Brookes News Update

What's driving the US economy?: The current US boom is the strangest in US history. Despite rising consumption, investment and employment a large number of Americans are convinced that the economy is on the verge of collapse
Victorian Liberal Party becomes the Dhimmi Party: Instead of pandering to Muslim bigotry Liberal Party Minister Andrew Robb should be savaging Bracks for buying Muslim votes by suppressing criticism of Islam
Danish cartoons and Muslim fury: Why are most western countries dealing with Muslims who think they have a right to punish their hosts if they dislike something they do?
Sinai Option - the road to permanent peace in the Middle East: The Sinai option: the transfer of the Arab population from the land that used to be called "Palestinian mandate" to the Sinai peninsula, an area of land comparable with the entire Palestinian mandate
An Iraqi Mayor salutes the US 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment : A letter of gratitude from the Mayor of Tall 'Afar, Iraq, to the men and women of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and their families
Government spending and jobs - another Keynesian fallacy : The Keynesian fallacy that government spending can cure persistent widespread unemployment appears to be alive and well in some of our universities
Cost and prices: another economic fallacy : Those who argue that wages rates or oil price hikes can be inflationary have fallen into the old fallacy that costs determine prices

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ELSEWHERE



Evolutionary forces work rapidly -- even in recent times: "Providing the strongest evidence yet that human beings are still evolving, researchers have detected 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, in the past 5000 to 15,000 years. The genes include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin colour and brain function. Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny. Three populations were studied: Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favoured by natural selection. The study may help anthropologists explain the variety of distinctive appearances, even though people's genes are on the whole very similar, said Spencer Wells, the director of the genographic project of the National Geographic Society. The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not halt in the distant past, as is assumed by many social scientists. "There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago, who headed the study

Canadian Christians swing Rightwards: "Conservative Party popularity among churchgoers, and especially among Protestants, increased significantly this past federal election - driven largely by moral issues such as same-sex "marriage." Protestant churchgoers were 25% more likely to vote Conservative as compared to previous elections, according to an Ipsos-Reid Poll. And among churchgoing Catholics in Quebec, votes for the Liberal party were cut roughly in half compared to 2004. "For the first time in the history of polling, Catholics who are regular churchgoers shifted away from the lending the largest measure of their support to the Liberals (42 percent voted Conservative, 40 percent Liberal)," as reported by Faith Today. Those who attend Catholic Church services more than once weekly were even more likely to vote for Stephen Harper."

Wacko Jacko: "Michael Jackson, the king of pop, is "on the verge" of converting to Islam, CBS News reported last week. If that's true, it fits into a recurring and important African-American pattern.... Given Mr. Jackson's famous eccentricities, it is unclear what his Bahraini venture amounts to, but if he does convert to Islam, he will be following a path in place since the late 1940s, of African-Americans under stress turning to some form of Islam..."

Muslim rapists: "A Muslim rape epidemic in sweeping over Europe -- and over many other nations host to immigrants from the Islamic world. The direct connection between the rapes and Islam is irrefutable, as Muslims are significantly overrepresented among convicted rapists and rape suspects. The Muslim perpetrators themselves boast that there crime is justified since their victims were, among other things, not properly veiled".

GM selling off the family silver: "General Motors Corp.'s board met for the first time Monday with new member Jerome York, an adviser to investor Kirk Kerkorian and an outspoken critic of the company's turnaround efforts. In its one-day meeting, the board was expected to consider GM's planned sale of a majority stake in its finance unit, General Motors Acceptance Corp.... GM's board met the same day the struggling automaker announced the sale of a 17.4 percent stake in Japan's Suzuki Motor Corp. for $2 billion."

Am I a globalist? by Tibor R. Machan: "Even though the global statism of communism is no longer a widespread theme among critics of capitalism, there are plenty who still regard the classical liberal, libertarian polity misguided. The fact that it accords best with human nature, as most reasonably conceived in the tradition of such thinkers as Aristotle, Locke, von Mises, and Rand, leaves these critics unimpressed. So they have come forth with the label 'globalist' with which to tar and feather those who support freedom for all human beings in all of their communities. Well, then I must confess to being a proud globalist myself. I consider it well established that human beings, anytime and anywhere, live better if their right to liberty, including free trade and property, is widely respected and well protected."

Australia doing well on employment: "The unemployment rate has fallen to 5.2 per cent in February on the back of a surge in new jobs. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported total employment grew 25,900 during the month. The number of unemployed people fell 3700 to 554,100. Unemployment in January had been 5.3 per cent. The median market forecast was for a rise of 10,000 in employment and a jobless rate of 5.3 per cent in February. There are now 10.058 million Australians in employment. The participation rate stayed steady at 64.4 per cent. The number of people looking for full-time work, however, fell 2800 to 394,000 while there was a small fall in those looking for part-time work to 160,000. The male unemployment rate stayed at 5.2 per cent while the female unemployment rate dropped 0.1 percentage points to 5.2 per cent.

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 Pages are here or here or here.

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FROM CATHY BUCKLE IN ZIMBABWE

"This letter is being sent out three days later than normal because I am now entering the 92nd hour with only enough electricity for lights in my home. At midday on Friday the voltage to my home crashed and the power is insufficient to heat the water geyser, run a fridge or stove or even boil a kettle. 25 telephone calls to the electricity supplier in the last four days, a personal visit to the faults office, a number of offers to provide fuel or go and collect electricians are all to no avail.

In the villages less than 15 kilometres out of Marondera there is also no electricity which means the grinding mills are not working. I was told by a friend that there are scores of people now going without food and that the atmosphere is extremely tense. This morning there is literally mud coming out of the taps in my home which means there are problems pumping water too. Zimbabwe is now entering the darkest of days. It is hard to describe how anyone is surviving now and this week I had the most amazing encounter which helped me put my own problems into perspective.

Standing at the entrance gates of a wholesaler there was a thin, gaunt, tired looking man. On the ground next to him was a small pile of empty cement bags. He bent and picked up a bag and held it towards me, asking me to buy it. An empty cement bag, turned inside out and with two crude holes cut into the top for handles. "Only thirty thousand dollars" the man said to me. This was literally just an empty cement bag, it hadn't been sewn, reinforced or even cleaned very well. I could think of no earthly reason why I would want an empty cement bag but the look in the mans eyes, the slight trembling of his hand and the thinness of his body gave me a whole lot of reasons. I gave the man forty thousand dollars and told him to keep the change. I took my cement bag and the man called out "God bless you, thank you," as I walked away. We both knew that the money I'd just handed over would buy the man just half a loaf of bread but to me, and obviously to him, selling cement bags enables a sliver of dignity to be maintained.

Please keep the people of Zimbabwe in your thoughts and prayers in these very hard times"

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Ralph Peters reports from Baghdad: "I'm trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it. Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills. And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn't stoop in such an hour of crisis. Let me tell you what I saw anyway. Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops. All day - and it was a long day - we drove through Shia and Sunni neighborhoods. Everywhere, the reception was warm. No violence. None. And no hostility toward our troops. Iraqis went out of their way to tell us we were welcome."

Muslim aggression in India too: "India was on high alert last night after a series of explosions tore through the country's holiest Hindu city, sparking fears of renewed communal violence. The blasts struck a crowded temple and the railway station in Varanasi, leaving at least 15 dead and scores injured. Religious institutions across the country, particularly Hindu temples, are braced for further attacks. Sniffer dogs have been deployed at religious sites in leading cities and devotees were being searched before being allowed to worship. Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, appealed for calm, fearing a resurgence in violence between Hindus and Muslims. The attacks on the temple-studded city on the bank of the river Ganges came as Hindus prepared for one of their most important festivals".

Leftist principles in action: "Illinois Governor Blagojevich still continues to support a member of the racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay organization Nation of Islam for a position on his hate crimes commission. The guy just refuses to admit he made a mistake and fix it. Obviously it's absurd for somebody who hates whites, gays and Jews to sit on that panel."

Surprise! Polling hanky panky from CBS "It appears that every other day there's a new poll released on President George Bush's job approval rating.... This time we're talking about a CBS poll that showed President Bush's approval rating at an all time low of 34%.... So, in an effort to turn the findings of bloggers and talk hosts, who caught CBS monkeying with the poll numbers, into a non-story, they decided to "out" themselves on their website, albeit in the guise of explaining how polls are conducted. CBS News explained to readers what most pollsters do when they conduct their telephone surveys, and then they dropped this little bomb in the midst of their explanation: Bush's favorability poll was weighted in favor of Democrats. Bush's 34% approval rating is a result of polling 37% Democrats, 28% Republicans and 35% other or independents. One can only imagine the affiliations of that 35%. Are they Libertarians? Socialists? Communists? Are some extreme right-wing militia-types, who hate Bush as much as the left?... Also, the poll fails to differentiate between registered voters, likely voters or people who don't even know they can vote."

Prof Bainbridge explains why Vermonters are leaving Vermont: "Might it be that Vermont's problems illustrate the social cost of high taxes, extensive regulation, and low growth policies? For individuals, Vermont has the 6th highest state tax burden in the country. For business, Vermont has one of the worst state business tax climates in the country, ranking 46th out of the 50 states. And then there's regulation..."

The usual Leftist "tolerance": "The abortion debate is unusually tense on the campus of Harvard University this semester, with abortion rights advocates allegedly tearing down pro-life posters that show a baby through the several stages of development. The Harvard Right to Life (HRL) group has named the in utero child featured on the posters Elena. Along with the photos of the baby are facts scribbled on the signs as if a child had drawn them. The most recent ad shows "Elena" at 8 weeks and labels distinct body parts, including the brain, skin, intestines, fingers and "my pumpin' heart". The student organization began posting the Elena ads in mid-February, according to HRL President Meghan Grizzle. The group posts a new ad in the series every week, and Grizzle said students have to replace them "a few times a day."

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 Pages are here or here or here.

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Even this young Californian now knows the score:

An excerpt below from his article "Hitler was a liberal"

When liberals are not trying to pass Nazism off as "fascism," they are attempting to pass it off as an extreme form of "conservatism" and an inexorable byproduct of Christianity. In 2003, on his show ''Scarborough Country,'' former congressman and current MSNBC personality Joe Scarborough shed light on a college textbook that grouped Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as "conservatives." Now how exactly could Hitler, a man who was a strong supporter of social welfare programs, gun control, animal rights, government funding for the arts, and bans against smoking in public get away with being called a "conservative"?

The reason is simple. Liberals are such shameless liars and persistent revisionists that they will malign anyone they disagree with as Hitleresque, from the spastic Iraq war protestors comparing George W. Bush to Hitler to Sen. Dick Durbin comparing American troops to "Nazis." Perhaps this is on account of the equivalence of their deep-seated rejection of God to Hitler's militant rejection of God, which led to one of the ugliest mass murders in human history. But wait a minute, wasn't Hitler a Christian also?

Well, if being a Christian means claiming the role of God for one's self and coercing the subjects of one's rule to shake off their beliefs in Christ and pledge a new allegiance to the Third Reich, then perhaps Hitler was a Christian. But this certainly doesn't explain why the Nazis harassed, arrested, tortured, and murdered Christian clergymen for espousing their beliefs, or for that matter why during the first five years of the Nazis' rule a majority of concentration camp inmates were Christians, Jews being late arrivals for the most part, nor does it explain why on November 4, 1936, the Nazis ordered the removal of crucifixes from schools in the Oldenburg area on account of the notion that they were "symbols of superstition."

To set the record straight: Hitler was not a Christian, the Nazis were not Christians, Nazi Germany was not a Christian theocracy. It was a militant secularist, socialist regime that championed the sovereignty of man rather than the sovereignty of God. In February 1937, Hanns Kerrl, minister of religion in the Third Reich said: "The question of the divinity of Christ is ridiculous and inessential. A new answer has arisen as to what Christ and Christianity are: Adolph Hitler." University Nazis in Keil wrote in 1935: "We Germans are heathens and want no more Jewish religion in our Germany. We no longer believe in the Holy Ghost; we believe in the Holy Blood." Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth, before World War II said, "Our religion is Germany." In fact, grace before meals given to poor children by the Nazi Welfare Committee ended "For this food, my Fuehrer, my thanks I render." Maybe I'm just confused, but I can't precisely recall Jesus ever taking on the name of "Fuehrer" but then maybe I haven't reading my college textbooks closely enough....

For more on the claim that Hitler was a Christian, see here

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ELSEWHERE

Muslim fanatic really loves the West: "A fanatical Muslim who ranted against Britain has moved back here from Pakistan — to live on benefits. Hate-filled Zeeshan Siddiqui, 26, who once called London an “organ of the devil”, is enjoying life in a suburb of the capital. The Sun tracked down Siddiqui to a quiet, tree-lined road in Heston, West London, following his release from custody by Pakistani police who were probing suspected terror links. In the past he has said he wants to be an Islamic martyr, called for all non-Muslims to be killed and declared his contempt for the UK. Yet he is happy to sponge off our taxpayers to the tune of 52.60 pounds a week in Jobseekers Allowance. Siddiqui slipped back into Britain in January after eight months in prison in Peshawar.

House of Lords defends English liberties again: "Britain's House of Lords has voted for identity cards to be voluntary, defying Prime Minister Tony Blair and the House of Commons on an issue Blair says is key to combating terrorism. The unelected Lords voted 227-166 against the compromise plan approved by the lower house last month. After Blair backed down on making identification cards mandatory for all residents of Britain, the Commons backed a proposal to require them for British citizens applying for passports. Rebels in Blair's Labour Party had opposed making the cards mandatory, but critics said that despite the changes, the ID cards were still being forced on the public. Blair says the cards are crucial to the fight against terrorism and fraud. Opponents say they are likely to be ineffective and could violate civil liberties.

Dose of sanity angers French Left: "Moves to curb France’s chronically high youth unemployment are at the centre of a trial of strength today between public service unions and students, who have called demonstrations across the country, and Dominique de Villepin, the embattled Prime Minister.... The CPE, just passed by parliament, will allow employers to hire under-26-year-olds for a two-year period that can be terminated at any time. Youth unemployment, at 23 per cent, is widely blamed on protective labour laws that put off employers. Jobless rates of up to 50 per cent on immigrant housing estates helped to fuel last autumn’s riots. The CPE is opposed by a majority of the young and the Left, who fear employers will use it to exploit younger workers. Business leaders have given it half-hearted support, demanding a full-scale revamp of labour laws. The battle over the CPE has rallied the demoralised Socialist opposition and unions to resist what they depict as M de Villepin’s drive towards “Anglo-Saxon-style” deregulation."

Why Africa is poor: "The rot starts with government, but it afflicts the entire society. There's no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There's no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there's no point being a phone company.) There's no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is underfunded and looks even harder for bribes.) There's no point getting an education because jobs are not handed out on merit. (And in any case, you can't borrow money for school fees because the bank can't collect on the loan.)"

In case you have not seen it yet, here is the Drudge Report of the latest Streisand rave -- in which she accuses GWB of being a "C student" while herself making lots of spelling errors. Those who live in glass houses...

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 Pages are here or here or here.

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ANOTHER INDICATION OF THE WIDESPREAD ACCEPTANCE OF THE NAZIS IN THE 1930s



Prince Philip has broken a 60-year public silence about his family's links with the Nazis. In a frank interview, he said they found Hitler's attempts to restore Germany's power and prestige 'attractive' and admitted they had 'inhibitions about the Jews'. The revelations come in a book about German royalty kowtowing to the Nazis, which features photographs never published in the UK. They include one of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms. One row back in the cortege in Darmstadt, western Germany, was his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, wearing a Royal Navy bicorn hat.

Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering. Explaining the attraction of the Nazis, 84-year-old Prince Philip told an American academic: "There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic. "I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was." The revelations are in the book Royals and the Reich

He added that there was 'a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-Communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?' Philip stressed that he was never 'conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views'. But he went on to say there were 'inhibitions about the Jews' and 'jealousy of their success'.

Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921, the youngest of five children and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. All four of his sisters married German princes and three - Sophie, Cecile and Margarita - became members of the Nazi party. Sophia's husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became chief of Goering's secret intelligence service and they were frequent guests at Nazi functions.

Philip went on to fight with distinction for the Allies in the Second World War before marrying the young Princess Elizabeth in 1947, five years before she became Queen. He served with the Royal Navy where, by 1945, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant on a destroyer and was mentioned in despatches. All of his sisters and brothers-inlaw are now dead but he keeps in contact with his German relatives. His comments on the family's Nazi connections appear in Royals and the Reich, by Jonathan Petropoulos, to be published in Britain in May.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Steven Pinker on Eugenics: "Contrary to the belief spread by the radical scientists, eugenics for much of the twentieth century was a favorite cause of the left, not the right. It was championed by many progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger, and the Marxist biologists J. B. S. Haldane and Hermann Muller. It's not hard to see why the sides lined up this way. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt Protestants hated eugenics because it was an attempt by intellectual and scientific elites to play God. Progressives loved eugenics because it was on the side of reform rather than the status quo, activism rather than laissez-faire, and social responsibility rather than selfishness. Moreover, they were comfortable expanding state intervention in order to bring about a social goal. Most abandoned eugenics only when they saw how it led to forced sterilizations in the United States and Western Europe and, later, to the policies of Nazi Germany".

Truth under attack again: "Students and lecturers are calling for a Leeds University don to be sacked after he said he supported a theory that black people were inferior to whites. In a row that has reignited the debate on the limits of freedom of speech, Frank Ellis, a lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies, sparked anger after stating, in an interview with the university's student newspaper, that he was an 'unrepentant Powellite' who thought that the BNP was 'a bit too socialist' for his liking. Ellis said he supported right-wing ideas such as the Bell Curve theory, which held that white people were more intelligent than black people. '[It] has demonstrated to me beyond any reasonable doubt there is a persistent gap in average black and white average intelligence.' Repatriation would get his support, he added, if it was done 'humanely'. Now students are preparing to picket his lectures, protest on campus and bombard the vice-chancellor with emails calling for Ellis to be removed from his post."

Wisdom from Berkeley: "David Brooks quotes Peter Beinart of The New Republic as saying that Harvard students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd expect from a good high school student," and that required courses can be "a hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes." But Harvard students are in most cases outstanding high school students, so they arrive with at least the core knowledge expected of a good high school student". [A false but amusing assumption. America's High Schools are now so bad that even Harvard has to give 20% of its freshman intake remedial courses in the "3rs". See here]

Catastrophic drop in births in Japan: "More than half of the women born during Japan's second postwar baby boom from 1971 to 1974 had not had any children by age 30, according to statistics released Friday by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. Coupled with an earlier prediction that the number of women of childbearing age-15 to 49-will continue to decline over the coming decade or more, the ministry is concerned that the fall in the birthrate will accelerate. "(Because) numerous women in the second baby boom generation have few children, (this) could mean the birthrate will fall at a faster rate, and the population will further decline," a ministry official said. According to a special report published by the ministry focusing on births, the share of women who had not given birth by age 30 was 18 percent among those born in 1953, and rose every year thereafter. The figure topped 30 percent among those born in 1961 and 40 percent for those born in 1967; among the cohort of women born in 1973, a year that saw more than 2 million births in total, 51 percent had not had a child by age 30."

I put up a post on Socialized Medicine yesterday that noted how low the British National Health Service has sunk. They now fund "alternative" treatments while refusing to fund some real therapies.

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 Pages are here or here or here.

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Erring Spell-Check Causes 'Sea Sponge' Invasion

Below is a true funny story with a sequel. See below for the sequel -- a sequel which I think is original to this blog

"Spell-checking on his computer is never going to be the same for Santa Cruz solo practitioner Arthur Dudley. In an opening brief to San Francisco's 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words "sea sponge" instead of the legal term "sua sponte," which is Latin for "on its own motion." "Spell check did not have sua sponte in it," said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.

That left the justices reading -- and probably laughing at -- such classic statements as: "An appropriate instruction limiting the judge's criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction." And: "It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense." The sneaky "sea sponge" popped up at least five times.

Dudley said he didn't notice the mistake in People v. Danser, A107853, until his client -- William Danser, a former Santa Clara County Superior Court judge seeking reversal of his conviction for fixing traffic tickets -- called for an explanation.

Dudley corrected the error in his reply brief, telling the court that a "glitch" caused the weird wording and instructing that "where the phrase 'sea sponge' is found, this court should insert the phrase 'sua sponte.'" The faux pas has made Dudley the butt of some mild ribbing around Santa Cruz. Local attorneys, he said, have started calling his unique defense the "sea sponge duty to instruct.""

The sequel:

The article above that reports the howler itself contains a howler. Where my heading above used the correct term "erring", the heading in the original article used "errant". This a not uncommon mistake but it is rather appalling in people who deal in Latin every day -- as lawyers still do. "Errant" is ultimately (via French) derived from the Latin infinitive "ire", which means to travel or to wander. So an errant knight is not a knight who makes a lot of mistakes but a knight who travels about rather than staying at home. The author of the article should be made errant.

Interestingly, neither Orrin Kerr and his commenters on the Volokhs nor Instapundit (both legal academics) picked up the erring "errant", though they did note the story. A legal education obviously ain't what it used to be. I learnt that stuff in High School myself -- 46 years ago.

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ELSEWHERE

Religious comeback in China: "At least one-third of the 60 million members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) belong to a religious organization and half of these, some 10 million members, participate regularly in religious services. But the Central Committee is not standing by passively and is prohibiting party cadres from participating in religious activities and is promoting Marxism and atheism, but many members are defending themselves: "Faith is a personal matter and we will never sell ourselves to the Party."... Mrs Xue ... a CCP member who works for the national security bureau in a big city, was baptized in the Catholic Church 13 years ago. Since then, she had always attended Sunday Mass in an official church, until her colleagues found out. Her superior warned her not to attend religious activities openly. Now she attends Mass in an unofficial house church that belongs to underground Church. It seems in fact that the increase in religious practice among Party members is a phenomenon that has gone beyond the Party's control"

CA: Samoan families learn American culture: "The Malepeai family moved from Samoa to San Francisco's Hunters Point neighborhood in search of the American dream. One day in November, they faced their worst nightmare. A teacher at Malcolm X Academy spotted marks on Kennedy Malepeai, 6, and reported what she saw to the school's principal, who by law had to inform Child Protective Services. A social worker quickly arrived at Malcolm X. A tense, teary meeting between the principal, the social worker, and the boys' mother ensued. Sineva Malepeai, 35, told them she had hit her son with a belt because he had kicked his cousin -- a child-rearing strategy she believed in and learned growing up in Samoa. The social worker threatened to take Kennedy and his three siblings away from their parents and place them in foster care."

Muslims really do believe that stuff: "Coming hard upon the heels of the cartoon riots and the election of the Hamas terrorists, the destruction of the Shi'ite mosque of the Golden Dome in Samarra by Sunni jihadists, and the subsequent Shi'ite bloody retaliation, should put to rest Western delusions about the true nature of Islam. But don't hold your breath. Such displays of Islam's violent intolerance have been coming thick and fast the last few decades, and can be found on every page of history going back to the 7th century, when Islam began its expansion with the blood of several hundred decapitated Jews. Yet still some Westerners, enthralled to their own materialist assumptions and multicultural "we are the world" sentimentalism, wave away this evidence and reduce this destructive behavior to any and every cause except the one that counts: spiritual belief."

This lady KNOWS Muslims: "The West has been wallowing in a state of ignorance and denial for thirty years as Muslim extremist perpetrated evil against innocent victims in the name of Allah. I was ten years old when my home exploded around me, burying me under the rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as the perpetrators shouted "Allah Akbar!" My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the meaning of the word "infidel." I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts, but in a bomb shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness, freezing cold, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of 13 I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends--killed by Muslims. We were not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab Christians living in Lebanon".

Trade and the rise of freedom: "It is no exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. As Murray Rothbard wrote, 'The market economy is one vast latticework throughout the world, in which each individual, each region, each country, produces what he or it is best at, most relatively efficient in, and exchanges that product for the goods and services of others. Without the division of labor and the trade based upon that division, the entire world would starve. Coerced restraints on trade -- such as protectionism -- cripple, hobble, and destroy trade, the source of life and prosperity.' Human beings cannot truly be free unless there is a high degree of economic freedom ..."

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 Pages are here or here or here.

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Why Tibor Machan likes the rich

(Excerpt from here)

I have never known envy in my life. Somehow the sight of greater wealth on the part of others has never lead me to desire to exchange their lives for mine. Nor, especially, have I ever felt ill will toward those who are rich. On the contrary, I have been very pleased at the existence of the rich. And there are some good reasons for my pleasure with them, even if I can hardly even think myself in their shoes.

For one, the rich remind me that if I wanted to aspire to be one of them, I would have a decent chance at it. I know some rich people and some of these started nearly as low on the economic ladder as I did. But they wanted to be well off and found a way to do this while also gaining satisfaction from their work. I know some people who are millionaires, a few who probably have a billion or so, and in each case I know that the way movies or sitcoms or best sitcoms pulp novels depict them is hopelessly inaccurate. None of these folks is mean or greedy or amoral, quite the opposite. I know that if I had wanted to concentrate my energies on securing wealth and great prosperity-e.g., by means of expertise in finance or corporate management-I could have given that a decent shot, with not too bad a chance at success.

Another reason I welcome the existence of the rich in our society-near enough to the lives of my family and friends to witness what their lives are like-is that without them we and millions of others would scarcely have a chance for occasional luxury, a taste of the finer aspects of nourishment, entertainment, decoration, art and culture in general.

Who but the rich sustain good restaurants? Who but the rich make fine porcelain or jazz clubs or beautiful rugs or fancy furniture, not to mention stunning architecture and enthralling theater possible? I cannot afford to support artists, musicians, actors, great chefs, and the other people who create and produce some of the marvelous features of our culture, nor can my equally middle level and poor income earning friends. But once in a blue moon we all manage to go to a great French restaurant, an art gallery, a neighborhood where fashionable estates are located, or a shopping center that features exquisite merchandise.

I find it disgusting how the envious among us would rather destroy the rich than witness the difference between poverty, modest wealth, and the great wealth of the rich. I find it especially loathsome how so many American politicians, who ought to know better- and some of whom are indeed among the richest people in the country- gladly capitalize on this envy and persist on using the rich as a scapegoat of their own unwillingness to do the right thing.

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ELSEWHERE

Great to hear that Christianity guides Blair: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he believes God will judge him on his decision to go to war with Iraq. In an interview with chat show host Michael Parkinson to be broadcast on Britain's ITV1 television, Mr Blair says he made policy decisions according to his conscience, which is guided by his Christian faith. Asked about joining the US-led invasion in March 2003, he said: "That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that - well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people". Pushed to clarify what he meant, Mr Blair, a devout Christian, replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well".

A surprising article from the elite Smith College of Massachusetts: "This week, John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a series of controversial statements regarding the state of the United Nations. He said that the organization is riddled with "bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions." He could not be more correct.... It is common for liberals to unquestioningly recognize the causes of the United Nations as being good, simply because this is an organization founded upon principles of basic human rights and peace, two cornerstones of idealized liberalism. However, the United Nations is more than deserving of skepticism, particularly given its track record for the past several years. The actions of the United Nations have become increasingly ineffective and often corrupt in recent years, and Bolton has been progressively more vocal on these points."

"Doing" the dog: "I have long said, that if we change the meaning of marriage, it will be the beginning of an unstoppable landslide as the Left continues to push for more and more sickening lifestyles to be ratified as normal..... In the state of Massachusetts, where the leftists have already altered the meaning of marriage to include people of the same sex, they are considering legislation (HB19) that will make it legal to have sex with animals".

Young Muslim Americans becoming a threat: "In an article published in the London Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Dr. Muhriz Al-Husseini, director of the Center for Dialogue and Research and editor of the U.S.-published newspaper Al-Minassa Al-'Arabiya, warns that religious extremism and ignorance are spreading among the young generation of Muslims in the U.S."



A bit amusing but highly commendable!: "Cricket is not a sport one normally associates with China, but the world's most populous nation has embarked on an ambitious plan to change that. China's sporting mandarins have dubbed it "the noble game", and with communist single-mindedness have plotted a five-year plan to become a cricketing nation. The Asian Cricket Council's media officer, Shahriar Khan, said China's interest in cricket was simple. It realised that the biggest game in Asia is cricket - a game that China's major rival in the region, India, happens to be rather good at. With China increasingly making its presence felt in the region, learning to play cricket makes good sense. "China very much wants to engage with Asia via this game""

There are some good pictures here of New York's recent "Support Denmark" rally.

In "The end of Fukuyama" Christopher Hitchens gives the rather idiotic Francis Fukuyama a good blast. One excerpt about the Islamists: "In the face of this global threat and its recent and alarmingly rapid projection onto European and American soil, Fukuyama proposes beefing up "the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like." You might expect a citation from a Pew poll at about this point, and, don't worry, he doesn't leave that out, either. But I have to admire that vague and lazy closing phrase "and the like." Hegel meets Karen Hughes! Perhaps some genius at the CIA is even now preparing to subsidize a new version of Encounter magazine to be circulated among the intellectuals of Kashmir or Kabul or Kazakhstan? Not such a bad idea in itself, perhaps, but no substitute for having a battle-hardened army that has actually learned from fighting in the terrible conditions of rogue-state/failed-state combat. Is anyone so blind as to suppose that we shall not be needing this hard-bought experience in the future?"

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 EVOLUTION OF BLONDE HAIR AND BLUE EYES

Pigmentation loss is of itself maladaptive

J. Richards tells us very punnily that "Peter Frost has written a cool paper on the evolution of blond hair". Cool it may be but plausible it is not -- if I may use a Yiddish grammatical construction.

The theory put forward is that sexual competition was greater among Nordics and this led to a "different" appearance being favoured -- and those "different people hence reproduced more. This rather wacky theory is based on three postulates and as far as I can see, none are well-attested.

1). Nordics were particularly dependant on men for food acquisition.
2). Nordics had particularly high rates of fatality among males.
3). Nordics have always been particularly sexually liberated.

The facts as I know them are that up until the 20th century the Nordics were as sexually jealous and puritanical as anyone; that many populations and probably all primitive ones have had high rates of male fatality; that Nordics were farmers as well as hunters as far back as we know; and women doing farm work is as common as dirt in human populations.

If I am wrong in those common understandings, I would be delighted to see good evidence of it.

I prefer the traditional theory which I will very briefly restate in a moment but let me offer a small anecdote first: I was once at a conference at Oxford when I got talking to a Swedish psychologist. He was a Knight of the Northern Star, in fact, so he was a very eminent Swede (You didn't know Sweden had knighthoods, did you?). I talked to him about the emigration of Swedes out of Sweden and he commented that seeing the place was mostly in the dark for six months of the year he really didn't understand why anybody ever wanted to live there in the first place.

And that fits in with the view that loss of pigmentation (in hair, eyes, skin) is a MALADAPTIVE mutation (or set of mutations). Because of increased visibility, proneness to skin cancer etc, people with that mutation got competed out of living in desirable places and had to go to places that were at once cloudy (so less likely to allow sun-damage to fair skin etc.) and places that nobody else wanted (because of the cruel climate).

But, to survive in such a climate, abilities to think ahead had to be selected for and that gave us the higher IQ of whites. And with that higher IQ they bounced back and in effect conquered the world.

What's wrong with that account?

That the genes involved in pigment loss seem to be various is the only obvious objection but we still know very little about how genes interact so one crucial mutation could well be at the back of it.

Update:

I should of course have mentioned that, while fair skin is maladaptive to an outdoor life in most of the world (sunburn, skin cancer, visibility to prey species etc.), it is of course adaptive in cloudy climes -- being better able to use whatever light there is to make the very important vitamin D. As this article notes, even today, darker skinned people living in cooler climates can develop vitamin D deficiency diseases. It might also be argued that a fair skin is good camouflage for hunters in a snowy environment but ANY naked hunters amid snow would be distinctly unlikely!

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ELSEWHERE

For the first time since the Iraq invasion, casualties have dropped for 4 months running. Sounds like an important development to me. I'm sure if casualties were rising I would be hearing plenty about it. But no. Instead we got heaps about Cheney peppering a guy with birdshot. Coalition deaths (not including Iraqi soldiers): Oct. 2005: 96; Nov. 2005: 86; Dec. 2005: 68; Jan. 2006: 64; Feb. 2006: 57

Blacks don't care: "A Harvard University study suggests white Americans are far more likely than their black counterparts to die soon after the death of a spouse. The longitudinal study of 410,272 elderly U.S. couples indicates the "widowhood effect" -- the increased probability of death among new widows and widowers -- is large and enduring among white couples, but undetectable among black couples. That, say researchers, suggests blacks may somehow manage to extend marriage's well-documented health benefits into widowhood."

And this guy has spent his life giving other people advice! "A renowned psychiatrist from UC Irvine was duped into squandering at least $1.3 million of his family's fortune on a Nigeria Internet scam, according to a lawsuit recently filed by his son. The son, also an Orange County doctor, said his father - Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk - gave as much as $3 million over a 10-year period in response to an Internet plea that promised the doctor a generous cut of a huge sum of cash trapped in African bank accounts in exchange for money advances.... Gottschalk - who at 89 still works at the UCI campus medical plaza that bears his name - said in court papers that the losses were caused by "some bad investments.""

Deceitful media again: "Last week, the Federal Reserve released their triannual survey of family income. The press seized on the major finding, that average family income declined from 2001 through 2004 and that growth in families' net worth was the slowest in a decade. Those stats make for an easy morality tale about the Bush administration's callousness towards the poor and solicitude for the rich and the powerful. Emblematic of the coverage was a quote from an economist that ran in USA Today: "The household balance sheet is in good shape, better shape today ... but it's not improved for everybody. It's improved for the people in the top distribution of income and wealth," he said. But the headlines and the morality tale are the exact opposite of the facts only a few pages inside the Fed report. The rich didn't get richer; the rich got poorer while most everybody else did ok".

Leftist versus Leftist: "The makers of the gay cowboy flick "Brokeback Mountain" were too rough on sheep, an animal-rights group charged yesterday. In a letter to director Ang Lee, The Humane Society also complained about the way the horses and elk were treated. "The excessively rough handling of the sheep and horses leaves viewers questioning whether anyone was looking out for the safety of those animals," the letter said. "And many also wonder how the filmmakers got the elk to lose its footing and crumple to the ground 'on cue' after being shot.""

There is now a big lot of new posts up by Chris Brand -- this time including a picture of him! He covers Muslims, blacks, IQ, David Irving etc.

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

Minimum wage lies v the US economy and the Victorian Libs: The American jobs market is being used to attack the fundamental economic law that pricing any product above its market-clearing price will create a surplus
Should we be concerned with the US economy's falling savings rate?: Because it is not possible to quantitatively establish the amount of real goods and services, various data like real income, real personal consumption expenditure, or real GDP government statistics shouldn't be taken too seriously
Liberal Party implodes while Bracks' Government attacks consumers: Environment Minister John Thwaites is calling for a ban on plastic bags if retailers do not reduce their use. This is another example of ALP stupidity and ignorance
The media, Abu Ghraib and the forgotten massacres: When spoiled Western journalists cave in to Muslim thugs and abuse their positions of influence by writing lies they are deliberately spitting in the faces of real heroes who have taken terrible risks and have even made the ultimate sacrifice
Maureen Dowd's fascist slip: Maureen Dowd is the same penetrating intellect that called Florida's Cuban
community a bunch of totalitarians because they resisted Elian's illegal return to Castro's socialist paradise
Moralising lefties v. free markets: They are everywhere, lefty moralists, I mean. The ones who are forever flaunting their feelings of moral and intellectual superiority, which means nearly all of them
Right-wing hysteria v the Dubai ports deal: The world's shipping business is run by foreigners. Our brain-dead Congress has made so many restrictions on the business everyone avoids flying the American Flag like the plague
Hamas and the Palestinians: a missing opportunity: Perhaps they might notice that the Hamas leadership is a present day Nazi party and the rest of the world might think twice about funding another Reich. Or Caliphate.

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ELSEWHERE

I am posting a lot on Tongue Tied this week so I may not post as much here as I usually do. So if you are not a regular reader of Tongue Tied, maybe you should catch up with this week's offerings. There is not much overlap between what I post there and what I post here.

Fighting the world's woes with liberty: "When I began to read Fidel Valdez Ramos' column in the UN Report I receive frequently via email, I was afraid I would once again be witnessing a plea that the problems of the world should be addressed mainly by way of foreign aid. This is what so many people involved in developmental studies advocate -- for example, Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs and his celebrity partner, U2's Bono. To my surprise the essence of Mr. Ramos' pitch was different. Although he is associated with the widely respected mainstream organization, the Ramos Peace and Development Foundation, as well as with the Boao Forum for Asia, the central message Mr. Ramos aired was that one crucial means for helping the world's poor countries is to remove barriers to their entry into the world economic community."

Political boundaries ought not to be economic boundaries: "My next-door neighbor in Virginia agrees to mow my lawn for $25. He mows and I immediately give him $25 in greenbacks. Rather than spend his earnings on beer or a back massage, my neighbor uses the $25 to by a share of Microsoft. Everyone applauds. An American earns money and invests it, making 'our' economy stronger. Now consider a slightly different example in which I live, not in Virginia, but in Maine on the U.S. side of the Canada-U.S. border. My neighbor is a Canadian living in Canada. He mows my lawn; I pay him 25 U.S. dollars. While my neighbor and I are just as pleased with our transaction in this example as we are in the previous one, pundits and politicians regard the second case with much more suspicion."

A Tocquevillian in the Vatican: "Upon Joseph Ratzinger's election to the Papacy in April 2005, many commentators correctly noted that Benedict XVI's self-described theological "master" was St. Augustine. The fifth-century African bishop is widely acknowledged as a giant of the early church whose life and writings are counted, even by his detractors, among the most decisive in shaping Western civilization. Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, is full of citations and themes drawn from Augustine's texts. The encyclical's publication appears, however, to confirm that another, more contemporary thinker has influenced the way that Benedict XVI views religion in free societies and the nature of the state. That person is the nineteenth-century French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville.... What Tocqueville did not doubt, however, was religion's importance in sustaining free societies. This theme is addressed at length in Democracy in America. More importantly, it has attracted Joseph Ratzinger's attention".

William Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard, offers an amusing analogy: "Harvard is the General Motors of American universities: rich, bureaucratic, and confident--a deadly combination. Fifty years from now, Larry Summers's resignation will be known as the moment when Harvard embraced GM's fate. From now on, the decline will likely be steep. And not only at Harvard: Among research universities as in the car market of generations past, other American institutions will follow the market leaders, straight to the bottom. The only question is who gets to play the role of Toyota in this metaphor."

Why Venezuela's Chavez should make the left cringe: "The left has repeatedly condemned the right for being militaristic. It has pressed for disarmament in the region, deeming it immoral that resources should be used to buy weapons when so many people are hungry. Hugo Chavez has started the biggest arms build-up in Latin America in a long time. He is buying $2 billion plus worth of Mi-17 and Mi-35 helicopters, Mig-29 fighters, C-295 transport planes, patrol ships, and corvettes. He has knocked every door, from Brazil to Spain, from Russia to China, lusting for weapons."

Frist: Tax cuts make money: "Many people in Washington have long known a dirty little secret about tax-cut measures: When done right, they actually result in more money for the government. Ever since the Senate approved the last major tax relief bill, in 2003, revenues have increased every year. In 2004, they went up 5.5%. Last year, they rose 14.5%, the largest increase in nearly 25 years. Total government collections, in fact, increased more after President Bush's 2003 tax cuts than they did after President Clinton's 1994 tax hikes."

Another huge conservative laugh here at the embittered Leftists who have few or no children. Tomorrow belongs to conservatives.

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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POLITICS, HAPPINESS AND GENES

The fact that political stance is highly hereditary ties the two reports below together:

Even the Left-leaning Pew Research Center is still finding that conservatives are happier than Leftists. Such results are hardly surprising. Leftist politics are the politics of grievance, complaint and whining. But I also liked the comment about Democrats by Statguy: "Anyone who consistently looks to the government for help is in for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness".

Depression: Those pesky genes at work yet again: "In a world first, researchers from NSW have discovered the gene responsible for depression. After 25 years' research, scientists have found that people who carry a particular gene are more likely to suffer depression regardless of their life experiences. The medical breakthrough will have major ramifications for diagnosis and treatment of the disease which affects one in four Australians. The study, to be published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry this week, shows that people who carry a short serotonin transporter gene are predisposed to depression. Conversely, those who carry a long version of the serotonin transporter gene would be more resilient to whatever life throws at them. Around 43per cent of the population is believed to carry the short version of the gene".

So we should perhaps feel sorry for Leftists. They are born miserable. The trouble is that they want to take all the rest of us down with them too. They hate other people being happy. That is why their policies are good at tearing down the rich but hopeless at lifting up the poor. The results of their policies uncover what their real priorities are -- hurting rather than helping. Stalin and his ilk were no accident.

Update:

There is another report on the genetics of depression here.

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ELSEWHERE



Well-deserved: "The sharp drop in the price of Google's shares may portend a long-awaited pullback in the broader stock market, technical analysts said. Google closed on Nasdaq at $US362.62 ($488.11), down $US27.76 ($37.36) for the day, after earlier falling as low as $US338.51 ($455.56). Google's 7.1 percent drop didn't come out of the blue. The stock is down 23.7 percent since January 11, when it hit its lifetime high of $US475.11 ($639.50)."

I guess the media will try to ignore this but a manifesto against Islamofascism has just been signed by some notable campaigners -- Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bernard-Henri Levy etc. Excerpt: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats...."

Leftists blame the victim: "There's a certain consistent pattern regarding the worldwide Left's assessment of culpability for Muslim terror. It is the fault of the murdered.... For a decade or more, it has been a given on the Left that Israel is to blame for terror committed against Israelis by Palestinian Muslims (Palestinian Christians don't engage in suicide terror). What else are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they had Apache helicopters, the argument goes, they would use them. But they don't, so they use the poor man's nuclear weapon -- suicide terror. The same argument is given to explain 9-11. Three thousand innocent Americans were incinerated by Islamic terrorists because America has been meddling in the Middle East so long. This was bound to happen. And, anyway, don't we support Israel? And when Muslim terrorists blew up Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others, the Left in Spain and elsewhere blamed Spanish foreign policy. After all, the Spanish government had sent troops into Iraq. When largely Muslim rioters burned and looted for a month in France, who was blamed? France, of course -- France doesn't know how to assimilate immigrants... During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, black mobs murdered innocent Korean shopkeepers and burned sections of the city. The liberal response in America was virtually universal: We must understand the anger of these people..."

Abortions getting easier: "Women who are less than nine weeks pregnant can safely have medical abortions at home, according to the head of a government-backed pilot project. Abortion services for the 20,000 women who seek a chemically induced abortion every year could be transformed should the Department of Health's official evaluation of the pilot confirm initial findings. But it is also likely to provoke controversy from anti-abortion campaigners who will claim that home abortions would make the procedure easier and therefore lead to more women having terminations. Shirley Butler, the project manager of one pilot which has tested the abortions with 172 women patients since 2004, told the Guardian: "We haven't had any significant problems apart from one woman who had a slightly heavy bleed. In my opinion medical abortions outside of acute hospitals seem to be safe.""

Why foreign aid to Africa does not work: "Economic development in Africa will depend -- as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world -- on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders. Development everywhere is homegrown. As G-8 ministers and rock stars fussed about a few billion dollars here or there for African governments, the citizens of India and China (where foreign aid is a microscopic share of income) were busy increasing their own incomes by $715 billion in 2005."

Leftist scam in Britain: "A 2 million pound bid for funds made to Walsall Council has been turned down as officials have never heard of the organisation and were staggered that its plea was for nearly twice as much cash as 53 others put together. The Anti Abuse Of Minorities group request was to help fund investigations into racial abuse and institutionalised racism. The application was nearly twice as much as the total 1.2 million pounds requested by 53 other groups across the borough. Councillor Zahid Ali, communities and partnership cabinet membership, said he had never heard of the group, which cannot be found on the internet. The application was one of the least researched he had ever seen he added. "It was the first time I had heard of them. We just don't know much about them. It was their first application and many of the forms were incomplete. There was no way we could give this kind of money." Efforts to contact AAOM were unsuccessful."

Tim Blair has an interesting look back in time to when British cartoons about the Nazis were causing official palpitations similar to what we now see in response to the Mohammed cartoons.

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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SIKHISM

I have always liked the Sikhs. Sikhs were one of the many groups in the very multi-ethnic area where I grew up. I remember in my early teens how a tall dignified brown man in a blue turban gave me a tract about Guru Nanak (founder of Sikhism). The name of the publisher of the tract so amused me that I remember it to this day, nearly 50 years later: The Gurpurb publishing company.

Although Sikhs are sometimes mistaken for Muslims because they wear turbans, Sikhism in fact started out as an Indian alternative to Islam and Sikhs fought the Muslims almost from the inception of Sikhism. There is a good interview here with a British Sikh leader who calls on Britain to stand firm against Islamic pressure.

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ELSEWHERE

Arrogant EU elitists: "The French President, Jacques Chirac, will urge European leaders to set the doomed European Union constitution aside and consider radical projects that can be pushed through under existing treaties. A list of more than a dozen such projects has been drawn up already, some at the heart of the EU constitutional treaty frozen since France and Holland rejected it in referendums last year, and from which Mr Chirac will choose a few to present at summits in March and June. Ideas salvaged from the constitution include the creation of an elected EU president, replacing the present system of a six-month rotating presidency. The French list includes asking the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, to take on the effective role of EU foreign minister. Paris also said it would be possible to use existing treaties to form an EU diplomatic service. New EU embassies would replace overseas delegation offices now operated by the European Commission.... A French official called for European Union lessons for secondary school pupils in all 25 member states, based on a standardised teaching model covering EU values and history."

Addiction Gene: "Genetics researchers have confirmed that people with a different form of a certain gene are more susceptible to drug and alcohol addiction. They hope the finding will help predict who might get hooked and what treatments will help those who do. Researchers led by Wolfgang Sadee, a scientist at the Ohio State University, have figured out how differences in one gene can make the brain more sensitive to alcohol, narcotics, or nicotine. The gene Sadee's team looked at has long been known to code for a kind of brain protein called an opioid receptor, which acts like a switch, turning on pleasure and blocking pain when triggered by certain addictive drugs."

Mexico still stupidly socialist: "The future for foreign manufacturing (maquiladoras) in Mexico is bleak. Tijuana, home to one half of the nation's foreign owned plants, has enjoyed zero unemployment for the last five years. That trend has reversed. This month 17 Japanese manufacturers in TJ announced they are moving their operations to Asia. There is now growing unemployment in every sector of Tijuana's economy. Vicente Fox deserves much of the responsibility for making Mexico less investor friendly by not advancing two of his campaign pledges: To overhaul a socialistic and antiquated set of labor laws and reducing bureaucratic red tape. His policies, in fact, have created more red tape and increased the costs of doing business in this country."

Venezuela: Another destructive revolution: "Seven years after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez first took office, an event commemorated earlier this month, Juan Francisco Rivas is still waiting for the 'revolution.' His 24-square-meter makeshift house, currently inhabited by nine people, sits at a 45-degree angle atop one of the city's worst hillside slums, Petare. His roof is a single metal sheet. There is no hot water. Mr. Rivas voted for Mr. Chavez in 1998 but today, while showing his often-flooded living room, says, 'Look at this place and tell me honestly that Chavez is for the poor.' During the 1990s, Rivas worked as a carpenter and even had social security. Today he is grateful to get three days of work per week, all in the underground economy."

Stateless in Somalia, and loving it : "Somalia is in the news again. Rival gangs are shooting each other, and why? The reason is always the same: the prospect that the weak-to-invisible transitional government in Mogadishu will become a real government with actual power. The media invariably describe this prospect as a 'hope.' But it's a strange hope that is accompanied by violence and dread throughout the country. Somalia has done very well for itself in the 15 years since its government was eliminated. The future of peace and prosperity there depends in part on keeping one from forming."

Wanted: Secretary General: "This week, The New York Times finally caught onto a story that U.N. experts and others in the press have been focused on for months -- the world body's upcoming selection of its next Secretary General. The current Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was first elected in 1996, and according to U.N. tradition may only serve two terms. It doesn't help, of course, that on his watch corruption, nepotism and incompetence have become the organization's defining traits. So what happens now?"

80,000+ now on "no-fly" lists: "The latest figures that I have seen are that at least 80,000 Americans are now on FBI and Homeland Security's red-flagged 'no fly' lists with another 325,000 on yellow-flagged 'watch lists' (the latter being subject to body and luggage searches). Hundreds more names are added every week. The criteria for being put in these lists is secret, and there is no official procedure for getting off a list. Government propaganda for these lists implies that only 'known terrorists' and terror 'suspects' are on the lists, but the reality is far different."

FDR believed in Stalin: "The great irony, unacknowledged by Russian historians even today, is that had it not been for the hundreds of thousands of Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the Red Army would never have reached Berlin before the Americans. Roosevelt refused to attach strings to aid. Nor, more surprisingly, did he intervene or protest when it was discovered that the Soviet Military Mission in the US was spying shamelessly and flying quantities of stolen documents from the Manhattan Project out of the country". More on Roosevelt and Stalin here.

Rand Simberg has a good fisking of a particularly nutty bit of Leftist kookery.

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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STALINISM STILL LIVES AMONG AMERICAN "LIBERALS"

Stalin of course said that there was perfect freedom of speech in Russia -- as long as people agreed with him

A friend of mine took his young daughter to visit the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, explaining to her that the place is important because years ago it sold books no other store would - even, perhaps especially, books whose ideas many people found offensive. So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he didn't really mind seeing piles of Churchill's books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in.

However, it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed English translation of Oriana Fallaci's new book, "The Force of Reason," might finally be available, and that because Fallaci's militant stance against Islamic militants offends so many people, a store committed to selling banned books would be the perfect place to buy it. So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was in yet.

"No," snapped the clerk. "We don't carry books by fascists."

Now let's just savor the absurd details of this for a minute. City Lights has a long and proud history of supporting banned authors - owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted (and acquitted) for obscenity in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and a photo at the bookstore showed Ferlinghetti proudly posing next to a sign reading "banned books."

Yet his store won't carry, of all people, Fallaci, who is not only being sued in Italy for insulting religion because of her latest book but continues to fight the good fight against those who think that the appropriate response to offensive books and cartoons is violent riots. It's particularly repugnant that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by a snotty San Francisco clerk.....

Strangest of all is the scenario of such a person disliking an author for defending Western civilization against radical Islam - when one of the first things those poor, persecuted Islamists would do, if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the United States, is crush suspected homosexuals like him beneath walls.... The store's website proudly declares that the place is "known for our commitment to freedom of expression".

More here. (HT Augean Stables)

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