BLACKS VERSUS HISPANICS

John Brimelow recently put up on Vdare a reasonably friendly comment in response to my recent post about New Orleans. That he calls me a "market supremacist" causes me no grief at all -- though my libertarianism is in fact much broader than mere market advocacy. What Brimelow implies by calling me that however is a bit amusing. He is claiming that I ignore the importance of race and genetics. I am sure that any regular reader of my posts would be falling off their chair laughing at that!

What Brimelow is bothered by is that I appear to be defending Hispanics. As he is an anti-immigration warrior that curdles his egg-nog. I in fact am also an immigration restrictionist, unlike some libertarians. I think that just as a homeowner has the right to say who lives in his house, so a nation has a right to say whom they admit to their home. And, as an Australian, I am very mainstream about that. Both of our major political parties support a crackdown on illegal immigration and our government has in fact successfully reasserted control over immigration into our country.

But none of that should blind us to the fact that not all minorities are the same. And I think that a comparison of blacks and Hispanics treated as groups definitely favours Hispanics. I am well aware that the measured mean IQ of Hispanics in the USA is at present low but I have presented reasons elsewhere for thinking that Hispanics will in general eventually rise above that and become good mainstream Americans -- which only a Leftist would expect to happen with blacks as a group.

And Brimelow's claim that wages of up to $15 per hour are unattractive in a country where the national minimum is $5.15 seems to me quite absurd.

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ELSEWHERE

There is an interesting article here by Jeffrey Hart that attempts to summarize and integrate the current themes in American conservative thinking. Most of what Hart says has merit but, as might perhaps be expected from a professor of English, his history is weak. Identifying the founder of the Progressive Party (TR) as a conservative is an easy mistake to make (given the often extreme ways in which pre-WW2 and post-WW2 Leftism differ) but it is quite wrong nonetheless. One wonders if he has ever heard of TR's progressively more strident anti-business policies. See here for a more informed commentary on TR.

Conversions to Islam show failure of mainstream churches: "Mary Fallot looks as unlike a terrorist suspect as one could possibly imagine: a petite and demure white Frenchwoman chatting with friends on a cell-phone, indistinguishable from any other young woman in the caf, where she sits sipping coffee... Ms. Fallot is a recent convert to Islam... Fallot laughs when she is asked whether her love life had anything to do with her decision. "When I told my colleagues at work that I had converted, their first reaction was to ask whether I had a Muslim boyfriend," she recalls. "They couldn't believe I had done it of my own free will." In fact, she explains, she liked the way "Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points." Those reasons reflect many female converts' thinking, say experts who have studied the phenomenon. "A lot of women are reacting to the moral uncertainties of Western society," says Dr. Jawad. "They like the sense of belonging and caring and sharing that Islam offers."

Discrimination as property rights policy: "My wife and I were waiting to be seated at an airport restaurant when an angry man exclaimed, 'This is America! There's not supposed to be discrimination!' The man had been told that he could not be served since he was traveling with a pet and was asked to leave. I just rolled my eyes and felt sad for this person. The truth is, everyone discriminates. We do so not only on purpose but also with total impunity in most cases. Every decision that we make implies the rejection of other possibilities. Faced with the challenge of choosing from many options, a discriminatory process solves the problem. If we value A over B, we are discriminating against B."

German news magazine highlights Eastern European economic miracle: "The Spiegel is not known as a market-friendly publication, so it is noteworthy that the German news magazine has a lengthy article reviewing the economic revival in former communist nations. Slovakia and Estonia get much of the attention, and rightly so. These nations have implemented the flat tax and many other free market reforms. Too bad Angela Merkel thinks Germany needs more government. She could learn a thing or two by looking to the East:

Wonders never cease. There is actually a whole book called The Dittohead's Guide to Adult Beverages. Limbaugh-style humour is definitely in evidence. For impoverished Limbaugh fans, there are some extracts from it here.

A truth-teller not to be forgotten (Alain Besancon in "Commentary" of 1998) : "In my country [France], it is still possible to provoke a scandal by raising in public the issue of the crimes committed by Communism -- and an even greater scandal by suggesting that not only in the enormity of its crimes but in its very nature, Soviet Communism can be compared with that other great evil of our century, Nazism. This was illustrated once again by a recent French best-seller, The Black Book of Communism, an 846-page compilation by six historians with an introduction that points out a number of commonalities between the two totalitarian systems. The book has raised a storm of controversy in intellectual and political circles, and has even caused an uproar in parliament." (Hat tip to Keith Burgess Jackson)

I have just put up a new recipe on my recipe blog. (Mirror site here). It is a versatile recipe for fresh bernaise sauce.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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YET MORE EVIDENCE FOR THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IQ

"Bigger is better when it comes to brain matter, says a leading neuroscientist. Canadian researchers examined the brains of 100 people who were given extensive IQ tests before they died and found a correlation between cerebral volume and intelligence. "This is essentially the first study that is actually looking at the size of the brain directly and not through imaging," Sandra Witelson, who headed the study at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University, said Thursday from Hamilton. "What is very clear is that there is a correlation between brain size and intelligence, particularly verbal ability," said Dr. Witelson, noting that verbal ability encompasses comprehension of complex sentences, understanding verbal logical information and verbal memory.

The study looked specifically at the size of the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain, and found a correlation with verbal intelligence in women. The same correlation was found for right-handed men. The research paper was published online this month by the journal Brain. Dr. Witelson is the scientist who made headlines in 1999 after painstakingly studying the brain of the scientific genius Albert Einstein. She discovered that one part of his brain - the inferior parietal region, which is related to mathematical reasoning - was 15 per cent wider on both sides than normal. Her latest study involved the brains of 58 women and 42 men who all lived and died in the Hamilton area over the past 25 years. The subjects had secondary stage cancers - their cancers had spread, or metastasized - and while still relatively healthy, they agreed to take the intelligence tests as well as donate their brains to science after death.

Some studies have looked at intelligence using MRI images of the brain, but Dr. Witelson noted there is room for ambiguity in the images that come through computer programs. Likewise, she said people can't just look at head size and determine that a smaller head means a smaller brain, or vice versa. "There's a lot inside a skull other than just the brain," she said. The brains in her study were weighed and the volume calculated through the simple Archimedes' principle - they were placed in water, and measures were taken of how much water was displaced".

More here

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SOME MORE NOTES ON KATRINA AND ITS AFTERMATH

Katrina cleanup: Private firms best: "There are many reasons for the difference between the lack of progress in Pascagoula and the quick cleanup in the Biloxi area. But officials here point fingers at what they consider the No. 1 culprit: the federal government and, in particular, the Army Corps of Engineers. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Harrison County, the home of Biloxi, and Jackson County, where Pascagoula is located, each had about 10 million cubic yards of debris to clean up. Both counties took up the federal government on its offer to foot the bill. But while Harrison County and all but one of its cities hired contractors on their own, Jackson County and its cities, at the urging of the federal government, asked the Army Corps to take on the task. Officials in Jackson County said it was a choice they had regretted ever since. The cleanup in Jackson County and its municipalities has not only cost millions of dollars more than in neighboring counties, but it is also taking longer".

Those who live in glass houses ....: "The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which slammed the Bush administration for its allegedly slow and racially insensitive response to Hurricane Katrina, has yet to spend any of the estimated $400,000 that it raised for the victims of the Aug. 29 storm."

I have just put up here an interesting email from a reader that takes a skeptical look at the New Orleans fiasco.

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ELSEWHERE

There is yet another survey of American professors here which shows how strongly they adhere to Leftist politics. It also shows that the range of views among them is quite narrow. They march in lockstep to their Leftist drumbeat. They conform to an orthodoxy rather than being individual thinkers. No wonder they want to impose the same orthodoxy on everyone else.

Comment from Germany: "A former German hostage who spent 24 days in the hands of unknown captors in Iraq has said that her kidnappers were not criminals and had demanded humanitarian aid for Sunni Arab regions. She described her captors as "poor people" and said that she "cannot blame them for kidnapping her, as they cannot enter [Baghdad's heavily fortified] Green Zone to kidnap Americans." This has got to be another evil trick by Bush&Rumsfeld Inc. - incapacitating Iraqi terrorists ability to kidnap Americans by not allowing them to enter the Green Zone! Shocking!

The religion of peace: "A man allegedly killed his four daughters today by slitting their throats while they slept in their home in eastern Pakistan, after the eldest married a man of her choice, police said. "The man came to a police station ... after killing his four daughters," said senior police officer Mukhtar Iqbal Tikka. Nazeer Ahmed, who worked as a labourer near Burewala, some 110 kilometres east of Multan, had resented his eldest daughter's love marriage and killed the three others, fearing they might follow her, Tikka said. Ahmed allegedly told police his eldest daughter Muqadas Bibi, 25, had married a man of her choice against his wishes and her act had tarnished the family's honour so he plotted to kill her and his other daughters".

Stupid Jewish Leftists: "The movement of which I am a member has just voted against a war that I support. This vote by the Union of Reform Judaism was the first vote by a major national Jewish organization or religious movement opposing the war in Iraq. This war was and is being fought for American reasons, not Jewish reasons. However, to see this war that toppled one of Israel's fiercest enemies-an anti-Semitic dictator who sent $25,000 to the families of every jihadist who had been able to kill and maim Israeli children and other innocents-opposed by Jews is more than an act of ingratitude to this country and this president. This vote was an act of stunning and incomprehensible historical blindness".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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A SMALL PERSONAL NOTE

As I think I have mentioned here before, I get a lot of email where the sender's address ends in "mil" -- indicating that the sender is either enlisted in the U.S. armed forces or works as a civilian for the U.S. armed forces. And some of those emails do come from servicemen in Iraq. A frequent feature of those emails is that the sender thanks me for what I write in my postings both here and on other blogs. I always feel most unworthy of such thanks. I feel that it is I who should be thanking the men concerned who voluntarily put their lives at risk to serve the welfare of us all. Perhaps I am biased because of my own small service in the Australian army but I think the profession of arms is the noblest profession of all. In what other profession does one consciously volunteer to put one's own life at risk as an integral part of the job? I am therefore pleased that my latest post on Tongue-Tied may be of some help to the men and women serving in Iraq.

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NO RACIAL DIFFERENCES HERE OF COURSE

Blacks are streaming back to New Orleans to take advantage of the well-paid work available there .... Whoops! ... I got it wrong:

"Much of New Orleans lies abandoned and destroyed after Hurricane Katrina struck nearly four months ago, but for Latin American immigrants the storm-ravaged city has become a land of opportunity. While New Orleans residents are slow to return, the immigrants, most of them illegally in the United States, have swarmed in to do the hard work of cleaning up and rebuilding that others so far have shunned. They are not here because of altruism -- New Orleans is just another place in a strange land to them -- but because there is a huge unfulfilled demand for labor and, as a result, high wages they cannot get in their homeland or in other U.S. cities. In a sight common in the southwestern U.S., but new to New Orleans, they crowd street corners starting at daybreak, offering themselves as day laborers to anyone who needs them.

Most days, Delgado and his colleagues -- sometimes as many as 200 on this corner parking lot near the New Orleans central business district -- get hired quickly by contractors in passing pickup trucks, who whisk them off to whatever project is pending. "Baby, we couldn't do it without them," one of the employers shouted through his truck window.

There is so much work to be done, the immigrants say, that often they finish, return to the corner and get hired the same day for another job. The pay is good -- "$10, $12, $15 an hour," said Jose Del Rio, 38, from Chihuahua, Mexico -- and there are few problems....

The city was mostly abandoned after Katrina flooded 80 percent of it on Aug. 29 and most of it still sits empty and in ruins, waiting to be rebuilt. Mayor Ray Nagin said this week studies showed that as many as 150,000 of the pre-storm 462,000 residents have returned, but many doubt the figure is that high..... When asked where the American workers were, Del Rio shook his head and said, "Who knows? It just seems like the Latin race likes to work more.""

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ANOTHER LEFTIST FRAUD

The following note concerns Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the patrician socialist President F.D. Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt's fake "anti-racist" reputation: "The incident that most famously led to Eleanor Roosevelt's reputation as a foe of segregation and discrimination was her defense of the famous opera singer Marian Anderson. In 1937, Anderson was barred from performing at Constitution Hall because of her race. Roosevelt protested by resigning her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution which owned the hall. She also was instrumental in arranging for Anderson to perform at a special integrated out door concert on the Washington Mall. It was inspiring event that did much to show the follies of segregation. Yet, as black author, Zora Neale Hurston observed, there was more to the story. In 1951, Hurston noted that Anderson's manager...

"had originally applied to two places-Constitution Hall, the property of the D.A.R., and the auditorium of the White High School, the property of the District of Columbia.... The D.A.R. refused their hall to Mrs. Anderson..The school board likewise refused the auditorium of the high school.Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, et al., rushed into the fray and gave with a howl against narrow-minded racial discrimination that could be heard in Addis Ababa..But it was all directed against the D.A.R. No loud screaming against the school authorities. And as far as the high-school auditorium is concerned, to jump the people responsible for racial bias would be to accuse and expose the accusers themselves. The District of Columbia has no home rule; it is controlled by the congressional committees, and Congress at the time was overwhelmingly Democratic. It was controlled by the very people who were screaming so loudly against the D.A.R. To my way of thinking, both places should have been denounced, or neither.

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ELSEWHERE

The Australian Left is different: "Tax cuts for high-income earners and families will form the bedrock of a federal Labor tax plan designed to make Australia more competitive in the global labour market. Labor Treasury spokesman Wayne Swan has called for urgent reform to create a "flatter" tax system by cutting the number of marginal tax rates from four to three. In his most comprehensive blueprint yet for a redesign of the tax system, Mr Swan has also proposed stripping high-income earners of the tax-free allowance in return for lower marginal rates. His plans would also have more low-income earners pay no tax. In an essay, The Cutting Edge of Competitiveness, Mr Swan said his proposals would simplify the system and make Australia more competitive internationally".

Our friends, the Saudis: "The lawyer for an Indian migrant worker sentenced to have his eye gouged out as punishment by a Saudi Arabian court said he has launched a new appeal against the verdict.... Noushad, 32, had been working at a petrol pump in Dammam on the Saudi east coast since 1995. He had a fight with a Saudi customer over payment in April 2003 that put him in jail. The Saudi man later lost his eyesight, but the Indian said it was not because of the injuries he inflicted, and that he had acted in self-defence".

Jeff Jacoby has a very good post pointing out why the Jewish Hanukkah celebrations are significant for Christians.

For Americans there is a very sobering article just up on Strange Justice

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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 ANCIENT WORDS OF WISDOM

In this festive season many of us devote extra thought to the founder of the festivities and as I read his words I am struck by the evidence in them that the Left have always been with us. The intellectuals of Jesus's day were the Pharisees and when I read what Jesus said of them it seems to me that he could have been talking about our modern-day Leftist intellectuals. To remind you:

13 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

25 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

26 Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

From Matthew 23

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ELSEWHERE

Stupid US border cops: "Those leaky national borders so many people fret about? Not, apparently, a Minnesota problem -- at least in International Falls, where agents of the United States Customs and Border Protection are cracking down on people who might seem like innocents to the untrained among us. Take the case of Canadians Bob and Diana Hawley. On Nov. 2, they approached the border as they have for the past 20 years. The Kenora, Ontario, couple was headed to what they consider their winter home, an $850-a-month condo in Panama City, Fla. ... The Hawleys were -- gasp! -- attempting to transport a small yellow box of tools across the border. Agents spotted the toolbox and told the couple they were not welcome to enter the United States.'They said we must be going to Florida to do work,' Diana Hawley said. 'We tried to tell them that we always carry the toolbox in the car. If there's a breakdown, we might need it...' For the first hour of the interrogation, the Hawleys kept thinking this was just a misunderstanding. They have a hard time seeing how they can be confused with construction workers. He's 71, she's 70. He wears a knee brace and doesn't get around so easily."

Micro economics: "The White House regularly bemoans the fact that the economy is humming along impressively but the public doesn't recognize it. Just last week, President Bush told NBC News anchor Brian Williams that he's 'a little bit' frustrated by the public's negative attitude. 'I also think it's important to understand why people don't see or don't feel the improved economy,' Bush said. But he didn't offer an explanation. In truth, there are two explanations. One is the media, which dwells on bad economic news at the expense of good. As gasoline prices soared past $3.00 a gallon, the press couldn't say enough about this ugly trend. More recently as prices plummeted, the media was far less interested in touting the dramatic reversal. The second explanation involves the Bush administration itself.... the administration hadn't spread the word effectively about the strong economy.... How do we know the media has poisoned the public's view of the economy? It's really very simple. Opinion polls show basically that people believe overwhelming that they're doing well financially but the country isn't."

Even some 'progressives' now think multiculturalism has had it's day: "I was lucky to listen, in September, to a speech given by the British Commissioner for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, in response to the July 7 London bombings. Phillips made an impassioned and eloquent speech about moving beyond multiculturalism. In essence, he seemed to be suggesting that while multiculturalism had served Britain well in welcoming and accommodating millions of immigrants from all over the world over the past five decades, it was time that for the good of all Britons, British society took the next step: progressive integration. Phillips said not to take this step would be to "sleepwalk into segregation" as different communities became further entrenched and increasingly isolated from each other. Phillips seemed to suggest that we should remember that multiculturalism was meant to be a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. And as a means to an end, it's day has come".

Tyrannical (and job destroying) NSW occupational health & safety act: "If you think the proposed [Australian] sedition laws are tough, spare a thought for a piece of legislation that makes them look almost benign. Under this law, there is a presumption of guilt, the trial occurs before a tribunal and there is no appeal to a real court, and 96 per cent of those accused are found guilty. Plus the party bringing the case gets to keep half the fine. It's a package Philip Ruddock can only dream of. The law is the NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act 2000, under which hundreds of managers and companies are prosecuted every year".

"Homophobic" incident": Another lapse in sanity from Britain: "Mrs. Lynette Burrows was investigated by the police for what she said on a radio program. She had stated her belief that homosexuals should not be allowed to adopt. She added that placing boys with two homosexuals for adoption was as obvious a risk as placing a girl with two heterosexual men who offered themselves as parents. "It is a risk," she said. "You would not give a small girl to two men." A member of the public complained to the police and an officer contacted Mrs Burrows the following day to say a "homophobic incident" had been reported against her. "I was astounded," she said. "I told her this was a free country and we are allowed to express opinions on matters of public interest. She told me it was not a crime but that she had to record these incidents." "They were leaning on me, letting me know that the police had an interest in my views. I think it is sinister and completely unacceptable.""

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots of good reading for the festive season.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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MERRY CHRISTMAS to all who come by here



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THE SECULAR AND THE SACRED NEED NOT CONFLICT

"Christmas in America is done in a way that offends many people around the world, and also many Christians in the United States. The mega-bucks shopping, the over-the-top promotion, the non-stop jingles and carols, the light displays, yard decorations, huge inflatables everywhere -- must Christmas really be like this? No, it doesn't need to be. But neither should we be quick to take offense. A big Christmas need not be an insincere Christmas.

This point was made by Benedict XVI before he became Pope. He noted in a 1977 essay that .... "such criticism is largely justified, even though it might too readily forget that, behind the facade of business and sentimentality, the yearning for something purer and greater is not entirely extinguished; indeed, that the sentimental framework often provides the protecting shield behind which hides a noble and genuine sentiment that is simply reluctant to expose itself to the gaze of the other."

He is speaking about the core of good and virtuous intentions behind much of what is assailed as "commercialism." Much of what people buy is for others. But what people do to commemorate Christmas reflects an inner sense that something extraordinary is occurred and continues to occur on the night of Jesus' birth. All this fuss would not take place over a fat man in the red suit... From the earliest centuries, Christmas was not merely a private affair for homes and parishes. Christians obtain grace from reflecting on the miracle of the Incarnation but they have given the event called Christmas as a glorious gift to the world".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

I have always thought it crystal clear that the USA is the kindest nation that the world has ever seen. There is a short article by Herb London that gives a brilliant example of that.

Post from No Left turns: "This is amusing. I'm guessing that the New York Times is in need of copy because this report, filed from Kenya about anthropologists researching their so-called Dream Tribe is pretty empty. It seems that anthropologists--those who study human beings as if they were worms (that is, as if they have no rational faculties) and then call it science; or, those who study culture and cannot discover the human nature to be found therein--discovered the isolated Ariaal tribe, in the 1970's, in Kenya and started poking at them and asking them questions. The article notes--without even the depth of a Margaret Mead--that the tribesmen have been studying the anthropologists as well, and that they are disappointed when they get no feedback from the researchers. A chief, wearing a Boston University T-shirt and sandals made of used tires, said this: "We don't mind helping people get their Ph.D.'s, but once they get their Ph.D.'s, many of them go away. They don't send us their reports. What have we achieved from the plucking of our hair? We want feedback. We want development." The article notes some of the published studies to come from this research. For example, "In a study in The International Journal of Impotence Research, Dr. Campbell also found that Ariaal men with many wives showed less erectile dysfunction than did men of the same age with fewer spouses." Amazing.

Africa's war on poverty begins at home: "It is true that rich countries' protectionism harms some producers in the developing world but trade liberalization in rich countries as a cure for African poverty is often over-emphasized. The main causes of African impoverishment are internal. Africa lacks political stability and economic freedom. Its tariffs are high and private property rights weak. It is hypocritical for African leaders to call for greater access to global markets while avoiding policy reforms, including trade openness, at home."

Good to hear: "The city transit union sent its members back to work without a new contract yesterday after a three-day strike that brought subways and buses to a standstill, earning the union the wrath of commuters and millions in fines and lost pay. Union members were told to return to their jobs starting with the evening shift. Buses were scheduled to roll again by evening.... The walkout, which began early Tuesday, was New York's first citywide transit strike in more than 25 years. The workers left their jobs in violation of a state law prohibiting public employee strikes. The return to work was announced minutes before Mr. Toussaint and two top deputies were due in a Brooklyn courtroom to answer criminal-contempt charges that could have landed them in jail".

Unusual good sense in San Francisco "The ranks of homeless people on welfare in San Francisco shrank 84 percent over the last 18 months through the city's Care Not Cash program, and by next May, there should be no homeless people left on the rolls at all, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday in his second annual State of Homelessness address. The best news about that development, he told a cheering crowd of city workers, homeless people and social service providers, is that about half of the 2,106 homeless people who left welfare -- 1,101 of them to be precise -- are now living in newly created housing, Newsom said. And at a time when crucial federal funding for housing and other social programs is either being cut or put in danger of cuts, that's 'not bad,' he said. 'I remember my critics saying there is no way there will be a decline in (welfare) rolls with Care Not Cash,' Newsom said. 'Well, now that's 84 percent. ... We've done a very good job with that program... The voter-approved Care Not Cash overcame court challenges and premiered in May 2004, when 2,497 homeless people were receiving monthly welfare checks of as much as $410. Those checks are cut to $59 under the program, and the homeless are offered housing or shelter instead'"

Small steps toward immigration reform: "Congress passed an immigration bill last week that takes some small steps toward asserting control over our nation's porous borders. I supported the bill despite its lack of substance, in the hope that it will move America in the right direction on the critical issue of illegal immigration. Some measures in the bill sound good, but are in effect superfluous. Do we need new legislation requiring the Department of Homeland Security to achieve 'operational control of the borders?' Shouldn't the federal government already have 'operational control of the borders?'"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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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INTERESTING SUMMARY OF THE VATICAN'S ATTITUDE TO THE AMERICAN PRESENCE IN IRAQ

The Vatican opposed the American invasion but now supports the American presence!

So during the months of the war in Iraq, various and sometimes opposing approaches operated at the highest levels of the Church, under the insignia of pope Wojtlya. But these different approaches were essentially reconciled beginning in the autumn of 2003. The turning point was the terrorist bloodbath in Nassiriya on November 12. And the new orientation was marked by cardinal Ruini's homily at the Mass for the nineteen Italians who were killed:

"To love even our enemies: this is the great treasure that we must not permit to be stolen from our consciences and our hearts, not even on the part of the terrorist assassins. We will not run away from them, but will face them with all the courage, energy, and determination of which we are capable. But we will not hate them; on the contrary, we will not grow weary of exerting ourselves to make them understand that all of our effort, including our military effort, is aimed at safeguarding and promoting a humane coexistence in which there is room and dignity for every people, culture, and religion."

From that point onward, beginning with that memorable "we will not run away," the Holy See consistently defined, not as an "occupation," but as a "mission of peace," the presence of Western troops in Iraq in defense of the nascent democracy.

This same realist line, which had forcefully opposed the war at the Vatican, now defended its results and demanded that the soldiers remain in Iraq as long as necessary, to safeguard the formation of a new order, free and peaceful, which, as precarious as it might be, is seen as much more acceptable than leaving this crucial country to its own devices.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Projection again: It's the Leftists who live in a "bubble": "To a remarkable degree, America's liberal elites have constructed for themselves a comfortable, supportive, and self esteem-enhancing environment. The most prestigious and widest-reaching media outlets reinforce their views, rock stars and film makers provide lyrics and stories making their points, college professors tell them they are right, and the biggest foundations like Ford fund studies to prove them correct. It has been a disaster for them..... As a result, liberal discourse has become an in-group code, perfectly understandable and comforting among the elect, but increasingly disconnected from everyone else, and off-putting to those not included in the ranks of the in-group. Rather than focusing on facts, logic, and persuasion, liberals find it easier to employ labeling ("That's racist!") and airy dismissal of contrary views to sway their audience, and because their authority figures in the media and academia accept this behavior, they assume it is persuasive to the rest of us. Even worse (for them), the self-reinforcement they experience in their geographical, academic and media strongholds encourages more and more extreme expression of their worldview. Within the in-group, such strong expression of group norms earns prestige. But to the rest of society it becomes stranger and stranger, until it becomes repellant".

The Democrat love-affair with evil: "So what is the real reason the Democrats seem so eager to help Al Qaeda? There are two reasons: they like America and Republicans even less than they like Al Qaeda. Bleeding heart Democrats were once known to be pro criminal, and now they are know to be pro terrorist. They were and to a large, but quieter, extent still are pro criminal because they believed an evil, capitalist, individualistic, Republican America produced criminals, and so they did everything they could to coddle criminals and blame America for producing them. Fortunately, as crime then rose, the Democrats descended. But now the Democrats are back at the same concept with their pro-terrorist theme".

Canadians bow down to Islam: "On December 2, the Liberal candidate for Mississauga-Erindale, Omar Alghabra, made his victory speech after winning the nomination. In that speech, he reportedly exhorted his audience, "This is a victory for Islam! Islam won! Islam Won! ... Islamic power is extending into Canadian politics". Alghabra's victory speech was delivered to an audience of several hundred in the Coptic Christian Centre of the Church of the Virgin Mary and St. Athanasius in Mississauga. David Ragheb, a member of the congregation, reported that following Alghabra's victory speech, Markham Councillor Khalid Osman took to the stage and declared, "We have the east, we have the west, and now we have Mississauga!" to cheers and applause from the audience. Ragheb also reported that Rogers Cable was present throughout and may have filmed the event. "A member of parliament is supposed to represent my concerns about taxes and roads in Mississauga, not promote an Islamic agenda," said Ragheb. Victor Fouad, a Coptic Christian, was disturbed to hear of such Islamist rhetoric from a Liberal who could easily become a Canadian parliamentarian. Mr. Fouad assumed that Paul Martin would likewise disapprove of such incitement by a Liberal candidate, and so wrote to the Prime Minister detailing what had happened. That message was ignored. The event took place over 2 weeks ago, and Paul Martin's silence since that time can only be interpreted as approval of Mr. Alghabra's rhetoric".

With liberty and cacophony for all: "Last month's riots in France reminded me -- not that I needed reminding -- that I'm glad I emigrated to the United States and not to France. As is known by now, the Paris rioters went on a rampage because they, the children of immigrants, had long felt like second-class citizens in France, the land of their birth. After decades of being discriminated against and shut out from the mainstream, the dam apparently broke recently. Across the Atlantic here in this country, it is a different, more positive story. A group of us Indian-American immigrants sat around recently, talking, reminiscing, all with similar backgrounds: all had had a middle-class Indian upbringing, had been in this country for a decade or more, had come here with essentially the same things -- a good education, two suitcases and the proverbial 10 dollars in our pockets. And all had, through a combination of frugality, resilience, positive attitude and hard work, pursued and achieved the American Dream, more or less. Lest we get self-congratulatory, however, one in the group put it in proper perspective: Yes, we had done well, he said, but the credit goes, in large part, to the country and society in which we live."

In response to my recent posts about the U.S. birthrate a reader has sent me some interesting anecdotes and observations about which groups in the U.S. population are having the babies. I have posted the email here

China Hand has just put up his Christmas wishes together with some festive photos from China.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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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NEW FORMAT?

I believe that users of some minority browsers (Firefox?) are having trouble with this page seeming wider than the screen. It is because of the Table I posted on 22nd. IE handles it with no problems so the solution is to switch to IE or use the mirror site for a week or so until the table drops off the front page. The problem could also be caused by a low screen resolution so setting your browser or your screen to a higher resolution should help.

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INTERESTING DATA: STUPID INTERPRETATION

New research by economists Professor Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick, and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee at London University's Institute of Education, reveals that the more daughters a family has the more likely the parents are to vote for left of centre parties. Sons, by contrast, make people more right-wing.... On average, each daughter raises the likelihood of left-wing voting by 2% percentage probability points....

The researchers believe there are subconscious reasons behind the observed voting decisions. Women, they argue, are inherently collectivist while men are individualistic. They point out that because there is pay discrimination against women, and females put greater importance on public spending on issues like community safety, females are thus intrinsically more left-wing than males. As men acquire female children, those men gradually shift their political stance and, through subconscious concern for their daughters, become sympathetic to the "female" desire for more public spending and thus a steeper income tax schedule. Similarly, a mother with many sons becomes sympathetic to the "male" case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods....

Source

If women are inherently more Leftist, how come GWB got roughly 50% of the female vote in the 2004 Presidential election? The finding above more probably reflects some hormonal influence

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Brookes News Update

Clinton's boom holds lessons for Bush: By raising interest rates the fed has confessed that they had been forced below their market level
Australian economy: why the jobs figures are dangerously misleading: Tightening labour markets are not always indicative of economic growth. That Terry McCrann thinks otherwise is typical of our economic commentariat, despite the fact that classical economists knew better
How Australia's rightwing managed to discredit labour market reform: A competent economist would have immediately pointed out that there is no economic law that says free labour markets are sufficient or even necessary to promote productivity and economic growth. The 1960s is ample proof of this fact
Media lies about President Bush and "mass spying": Taking their cue from the NYT the media falsely accused Bush of mass spying against Americans. The media are the real scandal here -- not George W. Bush
Lebanese Muslim thugs spark riots and the media blame "racist" Australians: Lebanese Muslim goons have been terrorizing locals for years without a peep from those leftwing bigots who call themselves journalists
Muslim bigots impose blasphemy laws on Victoria: The Bracks Government suspended free speech in Victoria by imposing a blasphemy law dressed up as an anti-vilification law. Moreover, an EOC member who is a Muslim bigot conspired to persecute two Christian pastors
Letter to an American Soldier: We will not allow them to sully your honor or your service. We will not allow them to throw mud into the blood you have spilled
Kanye West 2006?: Good luck to Kanye and his political aspirations. Better yet, Kanye, don't give up your day job
Attempt to assassinate Iran's President fails: Rebels attacked Iran's Presidential convoy

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ELSEWHERE

The Left are always claiming that the GOP are in the pocket of big business. There is an absolutely scandalous story just up on EDUCATION WATCH, which, I regret to say, confirms that accusation.

Chinese Repressed Again in Dongzhou: "Two weeks after a protest that culminated in gunfire and bloodshed, the rebellious farmers and fishermen of Dongzhou have been reduced to submission. Authorities have sealed off the seaside village and flooded its streets and lanes with police patrols, residents said, and an unknown number of men have been summoned by a knock on the door and hauled away for interrogation."

Apologists for evil out in force: "He co-founded the Crips gang to protect his neighborhood, not kill people or run drugs, and Stanley Tookie Williams died an innocent man, wrongly executed for four murders he did not commit. That's how celebrities, religious leaders and former and current gang members remembered the man who was executed last week for the 1979 murders of four people. It was a far different picture than the one painted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he refused to grant clemency to Williams who, Schwarzenegger said, did not demonstrate the remorse necessary to warrant consideration.... But Williams eventually came to renounce the Crips and other gangs, and in a tape he made from prison, he called on mourners to continue his anti-gang efforts. Teach them to promote peace and teach them to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods that you, others and I helped to destroy," he said on the scratchy recording".

Sometimes even lawyers can do good. There is a tribute to one here. Excerpt: "Few people know that every day, American JAG officers work in Iraqi courtrooms with Iraqi judges. They prosecute insurgents. McGovern did not know. But after the Akbar case, he was sent to Iraq to do just that. He would charge insurgents with murder and attempted murder. If he did not have quite enough evidence to get them on those charges, he would bring them up on illegal border crossings. He would argue his case using Iraqi laws signed in 1969 by Saddam Hussein. In five months, he worked with more than 400 cases and had a 90 percent conviction rate. He often sat close to those insurgents everyone hears about on the evening news."

Christian persecution growing : An array of activists yesterday offered a grim assessment of religious freedom around the world, saying that 2005 years after Jesus' birth, many of His followers are severely repressed. The chief villains in a "Christmas Under Siege Around the World" panel at the Capitol were Indonesia, China, Uzbekistan, Iran and North Korea. "Anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world ... the mass media seem to generally ignore or downplay its gravity,"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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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Skin colour and brain activity genetically linked?

German (Austrian?) geneticist Volkmar Weiss has just pointed out that the effect of the recently identified skin color gene SLC24A5, which makes the difference between the white race and other races (See here), is more than skin deep. SLC24A5 is also active in the brain (See here).

Given the statistical linkage between IQ and skin colour (See for instance the Table below), that should not really be too surprising but there are none so blind as those who will not see. The Table is from an article by Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa that is in press at the journal Intelligence.



There are more details and some commentary about the article from which the table above is taken here but you need to scroll down to get to it. And see here for some interesting comments on Volkmar Weiss's observation.

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ELSEWHERE

Poor whites keeping the U.S. birthrate up? There is a big table of statistics here on female fertility in the USA. The figures that I found most interesting were from non-Hispanic whites aged 35 to 44. Women of that age will have mostly completed their families and the difference between the over 40 and under 40 sectors were in fact slight. Around 20% had NEVER had children, which, to the best of my knowledge, is what it has always been. There were plenty of maiden aunts in Victorian and Edwardian England, for instance. But most encouraging was the no. of children per woman in that age and racial group. At around 1.8 it is quite high compared with Europe. How many of the whites concerned were poor whites is however another matter. My guess would be that the white American birthrate is so high mainly because America has a lot of poor whites. In welfare states, of course, nobody is really poor.

Islamic Jew-hatred: "Outsiders are rarely aware of how intense the Muslim world's Jew-hatred is. "What has surprised me is the virulence of this new anti-Semitism throughout all the Muslim countries," the distinguished journalist and editor Harold Evans wrote in 2002. "It is frenzied, vociferous, paranoid, vicious, and prolific, and is only incidentally connected to the Palestinian conflict." It is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that accounts for this loathing of Jews. It is the loathing of Jews that accounts for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obsessive anti-Semitism almost always characterizes the most dangerous threats to America and the West. Nazism, Communism, Islamofascism -- one thing they have in common is intense anti-Semitism. Which is why Ahmadinejad's strident rhetoric should be setting off urgent alarms. Dictators who talk about wiping nations from the face of the earth generally mean what they say. We should know by now that it isn't only Jews who are endangered by the mullahs and their threats. All of us are. And time is wasting".

The German sickness: "Stern magazine (Germany's # 1 magazine by circulation) has finally discovered why life is so rotten in Germany these days. The Western world is breaking apart and its all America's fault. This time it's a commentary in Stern magazine with a dramatic title: "America is destroying the West." Like so many Stern pieces, this article has all the tell-tale elements of the perverted view of America that has come to dominate and cloud the minds of many in the German media establishment".

Stupid German Leftist women embrace Islam: " More than 1,000 people converted to Islam in Germany this year, the highest figure on record, and the majority were women who were not married to a Muslim, according to a report this week. "This is a considerable rise," Salim Abdullah, the director of the Central Institute of Islamic Archives in Germany, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. The Institute said its statistics showed that 14,352 of the 3.2mn Muslims in Germany are of German descent. More than 60% of the converts to Muslim are women and most of them are "university-educated and affluent", Abdullah said. Only a small percentage converted to Islam as a result of marrying a Muslim.

Dennis Prager comments: "Jews who support the Christian right are "Uncle Jakes." So says a pro-Israeli Jewish official in his recent column for the Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel organization. "Uncle Jake" is M. J. Rosenberg's term for Jewish equivalent of "Uncle Tom." Just as the left sees conservative blacks as traitors to African-Americans, so it sees conservative Jews as traitors to the Jewish people. I am the "Uncle Jake" most criticized in the Rosenberg column. That a Jew on the left would use this term to describe Jews who support conservative Christians gives one an idea of how irrational, how hysterical are the arguments of the Jewish (and non-Jewish) left. And lacking a rational basis, they frequently rely on name-calling... The use of this smear is the tactic of those who cannot argue".

Freeman calls Black History Month `ridiculous': Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is "ridiculous." "You're going to relegate my history to a month?" the 68-year-old actor says in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" to air Sunday (7 p.m. EST). "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history." Black History Month has roots in historian Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week, which he designated in 1926 as the second week in February to mark the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Woodson said he hoped the week could one day be eliminated - when black history would become fundamental to American history. Freeman notes there is no "white history month," and says the only way to get rid of racism is to "stop talking about it."

Arnie strikes back: "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in his hometown in Austria to remove his name from a sports stadium and stop using his identity to promote the city. The governor's request came after politicians in Graz began a petition drive to rename the stadium, reacting to Schwarzenegger's decision last week to deny clemency to condemned inmate Stanley Tookie Williams. Opposition to the death penalty is strong in Austria".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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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Liberalism as Socially Motivated Cognition

Excerpt below from a post by Dr Helen. My own comment on the "study" that got her dander up is here

"I have mentioned a research study by the APA entitled, Political Conservatism as Socially Motivated Cognition, that appeared biased against conservatives. The study pointed out that there had been little research done on the traits of liberals--but they must have overlooked this article in Clio Psych's Journal from 2003. Here is an excerpt from the article that mentioned research on liberals from 1982--I guess the writers of the APA's biased article did not see fit to go back that far.

Research on the psychology of radical activists helps us to understand this mismatch between Chomsky's ideas and his personal style. In the 1970s, Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter administered Thematic Apperception Tests to a large sample of "new left" radicals (Roots of Radicalism, 1982). They found that activists were characterized by weakened self-esteem, injured narcissism and paranoid tendencies. They were preoccupied with power and attracted to radical ideologies that offered clear and unambiguous answers to their questions. All of these traits can be found in the work of Chomsky and other anti-imperialist intellectuals.

And if you ever wondered why some liberals seem wishy-washy at times--this paragraph from the same article might explain things:

The unwillingness to offer alternatives reveals a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. If they offered their own policy ideas they would be vulnerable to criticism. They would run the risk that their ideas would fail, or would not seem persuasive to others. This is especially difficult for anti-capitalists after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has also been difficult in the war against terrorism because Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are such unsympathetic figures. Psychologically, it is easier to blame America for not finding a solution than it is to put one's own ideas on the line.

Hmmm.... I don't agree here that it is lack of self-esteem that would cause liberals to seem spineless. I think it is their desire to avoid responsibility at any cost".

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ELSEWHERE

There is a useful summary here of the recent Steven Pinker lecture in which Pinker came out in favour of the argument that Western Jews are genetically more intelligent than other Westerners: "Though the moderator thanked him for a very 'even-handed' presentation on a controversial topic, to my ear what Pinker presented was a spirited endorsement of the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending (CHH) paper. The presentation generally seemed to fill the need to present these controversial ideas to a very interested audience by a trusted authoritative source. It didn't seem to me that Pinker added anything that Cochran or Harpending could not have provided themselves except proximity to NYC and comfortably strong Ashkenazik credentials. Overall Pinker emphasized the reasonableness of the authors' hypotheses, the generally better quality of the genetic evidence over the environmental, the non-rational basis of much of the opposition, and the paper's strong foundation in the current state of knowledge". There is another account of the talk here.

Media New Orleans backtrack "In the traditional winter/spring crush by major newspapers to publish investigative stories that land them on finalist lists for hotly contested journalism awards, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times both put forth front-page stories this weekend that dramatically contradict much of their own coverage of the disaster. The New York Times found that of 260 deaths it analyzed, "Of those who failed to heed evacuation orders, many were offered a ride or could have driven themselves out of danger," while the Los Angeles Times found that "the well-to-do died along with the poor." Despite media coverage that focused on poor blacks, of the 380 bodies formally identified in New Orleans thus far, the Los Angeles paper said, a disproportionate number were white -- as measured against the city's population"

A wonderful article here by a man who gave up journalism to join the Marines. Excerpt: "When people ask why I recently left The Wall Street Journal to join the Marines, I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that's not the whole answer, and how I got to this point wasn't a straight line. It's a clich‚ that you appreciate your own country more when you live abroad, but it happens to be true. Living in China for the last seven years, I've seen that country take a giant leap from a struggling Third World country into a true world power. For many people it still comes as a surprise to learn that China is chasing Japan as the second-largest economy on the globe and could soon own a trillion dollars of American debt. But living in China also shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens. I've seen protesters tackled and beaten by plainclothes police in Tiananmen Square, and I've been videotaped by government agents while I was talking to a source. I've been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them.... When you live abroad long enough, you come to understand that governments that behave this way are not the exception, but the rule. They feel alien to us, but from the viewpoint of the world's population, we are the aliens, not them. That makes you think about protecting your country no matter who you are or what you're doing".

Now for the Senate: "House lawmakers opened the way for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as one of their last acts of an all-night session Monday bringing their legislative year to a close".

I have just posted here a challenge to the "anti-vilification" laws in the Australian State of Victoria that have been used to prosecute two Christian pastors for quoting the Koran(!)

The latest issue of Ovi Magazine is out. I have an article or two in there somewhere. It's a magazine to browse through rather than look for particular content. Could be handy during the Christmas break.

Jim Paine is continuing his monitoring of the disgusting but basically empty-headed Prof. Ward Churchill and his supposed "Indian" ancestry. It should be a wonder that an American university continues to employ such a chronic liar but I am afraid that it is not. Leftists have never rated the truth as very important.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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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RACE IS REAL -- AGAIN

Even mentioning the word "race" makes one into something of a polecat these days but reality does not go away because it has become unfashionable and reality is my no. 1 interest in life. The only "reality" Leftists have in mind when they claim to be "reality-based" is their devotion to a theory! And the theory concerned -- evolution -- is a highly imperfect one!

Anyway, there are a few scientists -- mostly Asian -- who continue to do research on human genetics that includes mention of race. And they of course uniformly find that the allegedly "social" construct of race in fact has an overwhelmingly genetic basis. The more genetic markers they use, the more accurately they can tell what your racial origins are. I reproduce the abstract of the latest such study -- by Tang et al -- below. Note that they could even pick out Hispanics reliably on the basis of their genes -- presumably because Amerindians are distinct genetically and "Hispanics" are in fact mostly Amerindian.

"We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ ethnicity-as opposed to current residence-is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population. Implications of this genetic structure for case-control association studies are discussed".

Still, I suppose all those Leftist "intellectuals" who cannot believe the evidence of their own eyes as they walk down the street (all those black skins are "socially constructed", don't you know?) are not going to be much moved by research of any kind. The PDF of the whole study is here

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ELSEWHERE

There is a post here which is a very good example of Leftist elitism. The writer dismisses the Iraq election on the grounds that Iraqis are too simple to have minds of their own. So a nice dictatorship is all that they are fit for. And did you know that the only reason American troops are in Iraq is "Bush's vanity"? A lot of these Leftists really are sick puppies.

Adult Stem Cell Research Discovery Could Change Entire Embryonic Debate: "Scientists at the University of Louisville say they have made a discovery of a certain kind of adult stem cell they say could drastically change the debate about embryonic stem cell research. The researchers have reportedly found stem cells from adult mice to change into brain, nerve, heart muscle and pancreatic cells. The ability to take on the characteristics of other cells is the primary selling point for using embryonic stem cells, which can only be obtained by destroying unborn children in their earliest days. The discovery could greatly expand the dozens of therapies and treatments already available from adult stem cells and the researcher say it could end the entire stem cell research debate. "We have found a counterpart for embryonic stem cells in adult bone marrow. This could negate the ethical concerns""

Michigan Brownshirts Rampage for Race Quotas: "Momentum continues to build for a noisy showdown over racial preferences in Michigan. Just how ugly the issue could become was starkly demonstrated last week in Lansing, the state capital. The state’s Board of Canvassers, a four-person body split by law between Democrats and Republicans, was meeting to decide whether to certify for the 2006 ballot a referendum that would ban the use of race in state hiring and admissions policies. But no sooner had the meeting started than a mob of mostly black students from Detroit schools, led by a radical national outfit calling itself By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), stormed the building, overturning tables, jumping on chairs, stomping their feet and yelling “They say Jim Crow – We say hell no.”"

If you have broadband (or a lot of patience) there are some excellent and revealing photos here which were taken outside the gates of San Quentin Prison on the evening of December 12, 2005 during a vigil marking the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams. They show the Left at their looniest and most intolerant and also show the media displaying their usual bias.

Hopeless British Tories: "But the Cameron thing is not a revival of Conservatism. Early indications are that the arrival of this apparently young, dynamic leader may well boost his party's standing in the polls. But in political terms, his accession marks the final demise of anything that might be recognised as a Tory Party. The political emptying-out of Conservatism, a process that has been proceeding in faltering fashion for some time, is now set to accelerate towards a conclusion. Many comparisons have been made between Cameron and prime minister Tony Blair. Here is one that seems to have escaped the notice of most commentators. We now effectively have a non-Tory leading the Conservative Party, to go with our non-Labourite leader of the Labour Party".

Apply zero tolerance to something that matters : "He was once in the Air Force, he says, refueling jet fighters. He once worked for a military contractor, building nose cones for missile defense systems. But he can't work for the city of Scottsdale. The city this week pushed Garrett Ross out of his job as a building inspector. This, because of a 4-year-old speeding ticket. Or more precisely, his failure to disclose said speeding ticket when he applied for his job in 2004. How the city and its bureaucrats managed to survive with such a hardened criminal in their midst is beyond me. Fortunately, they caught on last month. 'This letter is your notice that under the provisions of Sec. 14-74 of the Scottsdale Revised Code request that your presence is required at a Pre-Termination Hearing at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005 ... ,' said a Nov. 29 ungrammatical letter from Frank Gray, general manager of Planning and Development Services."

See here for America's first libertarian student newspaper, the Pennsylvania Independent. They aim to make sure the next generations of Americans value liberty, and hope to be the first in what is to be a rightward shift toward libertarian principles and values. It has some good articles.

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts -- on his usual themes of IQ and race.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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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)

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