BURNS NIGHT!

I don't feel much in the mood for pointing out Leftist distortions and deceptions today so I will talk about more personal things. I might however note in passing that there is a particularly poisonous Leftist site here that seems to be enamoured of the egregious Prof. Ward Churchill. They seem impressed that Churchill is popular with his students. The fact that con-men are usually popular is not mentioned. There is a systematic dismantling of some of their deceptions about Churchill here

With that aside, I am going to say a few words about what I did on Monday. Monday was Anne's birthday and preparations also had to be made for Burns night on Wednesday (TODAY!) so I was busier than usual. At 9am I set out to track down and capture a haggis for Wednesday dinner. And it was in fact more of an expedition than I had expected. Being a lazy sod, I don't make my own haggis but get it off a very talented man who is both a master butcher and a brilliant pastrycook. Visiting his shop is always a great pleasure. His website is here. I usually get to his shop by taking an exit off the freeway that leads straight to the shop but on Monday I discovered that the bureaucrats who know better what is good for us than we do ourselves had closed that exit off. So I spent half a nerve-frazzling hour trying to find an alternative route to the shop. I eventually succeeded more from luck than good management. And, Yes, I DID stop and ask for directions at a nearby service station but the young girl on duty there did not have a clue, not too surprisingly.

Anyway, I did finally get my haggis plus some clootie dumpling for dessert. I am marking the birthday of the poet in a very low-key way this year. No speeches etc. There will be just four of us at my place to share some haggis and probably read some of the poems. For those unfortunate souls who have never been to a proper Burns night, you can at least read about it here. My own previous post on it is here.

Anyway, on Monday night I took Anne to the Hilton for the smorgasbord. The Hilton smorgasbord is probably the dearest in town but the food is probably also the best -- including a big bucket of the incomparable Sydney rock-oysters in prime condition. I had bought Anne some white slacks (of a very un-slack kind) plus an embroidered white top for the occasion and she got into high heels for what she said was the first time in 40 years so she looked pretty good to me. For some inscrutable reason she seemed to think that I looked good in a blue shirt and grey slacks but there is no accounting for taste. Anyway, we people in our 60s can still have a lot of fun, surprising though that news might be to much younger people.

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ELSEWHERE



Tory win in Canada: "Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party won national elections Monday and ended 13 years of Liberal rule, a victory expected to move Canada rightward on social and economic issues and lead to improved ties with the United States. The Conservatives' winning margin was too narrow to avoid ruling with a minority government, a situation that will make it difficult to get legislation through a divided House of Commons... With nearly all votes counted in the race for the 308-seat House, officials results showed Conservatives with 123 seats; Liberals with 103; Bloc Quebecois with 50, New Democratic Party with 28; and one seat to an Independent. Three seats still haven't been determined. Prime Minister Paul Martin conceded defeat and said he would step down as head of the party"

Amusing: My post yesterday about the hate-filled Canadian John Chuckman seems to have got under the chuckful one's skin. I got a speedy email rejoinder from him. I cannot find the rejoinder online at the moment so I reproduce it in full here (together with a few more comments from me) for the entertainment of all.

Israel has Leftist loonies that are arguably the looniest of all. They abuse and call "Nazis" the very Israeli soldiers who protect them from extermination by the Arabs. What would Leftists do without the word "Nazi" to abuse people with?

Blair tries to cut one of Britain's biggest rackets: "Ministers will try to sound the death knell of the sick-note culture today by unveiling plans to take a million people off incapacity benefit at a saving of up to 7 billion pounds. The proposals will mean hundreds of thousands of people who have been on the benefit for many years being asked to attend interviews to judge their suitability for work. After Tony Blair made clear yesterday that he was ready for a showdown with his party over the education Bill, he will open up a new battlefront with his backing for the plan that John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will present. Like the schools Bill, it may receive support from the Conservatives. Doctors will be urged to consider alternatives to writing sick notes if they believe that their patients will be helped by doing work"

While the Da Vinci Code movie debuts at Cannes, the real story of a fake gospel goes unnoticed in the mainstream media. The late professor Morton Smith apparently created a fake "Secret Mark" gospel with the intent on showing that Jesus was homosexual. Apparently Morton Smith was homosexual although it is never openly documented owing to political correctness. This new book by an attorney, Stephen C. Carlson, has debunked the whole thing. They will never make a movie about it. Instead millions will flock to the fictional Da Vinci Code and swallow it hook line and sinker. I have never read nor do I intend to read the Da Vinci Code but it apparently contains some very large howlers. It refers for instance to Opus Dei monks whereas Opus Dei is a layman's movement.

The EU pot calls the Turkish kettle black: "The European Union today welcomed Turkey's decision to end the prosecution of Orhan Pamuk, the country's best selling writer, but urged a wider reform of the country's free speech laws.... Olli Rehn, the EU's Enlargement Commissioner, said the collapse of the case should lead to a "positive outcome" for the dozens of Turkish journalists and authors currently facing similar charges.... "It is clear for me that Turkey needs to fill properly the loopholes of the current Penal Code, which leave too much room for abusive and restrictive interpretations limiting freedom of expression.""

Chris Brand has just put together a new lot of posts which he believes represent good news on racial matters.

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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LEFTIST LOGIC: THE NAZIS INVOKED GOD SO ANYBODY WHO INVOKES GOD IS A NAZI

That is the classic non sequitur underlying a piece of pure hate by the aptly-named Canadian John Chuckman. According to him, asking the blessing of God is akin to Nazism. The entire article is one distortion after another. Putting a balanced argument would leave him with nothing to say. I have added just a few comments out of the many that spring to mind

I hadn't realized until recently that Stephen Harper was using "God Bless Canada!" as a tagline for his speeches. Some may think this a harmless, or even beneficent, expression for a politician to use, but for those with knowledge of history, nothing could be a more frightening. I do believe we all know to whom Harper is tipping his hat with these words. George Bush, author of two wars which have killed more than a hundred thousand innocent people [A reference to a now thoroughly discredited piece of Leftist propaganda masquerading as science] and the champion of an ugly set of repressive laws [Being a Canadian Leftist, I guess he means the awful oppression of homosexuals being allowed civil unions only -- which is just the same as Hitler murdering homosexuals by the thousands, of course] in the United States, says "God Bless America!" every chance he gets.

Some might say Bush uses the line because he has nothing else to say, and I don't doubt this is part of the truth. But slogans of this kind are always used to protect dangerous people from criticism. The words are used also as code, a kind of insidious political wink, to bloodthirsty supporters, the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell types [Who was it again that Robertson and Falwell killed? I forget. Was it Mary Jo Kopechne perhaps?] . They says [He is as weak on grammar as he is on the facts] things that cannot be uttered in public [Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell hold back from speaking their minds in public?? This bozo must be the only guy who thinks so]. Bush usually says it in front of a set of gigantic, eagle-topped American flags, reminiscent of nothing so much as the days when Germany's leader spoke and sputtered in front of platoons of monstrous, threatening flags. [But I guess the red flag would be OK]

Bush also always wears a prominently-placed American flag pin on his lapel, just in case you forget where he's from. I can never help thinking of the image of Hitler wearing his quiet Iron Cross on an otherwise plain, neatly-tailored uniform. [So all patriotic Americans are Nazis, I guess. And the similarity between a German war decoration and the American flag really is obvious, isn't it?] Neatness and patriotism for the cameras instead of troops sloshing through human blood. The belt buckle of the German legions which murdered their way across Europe were embossed with "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us) [But "Allah akhbar", meaning "God is great" is OK of course] over a fierce eagle grasping the swastika. This is only to say that there is a record in fairly recent history of the use of religious slogans in politics to cover horrors. I recall a photograph of American Marines, having illegally [Illegally under what law? Are heaps of U.N. resolutions that Saddam refused to comply with and big majority votes in the U.S. Congress not enough?] invaded Iraq, kneeling for a quick blessing before going out to kill more Iraqis in their own land [How nasty of them to kill terrorists while the terrorists are trying to kill them!].

The blurb about Chuckman says: "He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency". I would say that all three of those attributes are conspicuously missing from the above article.

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Murdoch is on the ball: "Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent company of The Times, yesterday gave warning that British competitiveness and productivity were being held back by over-regulation stemming from the Government.... Mr Murdoch said that Labour was "extending the nanny state," and complained that the "cost of business was going up" at a time when newspaper advertising, and by implication the wider economy, was "tightening up". Arguing that education was fundamental to Britain's competitiveness in the world, Mr Murdoch said: "If the labour Party is so stupid as to prevent Blair from putting through his [education] reforms, then the Conservative Party should certainly support Blair. We're not educating our people properly here."

Conservatives ahead in Canada: "Latest opinion polls are predicting a clear win for the opposition Conservative Party in tomorrow's Canadian election but leader Stephen Harper will need a late spike in support to achieve an absolute majority in the 308-seat House of Commons. After starting the eight-week campaign well behind Paul Martin's Liberal Government, Mr Harper has retained his comfortable 7- to 12-point lead in all the major polls published at the weekend.

The European parliament shows its fundamentally anti-democratic nature by acting as if its rejected constitution had been approved: "Look at the number of policies and institutions envisaged by the constitution that have been, or are being, enacted regardless: the European External Action Service, the European Human Rights Agency, the European Defence Agency, the European Space Programme, the European External Borders Agency, a justicable Charter of Fundamental Rights. None of these has a proper legal basis outside the constitution"

A good Indonesian Muslim: "I have been called 'Chrislam' because I am so close to Christians," Abdurrahman Wahid is saying. "When I was criticized by a certain Muslim preacher for not being harsh enough against the 'kaffir' [infidels] -- for being too close to Jews and Christians -- I told him to read the Koran again. Because when the Koran speaks of 'infidels,' it means idolaters," not monotheists.... With 200 million residents, Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim nation, and Wahid -- popularly known as Gus Dur -- was not only its first democratically elected president but the longtime chairman of its largest Muslim organization, the 35 million-member Nadhlatul Ulama. A revered religious scholar who studied in Cairo and Baghdad, Wahid is a longtime champion of a moderate, progressive, and nonpolitical Islam. As a result, he has frequently clashed with militant fundamentalists whose growing influence, fueled by Arab/Wahhabi oil money, is undermining Indonesia's traditional religious pluralism".

Modern liberalism's central flaw : "Modern liberals sadly cling to their most grievous flaw and that is what makes them, even if at times only inadvertently, fundamentally misanthropic. They believe that advancing their objectives, even those that are perfectly valid, ought to be done by using coercion against those whose cooperation they seek. This major, colossal error on their part makes it even difficult to join them in their various campaigns to help those they wish to help, to argue against those whom they rightly oppose. As a recent example, consider the war in Iraq. Most modern liberals oppose this war but do so on grounds that are frankly blatantly hypocritical"

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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PARDON ME WHILE I LAUGH

Below is part of a rather pathetic news report to which I have added a few comments:

"Hundreds of progressive Christians from around the country are coming to Berkeley next week to plan how to take Christianity back from the right wing. [Only hundreds! How amusing! Probably more like dozens. And THEY are going to convert millions of Christians to Leftism?]

"'Progressive Christian' is not an oxymoron [just an ordinary moron], despite what the right says," said Diane Thomas, director of advanced placement programs at the Pacific School of Religion, part of UC Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. PSR is sponsoring the event. "Our goal is to put the soul back in Christianity, to focus it back on what it's always been about," said Thomas.

The event will be held Monday through Thursday at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. PSR Dean of Faculty Emeritus Delwin Brown, one of the main speakers, says the left has itself to blame for its present powerless condition. "We assumed that a more humane, more compassionate, more intellectually serious interpretation of Christianity would inevitably win out," he said. "We forfeited the argument to the other side." Brown said the left also has a tradition of hostility to religion that handicaps its ability to talk to people of faith. [A sudden rush of reality to his head]

"There's been a long-seated suspicion of authoritarianism [including Communism?], primary of which is organized religion [Organized religion is the main source of authoritarianism? He must have forgotten about the whole history of the Left from the French revolution on -- but in this guy's weird religion maybe the Communists were not authoritiarian!].

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Thomas Holsinger makes the case for invading Iran: "All the reasons for invading Iraq apply doubly to Iran, and with far greater urgency. Iran right now poses the imminent threat to America which Iraq did not in 2003. Iran may already have some nuclear weapons, purchased from North Korea or made with materials acquired from North Korea, which would increase its threat to us from imminent to direct and immediate." [And even Pat Buchanan seems to agree!]

V.D. Hanson on Leftist self-contradiction: "At home, much about Iraq has been turned around in Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass fashion. Indeed the debate over Iraq has too often descended into Jabberwocky-like gibberish. We were once slandered as hegemonic; but when we didn't steal anything in Iraq, and instead spent billions in aid, suddenly we were called naive by the now realist Left. The war was caricatured as all about grabbing oil. Then when the price skyrocketed, we were dubbed foolish for tampering with the fragile petroleum landscape, or with not charging Iraqi price-gouging exporters for our time and services. Americans tried to remain idealistic on the principle that Iraqis, if freed and helped, could craft a workable democracy, and that such consensual governments would make the volatile Middle East safer, since elected and legitimate governments rarely attack their own kind. In response, the supposedly idealistic Left charged that we were bellicose and imperialistic - as if being on the side of the purple-fingered Iraqi voter was not preferable to being on the side of the terrorist and insurrectionist, who masked his fascism with national rhetoric."

Religious freedom to be restricted in EU : "Clergymen across the United Kingdom have been left highly concerned by a European Union report which has recommended that clergy not be allowed a right of conscientious objection to conducting gay weddings if the Parliament decides to enact legislation permitting same sex marriages. The EU ruling states that the rights of access to abortion, euthanasia, birth control and marriage trump the right of conscience to opt out of conducting gay weddings, reported The Church of England Newspaper. The highly controversial report by the EU's Network of Independent Experts on Human Rights said that where "euthanasia or assisted suicide are partially decriminalized, the right to religious conscientious objection, while it should be recognized to the medical doctors asked to perform euthanasia or to assist a person in committing suicide, should not be exercised in a way which leads to depriving any person from the possibility of exercising effectively his or her rights as guaranteed under the applicable legislation." The report also stated that the "right of access" should take precedence over the right for clergy or registrars to object to solemnizing gay weddings, where the law permitted them.

German government scammed: "Part of the ransom money alleged to have been paid by the German government to win the freedom of Iraq hostage Susanne Osthoff last month was found on Osthoff after her release, the German magazine Focus said on Saturday. Without citing its sources, Focus said officials at the German embassy in Baghdad had found several thousand U.S. dollars in the 43-year-old German archaeologist's clothes when she took a shower at the embassy shortly after being freed.... Osthoff, who converted to Islam and lived in Iraq, was seized heading north from Baghdad on Nov. 25 by gunmen who threatened in a videotape to kill her and her driver unless Germany ended all support for the Iraqi government... Two days after her release, the German government freed a Hizbollah member jailed for life in 1985 for the murder of a U.S. Navy diver. Berlin has denied a connection between the two events. Osthoff herself caused a stir when she said in an interview at the end of December that she did not believe her kidnappers were criminals.

Some readers may be aware of the Italian Muslim leader who is PRO-Israel. As he says here: "Israel exists by Divine Right, confirmed in both the Bible and Qur'an." There is also video of a recent interview with him (in English) here

Walter Williams explains that the poor get RICHER!: "Talk about the poor getting poorer tugs at the hearts of decent people and squares nicely with the agenda of big government advocates, but it doesn't square with the facts. ...The authors analyzed University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data that tracked more than 50,000 individual families since 1968. Cox and Alms found: Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. Three-quarters of these families had moved into the three highest income quintiles. ...Cox and Alm's findings were supported by a U.S. Treasury Department study that used an entirely different data base, income tax returns. The U.S. Treasury found that 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom income quintile in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile by 1988 -- 66 percent to second and third quintiles and 15 percent to the top quintile".

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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DERRIDA

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for Leftists. Their peculiar compulsions often give them a need to deny reality, which is why the "nothing is real" brand of Continental philosophers appeal to them -- with Jacques Derrida being the chief reality denier -- a man who always had a rapturous audience of Leftists on his visits to America. But listen to the painful stuff that Derrida had to say about the 9/11/2001 events in NYC and elsewhere:

"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy-a name, a number-points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

Amusingly, he got it right in his last sentence above. Leftists are often intelligent people. They must at times find it depressing that they have to claim to find wisdom in such a hopelessly incoherent soul as Derrida. They would find more sense in the average loony bin. (HT Capitalism Magazine)

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Brookes News Update

Inflation and the US economy -- what's the problem?: As money is not neutral, a price stabilisation policy would aggravate inflation and destabilise the economy by distorting prices and production
The commodities boom and China: the missing ingredient: A great deal has been said about the current commodity boom -- nearly all of it wrong. As usual so-called analysts fell into the trap of confusing symptoms with causes
Murdoch journalists smear President Bush over NSA spying program: What was particularly dishonest about these so-called journalists was their refusal to give space to anyone who could provide a legal argument for the President's surveillance program
The media bats for the Dems to blame the GOP for Abramoff: The Bush-hating Michael Gawenda is another lefty journalist who is falling over himself to slime the Republicans over the Abramoff affair
Illinois GOP: Finding the Promised Land: What incentive is there for voters to unseat a Democratic incumbent and hire a Republican in his place, if the GOP offers candidates who, on the issues, are nothing more than Democrat-light?
Lefty journalist distorts the facts on General Motors' crisis: The leftwing Stephen Ellis is another Murdoch journalist who has trouble confronting reality, in between bashing markets and president Bush
Capitalism is the real friend of the poor -- not socialism: The one question our anti-poverty warriors never really address is the nature and origins of poverty. They always give the impression that poverty is a unique problem caused by an unjust distribution of wealth and income
Keynesians are wrong -- cost cutting does benefit the economy: Cost cutting is an important means of correcting previous erroneous decisions in order to be able to return to a situation where real wealth can be generated again

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ELSEWHERE

Access to the German version of Wikipedia has been restricted by a German court. This is of course an intolerable attack on free speech which I am sure all libertarians will do their best to defeat. You can see that the forbidden information which caused the site to be taken down -- the information that the real name of a German/Yugoslav hacker known as "Tron" was in fact Boris Floricic -- cannot be found via a search of the German site but the information IS still freely available on the U.S. site. To do my bit towards spreading the forbidden information, I will repeat the core of it here in my rough German: Hacker Tron heisst im Tatsache Boris Floricic. "Tron" is ein Beiname. Weiter hier. And my comment to the German court concerned: "Heil Hitler"!

Interesting that anti-hereditarian psychologist Prof. Elizabeth Spelke now say that at least some types of mathematical ability are genetically hard-wired. Sometimes the data can atom-bomb even a Leftist mind. But she is probably only an affirmative action appointee so unparsimonious thinking on her part should be no surprise.

In the latest "City Journal" we read how Democrats have begun to wield campaign-finance regulations, especially McCain-Feingold, and are pushing for a new Fairness Doctrine to try to muzzle the influential new media world of talk radio, cable-TV news, and the blogosphere. In short order, these outlets have ended the monopoly on U.S. political discourse that the liberal mainstream media, headed by CBS News and the New York Times, so long enjoyed, with seismic political consequences, possibly including George W. Bush's reelection. Apoplectic at its loss of power, the Left, rather than debating these new media, is trying to smother them, in such a flagrant attempt to suppress free speech as would make the Founders weep.

Cheney says domestic surveillance vital : "Vice President Dick Cheney offered a robust defense of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program Thursday, calling it an essential tool in monitoring the activities of al-Qaida and associated terrorist organizations. But he stressed the program was limited in scope and had been conducted in a way that safeguarded civil liberties. In a luncheon speech at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public policy think tank, Cheney warned that the United States still faced significant threats from a network of terrorists intent on establishing a radical Islamic empire throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East."

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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DEFENDING FAKE-HERO MURTHA: MORE DESPERATE LEFTIST "AD HOMINEM" NONSENSE

"Ad hominem" arguments (i.e. denigrating your opponent) are what you use when the opponent's facts are all against you

The January 18, 2006 NY Times Op Ed by James Webb attempts to discredit Marc Morano's reporting by stating in part: "One of the authors of the Murtha article was Marc Morano, a long-time writer and producer for Rush Limbaugh."

Marc Morano has circulated by email the following reply (partially quoted here): "So I guess all news reporting by ABC News's George Stephanopoulos, who worked for the Clinton administration, and NBC News's Tim Russert, who once worked for former Democratic Sen. D. Patrick Moynihan, should all be disregarded because they have a Democratic Party background.

Questioning a politician's war record has always been a legitimate role of journalists. Former President Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by some in the media for serving in Hollywood making films supporting U.S. participation in World War II. The AP and the Washington Post in 1988 questioned whether or not then-Vice President George H. W. Bush's (G. W. Bush's father) bailed out of his air plane too soon during a Navy bombing mission in World War II, causing the death of his two co-pilots. (See the August 12, 1988 the Associated Press article entitled: "War Buddy Reluctantly Disputes Bush's Account of Bomber Bailout."). The Nation magazine questioned the inflating of Sen. Bob Dole's war record in 1996. Of course, President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard has been scrutinized by multiple news outlets, as was Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War service. Why do so many believe Rep. John Murtha's war record should be above scrutiny?

Nobody has disputed the facts of the Cybercast News Service article written by myself and Randy Hall."

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ELSEWHERE

Vive la France! "France said on Thursday it would be ready to use nuclear weapons against any state that carried out a terrorist attack against it, reaffirming the need for its nuclear deterrent. Deflecting criticism of France's costly nuclear arms program, President Jacques Chirac said security came at a price and France must be able to hit back hard at a hostile state's centers of power and its "capacity to act.""

Another Leftist clutch at straws: "Scripps Howard News Service announced Jan. 13 that it's severing its business relationship with columnist Michael Fumento, who's also a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. The move comes after inquiries from BusinessWeek Online about payments Fumento received from agribusiness giant Monsanto -- a frequent subject of praise in Fumento's opinion columns and a book. In a statement released on Jan. 13, Scripps Howard News Service Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland said Fumento "did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto." [The payments actually went to the Hudson Inst. -- which DID disclose them!]

Amusing comment on an Irish Catholic priest who fathered a child: "It's great to hear of a normal heterosexual priest for a change. There's nothing wrong with a loving relationship. He should be left alone".

Another loony Leftist who cannot tell the difference between Nazism and democracy (not really surprising): "These are not your father's Republicans. These Republicans take no prisoners. Cross them and, even if you are a fellow traveler, they will have you rubbed out. They tasted first blood during the Clinton years, and like chicken-killing dogs, liked it. So when they picked Texan George W. Bush as their candidate, they decided it was time to see just how far they could take the smear, how far they could push it. But pushing it -- bending the truth, even breaking it -- was politically dangerous. They needed deniability and distance. So they outsourced their smear work. That's when the Brownshirts arrived. It was one thing to accuse a sitting president of lying about sex, and quite another to accuse war heroes of being lying cowards."

There is an amazing article here about the racial slurs that have been directed at SCOTUS nomineee Alito by Democrats. Calling him a "wop" was the least of it. It seems that Italian-Americans have joined WASPs as fair game for the Left. For people who claim to deplore racism, ethnic slurs directed at ANY group are pretty amazing. But principles and consistency have always been alien to the Left.

Ann Coulter: "As noted here previously, George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy. Since I described McCarthy as a great American patriot defamed by liberals in my 2003 book, "Treason," liberals have had two more years to produce a person - just one person - falsely accused by McCarthy. They still can't do it. Meanwhile, I can prove that Murrow's good friend Lawrence Duggan was a Soviet spy responsible for having innocent people murdered".

'Plantation' remarks still echoing on Hill: "Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's fiery political remark Monday that the Republican House is like a 'plantation' has triggered charges of playing the race card and a sharp rebuke from first lady Laura Bush, who called her comment ridiculous. The New York Democrat's racial broadside during a Martin Luther King Day appearance at a Baptist church in Harlem continued to spark debate yesterday on both sides of the political aisle. Black Democratic leaders such as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois defended and attempted to explain Mrs. Clinton's remarks, saying she was referring to a "further consolidation of power" by Republicans in Washington. But Mrs. Bush, en route home from a trip to West Africa, said, 'I think it's ridiculous -- it's a ridiculous comment.'"

There is an appalling story here of how the (mostly French) Belgian Left have allied themselves with the Muslims to hit out at the Dutch-speaking Belgians (Flemings).

There is a story on Australian Politics of a quite extraordinary outburst of rage and hate from a prominent Australian Leftist.

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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INDONESIA

These are the charming people immediately to Australia's North

Muslim Indonesians rival Pol Pot and the Nazis: "The Indonesian military used starvation as a weapon to exterminate the [Christian] East Timorese, according to a UN report documenting the deaths of as many as 180,000 civilians at the hands of the occupying forces. The 2500-page report, obtained by The Australian, has been suppressed for months by the East Timorese Government and will infuriate Indonesia, which has punished only a handful of soldiers for the murders, assaults and rapes that occurred during its 24 years of occupation. Napalm and chemical weapons, which poisoned the food and water supply, were used by Indonesian soldiers against the East Timorese in the brutal invasion and annexation of the half-island to Australia's north, according to the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation report... It documents a litany of massacres, thousands of summary executions of civilians and the torture of 8500 East Timorese - with horrific details of public beheadings, the mutilation of genitalia, the burying and burning alive of victims, use of cigarettes to burn victims and also ears and genitals being lopped off to display to families.... The deaths amounted to almost a third of East Timor's pre-invasion population .... The Indonesian security forces "consciously decided to use starvation of East Timorese civilians as a weapon of war", the report says... "The violations were committed in execution of a systematic plan approved, conducted and controlled by Indonesian military commanders at the highest level." ... The commission carefully notes that many of the Indonesian military officers who played key roles in the occupation have since been promoted and details their ascension in the military."

Indonesians tyrannizing Melanesians right now : "More than 40 West Papuan asylum-seekers who fled the troubled Indonesian province in a large outrigger canoe six days ago landed on a remote beach in far north Queensland yesterday.... The 25m traditional dugout canoe was fitted with an outboard motor and was flying the outlawed West Papuan flag. "Save West Papua people souls from genocide, intimidation and terorist from military government of Indonesia," read a crudely worded banner on the boat. "We West Papua need freedom, peace, love and justice in our home." ... Faced with increasing political tension in West Papua and the overwhelming strength of the Indonesian military, Ms Byrne said the asylum-seekers fled the troubled province rather than risk being jailed and tortured for their knowledge of government affairs.... The asylum-seekers are believed to include Herman Wanggai, a student leader from West Papua who had spent time in prison for treason, his wife and their three-year-old twins. [See my earlier post here for background on the plight of the Papuans]

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ELSEWHERE

Thatcher's legacy squandered by Blair: "Perceptions about the "state of the nation" tend to change only gradually. In the 1980s the belief that Britain was doomed to decline lingered for some time after the Thatcher reforms had paved the road to economic recovery. Labour, by contrast, has benefited from revived national confidence that Britain had rediscovered the secrets of market-led success. That confidence appears increasingly misplaced.... Public sector productivity is deplorably low, so that the larger the public payroll, the worse Britain's overall economy performs. In every year since Labour came to power, British output per hour, which had previously been showing relative improvement, has fallen further behind that of the United States. This year's productivity gain is expected to be a mere 0.9 per cent, equal to that of Germany, well behind France (1.4 per cent), and half the rate in the US (1.8 per cent) and Japan (1.9 per cent)... The past eight years have seen a marked "continental drift" in Britain. Taxes here are now higher than in Germany for the first time in a generation. According to the OECD, which is as objective as any institution, British state spending will swallow a bigger slice of national wealth next year than the famously profligate German welfare state".

Socialist tax laws could drive big British companies overseas: "The Times has learnt that at least one FTSE 100 company is investigating domiciling itself outside the UK following an 18-month crackdown by Revenue & Customs on tax avoidance. Other companies are so angry at the clampdown on previously accepted business practices that they are refusing to co-operate with Revenue's attempts to understand corporate tax planning. Guy Brannan, head of tax at Linklaters, the City law firm, said that the relocation plans of a number of companies were at a "pretty advanced stage". Mr Brannan said: "The Government's attitude is becoming counter-productive. If companies do not have to be headquartered in the UK and a large proportion of their business is elsewhere, they are investigating moving outside the UK." The Netherlands, Ireland and Luxembourg were popular alternatives to Britain, he said.... Last November Ian McCafferty, the CBI's chief economic adviser, attacked the Treasury's anti-avoidance campaign. "These measures are effectively a covert means of extending the tax base to raise revenue while circumventing previously accepted tax principle and practice," he said."

A richly deserved penalty: "A California court sentenced a couple to nine years in prison for planting a fingertip in a bowl of chilli to swindle a Wendy's fast-food restaurant. A judge in Santa Clara Superior Court sentenced Anna Ayala and her husband Jaime Plascencia to nine years' imprisonment for their role in the Wendy's scam, which caused a sharp fall in sales at the third-largest US burger chain.... Ayala, 39, a Las Vegas resident, initially claimed she found the piece of finger after buying the bowl of chilli last March. She hired a lawyer and complained publicly about the experience, attracting wide attention to the seemingly bizarre incident... Wendy's International, based in Dublin, Ohio, paid a $US100,000 ($133,000) reward for information to help establish the source of the fingertip. Company officials said it took Wendy's months to recover from the bad publicity and lost millions of dollars in sales because of the incident. At one point it gave away free ice-cream to try to lure customers back into its San Jose area restaurants."

Keith Burgess Jackson has finally given up on Hillary Clinton. He now calls her a "harpy". She certainly is a nasty piece of goods. Let's hope she gets the Donk nomination for Prez in 2008. She will be her own worst enemy.

I am delighted to report that the posts on Tongue Tied by Scott and myself are helping to educate America's young people in a way that the official education system would never do. A U.S. college English student has just sent me a copy of an essay that she handed in as part of her coursework. The essay was inspired by what she read on Tongue Tied. It is some evidence that the mind-control attempted by the Left-dominated U.S. educational system will never completely succeed. I have reproduced the essay here

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts to update us on the news about on race and IQ. See here

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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RACE AND IQ -- DESPERATE REARGUARD ACTION AT "THE GUARDIAN"

Leftists will of course always believe what they want to believe. Their simplistic conceptions of the world matter far more to them than the facts. But even for Leftists, the truth about race and IQ is getting increasingly hard to ignore. And a recent article in "the Guardian" by Marek Kohn is testimony to that. He admits that the old Leftist shibboleths like "race does not exist" just sound hysterical these days and refers to sources that set out at length the evidence that race not only exists but that it is important. In particular, he refers to two publications by Charles Murray that set out at massive length the scientific evidence for group differences, racial differences in IQ included.

So what is a Leftist to do who knows as much about the facts as Kohn does? He bleats. But as well as bleating, he deliberately misleads. He says that Murray only "suggested" that there are differences in average IQ between the races. The difference in average black/white IQ would however have to be the most massively proven finding in the whole of psychology. It has emerged ad nauseam in study after study stretching back nearly 100 years. What does it take to turn a "suggestion" into a fact? I guess Kohn must be one of those post-modernists for whom there are no such things as facts. If you cut his salary, I think you would find that he would have no hesitation in regarding that as a fact, however -- a fact to be howled loudly about.

In the end, however, Kohn does not challenge the research findings. All he does is bleat about their explanation. Because he cannot see how racial differences in IQ have arisen, he seems to think that this means that they do not exist. I might as well argue that because I cannot understand how someone as stupid as Marek Kohn could exist then he does not exist either. A Freudian would call that strategy a "denial" defence mechanism. It is of course true that our explanations of how racial differences in IQ have arisen are speculative but most explanations in astrophysics are speculative too. Does that mean that the stars and the planets do not exist? I would like to suggest that in the great scheme of things it does not really matter much whether Marek Kohn understands something or not. But the facts matter.

His conclusion is however perfectly sensible, even if he cannot resist a pun: "We have gone beyond the stage where the question of racial science could be seen as a straightforward contest between decent values and sinister pseudoscience. It's no longer black and white".

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ELSEWHERE

Assisted suicide now legal in the USA: "The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the Bush administration's attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die, protecting Oregon's one-of-a-kind assisted-suicide law.... The administration improperly tried to use a federal drug law to pursue Oregon doctors who prescribe lethal doses of prescription medicines, the court said in a rebuke to former Attorney General John Ashcroft. The 6-3 ruling could encourage other states to consider copying Oregon's law, used to end the lives of more than 200 seriously ill people in that state."

Hollywood puts ideology first: "Christian groups led a furious campaign against Hollywood yesterday, accusing the Golden Globe Awards of promoting films with gay or "leftist" themes to serve a political agenda. The criticism was made after Brokeback Mountain, a film about the forbidden love between gay Wyoming cowboys, won four awards. Other winners included Philip Seymour Hoffman, named Best Actor for his portrayal of the homosexual writer Truman Capote; and Felicity Huffman, the Desperate Housewives actress who played a transsexual with a gay prostitute son in Transamerica. "Once again, the media elites are proving that their pet projects are more important than profit," Janice Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, said. "None of the three movies - Capote, Transamerica or Brokeback Mountain - is a box office hit. Brokeback Mountain has barely topped $25 million in ticket sales. If America isn't watching these films, why are they winning the awards?" The criticism from the American heartland carried more weight than usual this year because Hollywood suffered the biggest decline in attendance in two decades last year. Some of the few box office hits of the year were films such as The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which appealed strongly to Christian audiences".

House of Lords defends free speech: "Plans to curtail the actions of Islamic extremists by banning the glorification of terrorism suffered a setback last night after peers voted down the proposed new offence. A series of peers denounced the offence as pointless and said that its removal from the Terrorism Bill would still allow suspects to be charged with indirect encouragement to commit acts of terror. A move to strike glorification of terrorism from the Bill was carried by 270 votes to 144, a majority of 126, at its report stage despite government protests that the power was needed".

Black racism: "Nagin promised that New Orleans will be a "chocolate" city again. Many of the city's black neighborhoods were heavily damaged by Katrina. "It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans - the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans." [See my comment on Nagin here]

Another Democrat nut: "Ohio's Republican leader wants Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Paul Hackett to apologize for calling some conservative Republicans religious fanatics and comparing them to terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Hackett was unapologetic Tuesday for the comments in a newspaper story, saying religious fanatics of any flavor should be ashamed. "I said it. I meant it. I stand behind it," he said. Hackett said in a Sunday column in The Columbus Dispatch: "The Republican Party has been hijacked by the religious fanatics that, in my opinion, aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden and a lot of the other religious nuts around the world." ... Hackett also said the practice of denying homosexuals equal rights is un-American. The newspaper asked Hackett if that meant the 62 percent of Ohioans who voted to ban gay marriage were un-American. "If what they believe is that we're going to have a scale on judging which Americans have equal rights, yeah, that's un-American," Hackett said". [See Reliapundit for some comments on the nutty one]

There is a new site up to enable bloggers to circulate news. I don't really know what it is good for but I have put up a few posts there just for fun. See here. May be worth exploring.

Some headlines on Australian Politics today: "More multiple rapes by Muslims", "Police attack on civil liberties in Victoria", "Uranium stupidity" and "Australia has brick-thick "security" staff too"

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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LEGAL SCUM EXPLOIT LEFTIST CALIFORNIA LAW

They emigrated from Taiwan as boys, worked hard, kept close to family, and now - before either is 30 - they are stuck with a little lawsuit with big statewide implications. Bill and Sam Wu of Elk Grove have joined the burgeoning rolls of California business and property owners under siege by serial suers. In this case - and there are many - the Wus are the target of a prolific Carmichael attorney, who has filed more than 150 disability-access lawsuits since August 2003.

To some, Scott N. Johnson, who is quadriplegic and drives a full-size van with hand controls and a wheelchair lift, is a crusader for the disabled, busting businesses for violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. To others, he is an opportunist - the Wus say extortionist - who makes a fat living driving around town, scouring mom-and-pop operations for even the smallest infractions, then filing lawsuits and squeezing out quick settlements.

What's clear is this: California, as one of only a few states that allows for monetary damages and attorneys' fees in ADA cases, is seeing an explosion in disability-access lawsuits. And a huge chunk of those cases is coming from just a handful of plaintiffs and attorneys, people whose litigious track records have made many business owners - big and small alike - suspicious and wary of any disabled person who comes on their premises.

"This is Scott's way of making money," says Bill Wu, 28, who fixed the access problem last year on the family's commercial property in North Highlands, which had been deemed ADA-compliant by the county. But the Wu brothers don't want to settle for the $4,000 they say Johnson offered. And so they are fighting, navigating the complexities of the federal court system without law degrees.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing Leftist post here called "A million tiny strands" which is particularly aimed at conservative and anti-Green journalist Marc Morano -- but also at Cybercast News service and other conservative writers. What the author "discovers" -- "gasp"! -- is that Morano and other conservatives tend to get support from people and companies who agree with them -- including companies such as Monsanto. Monsanto produces seed for genetically engineered crops so these days is apparently nearly as evil as oil companies. In a reflection of what is no doubt his own typically amoral Leftist thinking, our Leftist writer concludes from this that Morano and others are BOUGHT. They are not saying what they really think but are simply company propagandists telling lies. This is of course a totally ad hominem argument -- attacking the speaker rather than the facts and arguments he puts forward and has, as such, no scholarly merit whatever -- and suggests that the attacker LACKS arguments of substance. But ad hominem arguments do seem to have some influence on people so let me shoot back by pointing out that I personally have often run Morano's writings on my blogs and that I agree with almost all the things that the writers say whom our Leftist attacks. And just find ONE CENT that ANY company has ever donated to me. I am and always have been entirely supported by my own work and its proceeds. So in the weird world of the ad hominem arguer that must prove that what Morano says is right and correct? Search me! I guess Leftists will always find some way to escape confronting the facts so I don't exactly expect consistency there.

Americans vote with their feet too: "For the second year in a row, the Census Bureau reports, the population of Massachusetts has shrunk. During the 12 months ending July 1, 2005, the Bay State experienced a net loss of more than 8,600 residents, or 0.1 percent of its population. It was one of only three states to end the year with fewer people than it had at the start -- New York and Rhode Island were the others -- and the only one to do so for the second year running. A statistical blip this isn't. Not counting foreign immigrants, Massachusetts has been losing more people than it attracts every year since 1990, according to MassINC, a Boston-based research institute. The net outflow during the 12 years from 1990 to 2002 -- the excess of people leaving Massachusetts over those entering -- was 213,000, and the hemorrhaging has only gotten worse since then. MassINC reported in 2003 that one-fourth of Bay State residents would leave if they had the opportunity to do so. Among those who have lived in Massachusetts for less than 10 years, the proportion is even higher".

Why nobody cares about the woes of Detroit: "In the fat years of the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. companies squandered profits on misguided acquisitions and poor product decisions. Too many Americans once owned Detroit cars and believed that dealers and the companies mistreated them when their vehicles had problems. In short, a sizable percentage of the American public is not sympathetic to the plight of the domestic manufacturers. The United Auto Workers union and its members have an image problem, too. Sure, in recent years GM and Ford have made progress in working with unions and in achieving improvements in quality. However, for far too long UAW workers laughed at complaints about quality, and the union did nothing to punish workers who failed to perform. In terms of pay, pensions and health care, UAW workers are better off than most Americans in private industry.... Maybe it is time for the companies to stop their dividends. Maybe it is time for the union to tell its members how bad things are. And maybe it is time for the Governor of Michigan to understand why people don't want to build in her state".

House of Lords to the rescue again: "The Government's plan for identity cards suffered a double blow this evening after Lords ordered a detailed investigation into the cost of the scheme and demanded a more secure method of recording and storing citizens' personal information. Peers voted by 237 to 156, a majority of 81, on an amednment ordering an inquiry to put a precise figure on the revenue and capital costs of implementing the controversial Identity Cards Bill. The Government suffered a second defeat when peers voted by 206 to 144, a majority of 62, to demand a secure and reliable method of recording and storing citizens' personal data. Ministers must now either agree to the investigation or ask the Commons, where an earlier backbench revolt slashed Tony Blair's majority to just 25, to overturn the Lords' demands. The Lords' debate centred on a London School of Economics report which claimed the scheme would cost up to 19 billion pounds -- more than 30 times the Government's estimate - and that the cost of an individual ID card could be high as 300 pounds.

After five years of socialist government: "NZ business confidence has slumped to its lowest level since before the 1987 sharemarket crash, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) said on Tuesday in its quarterly survey of business opinion (QSBO). The independent organisation said a net 61 per cent of firms expected conditions to deteriorate over the next six months. This compared with a net 32 per cent of pessimists in the last survey in October. Not since March 1986 has the economy's mood been so downbeat. NZIER director Brent Layton said the survey increased the likelihood of a recession. The seasonally-adjusted figure was even more dire with a net 71 per cent pessimistic against 34 per cent in October. This is the most pessimistic in 35 years and possibly of the 45-year history of the survey, one of the most respected in the country".

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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ECONOMICS ROUNDUP

The founding ideas were right: "When discussing the incentives granted by government to people thinking about settling in America, Benjamin Franklin cited only those "derived from good laws and liberty." Recent arrivals would have to roll up their sleeves and put their backs into it because, as Franklin noted, streets were not "paved with half-peck loaves," houses were not "tiled with pancakes," and edible fowl did not "fly about ready-roasted, crying `Come eat me!'" But if a person were "sober, industrious, and frugal," he could "establish himself in business" and "enjoy securely the profits of his industry." Pursuing happiness could be hard and possibly very rewarding work".

The Media's Top 10 Economic Myths of 2005: "The Media Research Center's Free Market Project spent 2005 tracking news reporting on business and economic issues and compiled a list of the most common and most egregious errors. They ran the gamut from omissions to exaggerations and plain misinformation: America should follow French fashion in business; We must raise taxes to cope with ballooning deficits; Global warming is causing stronger hurricanes; America is cheap with its foreign aid; Hurricane Katrina will send the economy into a tailspin; The housing bubble is about to burst; Americans are dying of fat; Consumers are choosing between food and fuel; Big, profitable companies are up to no good; The U.S. economy is hopeless

Leftists never learn: "An attempt by Venezuela's leftwing president, Hugo Ch˜vez, to double the price that coffee producers pay farmers for a sack of beans has led to empty shelves in supermarkets throughout the country and fears of shortages of other basic foodstuffs. President Ch˜vez, who maintains price controls on basic foodstuffs, raised the price of coffee beans by 100% last month after weeks of protests by coffee farmers. But most of the country's coffee producers, who buy, roast and grind the beans, refused to sell on the coffee yesterday, claiming their margins had been cut, and began hoarding thousands of sacks of unprocessed beans... Some supermarkets in the capital, Caracas, said they had also run out of sugar, chicken, powdered milk and maize. Store managers said they were not being supplied with new stock from wholesalers and producers, who were complaining that their profit margins were too low. Frustrated customers were told that coffee, milk and sugar suppliers were sitting on their goods until the government raised retail prices. Some owners of street cafes in Caracas said they would run out of coffee within days if the government and coffee producers did not reach an agreement. Venezuelans love their morning cup of coffee and there was growing unease among office workers yesterday that their daily shot of espresso or cappuccino might soon be unavailable. The increase in the price of raw coffee beans was initially applauded by impoverished farmers. But the government did not raise the price at which retailers sell processed coffee to the shops".

Can trade ever harm a country? "A recent article from the Guardian joins the growing outcry against free trade. Its central message is that countries adopting 'neo-liberal' market reforms, recommended by academic economists, have done worse than those countries that ignored the supposed experts and spurned free trade. Every time I reread the article -- with the subtitle 'A look at Vietnam and Mexico exposes the myth of market liberalization' -- I discover more and more fallacies. To economize on the reader's precious time, I finally decided to quit digging for more errors and jot down the ones I'd already found..... this article hasn't focused on the positive case for free trade, as it has been made in countless other places. What I have done above is merely illustrate the invalid (and sometimes downright silly) arguments that, unfortunately, even trained economists use to justify bigger government."

Left/Right economics summarized: "The subject of this article is Kuttner's column about the debate, rather than the debate itself -- Kuttner the fight judge, not Kuttner the boxer. I was particularly struck by Kuttner's statement above. Evidently, the concept of genuine humility is so foreign to Kuttner that he regards an expression of humility as a debating tactic. In a sense, that is why Kuttner belongs on the left. Contemporary liberalism without hubris is Hamlet without the Prince.... Genuine humility is a feature of libertarian conservatism, which may be the fundamental reason that it differs from neoconservatism. If you think you have all of the answers, then it is difficult to resist passing No Child Left Behind Laws and other expressions of government hubris. Libertarian conservatives believe that we do not know enough to justify imposing our will on others through government. Supporters of activist government believe they know more than we do. I fear that they know less."

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ELSEWHERE

Want a laugh? Some Leftist git by the name of Prof. Allan Patience -- an adherent of the Australian Fabian Society -- is trying to tell us that modern-day conservatives are not really conservative because a true conservative is a sort of socialist. More about him and his mixed-up ideas on Australian Politics. Also see Australian Politics for the story of a Greenie local council who awarded a contract to Halliburton!

The right of conscientious objection is increasingly being denied to Christians in secularist Europe. You can be in big legal trouble unless you have secularist (or Muslim) beliefs.

The Canadian decline: "Over the past 20 years, Canada has become a place where merely speaking truth to power is a considered a revolutionary act. Over the past 20 years, our people have come to dread liberty because it demands responsibility. When you go into the voting both on January 23rd it may well be the last, best hope to take our country back. All you have to do is remember that a nation of sheep will always produce governments of wolves."

There is a list here of just some of the far-Left anti-Bush ballyhoo surrounding MLK day. It is one of the wonders of 20th century politics that most people seem not to know that it was REPUBLICANS who got the Civil Rights Act through Congress: "Republicans favored the bill 138 to 34; Democrats supported it 152-96. Republicans supported it in higher proportions than Democrats. Even though those Democrats were Southern segregationists, without Republicans the bill would have failed. Republicans were the other much-needed leg of the Civil Rights Act of 1964".

Today it's Leftists who stand in the schoolhouse door: "Milwaukee's innovative school choice program has become a beacon of hope for reformers everywhere. But the educational establishment has never accepted its success and is now striking back. A cap on the number of students that can attend the city's private choice schools has been reached, and starting Feb. 1, education officials will implement a rationing plan to allocate the program's available seats...."

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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IQ AND THE ARMY

As both a psychometrician and as a former Australian army psychologist, I suppose I should say something about the controversial Fred Kaplan article on lowered IQ standards for US Army recruits. I am not going to say much because I think Kaplan is spot-on -- though he does manage to write his whole article without using the term "IQ" once. As even Leftist commentators such as Kevin Drum have acknowledged, however, the "aptitude" test the U.S. Army uses to evaluate potential recruits is essentially an IQ test.

Kaplan does in fact do a useful job of summarizing the evidence for how important IQ is among soldiers. The idea that you can use any dummy as "cannon-fodder" is very much out of date. Putting a deadly weapon into the hands of a dummy is likely to make him more a danger to his fellow-soldiers than to the enemy. Modern soldiering in particular ideally requires a high level of intelligence. So the "validity" (usefulness, correctness, informativeness) of IQ tests is not confined to predicting educational achievement but also extends into fields very different from classroom performance -- to fields such as military efficiency. And that is why we have the term IQ -- because there IS a general factor of mental (or problem-solving) ability. There IS such a thing as a general factor of intelligence that shows up in a wide variety of situations.

So the fact that the US army is now recruiting less bright people to fill its ranks is a very bad thing indeed. It will tend to make the army less effective and more self destructive -- as if we did not have a big enough "friendly-fire" problem already! I think the US army should learn the ancient lesson of Gideon (Judges chapter 7) and stick with high standards no matter what.

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ELSEWHERE

Hate-filled homos -- they must be prosecuted: "The Gay and Lesbian Alliance (GLA) yesterday declared war on the South African National Blood Service (SANBS), as scores of its members turned up to donate blood under false pretences. And, a shocking 65 percent of the gay men who donated blood without disclosing their sexual preference are unsure whether they are HIV- positive. On Friday, about 300 men complied with a plea by the GLA to its claimed 100 000 male members to donate blood to SANBS centres across the country, but not to disclose their sexual orientation. The request is a part of an ongoing national campaign to protest the SANBS policy of excluding men who engage in sexual activity with other men from donating blood. David Baxter, media director for GLA, said on Friday that 65 percent of the members of GLA who had donated blood were unsure whether they were HIV-positive. He later said one of the donors had full-blown Aids". (HT Interested Participant).

Wal-Mart has become a political football: "UpWalMart. com and Wal-Mart Watch have at least two things in common : They criticize Wal-Mart, and they criticize each other. A few weeks ago, WakeUp-WalMart. com, financed by the grocery workers union, launched its latest TV ad campaign questioning whether Christians should shop at Wal-Mart, given its low wages and benefits. At the same time, the group sent a letter to Wal-Mart Store Inc. chief executive Lee Scott signed by 65 ministers. "Jesus would not embrace Wal-Mart's values of greed and profits at any cost, particularly when children suffer as a result of those misguided values," the letter said. Wal-Mart was upset. But so was Wal-Mart Watch, a group backed in part by the service workers union and formed to take on the world's largest retailer. Wal-Mart Watch declined to put its name on the ad, even though it earlier had helped cull names from its lists of religious leaders for the letter. "What would Jesus do, indeed," Tracy Sefl, Wal-Mart Watch communications director, said in an email to The Wall Street Journal. "I think he would say the ad was a mistake. We heard from numerous supporters who were offended."... The two organizations are top-heavy with former Democratic operatives from the 2004 presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Howard Dean. Both groups arose as Wal-Mart's rapid expansion made it a lightning rod in some corners of labor and the political left for a long list of grievances against big business.

Jack Wheeler has reproduced some of the cartoons mocking Islam that have caused such an uproar in Denmark. Should be more of it.

Jihad: The Year the Muslims Took Rome: "Few know about it, but it happened.... What happened is that in 846 some Muslim Arabs arrived in a fleet at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to Rome, sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter all of the gold and silver it contained. And this was not just an incidental attack. In 827 the Arabs had conquered Sicily, which they kept under their dominion for two and a half centuries. Rome was under serious threat from nearby. In 847, the year after the assault, the newly elected pope Leo IV began the construction of walls around the entire perimeter of the Vatican, 12 meters high and equipped with 44 towers. He completed the project in six years. These are the "Leonine" walls, and significant traces of them still remain. But very few today know that these walls were erected to defend the see of Peter from an Islamic jihad. And many of those who do know this remain silent out of discretion. "Bridges, not walls" is the fashionable slogan today. (See The Legacy of Jihad. Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims by Andrew G. Bostom)

A marvellous article about China: "Renmin University, also known as the People's University of China, has an enrollment of almost 19,000 and is one of China's most respected schools. It was founded in 1950 by the Communist party. The children of many Chinese officials were educated there, and three generations of Chinese leaders, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, have paid special attention to the school's development. So I was especially surprised by what I learned. It was about 8 P.M. on a Friday when I ventured onto Renmin's campus. In a courtyard near the school's east gate, I discovered some 200 students who were exchanging views about history, economics, politics, and culture. It was U.S. history, economics, politics, and culture that they were discussing - and they were speaking English.... Some students smiled and began to ask me questions. One asked where I was from and I said, "The United States, Washington, D.C." Immediately, he flashed two thumbs up and said "Very good. America is very good. America is our model." ... While thinking through U.S. policy toward China, the Congress and the administration should know that a surprising number of Chinese people embrace U.S. ideals and are fond of American culture. At a time when U.S. policies are reviled around the world, that is something to celebrate and promote. It strikes me as an investment in government of the people, by the people, for the people in China".

California Democrats protect sex offenders: "A state Senate committee on Tuesday killed a "Jessica's Law" proposal to punish sex offenders that was one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top priorities this year. Senate Bill 588 by Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster, would have increased penalties for various sex crimes, required satellite monitoring of sex offense felons and forced sex offense registrants to live more than 2,000 feet from schools and parks. The legislation failed on a 5-2 party-line vote in the Democrat-dominated Senate Public Safety Committee".

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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