ONE REASON WHY GERMANY HAS 12% UNEMPLOYMENT

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democrats have pledged action. So has Angela Merkel, whose conservative parties lead the polls for the Sept. 18 elections. Her would-be government partners, the Free Democrats led by Guido Westerwelle, have been most vocal in promising the same. What Germans of all political stripes seem to want is action to reduce the battery of 90,000 laws and regulations and curb the powers of the 4 million bureaucrats that economists say stifle initiative and motivation.

But tell that to the managers of small businesses who have heard such promises before. Indeed, just mention the word "bureaucracy" to Patricia Ferer and her eyes roll, the hands go up and the frowns set in..... Ulrike Hoerchens, an expert on regulations at Germany's Federation of Retailers, which represents 100,000 retailers, hears these complaints all the time. "Red tape strangles many businesses," she said.

Udo Robakowski, 34, was one of those who nearly suffered. In a burst of optimism, he moved to Berlin from Cologne in 1998 and plunged into setting up a top quality shoe shop in Berlin's elegant Charlottenburg district. But the enthusiastic Rhinelander has become increasingly frustrated with the bureaucracy, the complicated tax structure and the endless regulations. "I had 10 years' experience in the shoe business before I set up my shop here," Robakowski said. But one day, he recalled, the Obermeister, the superviser of the Meisters, the title given to those who have passed the examinations for making and mending shoes, turned up. "He wanted to see my Meister's certificate. I never did the exams. He then said I did not have permission to carry out all the shoe repairs. "He then threatened to fine me 25,000 deutsche marks," now about 12,500. "It was so stupid. All he had to do was to look at the quality of my work."

Robakowski, who employs two people, said that he could easily employ more but that it would cost too much. Hoerchens explained: "Once a retailer employs six people, the employer has to register his staff. You cannot imagine the bureaucracy. You have to fill in 18 different forms and many from different departments. "This costs time. It costs money and you really need help to do this. Each employee costs the employer an additional 4,500."

Asked whether the situation would change after Sept. 18, despite the loud promises, neither Hoerchens, Ferer nor Robakowski was willing to place bets.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

One for the "Unbelievable" files: "Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic. Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing."

California tries to mandate higher unemployment again: "For the second time in two years, the Legislature is sending Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a bill raising the state's minimum wage. And for the second time, the governor is expected to veto it, setting the stage for a possible ballot-initiative fight on the issue next year and possibly carrying repercussions for the governor's agenda in the Nov. 8 special election, Democrats say".

A people disaster: "Buildings can be rebuilt, but "The Big Easy" has died and cannot be resuscitated. People will remember the Superdome as a concentration camp, a huge "rape room." They will forever wonder if the cop they see stayed on duty or became a predator, or whether he did anything but watch. Many will feel some small sense of shame each time they turn on that TV they stole (or bought from a thief). The rest of the country and the rest of the world now has put their whole city and anyone admitting to have lived there into the same category as British soccer fans, politicians and people who cheat on their marriages -- okay most of the time, but never quite trustworthy. It is already happening. Cities where the refugess are being taken are putting extra police on duty around them to guard against a spread of the problems which have been so widely reported. And this is the tragedy following the tragedy, because the vast majority of these folks are good people, who only need a safe place to stay while they come to terms with the world as it really is. The looters generally won't leave their loot, for fear that someone will do to them what they did to someone else. I predict that, as a direct result of the mess in Louisiana, there will be a resurgence in militia and local posse membership. Now that we have seen Americans turning into animals, a lot of Joe Sixpacks are going to look around and realize that the only way to protect their families and their homes will be by turning into Joe SixGUN. Expect a lot of the towns near New Orleans to openly support these groups as they form or come back to life.

Britain: Abortion laws too lax: "Powerful public support for an overhaul of the 40-year-old abortion laws has emerged from a Daily Telegraph survey of the nation's attitudes to the key ethical and moral issues of the day. Only 27 per cent of those questioned believed that the current 24-week legal limit for termination should be retained. Fifty eight per cent said abortions should not be carried out after the 20th week of pregnancy, with women more likely than men to favour tighter controls"

Phenomenal economic turnaround under GWB: "We are currently within a hair's breadth of achieving 5 million new jobs since the president's tax cuts were fully implemented in May 2003. If we hit it this month, that would mean 5 million jobs in 28 months. When the new jobs numbers are reported four weeks from now, maybe it will be time for the administration to crow a little bit. Perhaps the reason President Bush has had so much trouble selling his admirable Social Security reform plan is that so many people think his economic performance is weak. But perhaps so many people think this way because the press systemically tells them so"

Oil for Food scam: $12 Bn illegally misallocated; Kofi Annan's son was involved in a $64Bn contract but Dad apologises and keeps his job. The UN secretary general's behaviour, and the "free ride" liberals have given him compares poorly to the standards of ethics demanded in your average democracy. Peter Reith lost his job as an Australian federal minister because his son used $50,000 worth of calls on a government phonecard. UN practice is at the banana republic level.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- but a bit over-clever and thus hard to follow.

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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THINK ISRAEL

Below are just some of the recent articles up on Think Israel

DANGERS OF CAPITULATION
I WAS THERE: IMPRESSIONS OF KFAR MAIMON
A DAUGHTER OF ISRAEL
A SALUTE TO THE TRUE LEADERS
THE UNBEARABLE EASE OF DESTRUCTION
GAZA VERSUS BERLIN
GOING BEYOND SCAPEGOATING
ISRAEL AND THE HOLOCAUST
GAZA'S HISTORY AND THE JEWS
ISRAEL: THE JEWISH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION STATE
OCCUPATION AND SETTLEMENT: THE MYTH AND REALITY
THE OSLO SYNDROME
WHY SOME JEWS STILL BELIEVE IN ARAB MYTHS
SCORCHED-EARTH KULTURKAMPF

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ELSEWHERE

The end of a golden age for Jews: "Pipes contends that the mega-events of the last few years may have ushered in a less favorable era for American Jewry: "The Jews' Golden Age in America began in 1950, when social restrictions were eased in universities, banks, businesses, clubs, etc. This period may now be ending with the growth of the American Muslim population. Within that community, there are significant elements that see American Jewry as their prime enemy; they perceive Jews as the cause of Islamic failure.... "Militant Islam cannot be compared to any segment of Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. These religions do not embody groups with totalitarian utopian ideologies that seek world hegemony. In fact, militant Islam resembles fascism and communism more than any religious movement. "All we can do presently is prepare ourselves for worse to come".

Birth order does affect some things: "Younger children do less well in terms of overall educational attainment than their older brothers and sisters, new research reveals today. A first child is typically at least a year ahead of a third-born brother or sister at the equivalent stage at school, it shows. At the same time, it suggests that parents with limited financial resources may invest more time and money in the education of their eldest child. The findings are claimed to represent the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of family composition on educational achievement. They will influence the long-running debate about why first-born children are typically more successful than their younger siblings. The research was carried out by Kjell Salvanes of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and will be presented today to the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society, hosted by University College London. Working with colleagues at UCLA in the US, he analysed the entire population of Norway aged 16-74, between the years 1986 and 2000".

If you have not seen it already, Chrenkoff has a MOST interesting comparison between the situation in Louisiana and Mississippi. Miss. was worst hit but fared much better because of superior leadership. I don't need to tell you which political parties the respective leaders belong to.

Great news for Australian conservatives: "More young people voted Liberal than Labor at the last federal election, dispelling the popular belief that they are more likely to vote for left of the centre parties, a study has found. Political scientist Clive Bean said research into the political attitudes and voting behaviour of people aged 30 and under had found "substantially" more had cast their vote conservatively in last year's federal election. Professor Bean, from the Queensland University of Technology, said a poorly performing federal Labor Party under former Leader Mark Latham could be partly to blame. "In Australia, as in other countries such as Britain and the United States, the conventional wisdom has been that young people are more likely to vote for left of centre parties," Prof Bean said. "But an analysis of voter behaviour at last year's Australian federal election has shown this is not always the case. "Young men were far more likely to cast a conservative vote, and with young women it was a fairly even split between the two major parties."

Australian economy holding up well: "Australia's economic growth surprised observers with its strength yesterday but the outlook was met with caution for the year ahead. In the past three months, the country's Gross Domestic Product surged 1.3 per cent to add a further $2.7 billion to the national accounts. The result was well above most economists' expectations, which ranged from 0.7 to a steady 1 per cent, and took the yearly rate to 2.6 per cent. The number though is still well below the trend average of 3.75 per cent and lower than the past few years' rate of 4 per cent.... The impact of petrol prices and dampened consumer sentiment and spending were seemingly overshadowed by booming business investment, and the upward resources spike.... The Australian result reverses an emerging worldwide trend of slower economic growth."

The astrobiologists will love this report on Comet Tempel 1: "Dust emanates from the comet in frequent outbursts, likely a result of being warmed by the Sun. The dust kicked up by the impact was not the same as surface dust, but it spread through space and dissipated in a manner similar to the natural outbursts. While more analysis is needed, the interior is clearly different from the surface. Inside, the comet harbors a relatively high concentration of organic compounds, the stuff from which life is made. The organics were more prevalent during and after the outburst than the water and carbon dioxide that routinely escape from the nucleus, or hard core of the comet. The results were presented to reporters in a teleconference today and will be published later this week by the journal Science.

Strange Justice has a post up about a blogger in big legal trouble over exposing injustice

I often have up here postings about how something "is all in the genes". I have such a posting up today on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

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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REBUILDING AFTER KATRINA

Amid the constant negative whining and criticism coming from the Left via the media, we hear almost nothing about what to do next in hurricane-hit areas -- except of course calls for even more bureaucracy. So Jack Kemp's thinking is refreshingly constructive. Excerpt below:

"There are a few simple things Congress could do immediately to facilitate the rebuilding effort in the private sector. For example, the entire storm region could be turned into an enterprise zone, suspending burdensome federal regulations, such as the Davis-Bacon Act and the Jones Act. Also, onerous regulations imposed by the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communication Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency could be suspended.

Certain taxes, such as gasoline taxes, telephone taxes and others could be suspended for the duration of the emergency. Individuals living in the storm-affected region and companies doing business there could be relieved of the outrageously complex and economically destructive federal tax code.

For example, the individual income tax and the death tax could be suspended for people living in the storm region. Rules relating to retirement accounts could be relaxed to give people access to capital.

Small businesses could be relieved of payroll taxes, and companies in the region subject to the corporate income tax could be relieved of the most economically damaging features of the current corporate tax code. They could, for example be allowed to write off all investment spending (e.g. spending on plant, equipment, structures, machinery and technology) immediately rather than having to depreciate it over a period of years. In fact, now would be an ideal time to allow companies to choose to be taxed under a simplified reformed system of taxation, the blueprints of which are well developed and could be enacted into law in short time. To further increase access to capital, the capital gains tax could be eliminated.

Displaced individuals could be given education vouchers they could use to enroll their children in schools anywhere in the country. Similarly, vouchers might be used to transform low-income and public housing to give people property rights and pride of ownership in their dwellings. Housing vouchers, for example, could be used not only for homeowners whose houses were destroyed but also for renters and Section 8 housing residents to make a down payment on a house anywhere in the country.... "

"Marginal Revolution" also has two posts on privatising flood prevention and FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency). See here and here

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ELSEWHERE

An excellent point: "New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives."

If you have not seen it already, read Brad De Long's posting about the "plan" for dealing with a hurricane disaster that the State and local Democrat representatives for New Orleans had ready. The "plan" consisted of telling the poor: "You're on your own". But only the Mormons were in fact ready to look after their own. So that makes it all George Bush's fault, of course. There is more on that here.

A realistic black guy's take on what happened in New Orleans. Excerpt: "The pictures I have been seeing are of people - black people - stealing shoes, diapers, and television sets. Not food and definitely not water. Not unless the armfuls of clothing, shoes, and appliances I see people wading through the streets with count as food and water. Now, if all the looters were looting out of desperation, how desperate were the guy and girls I saw toting several boxes of size 13 Nikes? How desperate was the fellow with the stack of diapers? What, is it that he has several babies at home suffering from loose bowels? .... Desperation? Yeah, right. I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem. The entire firearm department at a Wal-Mart department store, for example, was cleaned out and the looters used the stolen weapons to rob people. How low is that? Everybody is suffering and the black people would seek to rob people who are suffering just like themselves."

Some wise words from Thomas Sowell: "During good times or bad, the police cannot police everybody. They can at best control a small segment of society. The vast majority of people have to control themselves. That is where the great moral traditions of a society come in -- those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them that they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them. Now we see what those do-it-yourself standards amount to in the ugliness and anarchy of New Orleans. In a world where people flaunt their "independence," their "right" to disregard moral authority, and sometimes legal authority as well, the tragedy of New Orleans reminds us how utterly dependent each one of us is for our very lives on millions of other people we don't even see. Thousands of people in New Orleans will be saved because millions of other people they don't even know are moved by moral obligations to come to their rescue from all corners of this country. The things our clever sophisticates sneer at are ultimately all that stand between any of us and utter devastation.

Rebecca Hagelin has similar observations. Excerpt: "Why do we as a nation produce and embrace a pop culture that glorifies rap and hip-hop music, that teaches men to prey upon women and engage in senseless violence, and that is now, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's recent survey on media and youth, the number-one music choice of teenagers from all races and every socio-economic status? .... Why is it not only common knowledge but also accepted practice that organized crime and gangs hold much of the power and control much of the commerce in New Orleans? Will New Orleans return to business as usual? Or will you uplift the entire community by throwing out the thugs and their vile wares for which New Orleans is infamous? When you think about it, the values of the thugs involved in the post-Katrina crime wave really weren't all that different from those that have flooded sections of New Orleans with societal sewage for years."

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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WOMEN'S RIGHTS CAN BE WRONG

A recent very sophisticated econometric study by Silvia Pezzini of a huge body of data from several European countries looked at the effect of women's rights legislation on women's happiness. The study found, predictably, that getting access to the contraceptive pill was a great load off women's minds. What was much more interesting however, was the effect of laws that made divorce easier and laws that give working women maternity benefits. It was found that easier divorce REDUCES women's happiness overall and that job protection laws for mothers only worked for women who continued to be employed. Particularly in countries like Sweden, the main effect of maternity benefits for working women was that private employers stopped hiring women. Following is an excerpt from the conclusions of the paper:

"The main finding is that following the introduction of birth control rights, women who could take advantage from the policy (that is, they were of childbearing age at the time the policy was introduced) consistently registered an increase in welfare. The magnitude of the welfare gain is equivalent to the return from achieving higher rather than middle education and a third of the size of the gain from being married or cohabiting. It is approximately one tenth of the effect of going up one level on a 12-category scale of income....

At the same time, other women's rights have been less beneficial. The analysis shows that mutual consent divorce laws have decreased women's welfare, while granting high maternity protection in the workplace did not have significant effects, possibly because of negative feedback effects on the `employability' of women.

Source (PDF)

No-one really knows why easier divorce has made the majority of women unhappier but easier divorce certainly reduces the security of marriage and women do tend to value security in relationships highly.

USA Better for Working Women than Sweden

Just as one follow-up to the above, people might be interested in some findings in a 2004 book Key Issues in Women's Work by Catherine Hakim. Swedish women in the workplace who become pregnant must under Swedish law be given all sorts of benefits that few private businesses can afford -- so 75% of Swedish women work for the government. Nobody else wants them. And here's one result of that -- a result that should rile feminists no end:

"What is more, the glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendly Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will US, and it has also grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. In Sweden 1.5% of senior management are women, compared with 11% in the US."

Source

Conservatives keep telling Leftists that things are not as simple as you think and that coercion doesn't work very well -- and Leftists continue not to listen to that. But conservatives generally have the last laugh -- because human beings and human society ARE complex.

I say more about male/female matters in today's POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH.

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ELSEWHERE

Genetics will out: "A New Zealander who inherited $NZ1 million ($927,000) from foster parents who saved him from a childhood in institutions has been jailed indefinitely after 221 convictions in a 30-year life of crime, a newspaper reported today. A judge told Christian Harry Brusey, 46, he was a professional criminal who posed a risk to the safety of community despite his extraordinary upbringing by caring and affluent parents, The Dominion Post reported. The Wellington High Court was told Brusey was saved from life in an institution at the age of four by a wealthy couple and given the best education money could buy. But he turned to a life of crime with convictions for vicious sex attacks, theft, fraud and burglary with violence. Inheriting $NZ1 million when his foster parents died did not change him. "Maybe he was just born bad," detective Tim Leitch told the paper after Brusey was sentenced to preventive detention, which means he can be held indefinitely.

This is one poll you won't hear much about: "Most Americans, 55 percent, also say Bush does not deserve a significant level of personal blame for problems in the federal response to the crisis. And while 44 percent do assign him blame, only about half of them, 23 percent overall, blame him "a great deal."" There is a good coverage of the media frenzy on Newsbusters

A good post from Commonsense & Wonder: "How incredibly stupid is this? With housing and construction costs skyrocketing, a situation that Katrina is likely to exacerbate, the U.S. government wants to tariff Canadian lumber because it is too cheap. If the Canadian government wishes to subsidize their lumber industry with Canadian tax dollars so that U.S. citizens can purchase cheaper lumber what sane person in the U.S. would want to stop them?"

Three Cheers for "Price Gougers": "With every disaster or crisis, it seems that the public, press and politicians require a remedial course in Economics 101. In fact, apparently we need an ongoing educational campaign even when there is no catastrophe, as demonstrated by the recent foolish legislation in the state of Hawaii to cap wholesale fuel prices. Note the subhead in the linked story: "Some analysts warn move may spur supply problems." Really? Only "some"?"

Brits love the Gurkhas so this announcement should be popular: "Gurkhas, or Nepalese serving in the British army, are to be put on a par with British-born soldiers when it comes to family accommodation, British Defence Secretary John Reid announced this week. From April 1 next year, Gurkhas will be entitled to family accommodation once they have served for three years, and if they are accompanied by their spouses and children, he said. "The new arrangements put those Gurkhas who are eligible on the same footing as all other service personnel when it comes to the allocation of family accommodation," he said. In a statement, the Ministry of Defence in London said the announcement was proof of the government's commitment to ensuring that terms and conditions for Gurkha service were fair and equitable. Some 3,500 Nepalese serve in the British army, continuing a tradition that dates back two centuries. An estimated 43,000 Gurkhas were killed or wounded in action in the two world wars. Last year the government said it would grant the right to settle in Britain to those with at least four years' service.

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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GARBAGE SOCIOLOGY

Australians have repeatedly in recent years elected to power one of the world's most conservative governments -- so what do the sociologists find about Australian attitudes? This:

"Australians are now less conservative in their social and political thinking than they were under Paul Keating. The notion the country has swung to the Right under John Howard is challenged by the first major study of social attitudes since Labor lost power in 1996. Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report finds most people are satisfied with the economic gains made since the Prime Minister's election, and that they enjoy their work, are proud of their families, and feel confident and optimistic about the future. Most would happily give up tax cuts in exchange for more government spending on health or education, and support for immigration has more than doubled since the Keating years. "There has been no big swing to the Right on social issues," says Shaun Wilson, a lecturer in sociology at Macquarie University, who helped write the report.

Sheer Leftist boilerplate in other words. In the unlikely event that the study was done with proper academic care (i.e. with such things as a split-plots design, verified random sampling, balance against acquiescence, control for social desirability etc.), it just shows how slanting the questions can produce any answers you want. Sociologists generally know nothing about psychometrics but they are great at Leftist bias. I am a psychometrician who taught in a Sociology Department for 12 years so I know whereof I speak. If the "research" concerned ever gets published in a refereed journal, I look forward to having fun with it -- as I have done on many previous occasions.

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ELSEWHERE

A good comment from Frum on the New Orleans disaster: "There may well be fault on the part of the federal government and this administration. I'm certainly open to evidence on that point. But to review the wild, contradictory, and utterly opportunistic charges from the administration's critics is to enter a realm of madness. Some patient bloggers are responding to the charges one by one. Here is a post in reply to the charge that the levees were somehow neglected. Here is an accounting for the Louisiana National Guard: 8,000 of whom remain on duty in-state, including the Guard's most pertinent engineer group, numbering four battalions. Here is a crushing reply to those who blame the Bush administration for hurricanes - when hurricane activity has in fact dropped since 1940. Here is one of many stories detailing how the notorious New Orleans police force led the breakdown of civic order".

One of the most objectionable Leftist accusations about NO is fisked here. (Via Les Bates)

Brits trapped in NO: "During seemingly endless days and sleepless nights, the British survivors' fear of the hurricane's destructive force was transformed into terror of the other survivors. Mr Nelson, 21, and Jane Wheeldon, 20, told The Times how they and some 50 other foreigners - many of them British backpackers - were ordered by the US Army to gather together to protect themselves from resentful locals. "The army told us to stick in a group and for the women to sit in the middle with the men around the outside and to be ready to defend ourselves," .... The "internationals", as the army labelled the stranded tourists, were among the few white people in the stadium. Marked out by their skin colour and unfamiliar accents, they were verbally abused, while their luggage made them targets for robbery."

Fabulous news: "The treatment of high blood pressure, a condition affecting 18 million Britons, is being reviewed after research indicated that combining two drugs dramatically reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes. A combination of new hypertension drugs and a common statin used to lower cholesterol cuts the chances of a heart attack or stroke by almost two thirds, a study of more than 19,000 patients with high blood pressure has revealed."

EU threatens slap on wrist: "The European Union on Thursday urged Iran to return to the negotiating table to discuss its nuclear program and threatened to take Tehran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions if it did not. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers, Britain, France and Germany briefed the EU nations on the collapse of negotiations with Tehran and said U.N. intervention could well become the only option."

German Socialists prefer Russia to the USA: "At the yesterday's extraordinary meeting of Social Democratic Party (SPD), German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said SPD will go to elections independently and put forward Russia as a key foreign policy partner of Germany. SPD met in Berlin for a day yesterday, August 31, 2005. The highlight was parliamentary elections to be held on September 18, one year ahead of the schedule. Even before the meeting was opened, Schroeder announced SPD will go to elections independently, not in alliance with the Green Party. Contrary to the major rival - Christian Democratic Union, which leader Angela Merkel stands for the Berlin-Washington political cooperation in the election program, Schroeder has put forward Russia as the major partner in foreign policy"

No safety for Arab Christians in Palestinian areas: "Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched".

Not all readers here may be aware that I have been putting up a few postings on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH about America's North/South war. I jib at calling it a "civil war" because as far as I can see it was just another war of independence -- and as a libertarian, I tend to sympathize with wars of independence. And slavery was already on the way out at the time anyway. All other civilized countries managed to ban it without a war.

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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LET'S NAME THE REAL PROBLEM IN NEW ORLEANS

One of the privileges of being a blogger is that you can speak the truth as you see it without being censored. And I am going to excercise that privilege now. From what I have seen of the pictures and news reports (including blogger reports) coming out of NO, the main problem there was not meteorological but racial. As even this very cautious report notes:

"Although TV correspondents covering Hurricane Katrina avoid commenting on the obvious, their cameras hold back nothing. The people who couldn't or wouldn't leave New Orleans are overwhelmingly poor and black. As are the looters.... None of this, of course, excuses the looting, except perhaps to obtain food and water to survive. And it certainly doesn't excuse the shooting. Some looters even fired shots at rescuers Thursday, interfering with their critical missions as the city descended into near-anarchy"

And one of the reasons why black leaders and Leftists are shouting so loudly about Bush "not caring" about blacks has been to divert attention from the fact that it is "back to the jungle" behaviour by many blacks that has been a major part of the problems in NO -- if not the major problem. As soon as normal restraints were loosened large numbers of blacks completely ignored all laws and decencies and behaved like insensate beasts -- looting, raping and even shooting at rescue helicopters. For troops to be sent in with "shoot to kill" orders against black gangs and looters in an American city is so extraordinary that it reveals how total was the breakdown of civility in post-hurricane NO.

Given the fragility of civilized behaviour among large numbers of blacks, it seems to me that this should be a wake-up call to Americans every bit as vivid as the 9/11 events were. Black criminality must now be targeted as relentlessly as the lawless Muslim regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq were. All criticism of "racial profiling" must stop. "Racial profiling" must in fact be stepped up if the large bestial section of the black population is to be put in the one place suitable for them -- jail.

Robert Tracinski also summarizes the real problems in NO well:

"It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting".

Tracinski blames the problems on the culture of dependency fostered among blacks by the welfare state but, as far as I can see (and as Mark Steyn notes), normal black behaviour in Africa is comparably brutal most of the time and there is no welfare State there.

Here is just one example of a blogger report out of NO. The author of the report emailed me: "I actually had to remove the sentences about "they were animals" in order to get a link from one major site" -- so even bloggers have trouble getting the truth out.

And for comparison, note the comparatively minor death toll from the huge flooding in Eastern Europe in 2002: "Across Europe and Russia, flooding in recent weeks is responsible for the deaths of at least 97 people. The floods have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes, ruined harvests, and destroyed buildings and roads. In Germany alone, 15 people have died and 25 are missing". There are of course virtually no blacks in Eastern Europe. And note all the stories of looting, raping and gang violence in this report. (NOT).

Update

There are comprehensive updates here and here of how local officials prevented the timely evacuation and rescue of the city.

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Amazing achievements of Britain's Indians: "Mr Sheikh was just 14 and newly arrived from Uganda, his family one of the 80,000 Asians expelled by the then President, Idi Amin. In their homeland Mr Sheikh's father had owned a chain of clothes shops: the family was affluent. When they landed at Stansted Airport in September 1972, their wealth confiscated by Amin, they were penniless. "All we knew was that we had to work, and work hard, to do well and give back something to this wonderful new country which had taken us in." Today, Mr Sheikh's company, Clifton Packaging, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary, has an annual turnover of £6.5 million..... Last week that recognition came. Mr Sheikh became one of just hundreds of British Asians, the majority second generation, who were proud of the Institute of British Asians' announcement that Asians, while making up no more than 2.5 per cent of the British population, account for 10 per cent of its economic output, generating £103 billion into the economy. It was, said the institute's chairman, Khalid Darr, a "staggering" achievement. "Entrepreneurship," he said, "coupled with a wonderful work ethic, fuelled by a desire to better oneself, is a potent force driving the British Asian business community.""

Keith Burgess-Jackson tells it like it is about the Left: "James Taranto prepares the Best of the Web Today page for The Wall Street Journal. While I appreciate his work, and look forward to it each weekday, I must take exception to one of his pet phrases, "the Angry Left." The Left isn't angry; it's hateful. Anger can be righteous, as when one is wronged by another. If you throw an egg at my house, I'll be angry at you, and rightly so, since you had no right to deface my property. There's even a word for righteous anger: indignation. There is nothing wrong with anger per se. Whether it is wrong depends on its object and the circumstances. Anger at those who wrong one is appropriate; anger at those who are innocent is inappropriate. Anger can be either wild, uncontrollable, and irrational or focused, controllable, and rational. What's pathological is not anger itself but the inability to get angry at those who do you down. Hatred is different. Hatred is personal. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., hatred is "The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another; the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation; enmity, ill-will, malevolence." There is no such thing as righteous hatred; nor is there a word for it, as there is for righteous anger. Hatred is necessarily wild, uncontrollable, and irrational. Whereas anger can be the impetus to justice, hatred is almost always the impetus to injustice...."

Keith (himself a lawyer) also has some interesting comments on the issues raised by the death of Justice Rehnquist. We will be hearing MUCH more about that issue.

Robert Hayes is having a big blog-fight with a slimy feminist blogger. Interestingly, the fight centred around a number of errors of fact in an original post made by the feminist blogger. Far from admitting the error, she tried to evade it. As it happens, I made a small error of fact in one of my posts yesterday too. My reply to the person who pointed out the error? "Thanks to you, I have now fixed the error". I like to think that summarizes the difference between Leftists and Rightists. Leftists cannot handle the facts. Conservatives put the facts first.

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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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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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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