimately, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in a process lasting up to three years. Ten extremists rounded up by officials ten days ago have already lodged appeals."

What Israel needs to do: "Anyone who thinks that more Israeli concessions comprise the magic way to peace should look carefully at the experience of the past 12 years... We agree with Mr. Sharon's argument that the defense resources spent on protecting outlying Gaza settlements could be better allocated to protect the country against terrorism. Israel should adopt a policy of relentless and massive deterrence, guaranteeing that Gaza-based terrorists will be hit very hard every time they fire rockets into Israel. For such a deterrence policy to work, it is essential that Washington support Israel when it defends itself against terror."

I am a bit slow off the mark on this story but note this offensive NYT article from a so-called historian: "The United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today's volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits". And see the article thoroughly taken apart by someone who DOES know his history.

A heartening story here of how the blogosphere helped at least one member of the U.S. military.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big selection of blogospheric reading.

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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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SCREEN POLITICIANS FOR PSYCHOPATHY?

In business, results count so I doubt that many successful businesses are headed by psychopaths. Psychopaths generally get found out pretty quickly so would not last long in a stable business. In politics, however, judgments of success or failure are much more arbitrary and I have no doubt that Bill Clinton and John Kerry would have been filtrered out of politics if they had had to pass a test for psychopathy. There are a few interesting excerpts from an article on the topic below:

Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters.. Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow. "These are callous, cold-blooded individuals," Hare said. "They don't care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse." He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life's savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said. Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. "Why wouldn't we want to screen them?" he asked. "We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?"

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It's a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren't just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We're worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they're lifting profits and stock prices, we're willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor's expertise in evoking ours. While they don't care about us, "they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them," says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.

Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish. "People see sociopathy in their personal lives, and they don't have a clue that it has a label or that others have encountered it," says Martha Stout, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of the recent best-seller The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books, 2005). "It makes them feel crazy or alone. It goes against our intuition that a small percentage of people can be so different from the rest of us -- and so evil. Good people don't want to believe it."

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it's extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego -- something he promotes rather than plunders. "The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self," Babiak says. "A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game."

My own research papers on psychopathy can be found here and here. Why I think Clinton and Kerry are psychopaths is spelt out here or here.

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