THE CARTOONS. A SELECTION FROM THE MANY POINTS BEING MADE:

The man who orchestrated the anti-Denmark uprising was a Danish Imam: "Abu Laban's celebrated celeb status is about history in Denmark. Danes have no more patience for those who preach love in one language and war in another, those who publicly play the role of the victim, demand tolerance and then secretly incite hatred. While much of Europe has been asleep at the wheel, oblivious to the monumental threat radical Islam poses to its future, at least one country is increasingly awake. Denmark's first battle is domestic, unmasking the enemy's fifth column inside its borders".

As already pointed out on this blog, Mohammed actually appears quite commonly in Islamic art and has also appeared widely in international cartoons, including America's "South Park", for some time. Indeed there have even uncomplimentary ones of 'Islamic' origin. So why all the fuss now? Daily Kos has an interesting suggestion: Saudi Arabia's mismanagement of the Hajj which left hundreds dead and the Saudi rulers thus needing to deflect criticism. Denmark as a remote small target with little strategic or economic leverage over the Saudis was a suitable scapegoat. Hence the call from the Saudis to boycott Danish exports (which the Saudis hardly buy in any case).

Denmark's role in pioneering and promoting "alternative" energy technology would for conspiracy theorists be an additional motive for Saudi bullying (lots of Danish electricity demand is supplied by wind energy).

Note that South Park has portrayed Mohammed in it's episode Super Best Friends recently. South Park has been accused of defiling the "virgin" Mary as recently as December 2005 but there have been no burnings of US embassies by outraged Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans.

British police need political authorization to act against Muslim lawbreakers: "Protesters who carried placards at the weekend demonstrations in London calling for the beheading of people who insulted Islam, and who shouted terrorist slogans, could be prosecuted for incitement to murder, government sources said yesterday. Charles Clarke, Downing Street and other ministers sent out strong signals to the police and prosecuting authorities to take appropriate action against the demonstrators. Ministers and opposition politicians refrained from joining criticism of the police for failing to arrest people on the spot in the protests at the Danish cartoons. But, while insisting that they would not interfere with the operational independence of the police, they left the authorities in no doubt that they expected action to be taken".

Keith Burgess Jackson comments on Childish Leftists : "I got to wondering what leftist intellectuals think about the violence being perpetrated by Muslims in various parts of the world. After all, leftists profess to care about people. Won't they condemn it in no uncertain terms? Brian Leiter has five guest-bloggers, any one of whom could post something about the violence. Alas, nobody has. William Edmundson, Ph.D., J.D., has a really neat post about the Super Bowl and beer. I went to Crooked Timber. I found only one post, and I don't know what to make of it. I read the hundred or so comments. Perhaps I'm not getting it, but most of the commenters seem to think the violence is funny. Either that or they're using humor to evade responsibility. Many leftists don't know what to make of the Muslim violence. To condemn it would be to take a stand, and that seems so, well, grown-up and old-fashioned. The violence can't be blamed on President Bush, or you can be sure the Left would be all over this issue. Leftists hate Christianity, since they view it as an oppressor religion, but they refuse to say anything even remotely critical about Islam or Muslims, perhaps because that would make them (the critics) seem imperialistic. Better to joke about the violence. Better to retreat into irony and sarcasm. To take a stand would require careful thought and moral backbone, neither of which is conspicuous by its presence among leftists.

Tom Gross has a good selection of defamatory cartoons about Jews and Christians from the Arab world. But I guess "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not part of their religion.

Newslinker asks: Why isn't anyone talking about what Islamists did to images of Budda back in 2001? No Buddhists firebombed or beheaded people in retaliation of the desecration of images of their guru? FLASHBACK from March 2001: "Ignoring an international outcry, Afghanistan's puritanical Taliban Islamic militia began demolishing statues across the country on Thursday, including two towering ancient stone Buddhas".

Chris Brand also has a summary of the cartoon upheavals, mainly from a British viewpoint.

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ELSEWHERE

U.S. roads more dangerous than Afghanistan: "More U.S. troops have died in off-duty motorcycle accidents since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, than have been killed in combat in Afghanistan over that same time, according to safety records. Military commanders in North Carolina say the deaths are largely the result of boredom, bonus pay, and adrenalin to burn off after troops return from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 350 troops have died on bikes since the 2001 terrorist attacks. That's compared to 259 killed while serving in Afghanistan".

Memri has the transcript of an intervierw with Camelia Sadat, daughter of the late Egyptian President, in which she tells of forced marriage at the age of 12 to an abusive husband. And Sadat was generally held to be an enlightened and moderate Muslim. Not to his own daughter, he wasn't.

Surprise, surprise! "At least $US700 million in funds from the Palestinian Authority's coffers have been squandered or stolen by officials over the past few years, an internal investigation revealed yesterday. Palestinian Attorney-General Ahmed al-Moghani cited 50 cases of "financial and administrative corruption" and said 25 officials had been arrested so far. He said 10 officials had fled abroad but the authority was seeking their extradition. "The amount of money that was squandered and stolen is more than $US700 million," Mr Moghani told reporters. "Some of these millions were transferred into personal accounts here and abroad".

I have just done an update to my Picture page -- adding quite a few new pictures. There is even a picture there for steam buffs! All the links to other galleries on the site are also now working.

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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MUSLIM DOUBLE STANDARDS



Fox News Channel "Special Report" anchorman Brit Hume said Sunday that violent demonstrations by radical Muslims protesting five-month-old cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammed betray a "howling double standard." "This is really a disgrace," Hume told the panel on "Fox News Sunday." "And it is a disgrace because of the obvious, howling double standard involved here." "What is striking about this is what offends these Muslims who are protesting and these imams," Hume complained. "Does the slaughter of innocent people in many parts of the world in the name of Allah offend them? Is that a sacrilege worthy of protest? "No, not in the least," he said.

Hume noted that there has also been no outrage on the Arab street over "the kinds of slurs against Christians and against the Jewish faith that are regularly spread abroad in the Arab world by the mass media and by many of these imams themselves."

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Zombietime points out that there have in fact been many pictorial representations of Mohammed in the past that have not drawn protests. He reproduces many of them.

Spineless Europeans: "EU officials said Friday that they had no plans to halt aid to Palestinians despite threats by gunmen to the bloc's headquarters in Gaza. European parliamentarians have also voted to keep aid going. On Thursday, about a dozen gunmen connected to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party surrounded the EU Commission's office in Gaza City. They demanded that the governments of Denmark, France, Germany and Norway apologize for cartoons of Mohammed published in newspapers in those countries. Armed Palestinians also threatened a "tough response" for further reprints of the cartoons in front of the French cultural center. Despite the threats, EU officials said they were not going to suspend aid -- at least for now. "If the situation gets more complicated then obviously for us it will not be easy to deal with it," European Commission spokeswoman Emma Udwin said

ACLU summarized: "Instead of defending our liberties, this radical organization threatens our freedom in courtrooms around the country. The ACLU will not defend the rights of the unborn child, opting instead to sacrifice babies on the altar of something called "choice." The ACLU is, in fact, one of the most vocal proponents of all forms of abortion. If a public high school student wants to hold a prayer meeting at school, the ACLU is the first in line trying to sabotage the project. In the vocabulary of the ACLU, there is no such thing as religious liberty. Instead, the organization routinely fights for freedom FROM religion-not freedom to exercise religion. If a mayor wants to place a Christmas display on the grounds of City Hall, the ACLU is at the ready to put a stop to it. If a judge wants to post the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, the ACLU is prepared to fight the idea-all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The method in Leftist unreason: "there is a method in the madness of the Left. There has always been a method in it. The Left is not engaged in an "argument," it is engaged in a revolution in the name of all that is just and right and good. Therefore, it does not aim to out-argue its opponents, but to shame them, to drive them from the field in ignominy, to make them figures of ridicule, moral indignation, and revulsion.... watch Ted Kennedy in action. His attacks on Judge Alito, like his earlier attacks on Judge Bork, were not intended as arguments, and certainly showed little regard for fact. They were all bluster, moral indignation, character assassination, ridicule, ostracism. If words could kill, his were the words of an assassin. This leftist tactic has worked for over one hundred years, because there are not many people who can stand unafraid before it. Most do not want to attract attention to themselves, lest its indignation and vituperation and moral ridicule be turned loose upon them. The tirades in which these words are launched-Senator Kennedy's neck muscles bulge, his flesh turns bright red, his voice rises ever higher so as to forbid anybody-anybody-from interrupting him-are meant to enforce acquiescence, not consent. They are meant to intimidate, not to present an argument."

There is a very well-informed article here about the effects of minimum wage legislation. Excerpt: "Only three things can happen in a business when the government forces wages up. Employers can reduce their costs, most likely by laying off workers or letting some go through attrition. They can raise prices to recoup the higher cost of labor. Or they can settle for lower profits. Advocates of raising the minimum wage have focused lately on studies showing little or no adverse effect on employment from the mandate. But far less attention has been paid to findings that price increases, at least in the short term, may be the most likely reaction of employers. And price increases have to be paid by someone.... The bottom line: A policy most people think is a slam-dunk to help the poor actually only benefits about one-fourth of poor families while hurting the rest and helping almost as many affluent families as it does the poor".

California Democrats love Communist Cuba: "Assemblywoman Nicole Parra and her father traveled to Cuba in early December on what has reportedly become an annual event organized by one of California's most powerful lobbyists and political fundraisers. Parra, D-Hanford, and other participants said the trip was arranged by Darius Anderson, founder of one of Sacramento's premiere lobbying firms and a top fundraiser for former Gov. Gray Davis. Since travel to communist Cuba is generally prohibited except under a license from the U.S. government, Anderson's repeated trips there with lawmakers, business people and others raise a number of questions.... The San Francisco Chronicle reported last December that the Anderson trips to Cuba have become an annual affair. Parra said she and her father, former Kern County Supervisor Pete Parra, paid for the trip, about $3,000 each plus airfare to Miami, out of personal funds. The trip was a personal, educational vacation, Nicole Parra said. At least one other lawmaker who attended, Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City, said she used campaign funds, according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun. Four other Assembly members were among the 100 people on the five-day trip, including the powerful speaker of the Assembly, Fabian Nunez, said Nunez spokesman Steven Maviglio."

Sense from Germany: "German Chancellor Angela Merkel compared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Adolf Hitler as Tehran vowed to resume the enrichment of uranium, which could be used to make nuclear weapons. Amid growing fears that the Iranians are intent on acquiring an "Islamic bomb", Ms Merkel warned that the world must not repeat the mistakes it made in appeasing the Nazis".

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 DAY TO BE REMEMBERED:



Today is the birthday of Ronald Wilson Reagan. A wonderful man. There will never be another like him. He is my only hero and I know I am one of millions in missing him.

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HOW BRITISH!

I received the following email from my old friend, Rafe Champion, who is mostly to be found blogging at Catallaxy these days.

"In case anyone is wondering about the cartoons that detonated the current agitation, here is a copy from a British libertarian/anarchist site. They were sourced from a Danish site that has been down since 31 Jan. In my view it is generally undesirable and bad manners to lampoon other people's religions, although I can't be sure where good humoured satire stops and offensive lampooning starts. However you can tell when it has gone too far and this means that people who produce works of art like the Piss Christ should be subjected to polite but firm criticism from all fair-minded and reasonable people who think that art and civility matter. There is no place for legislation or violence in response to lapses in taste. As Hayek pointed out, in a free society we have to put up with a lot of things that we don't like."

I must confess to being amused. I think that Rafe must be, like me, the product of a British culture that is now almost dead in Britain itself. What true Muslim who has ever existed would see "polite but firm criticism" as an appropriate response to mockery of their prophet?

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ELSEWHERE

Chronic stupidity at the Defense Dept.: "At a time when our Army and Marines bear by far the heaviest load of our nation's security burdens, OSD proposes reducing the number of soldiers to free up funds for wasteful Cold-War-era weapons systems. Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable. Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.... OSD wants a force that's all fantasy and no fight, a military designed to cope with a threat that might come someday - if we wish hard enough - but that ignores the gory reality our soldiers and Marines are facing every day right now"

Rabbi Aryeh Spero: "There is a madness in today's liberal thinking. It insists on policies that tie our hands to defend ourselves while giving free reign to the jihadists intent on killing us. It is dangerous because it is becoming the law, and thinking, of the land, and the Western world. Never before in history has a country and civilization made it impossible to defend itself from its enemies. Never before in history have the elites running a society done as much to cause national suicide..... Basically, the Left, i.e., the enemies of America living within America, have made it impossible to fight jihadism. We can't kill the enemy, we can't spy on the enemy, we can't interrogate the enemy, we can't find the enemy guilty. The terrorist in the eyes of the liberal is more sacred than the President of the United States. In effect, liberalism has tied us up so -- emotionally, legally, political-correctly -- that we are now defenseless: made so not by the enemy but by ourselves, self-induced. This is madness. We will be murdered by outsiders because those within are opting for suicide. Our military and domestic police strength is meaningless if tied up in legalisms forbidding its use. As to the enemy, he can do what he wants, and cannot be criticized for it."

Bigmouth Leftist failure tells Blair what to do: "Lord Kinnock, the former Labour party leader, has privately advised Tony Blair to fix a date to leave Downing Street, as the prime minister prepares for a climbdown on his flagship education reforms. The Labour peer believes that "clock is ticking" on Blair's reign and that there is "nothing left for him to achieve". Kinnock gave his advice to Blair at a private meeting before Christmas, but he refused to comment publicly yesterday".

UK proposal to police Web hits hurdles : "Another government tech policy has been defeated by the British House of Lords, with members rejecting plans to give police more power over terrorism-related content on Web sites. The government's original plans would have allowed police to act after deciding information on the Internet is related to terrorism. But this was changed by the House of Lords so that police would have to ask judges before telling Internet service providers to remove Web pages, according to the BBC. The government was defeated by 148-147 vote. The bill received a third reading and will now return to the House of Commons."

Exposing pseudo-sophisticated opposition to the war for what it is: "For Stein to advocate opposition to American soldiers while nonchalantly admitting his own lack of service is a remarkable display of arrogance -- a 'wussy' thing to do, one might say. To one who comes from similar circumstances as Stein, but has chosen to serve his country, the thought of such a spineless argument provokes disgust. ... Stein is one of many pseudo-intellectuals who feel that their education and socio-economic status excuse them of the responsibility to serve. They act as if they were entitled to freedom's blessings, just in order to indulge themselves."

Cable rate increases: "We should have learned by now that government is a terrible steward of competition. Its natural impulse is to regulate or manage, when the best it could do is get out of the way. This is especially true when rapid technological change disrupts an industrial sector, like telecommunications, that for decades operated under a restrictive regulatory regime based on the premise all we needed was one provider. With deployment of high-speed fiber optic networks, broadband providers, phone companies and even power companies are poised to enter the local video market, finally offering American families a competitive alternative that will drive innovation in the industry and deliver lower prices. The problem is outdated rules governing the industry prevent cable competition."

The story of how venal American politicians are now doing their best to STOP the conversion of Vietnam to capitalism is here. Excerpt: "Nativists argue that we should protect the catfish farmers in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana from their Vietnamese competitors for the simple reason that they're Americans, even if it means denying consumers safer, cheaper, better-tasting catfish. But because of the players involved, the catfish wars aptly illustrate the absurdity of nativist thinking. Thirty years after the last U.S. troops died in Vietnam, that country is inching its way toward capitalism. With petty politics and protectionist trade barriers, it's now the U.S. government that's standing in its way".

If you have not yet seen the comic-book version of the Koran, it's time you did!

On Australian Politics I have more on the recent stabbings of beachgoing Anglo-Australians by Lebanese Muslims

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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Brookes News Update

US economy: the inverted yield curve and recession : The inverted yield curve is emerging because the Fed has been reining in the money supply. So does this mean a recession?
Australian economy: Senator Nick Minchin screws up on tax cuts: Anyone who thinks Government ministers actually know anything about economics need look no further than Finance Minister Nick Minchin. This man thinks tax cuts are inflationary
Economic illiteracy and executive pay : The reality is that the exploitation of shareholders by management on the scale claimed by critics of executive pay is just another leftist spectre
Leftwing journalist smears Bush on NSA wiretaps: Michael Gawenda, former editor of 'The Age', is proof positive that leftism is a disease of the intellect, one of the symptoms of which is a brazen contempt for facts that conflict with reality
A lefty film reviewer praises a nasty piece of anti-capitalist propaganda: It's obviously the 'The Constant Gardener's' ideological leitmotif - and the evidence be damned - that ideological buffoons like Tom Ryan find so attractive
Bin Ladin is a Democrat: Democrats have lied about, slandered and sought to undermine and betray America in its war against Islamic fascist mass murderers. No wonder Osama Bin Ladin chose to merely read from one of their scripts
Poor people get hammered by tax increases: Poor people get hammered when government raises taxes. You see that means the rich don't have the money to invest and grow jobs and the economy
Green fascism and corporate CEOs: What we have is a particularly squalid attempt by a multinational corporation to use the greens' destructive ideology to exploit the power of the state at the expense of consumers

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ELSEWHERE

Disgraceful: The U.S. State Dept. sides with the Muslim hysterics: "The United States blasted the publication by European newspapers of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed as unacceptable incitement to religious or ethnic hatred. "These cartoons are indeed offensive to the beliefs of Muslims," State Department spokesman Justin Higgins said when queried about the furore sparked by the cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility," Higgins told AFP. "Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices."

Taranto comments on a speech by NAACP leader Julian Bond -- and shows how thoroughly the MSM suppress mention of hate-speech emanating from black leaders. They deliberately whitewash blacks (to coin a phrase).

Black conservatives were pretty appalled by the Julian Bond speech: "Bond is said to have called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and predecessor Colin Powell "tokens." He also compared the Bush Administration's judicial nominees to the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan and said "The Republican Party would have the American flag and the [Nazi] swastika flying side by side." "If Julian Bond's comments are indicative of the NAACP, the group has truly lost its way. I believe the NAACP has positioned itself on the far left of the political spectrum, and Mr. Bond's comments give me no reason to think otherwise," said Project 21 member Jimmie Hollis."

Public servants live better than the public itself : "For 50 years, public-sector unions, health care lobbyists, and social services advocacy groups have doggedly been amassing power in state capitols and city halls, using their influence to inflate pay and benefits for their workers and to boost government spending. The bill for that influence is now coming due, and it is overwhelming state and local budgets."

No hope for Europe: "The fertility rates in the western industrialized countries are well below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. For the European Union as a whole, the estimated 2005 fertility rate was 1.47 babies per woman. In some countries, the rate is even lower. However, in France, approximately one birth in three is to a Muslim family. Stripped of the Muslim influence, the fertility rate of the native-born or traditionally European French would be 1.2, similar to the rates in Italy and Spain."

Immigration of little benefit to Australia: "An abiding and unshakeable belief of Australian business is that immigration is good for the economy and we need a lot more of it than we're getting. But is the belief soundly based? According to a Productivity Commission paper on Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth, not really. The economic benefits are "very small"."

No cash for condemners: "The New York Times terms it 'odd.' Other accounts deem it 'unusual.' The Volkoh Conspiracy blog wonders if Atlas is, in fact, shrugging. However, the announcement that BB&T, the nation's ninth largest bank holding company, will not participate in private economic development projects that involve eminent domain action should not shock. The decision is consistent with the corporation's values, harnesses widespread public unease with the Kelo eminent domain ruling, and is another manifestation of symbol-laden stakeholder capitalism."

The last good train service in Britain to be scrapped: "The Gatwick Express, a dedicated rail service from London Victoria, is to be replaced by a slower stopping train to reduce overcrowding on services to commuter towns near the airport. he Government believes that the express is taking up too much capacity on the Brighton main line, which carries 32,000 commuters a day. Many Gatwick Express trains run half-empty, even in peak periods, while commuters from Three Bridges, Haywards Heath and other Sussex towns often have to stand all the way to or from London. But airlines using Gatwick are furious that their passengers will have to fight their way with heavy luggage on to already crowded trains stopping only briefly at the airport. At present, empty trains sit for several minutes at Gatwick station, allowing passengers plenty of time to board".

There is a new Australian Christian blogger. His interests seem to be mainly political. He has an interesting point here about the famous antisemitic "Protocols" being a projection of what Leftists wanted to do.

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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THE MOHAMMED CARTOONS



I guess most readers have heard about Europe's cartoon uproar by now. Without much support from other governments, the Danish government has been defending the right to free speech in Denmark. That right is under attack because a Danish newspaper printed cartoons about Mohammed. As a result, Muslims have of course started putting pressure on Denmark -- including calls for a boycott of Danish goods and services (Since a major Danish export is ham and bacon, that has its amusing side). So it is encouraging that quite a few European newspapers have now defied Muslim hysteria and reprinted the cartoons. Even the BBC has broadcast glimpses of them. Maybe Europeans are finally getting fed up with the constant demands for special treatment by Muslims. An unusually feisty British reader writes:

"What is vastly more offensive than any cartoon could ever be, is:-

* The Personality Cult demanding special respect for a criminal thug, intolerant aggressive war-monger against peaceful people, inciter and practitioner of rape, piracy, pillage, slavery, nastiest-possible desecration of others' most sacred things, and of deceit. (All extensively documented as he died the Emperor of his warlord empire-on-earth.)

* The book he would have you know to be the flawless, unchangeable Last word of God, which just happens to be one of the nastiest and most stupid books ever written. Why would a real God be so obsessed with details of sex, warmongering and financial arrangements? And make so many glaring self-contradictions in the process?

* The Jihad Denial pretending away of the many millions of murders of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, etc, a still-ongoing global genocide directly inspired by the cult of that thug and his nasty book. That's the GENUINE Islam.

The Mohammedo-Fascists' preoccupation with not being offended stands in the most stupendous contrast to their own tradition of being maximally nasty about the most sacred things of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, etc: ... which started with Mohammed's own desecration of other peoples' sacred idols in Mecca. Why should such a thug be worthy of any special respect himself?

And, of course, BUY DANISH goods if you see them anywhere. There is an unusually sensible Muslim comment here. One of the cartoons concerned is reproduced above and they are all here -- where it rightly comments: "These cartoons are much less offensive than what is routinely printed in every American newspaper about presidents, presidential candidates, and other pols".

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A good comment from Dick McDonald: "Yesterday when I asked a Floridian guest to the RAID rally why he was blaming Republicans for running up the national debt and borrowing from China to pay for tax cuts for the rich and sticking our children with this enormous burden, he had no earthly idea what our external debt was. When I told him the debt was a mere $4.6 trillion in a country worth $120-180 Trillion, he breathed a sigh of relief. When I explained that we were only obligated to China for a mere $250 Billion out of the $4.6 Trillion, his leftist propaganda started to drain from his body. When I informed him that China with a 10% growth rate(which I doubt they can sustain for long) and a GDP of $1.6 Trillion will take many years to catch the US with a $12.5 Trillion GDP and a 4% growth rate, the leftist liquid drained from his eyes. Facts have a way of doing that. Too bad Americans live in a vacuum of myths written by scriptwriters at the NYT. Fill your quiver with facts and you will eventually decimate our enemy. It will take an effort."

More TSA stupidity: ""Margaret Jackson is the blond, bespectacled, fiftyish chairman of Qantas Airlines. She seems as Australian as kangaroos and koalas: cheerful, plucky, and no-nonsense. Only someone completely bonkers could suspect her of being an Islamic terrorist a la the 9/11 hijackers. Which means, of course, that the TSA did. A screener named Bill rifled Maggie's briefcase last year at Los Angeles International Airport. In it he found the sorts of papers you might expect an airline's CEO to carry, specifically, cross-sections and diagrams of an aircraft. Well. The nitwits who strive to protect us from deadly nail clippers and grandmothers in sandals came out swinging. According to Maggie, our man Bill asked her, 'Why have you got all of this?' She told him, 'I'm the chairman of an airline. I'm the chairman of Qantas.' And this black guy, who was, like, eight foot tall, said, 'But you're a woman'. Boy, nothing gets past the TSA these days."

Beware of ad hominem fallacies: "An opinion piece -- whether an individual op-ed or a column -- exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or opinion. Therefore, the strength of the argument is the key factor in determining the effectiveness of the piece. A sloppily constructed, poorly thought-out argument will convince no one -- while a tightly constructed, coherent, and well-written argument can sway minds. That is why opinion pieces are considered intellectual ammunition in the war of ideas. The only valid response to a persuasive argument is an equally persuasive argument towards a different conclusion. Yet the witch hunters' central argument has nothing to do with the virtues of the arguments presented by Bandow and others. Their argument is, essentially, that because the writer has not disclosed information about his income, he is essentially untrustworthy and his opinions should not be given the time of day. This argument is flawed enough to make it invalid. In logic, that's called a fallacy."

Praise be to tax competition!: "Tax competition occurs when a government uses its tax system to try to attract capital, business activity, or wealthy individuals from other countries. At its most obvious this could be a 'tax haven' with very low (or even zero) tax rates, but it could include more subtle provisions such as tax breaks for specific businesses relocating into a country. Game theory suggests that if the low-tax countries successfully attract international investment then other governments will respond, leading to a competitive spiral of tax reductions as they all compete for mobile capital."

Smarter Muslims don't like Islam?: "An increasing number of Muslims living in Norway have over the past few years chosen to send their children to private Christian schools, NRK reports. At the Christian Regnbuen school in Oslo, 20 out of a hundred students are Muslims. Other private schools in Oslo, like St Sunniva and Kristelig Gymnasium, also have many Muslim students. - I believe they feel that their faith is taken more seriously here, that Christian schools have greater respect and understanding for their faith than they find in public schools, says Dean Lars Bjoerge Holm at Kristelig Gymnasium to Dagsavisen".

Phrenology lives! There is a satirical graphic of a Leftist brain 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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A SMALL VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH IN BRITAIN

The prosecution of two British National Party men for hate speech has failed. The jury acquitted them on some charges and failed to agree on others. It seems that you may now say critical things about Islam in private conversations in Britain. It's not much and even that limited freedom is still under attack: The British government says it is going to try the men again on the charges that the jury could not agree about. There is a good comment on the case and the verdict at Majority Rights.

ANOTHER HISTORIC NAZI POSTER

This one would be from the March 5, 1933 election when Hitler had become Chancellor but Marshall Hindenburg was still President



Translated, the poster reads: "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"

Can you get a more Leftist slogan than that? Modern-day Leftists sometimes try to dismiss Hitler's socialism as something from his early days that he later outgrew. But when this poster was promulgated he was already Chancellor (Prime Minister) so it was far from early days. Once again we see what a barefaced lie it is when Leftists misrepresent Hitler as a Rightist. He campaigned and gained power as a democratic Leftist. The March 5, 1933 election was the last really democratic election prewar Germany had.

Another example of the easy transition from Fascism to modern Leftism: "Where have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s. The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation? Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals — de Man, Heidegger, Eliade — with its exposé of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as "the most distinguished figure" then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein".

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ELSEWHERE

A reader writes: "Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain states that "All human lives ought to be equally valued". Meanwhile Allah's Last Testament is bursting full of vivid declarations of the utter worthlessness of the lives of unbelievers, and invocations to fight and slay them; and the military career of the Prophet was rich in examples of putting those principles into practice. Can I therefore take it as read that the MCB accepts that the Qur'an is not the word of God/Allah and that the Prophet's personal example is incompatible with the MCB's own conception of human rights? Or is the Prophet's well-documented approval of deceit involved here?

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts. Among his news is that the masterly essay by philosopher Neven Sesardic on fraudulent argument among philosophers is now available online. As Sesardic says, there is no topic on which philosophers of science go so conspicuously off the rails as the issue of racial differences in IQ. The philosophers concerned are positively Stalinist in the way they lie about the subject. But I guess there are other ways in which they like Stalin too. They essentially claim that the psychometricians ignore differences in environment, whereas psychometricians have always gone to great trouble to account for the role of the environment! Even my 1972 paper on the subject addressed that issue from the outset. The most surprising thing is that Sesardic did actually get his article published in an academic journal of philosophy. I guess truth still interests some philosophers. Update: I was delighted to receive an email from Neven Sesardic advising me that a revised and expanded version of his essay is now one chapter in his recent book Making Sense of Heritability.

Chris also notes that the book Affirmative Action Hoax now has a companion site here. Both book and site use impeccable science to expose the lie that blacks and whites have the same genetic potential. As the book shows, affirmative action is a huge fraud on whites.

Prager on the Hamas victory: "It is a sad day for humanity when a people choose to elect terrorists as their leaders. But for those of us who believe that clarity is the prerequisite to moral progress, the landslide victory of the terrorist organization Hamas in Palestine has a silver lining.... the Palestinian vote reveals the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace. It likewise reveals the falsity of the Left's belief that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population. That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality. Thanks to this election, the mask has been removed. When given the opportunity to express themselves, most Arabs and many Muslims elsewhere support terror and seek the annihilation of Israel. That is why the Hamas victory is such a defeat for the world's Left -- university professors, news media, socialist parties, the European Union, the United Nations, "peace" activists, editorial writers, and all other apologists for the Palestinians.... On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is".

Jonah Goldberg on the Hamas victory: "Today, various pragmatists, optimists and apologists for the Palestinians say they weren't voting for mass murder and terror, but for honest government and efficient social services. Fatah, the "party" of that terrorist carbuncle Yasser Arafat, was corrupt and incompetent while Hamas has successfully delivered much-needed social services. Hamas ran on "change and reform," proclaim the apologists, not terrorism. Fine, but that was equally true of the Nazis, who traded soup kitchens for indoctrination. Fascist movements have always gained popularity by delivering for the needy, the forgotten and the left out. They have always captured the imagination of the middle class by promising to reform the government, root out corruption, make the trains run on time. And fascist movements have always promised, as Hamas has, to bring about a moral and national restoration."

China Hand has just put up some new posts about Hainan, the big island off the China coast that, unlike Taiwan, remained under Communist control. The contrast with Taiwan is stark, even though Hainan has obvious potential. China Hand's site has been "hacked" in some way, however, so you would be best to load the mirror site.

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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THE ARROGANCE OF YAHOO

I have long had an impression of Yahoo as an arrogant organization and I am now sure of it. I have had an account with them for some years which I made use of in a minor way. Now they have suddenly deleted it without explanation and for no apparent cause. I sent them an enquiry to find out why but such grand pooh-bahs as Yahoo don't talk to little people like me, of course. I think it should be a warning to others not to rely on their services. I had both an email address with them and a website there -- and both suddenly vanished without even a puff of smoke. It could happen to you too.

As it happens, only a very few people had the email address concerned and I was using the website mainly as a backup. The only thing I had in their webspace that was not available elsewhere was some humorous content. And I must say that their arrogance is rivalled only by their childishness. There are heaps of webhosts that offer "free" (advertiser supported) webspace and many of them are more generous in what they offer than Yahoo is. So what they gain from sending me elsewhere for no apparent reason would seem to be nil. People reading my stuff will now see other people's advertisers rather than Yahoo's advertisers. Clever! I of course always have everything backed up to disk before I post it and you can now see here what used to be on Yahoo. For more of the humorous content see also here. It will be interesting to see how the new host works out. But there are plenty of other hosts if that lot does not work out in some way.

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ELSEWHERE

Leftist ex-Congressman complains of bureaucracy: "During the time I served in Congress, constituents would often say that members of Congress should try to live under the laws they pass. I'm no longer a Congressman, and I have a typical horror story about trying to live under one of the laws passed by the current Congress. Congress this past spring added something called the "Real ID" bill to another piece of legislation... The "Real ID" bill set new national standards for obtaining a driver's license, something previously governed exclusively by state law. Thus, the Republican Congress created a vast new bureaucratic system... This summer, my wife and I applied for diver's licenses in Virginia. My application was granted but my wife's application was rejected even though she served 31 years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of Major General in April. My wife, Kathy, had obtained driver's licenses in numerous states during her various assignments for the military and had never been rejected. The Virginia DMV contacted the Social Security Administration to verify her social security number. Kathy and I were married seven years ago but she did not notify the Social Security Administration of her name change, so they could not verify her Social Security number under her married name. Thus, she was rejected for a driver's license even though the U.S. Army had issued her an ID card with both her married name and her social security number".

Don't forget the Gipper: ""Twenty-five years ago...Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communism... [O]ver this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the exception, for America-in stark contrast to the stagflationary 1970s. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need to be constantly relearned, lest we return to the errors that produced the 1970s... Where Republicans have most strayed from the Reagan vision has been on controlling federal spending. But most still adhere to his tax-cutting lessons, with a few prominent exceptions (notably Senator John McCain). They should all recall the Gipper's words in his inauguration speech 25 years ago: 'It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government'."

The Enron trial begins this week and "Enron" appears in any case to have become a perennial Leftist swear-word so this 2002 post is worth keeping in mind as a roundup of what that debacle actually shows. Excerpt: "Like other anti-free-market commentators, Krugman also spreads the false tale that Enron's chairman, Ken Lay, was a free-market disciple. This too is, well, baloney. Lay was a member of the group of extreme anti-capitalist ideologues known as the Union of Concerned Scientists. He was also a strong supporter of the Kyoto global-warming treaty. He supported this treaty (which the Bush administration refused to sign on to), because he wanted his company to profit from another Byzantine regulatory scheme concocted by the government"

Inequality in NYC: "New York still has its economic problems, to be sure. But "income inequality" isn't one of them. The liberal groups complain that, in the Big Apple, the richest 20 percent of residents have average incomes that are nine times those of the poorest families. If that ratio is the problem, one quick "solution" would be to drive out all those millionaires - that would cut the average income of the top 20 percent. Of course, it would also deprive the city and state of billions of tax dollars that pay for schools, hospitals, subways and other services. In other words, we're lucky to have all those wealthy people here. Let's try to keep them. Beyond having lots of very rich folks, New York's population is unusual in another way: Every year, 100,000 or so poor immigrants move here. They choose the tough challenge of a new life, knowing it's likely to be a better one. We could reduce the number of poor New Yorkers in these statistics by shutting our doors to these new Americans. But that would mean turning our backs on a proud history as a beacon for hopeful people all over the world"

Bring back segregation! "District 10 supervisor candidate Charlie Walker yesterday called for creation of a separate San Francisco school system for African Americans. Separating blacks from whites is necessary because current education of African Americans is not working, Walker told the Sentinel. "I am hoping seriously that we consider separating blacks from whites because it's not working," Walker reflected. "What good did it do us to demonstrate to get our freedom when we didn't get nothing out of it. "The women, the gays, the Asians, the Latinos - they got it and we're still sitting around here. In San Francisco alone, 42% of our people are unemployed."

For my Burns Night celebrations last month we had our clootie dumpling (clootie dumpling is a sort of plum pudding) in a slightly decadent way. To my knowledge most Scots just sprinkle sugar on it but I decided that a rum sauce would go nicely with it. And the sauce was such a great success that I doubt that anybody tasted the actual clootie dumpling! I have therefore put the recipe for the sauce up on my recipe blog. (Mirror site 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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REPUBLICANS ARE RACISTS! -- BUT

The latest "Republicans are racists" screech is here. This version of the screech is dressed up in the language of social psychology, however. I know that language very well. I have myself written many academic publications in it and have come to similar conclusions. When the screech ends ""We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting", the article is quite right. The correlation between expressions of conservative attitudes and expressions of racially negative attitudes does not always emerge but mostly it does.

For an intelligent person, WHY that happens is the interesting question, however. That the finding might arise because conservatives are more honest in saying what they really think or that it might arise because Leftists are more deluded (including self-deluded) is never to my knowledge examined. Instead, complicated Freudian explanations for the correlation are offered that fall apart when closely examined.

I have myself done umpteen surveys of what people say about their thinking (attitude surveys) and have come to the commonsense conclusion that "You can't trust 'em". People "put their best foot forward" when answering surveys and often do not say what they really think. Psychologists do have some ways of coping with that. They include in their surveys "lie scales" or "social desirability scales" -- sets of questions that try to detect how frank and honest the respondent is being. I myself routinely included such scales in my surveys. But the most common such scales -- the ones I used -- examine lying about one's behaviour and one cannot assume that lying about behaviour and lying about attitudes are the same. To do so assumes a generality that may not exist. I hate to state the obvious, but people may lie about one thing and not another. You can never tell.

And that people who do not in general lie might lie about particularly sensitive issues such as race should, I hope, be supremely obvious. And given the always tense relationship between Leftists and the truth (as evidenced by the long history of Leftists denying the evils of the Soviet empire) that the liars concerned might be mostly Leftists seems in only marginal need of proof.

So my final conclusion is that attitudes surveys are unreliable sources of information. I rely on behaviour. And when history's most infamous racist said this,

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

I think you can see why. The expressed attitudes associated with a given behaviour may vary greatly with time and place. Expecting a permanent link between one set of expressed attitudes and one set of behaviours is something that only a psychologist would be stupid enough to do. Which is why I study history these days instead of psychology.

The truth of what I have just said has however begun to seep into some psychological skulls and some do therefore make an effort to use brain scans rather than expressed attitudes as a source of information about what people think. The limitations of using such gross measurements of such finely articulated phenomena as brain processes should, I hope, be obvious to all but some of the findings so far have at least been amusing. Such procedures have on some occasions shown fanatical Leftists to be "prejudiced". How awful! I say more about such studies here.

The link I have just given does deal with the work of Banaji -- the main protagonist in the latest screech -- but I might perhaps make one additional observation. At best, Banaji's research technique shows who has bad feelings about blacks. And on her results many Leftists do but there is nonetheless a preponderance of Republicans. Again however, the interesting question to non-simplistic people is: WHY? There is an old saying that "a conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night" so perhaps the technique is detecting those who have had REASON to be negative about blacks. And that such people might vote for a party that panders less to blacks would surprise only a psychologist.

Leftist psychologists are very keen to point the finger at possible instances of "motivated social cognition" ("bias" to you and me) so Michelle Malkin's comment on the latest screech does a good job of lobbing that ball back into their court. Or to put Michelle's point in the language of academic psychology: One wonders what precautions were taken to avoid a Rosenthal effect. But of course who needs such precautions when you know the answer before you start?

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing news report from Sweden here. The article does not explicitly say so but apparently the Swedish police preferred the word of a Muslim doorman to the word of one of Sweden's most prominent Leftists. Make of that what you will. A possible case of the pot calling the kettle Afro-American, I think.

Marginal Revolution on Islam and modernity "In my view all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings compatible with modernity and all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings incompatible with modernity. Call it the completeness theorem. It's how religions adapt and evolve to modernity that is important. Religions are constantly changing, emphasizing certain features, downplaying others, creating new interpretations. Given enough time, I believe that any religion will evolve towards compatability with modernity because it's the memes that combine modernity and religion which will survive and prosper. The problem is that Christianity has had hundreds of years to adapt itself to modernity while Islam has had modernity thrust upon it. Fish don't walk overnight and neither do religions. Nevertheless there are Islamic leaders who, under the pressure of current events, see the direction in which Islam must move and who are actively encouraging evolution in that direction".

Tibor R. Machan on Roe and privacy: "One reason that Roe v. Wade is still with us is that legal scholars and jurists are arguing about the wrong issue. The question isn't whether the US Constitution contains any reference to a right to privacy. Let's assume it does. Let's assume that the Ninth Amendment, as argued in Griswold v. Connecticut and some other cases, implicitly refers to the right to privacy every human beings has. Why would this be relevant? Some might argue that if one has the right to privacy, a woman who has an abortion is doing something private, something no one else has the authority to regulate or ban. But this simply will not do. If a pregnant woman is carrying a child -- as pro-life folks call it, 'an unborn child' -- she has no authority to have a procedure that will kill this child. Wherever one locates a human being, inside the pregnant woman or in a crib or at some hotel, unless he has threatened to attack someone, no one is justified killing him. Only self-defense justifies killing another human being, period. ... Privacy, then, is really quite irrelevant to the debate surrounding Roe v. Wade. The relevant question to be answered is, 'Is the being to be killed in an abortion a human being or is it human only potentially?'"

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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THE HOLY FATHER ON ISLAM

More on the discussions at Castelgandolfo



Some more detail is coming out about recent discussions by and with the Pope on the possibility of reform within Islam. This article has links to other articles discussing the debate the Pope's comments have kicked up. In sum the earlier brief note on this blog that the Pope seems to believe reform of Islam is not impossible, but nonetheless likely to be exceedingly difficult, (in other words, "don't hold your breath") would seem to hold. Interestingly this later Chiesa report indicates that if reform is to come it is likely to be from areas such as Turkey, Indonesia or from Western Muslims. The labelling of 'so called' Western countries is also interesting, ...is this a tacit acknowledgement that parts of Europe are no longer in the West? Eurabia? Key excerpt:

"The Holy Father is well-informed enough to know that there have existed and that there exist today, probably increasingly, other interpretations of the Qur'anic evidence with regard to a theology of revelation. These considered Muslim views and approaches do not (yet?), it would seem, inform the thinking and approach of a sizable Islamic movement or organisation - and we do not know what future problems lie ahead in this regard - but it does exist and is vividly discussed in many places, both in academia and beyond.

"An open debate on these matters does not yet seem to be possible within the Arab world but Turkish and Indonesian society grant relatively more room for airing and discussing such ideas, and the so-called Western countries offer even more space".

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ELSEWHERE

There are even big genetic racial differences in earwax! "It is not a subject scientists generally wax about. But a seven-page scientific paper published today is solely devoted to the genetics of earwax. Human earwax comes in two varieties -- wet and dry. According to the journal Nature Genetics, dry earwax is seen in up to 95 per cent of East Asians, but no more than 3 per cent of Europeans and Africans. The reason for the difference is a gene called ABCC11 which controls earwax-altering molecules. A 39-strong international team did the research. The role of earwax was unclear, said the scientists. "Insect trapping, self-cleaning and prevention of dryness of the external auditory canal are its plausible functions," they wrote. Armpit (axillary) odour was associated with wet-type earwax, raising the possibility that earwax might be involved in sexual attraction."

Crooked British cops: "Undercover detectives altered a surveillance log to avoid blame for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes in a bungled counter-terrorist operation, according to police watchdogs. The disclosure, in a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, puts fresh pressure on Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and his officers over the shooting.... Police sources say that the report, which is being studied by the Crown Prosecution Service, shows that a Special Branch logbook describing Mr de Menezes's last movements had been altered to hide that he had wrongly been identified as a suspect.... The IPCC team is said to have been alerted by a whistle-blower. A scientific technique for checking changes in documents showed the change that had been made. [All they are good at these days is political correctness]

Jeff Jacoby on the Hamas election win: "Western reactions to the outcome of the Palestinian election last week mostly came in two varieties: highly negative and decidedly undecided.... I think the sweeping Hamas victory is by far the best result that could have been hoped for. I say that not because Hamas is anything other than a blood-drenched terrorist group responsible for killing or maiming thousands of innocent victims, but because its lopsided win is an unambiguous reality check into the nature of Palestinian society. And if there is one thing that the West badly needs, it is more realism and less delusion about the Palestinians".

World Bank 'toadying to the corrupt': Sir Edward Clay, the outspoken former British envoy to Kenya, let rip at the World Bank yesterday for lending $120 million to President Kibaki's Government when it was embroiled in a massive corruption scandal. In a letter to Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank, Sir Edward accused the organisation of "toadying to a thoroughly corrupt administration" and said that last week's loan made a mockery of efforts to stamp out high-level looting.

William F. Buckley, Jr. on Bolivian President Morales: "Morales shapes his complaint in language similar to that which has been used by the father of the movement against socialism, Milton Friedman -- the language of free trade. Whose problem is it that many Americans use cocaine? And that they desire it intensely enough to give it a street price sufficient to support Bolivian producers at every level -- the agricultural workers, the refiners, and the exporters? The point is in part cynical, because Morales knows perfectly well that human weakness will always produce a demand for toxic substances, if they provide intense pleasures en route to devastation. But he is shrewd enough to pick up on the point of free trade -- even though it is a part of the neoliberalism he has otherwise denounced. What right does the United States government have to convert its concern for weak-minded Americans into a veto power on Bolivian agriculture?"

Interesting stories here and here about how capitalist Boeing has outsmarted the socialist European Airbus. One cost item not mentioned in Las Vegas Sun article is the various costs in deicing the A380 on the tarmac during snow and ice conditions in winter time. Although this is not a problem in warmer climes it is routine in the higher latitudes each winter and it is costly in time, materials, manpower and delays.

The horny-headed one has a great post on deceptive Leftist "statistics" about poverty. The poor are actually getting richer and the rich are getting poorer.

A little birdie tells me that the obnoxious Brian Leiter is feeling the heat of Keith Burgess-Jackson's Anti-Leiter blog. Keith seems to be feeling his oats so Leiter might be in for a long haul.

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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AN ABORIGINAL SUNDAY

This post will encourage Leftists to shriek "racist" and "Nazi" at me but they regularly shriek that at GWB and heaps of other conservatives so I am going to disregard such shrieks as devalued currency.

I grew up with Aborigines (Australian native blacks) in my class at school and I have seen plenty of them since -- particularly as a landlord (Yes. I HAVE let rooms and houses to them. Racists do that, you know) -- so I think I know a bit about them. And if you are looking for "cultural" differences, Aborigines must be as different from people of Northern European ancestry as you can get. And the reason why is that they were isolated in Australia from other populations for up to 60,000 years (on some estimates). So they evolved separately. And they evolved to suit Australia as it originally was. And the abilities they evolved -- particularly a remarkable capacity for observing and remembering minute details of the landscape -- do in some ways leave the rest of us for dead. In other ways, however, they are badly lacking in what is needed to fit into modern Western society -- a strikingly poor ability to plan ahead being their most obvious handicap. They very much "live for the day".

One thing I have always envied them is their ability to relax. They can sit around under a tree all day happily doing exactly nothing. I, however, am one of those instinctively hard-driving people who is genetically from the far North of the world. And the fact that, in my retirement, I post daily to seven blogs of my own and contribute frequently to four group blogs is, I think, some testimony to that. It is as hard for me to sit back and do nothing as it is easy for Aborigines. But yesterday I managed it. Just as Aborigines often do, I spent the whole day sitting around and doing practically nothing other than some intermittent chatting. Anne accompanied me in this experience, of course. She is probably more full of beans than I am these days, however, so she caved in first and shot off to do something at about 7pm. She spent many years as a remote-area nurse working with (and getting on with) Aborigines so knows them even better than I do. So she knew all about the model I had in mind when I said we were having an Aborigine day. She enjoyed it but she couldn't keep it up! Genetics will out.

Update:

I receive a heap of supportive emails but, although every one is greatly appreciated, I reproduce on my blogs only the tiniest fraction of such mail. I seem to be having a spasm of reproducing emails today, however. I have just added emails as updates to posts on GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH so I think I will also reproduce an email relevant to the post above:

"Your observations are -- as usual -- spot on. My wife Pam also worked as a remote area nurse (N.T., Qld., Torres Straits) and we came to like Aborigines very much".

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ELSEWHERE

More scientific evidence of deep-lying racial differences: "A common genetic mutation may explain why Asian heart patients are less likely than others to get relief from chest pain when they take nitroglycerin, a new Chinese study finds. Fudan University researchers examined 111 coronary heart disease patients who were self-administering nitroglycerin under the tongue whenever they experienced an acute angina attacks. Eighty (72 percent) of the patients reported that they had pain relief within 10 minutes of taking the nitroglycerin, while the remainder of the patients experienced no pain relief. The researchers found that many of the patients who didn't respond to nitroglycerin had an inactive mutant form of the ALDH2 gene. This mutant version is called ALDH2*2. In order for nitroglycerin to be effective, a patient's body has to be able to convert the nitroglycerin into nitric oxide. This process requires ALDH2. It's estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of the Asian population has the ALDH2*2 mutation. This information needs to be considered when doctors recommend nitroglycerin for Asian patients, the study authors said".

An interesting thought: "I finally figured out why the angry left hates President Bush. Psychiatrists call it transference. President Clinton almost destroyed the Democratic Party while he was in the White House. We all remember the wasted years, the scandals and the Republicans sweeping to power in 1994. And, if not for Bill, Al Gore would have won in 2000. So the angry left really hates Bill Clinton. But, through a process called cognitive dissonance, they can't hate one of their own, so they have transferred the hate to President Bush. But they really don't believe it, do they? [The Left are past-masters of using psychological defence-mechanisms to shield themselves from reality so use of transference is not at all unlikely]

Calls to act on Soviet crimes: "Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Council of Europe became the first international body to consider the crimes against humanity that were committed by the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and other states. In a debate that relit the clash between Russia and Western European countries, the 43-nation council considered a report by a Swedish parliamentarian that also called on former communist states to teach the truth about their former regimes, erect memorials to the victims and create days of remembrance. A resolution, adopted by a simple majority, referred to "individual and collective assassinations, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportation, torture, slave labour and other forms of mass physical terror."

Tibor Machan: Limiting outsourcing is wrong and harmful : "If my kid has been mowing your lawn for $5 an hour and he has gotten used to this, when some other kid offers to mow it for $3 an hour, my kid will be upset. He will have been outbid! The alternative of putting the competitor and the customer in chains isn't acceptable. It's flat out morally wrong. The only thing my own kid can do is either find some other job where he can make his $5 an hour or lower his price and keep the job at $3 an hour or less. Now if I had given the mowing job to my child and got a better offer and took it, I could be faulted for my insensitivity as a parent. But most of us aren't related to those who work at the Big Three, so we do not owe them special considerations that trump commerce."

The Rising Cost of Complying with the Federal Income Tax: "In 2005, taxpayers will pay roughly $1.2 trillion in federal income taxes. But America's tax burden is more than just the amount of tax paid. It also includes the cost of complying with federal taxes, including tax planning, paperwork and other hassles caused by tax complexity.... In 2005 individuals, businesses and nonprofits will spend an estimated 6 billion hours complying with the federal income tax code, with an estimated compliance cost of over $265.1 billion. This amounts to imposing a 22-cent tax compliance surcharge for every dollar the income tax system collects. Projections show that by 2015 the compliance cost will grow to $482.7 billion".

There is a satirical article here called: "Sexual orientation is flexible, right?"

Mike Pechar has a great post on how the "caring" Leftists of San Francisco are doing their best to dump the "homeless" onto other cities. Leftist piety does not last long when it affects Leftist wallets.

I have just put up on Australian Politics the latest salvo in Australia's history wars -- where Australia's lying Leftist historians are being exposed for what they are. Warning: The site is not quite office-safe at the moment.

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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