THE LATEST BIT OF PSEUDO SCIENCE FROM BERKELEY

I suppose I should comment on the latest version of an old Leftist tune -- summarized here for the general reader.

Starting in 1950, psychologists have been trying to prove that conservatives are psychologically maladjusted --an effort that was summarized by Jost et al. and demolished here. They never give up trying, however, and the study of 95 children from Berkeley, California by Jack Block and his wife is the latest episode. It's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to demolish the "research" concerned so I will just mention a few basics.

What the authors found was that Berkeley children who were rated as unhappy in their kindergarten years turned out as adults to be conservatives. So what do we conclude from that? Do we conclude that conservatives are intrinsically unhappy people? Hardly. The opinion polls repeatedly show conservatives to be the happiest (e.g. here). So what DO we conclude? How about saying that conservatives in ultra-Leftist Berkeley feel uncomfortable in that environment and pass on some of that discomfort to their children? But the children (as most children do) grow up to share their parents' politics so they turn out conservative in later life too. So conservative parents who were SITUATIONALLY unhappy have conservative children -- big deal!

But that is actually putting the best face on the study. It is not nearly as good as that:

1). The children concerned were not a representative sample of any known population. They may not even have been representative of Berkeley, let alone anywhere else. And if you don't sample, you can't generalize.

2). The correlation between personality and ideology was often very weak (e.g. .27 or 7% shared variance for the rating "Is self-reliant, confident") so there were nearly as many confident children who turned out Rightist as Leftist. The reported correlation could in fact have turned on the responses of just one child. That certainly weakens ALL causal inferences from the study. And many of the stronger correlations involve obvious value judgments. For instance "Is visibly deviant from peers" is said to characterize conservatives but why not turn the value judgment around and conclude that conservatives tend to be independent?

3). The measure of conservative ideology is suspect. Block does not list the actual attitude statements he used but, as I have shown elsewhere, Leftist psychologists in general don't have a blind clue what conservatism is -- and what they regard as a measure of conservatism is usually a caricature of the real thing -- generally a collection of ignorant and aggressive statements that very few real-world conservatives would assent to. That it was a caricature in this case is suggested by the fact that it showed conservatives as less intelligent. In the general population it is Leftists who are less intelligent.

I could go on to mention the Rosenthal effect etc. but what's the point? Michelle Malkin has links to various other comments on the study.

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ELSEWHERE



There is an incredible outpouring of Hillary mockery here. A small excerpt: "Listening to Hillary's views about Israel is like reading Hitler's email. Consequently she has made herself as welcome in Tel Aviv as a Scud missile. Any Jew that supports her for President is road testing the next generation of gas ovens. The inestimable W. Somerset Maugham said, "Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a full-time job". Remarkably, Maugham diagrammed that judgment without ever having met Hillary Clinton, in whom hypocrisy is more profound than just characteristic. It is her signature. She ricochets from one false image to another - wife, mother, do-gooder. Doting liberals are always enraptured when they receive a syrupy Christmas card with a picture of the Clintons gathered at the hearth with Hillary reading excerpts to Chelsea from A Girl's Life of Ilse Koch. None of this masks the essential Hillary. As a colleague observed of her - if it walks like a bitch and talks like a bitch, it's not a duck".

Bureaucracy under attack: "Corporate executives, faced with greater regulatory scrutiny and demands in the wake of corporate scandals like Enron, have for some time moaned that new compliance rules are costing them profits and manpower, as well as cumbersome and probably not that effective. Now a new lawsuit's adding another criticism: They're unconstitutional.... "Sarbanes-Oxley is a classic example of government overreaction," said Mallory Factor, chairman of the Free Enterprise Fund which recently hired former special prosecutor Kenneth Star as one of its attorneys. "We don't have a problem with transparency but we've created a class of people that are just professional bureaucrats that want a larger bureaucracy that's extraordinarily expensive and cuts down innovation." A recent study conducted by the Securities Industry Association estimated that the cost of compliance has nearly doubled in the past three years to an estimated annual total of more than $25 billion in 2005, up from $13 billion in 2002.... Factor said costs associated with Sarbanes-Oxley are prohibitively high for small and mid-sized companies that are trying to compete with larger players, creating a barrier of entry for these firms."

Some Muslim intellectuals get it: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We -- writers, journalists and public intellectuals -- call for resistance to religious totalitarianism. Instead, we call for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values worldwide. The necessity of these universal values has been revealed by events since the publication of the Muhammad drawings in European newspapers. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the arena of ideas. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations, nor an antagonism of West versus East, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats."

One size does not fit all in diplomacy : "Hooray, I finally found something on which I can agree with the Bush administration: The 'nucular' cooperation deal signed recently with India. In cutting the deal, the administration displayed some uncharacteristically nuanced thinking: A one-size-fits-all nuclear policy isn't sustainable in today's world, and when it comes to nuclear arms, India is not the same as Iran and North Korea, or for that matter, Pakistan. As someone of Indian origin, I probably don't surprise you with my thinking on this."

No Muslim dress privilege in Britain any more: "A young Muslim girl yesterday failed in her two-year legal battle to force every school in Britain to allow pupils to decide their own dress code according to their religious belief. Britain's highest court ruled to uphold the right of all schools to set uniform rules provided that they consult their local community. The Law Lords ruled that the human rights of Shabina Begum had not been breached when her school refused to allow her to wear a full-length Islamic dress to class and that Denbigh High School had not acted unlawfully. The ruling, which overturned a previous Court of Appeal decision, was welcomed by head teachers.

An interesting piece of hate-speech here from a "defender" of homosexuality.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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A BIRTHDAY CONCERT

Last Tuesday (21st.) was the birthday of J.S. Bach -- of whom I am a great afficianado. So Anne and I went to an organ concert at a nearby Lutheran church to celebrate the occasion. Both the organ and the organist were excellent and Bach's ringingly self-confident music grabbed me from the very first notes.

The thing that inspired this post however was the prominence of East Asians on the occasion. The man selling tickets at the door was Chinese in fact. It reminded me that I have often read that the great Western classical music has a proportionately much bigger following in China and Japan than it does in the West.

I am very grateful for that. It could well be that Western culture is now decadent and much of our glorious cultural heritage stands in danger of being largely lost. I was for instance horrified to find out that, at the end of his high school years, my son had never heard of such great English poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. I promptly sat down and read him some of course. The only introduction to poetry that his school gave him was to a very minor black poet! I happen to have known the black poet concerned (Kath Walker) and can tell you that she was essentially a Leftist whiner and little more.

So our kids are being de-educated and de-acculturated and it seems possible that there will one day be very few of our own people left who will know enough to carry on the knowledge and appreciation of past cultural wonders and attainments. That Asians may keep alive what we do not is therefore some comfort to me. While there is life there is hope.

When I first heard the music of Bach at age 13 (It was a performance of the Toccata and fugue in D minor) it was an electrifying experience for me. It would be sad indeed if the generations to come never got the exposure that would introduce them also to our crowning musical achievements. But I think that lack of exposure is probably already happening in far too many cases. So if Asians keep alive our great cultural traditions it will all be to the good.

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SEX AND IQ

This looks like some independent confirmation that Richard Lynn is right and that the average IQ score for women is lower. To get men and women showing up as scoring equally (on average), the test authors deducted points from the scores of men.

I have just posted here the original Lynn & Irwing paper. The ferocity of the attack on the paper is exactly what we would expect of a genuine contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Work that overturns what has long been believed will of course be resisted. So to allow the general reader to see for himself/herself that the paper is utterly sound, I have reproduced it. Out of respect for copyright, however, I have omitted the Tables and References (Essential to serious scholars).

Most readers of the paper will be amazed to recognize nothing in it that resembles what critics like Blinkhorn have said about it. Those who know of the uneasy relationship that Leftists have with the truth will not be surprised, however.

I have posted a PDF of Blinkhorn's rant here. Blinkhorn was so desperate that he criticized an addendum to the main Lynn & Irwing paper and ignored the main paper altogether. The addendum dealt with results from groups of students and I certainly think that you can conclude nothing from such data. But the main paper was a collection of results from a large number of general population samples and criticisms such as those made by Blinkhorn were anticipated there and fully dealt with.

To tell you in a few words what Lynn & Irwing found: Most IQ test data originates from surveys of students. And from such data it is reasonable to conclude that males and females have equal average IQs. And in the past, everybody concluded that. Lynn & Irwing however submit that males are "late bloomers" and that male IQ goes on increasing beyond the age of 16 while female IQ flattens out. And when they looked carefully at all the past studies of IQ among ADULT populations, that is exactly what the data showed.

Just to be perfectly clear, I should perhaps add that Lynn's finding is in addition to the long-known finding that males have a greater variance in their IQ scores. Female IQ scores cluster much more tightly around the average for their sex than the scores of men do. So there are not only more very bright men than women but also more very dumb men than women.

I have written a fair bit in approval of Lynn's work so in case anybody thinks that I am incapable of being critical of him, I should perhaps point out that I have criticized some of his early work in another field.

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ELSEWHERE

High-taxing Britain: "Gordon Brown is about to raise Britain's tax burden to its highest-ever level, raking in nearly one milion pounds a minute. An analysis by the accountants Ernst & Young, based on the Treasury's own figures, shows the chancellor will match the record high for the tax burden this year and rise above it next year. That means it will be higher than in the 1970s under Denis Healey, when the top rate of income tax was 83%, and the early 1980s, when it was 60%. The Ernst & Young analysis shows that the tax burden excluding North Sea oil revenues, the best measure of the load faced by families and businesses, will be 37.6% of gross domestic product this year, close to the 37.7% peak reached in the early 1980s."

More EU stupidity. A lot of EU countries are in a panic about their slow economic growth. So what are they doing about it? Instead of freeing up business to grow, they are erecting the selfsame economic barriers between themselves that it was the whole idea of the EU to overcome.

London's far-Left antisemitic mayor again: "Ken Livingstone was embroiled in a further dispute last night after suggesting that the billionaire Reuben brothers, who are involved with the 2012 Olympics, could “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs”. ....Conservatives on the London Assembly said that the brothers were not Iranian but born in India of Iraqi Jewish parents. Brian Coleman, assembly member for Barnet and Camden, said: “This is the latest anti-Semitic remark by Livingstone."

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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In memoriam

A very sad announcement below just received from Sean Gabb. I knew Chris Tame personally and find it hard to realize that someone of his vitality is gone. His good cheer and positive attitude together with his unflinching libertarianism was truly memorable

"It is with the deepest regret that I must announce the death of Dr Chris R. Tame, Founder and President of the Libertarian Alliance. Chris founded the Libertarian Alliance in the early 1970s. During the next 30 years, he worked tirelessly to recover the British libertarian tradition as a seamless heritage of freedom. He took issue with those Conservatives who saw freedom in terms purely of pounds and pence - and often not even as that. He took issue also with those who demanded freedom in all matters but those involving the getting and spending of money. He believed that freedom should be defined in the traditional English sense, as the rights to life, liberty and justly acquired property.

In July 2005, Chris was diagnosed with a rare and very aggressive form of bone cancer. Though only 55 at the time, and though he had avoided all those vices commonly believed to be dangerous, he took this diagnosis with great calmness. During the next eight months, he faced his approaching end with a fortitude and good humour that was an inspiration to those around him. To the very end, he retained a keen interest in public affairs and in the welfare of his friends and loved ones. On his last day, he made sure to check his e-mails.

Chris died peacefully in his sleep at 3:37pm GMT on Monday the 20th March 2006. He was never alone during his last six days. Mrs Helen Evans and Dr Sean Gabb were by his side at the end. Chris was married and divorced twice. He left no children. Dr Gabb will make a further announcement in the next few days of the funeral arrangments."

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Brookes News Update

The US economy and the Fed's credit binge: what does it mean for Americans?: So long as economists confuse GDP with growth, argue for a "stable price rule", teach that money is neutral and that it is possible for central banks to calculate a "neutral rate of interest" economies will be plagued by the so-called boom-and-bust cycle
Australia's term of trade boom and recession: Our unsustainable housing and consumption boom was not the result of a surge in the terms of trade but a surging money supply the consequences of which have yet to work their way through the economy
George Clooney's moral grandstanding and the viciousness of the Hollywood left: Celluloid intellectual George Clooney is out of touch with history as well as mainstream America. Hollywood's vicious leftists have betrayed their country more than once, not that Clooney cares
Australian protectionists do not even know what they are talking about: Some of our protectionists obviously do not know what they are talking about. Nevertheless, the media still publishes them
Leftist revisionism calls Crusaders 9/11 terrorists: It has been open season on Western civilization and Christianity for some time and now it's getting worse with leftist propaganda in our schools being used to rationalise Islamic terrorism
Bracks' Bill of Rights is an attack on basic rights: The Bracks' Government intends to use its phony Bill of Rights to undermine the common law and basic right by transferring power from the legislature to activist judges with a leftist bent. So where is the Victorian Liberal Party on this issue?
Can money supply be an economic indicator?: Regardless of the demand for money, once the money stock increases it sets in motion an exchange of nothing for something and thus economic impoverishment

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ELSEWHERE

On Australian Politics I have just put up a coverage of the recent big cyclone in North Queensland, Australia -- a big blow that was bigger than the Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans in the USA. Guess how many people died in the Australian big blow? Hint: There was essentially no underclass in the area of Australia concerned.

An Afghan man is facing the death penalty for becoming a Christian: "Abdul Rahman was arrested last month after his family went to the police and accused him of converting from Islam. He has gone on trial for rejecting Islam - an offence punishable by death under Shariah law. During the hearing, the defendant allegedly confessed that he converted from Islam to Christianity 16-years-ago. He had been working as a medical aid worker for Afghan refugees in neighbouring Pakistan. The judge said: "We are not against any particular religion in the world. "But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law. "It is an attack on Islam. The prosecutor is asking for the death penalty."



Since when does an Anglican Archbishop care about the Bible anyway?: "The Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, says he does not believe creationism -- the Bible-based account of the origins of the world -- should be taught in schools. "I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there has just been a jarring of categories," Dr Rowan Williams told The Guardian newspaper. "My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," the most senior clergyman in the Church of England added."

France bewails British invasion: "the Duke of Westminster's purchase of a famous Paris flea market is the latest rout in what is being decried on the French side of the Channel as a British invasion. "Not only have you stolen `our' Olympic Games, you are also shamelessly occupying our towns and countryside," writes Jos,-Alain Fralon, author of Help, the English are Invading Us, which is shortly to go on sale. "The English . . . have their own airports, their newspapers, their pubs, their lawns, their grocer, sometimes their own French wife." He suggests that the influx of Britons is causing profound damage to relations between the two nations: "How the Entente Cordiale is fading in our own beautiful countryside." He has a point: in Dompierre-les-Eglises, a village of 400 inhabitants situated 30 miles from Limoges in central France, 54 British families have bought 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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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EVIDENCE FOR WHAT THE LEFT HAVE CONSTANTLY DENIED

Documents seized in Iraq immediately after the US invasion in 2003 point to the presence of al-Qa'ida members in the country before the war, and show there had been moves to hide traces of "chemical or biological materials" from UN weapons inspectors. The documents have been posted on the internet as part of a rolling program by the US Government to make public the contents of 48,000 boxes of untranslated papers and tapes relating to the workings of Saddam Hussein's regime. Saddam is said to have routinely taped talks with cabinet members and intelligence chiefs.

US director of national intelligence John Negroponte was ordered by President George W. Bush to release the material. Hundreds of thousands of previously unseen documents and hundreds of hours of tapes will be placed on the web in the coming weeks. The first documents to be released offer tantalising clues to possible Iraqi contacts with al-Qa'ida. An Iraqi intelligence report dated September 15, 2001 -- four days after the attacks on the US -- says Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were in contact with Iraq, and al-Qa'ida members had visited the country. It claims the US had proof that the Iraqi government and "bin Laden's group" had agreed to co-operate to attack targets in the US and that the Americans might strike Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation.

However, the information comes from an unidentified Afghan informant who states merely that he heard it from an Afghan consul, also unnamed. According to ABC News, which translated the tapes, the claims are "sensational" but the sourcing is "questionable". Another document from a "trustworthy" source and dated August 2002 claims people with links to al-Qa'ida were in Iraq. There is a picture a few pages later of the Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But the papers suggest Saddam's agents were trying to verify the presence of al-Qa'ida rather than colluding with it.

Documents from 1997 confirm that Saddam was giving UN weapons inspectors the runaround by removing correspondence concerned with "prohibited weapons" and clearing "labs and storages of any traces of chemical or biological materials". The transcript of one tape recording shows an official named as Comrade Husayn expressing concern to Saddam that outsiders would find out about imported material, including some from the US, apparently for chemical weapons. "They have a bigger problem with the chemical program than the biological program," he tells Saddam. "We have not told them that we used it on Iran, nor have we told them about the size or kind of chemical weapons that we produced and we have not told them the truth about the imported material."

In another taped conversation from the mid-1990s, a man called al-Sahhaf -- possibly a former information minister -- says: "On the nuclear file, sir, are we saying we disclosed everything? No, we have uncleared problems in the nuclear field." Apparently confirming that the nuclear program had been abandoned, he adds: "Everything is over. but did they know? No, sir, they did not know, not all the methods, not all the means, not all the scientists and not all the places."

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

Vatican stops apologizing for the Crusades: "The Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the "noble aim" of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day "jihad against the Jews and Crusaders".... At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were "a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places".... Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II. He said that the Crusaders were "martyrs" who had "sacrificed their lives for the faith". He was backed by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, who said that those who sought forgiveness for the Crusades "do not know their history". Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott's recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as "utter nonsense". Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was "historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."

Former peacenik David Aaronovitch tells here how the brutalities of Serb leader Milosevic turned him off being a peacenik and made him more realistic: "What I want to do is chronicle how the Serbian leader was responsible for the invasion of Iraq. Along a line of logic that runs, crudely, no Slobo, no Bosnia, no Kosovo, no fashion for intervention, no Iraq."

More wacko antisemitism from America's Leftist academe: "A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke. The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization. But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, "pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and "neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will".

Max Boot rather wittily points out how some George Clooney films make the case for a neocon foreign policy.

Amazing! The mega-incorrect blog "Majority Rights" has logged a million hits in just the last 4 months. It is a blog devoted to the frank discussion of racial matters so the success of the blog does I think show that, despite all the Leftist propaganda, people can see that some racial differences are real and important and want to talk about that -- and generally have few opportunities to do so. Because I am a libertarian, my posts there are founded on the view that people must be judged on their individual characteristics and behaviour -- but that does not mean we have to deny reality. A lot of the other people who frequent the site are always grumbling about how far-Left I am however!

I am rather pleased to see that this blog has made the Hot 500 at blogrolling.com (no. 438 at the moment). To be in the top 500 out of about 30 million blogs (according to Technorati.com) seems pretty good to me. NZ Bear is only a little less cheering -- putting this blog at no. 505 at the time of writing. What it all means is that you are reading stuff that lots of other bloggers approve of or find interesting.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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MEDIA LIES ABOUT IRAQ

(Excerpt from Miranda Devine)

A soldier friend stationed in Baghdad for the past two months has been sending me emails with such arresting lines as: "It's late here and I [have] to get the Chief of Staff back to the Palace." From his office in the fortified military and government area, the Green Zone, he scans the web for news about Iraq and compares it with his reality. "Baghdad is not burning down around my ears," he wrote last week. "Things were tense a while back, but violence was within limits. Callous thing to say, but that is the reality around here." The only "quagmire" he sees is "the soft patch of ground out by the rifle range and no civil war in sight".

He exhibits a soldier's sang-froid. "We are expecting to be very busy the next few days. The terrorists are extremely media savvy (it's the only area they get to win) and will be looking for big headlines. End of religious festival, big crowds and convening of new government." But with the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion tomorrow, he says, "the only people who seem to have lost both their grip on reality and their nerve are the western media".

His reality is quite different: "I am more and more impressed with the Iraqis every day. There are problems, to be sure, but I do not know of any country that has gone through the sorts of upheavals that this one has without any problems. "One just has to remember the catastrophes of the French Reign of Terror, or the Russian and Chinese revolutions, not to mention the disasters that were Vietnam and Cambodia."

He also sent me a letter which has been circulating among soldiers for a month, from the mayor of Tal 'Afar, near the Syrian border, praising the "lion hearts" of the US 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment who have changed the city from "ghost town in which terrorists spread death and destruction to a secure city flourishing with life".

The violence of revenge attacks on Sunnis across Iraq, after last month's bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra, led many commentators to declare the civil war they have been predicting for three years had arrived. But others point to signs the crisis has spurred Iraq's political leaders to sort out their differences and work to form a national unity government, three months after their third successful election. And as Sunni politicians engage in the process, there are encouraging reports of infighting among Sunni insurgents.

Last Thursday Iraq's new parliament was sworn in and 82-year-old Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi told its first short session: "We have to prove to the world that a civil war is not and will not take place among our people. The danger is still looming and the enemies are ready for us because they do not like to see a united, strong, stable Iraq."

"I think it is right that we are here," wrote my friend last week on his 39th birthday, "and that we support these people against the thugs, criminals and terrorists who would try and turn back the clock on them".

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ELSEWHERE

Another crooked Bush-bashing poll. We read the following on CNN: "Although Americans don't believe the country faces an imminent energy crisis, most believe there are "major problems" --- from potential oil shortages to possible terrorist attacks -- and they are harshly critical of the leadership on the issue from the White House, according to a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.". In other words, Gallup asked the (slanted) questions CNN paid for. But as Stolen Thunder notes, however, nowhere are the details of the actual questions given, let alone the frequencies of the different responses to each question. I don't think we need to guess why.

Good point from Newsbusters: "Have a look at the chart at the bottom and answer one simple question: what's the biggest gasoline-price story over the last six months? Sure looks as if it was the way gasoline prices nose-dived about 80 cents from September to November. Remember all those MSM stories highlighting the plunge? Neither do I. But let market fluctuations push prices up about fifteen cents in the last month, and you can be sure that the MSM will start bemoaning 'soaring gas prices.'"

Poli Pundit is pretty outraged at the recent extensive service outages at blogger.com, which is a branch of Google. That certainly is one arrogant organization. What would it harm them to talk to their customers?

Good comment from Betsy: "I see that people are gathering around the world to protest the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. I guess they wish that Saddam Hussein were back in power and they support the terrorists in Iraq who are killing innocent civilians on an almost daily basis. These people would never gather around the world for a day of protests against tyranny in say, Iran, or genocide in Sudan. Nope, that's not the sort of thing that gets these people out into the streets, is it?"

Peaceniks getting bored: Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets around the world Saturday, marking the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with demands that coalition troops leave immediately.... Protests also were held in Australia, Asia and Europe, but many events were far smaller than organizers had hoped. In London, police said 15,000 people joined a march from Parliament and Big Ben to a rally in Trafalgar Square. The anniversary last year attracted 45,000 protesters in the city.

The colour of crime gets a rare mention in Britain: "A dog walker made no attempt to stop his pet savaging a 34-year-old woman in the street, police have said. The woman was left with serious leg injuries after the dog attacked her in Roseberry Street, Liverpool. The dog, which was believed to be a Staffordshire bull terrier or a pit bull terrier, was one of two being walked by the man, Merseyside Police said. A police spokesman appealed for information from the public over the attack. He said the man was described as black, 6ft and aged in his late teens or early 20s. One of the dogs was described as tan-coloured while the other was black, he added."

GOP failure is Donk opportunity: "Have America's entrepreneurs and corporate leaders found a new voice of regulatory sanity in, of all people, Nancy Pelosi? Apparently so, and that should be a wake-up call to Republicans -- because like everything else in the free market, the free enterprise agenda is up for grabs. In the recent "Innovation Agenda" that the House Democratic leader and her party unveiled, Ms. Pelosi acknowledges specifically the need to "ensure Sarbanes-Oxley requirements are not overly burdensome," and endorses reform. Meanwhile, the scourge of Wall Street, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, is criticizing Sarbanes-Oxley's "unbelievable burden on small companies" and its possible role in "preventing some initial public offerings.""

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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Privileged French students demonstrate to preserve their entitlements

The French government wants to make all young people more employable by making it easier to fire duds, but .....

The current demonstrations by students of French universities against a proposed liberalization of the labor laws, so that it will be easier for French employers to hire and fire young people, remind me very much of the strike by miners on the Witwatersrand in South Africa in 1922.

The demonstrators in France and the strikers in South Africa are and were supported by their respective national communist parties. The miners went on strike because the mine-owners proposed to replace expensive white labor with cheap black labor, hoping to increase profits. This move provoked one of the most bizarre political slogans of all time, promoted by the communist party: Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa!

What are the French university students demonstrating for? By opposing the proposed law of Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, they are in effect demanding that the children of Maghrebin and African immigrants stay exactly where they are, in the dismal and dispiriting housing projects that surround all French towns and cities, and accept their state of dependency on handouts derived from the taxes of their elders and betters.

The students are demonstrating for the continuation of their own protections and privileges once employed, as most of them soon will be. They do not wish employers to have the freedom to sack them, except at the cost of huge redundancy payments that the law currently grants them. Obliviously, of course, they are in effect also demonstrating for the continued segregation of the Arabs and the Africans.

And you can be sure that the "principled" young Frogs demonstrating are all Leftists. (Excerpts above from Theodore Dalrymple)

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ELSEWHERE

About time! "The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston said today it had defrocked seven priests accused of molesting children, as it cleans house following a 2002 scandal over paedophile priests. The seven included Rev Monsignor Frederick Ryan, a former vice-chancellor of the archdiocese accused of abusing two teenage boys and photographing them naked about 25 years ago in his quarters at the archdiocese's chancery. Ryan was placed on administrative leave in March 2002. "This moment provides an opportunity to express to the survivors of clergy sexual abuse and to their families my deepest sorrow for the grievous harm done to them," Archbishop Sean O'Malley said. The Boston Archdiocese, faced with an $US93 million ($126.23 million) bill to settle cases involving about 1000 sex-abuse victims, has shut more than 60 churches to raise money since the scandal erupted in Boston in 2002 and spread nationwide. The seven men are no longer allowed to perform any public ministry in the church and can no longer receive any financial support from the archdiocese."

Wrong target: "Last week, invoking national security concerns, members of Congress hastily acted to prevent a company from the Persian Gulf nation Dubai from taking ownership of facilities at several American ports. This Wednesday Dubai Ports World announced that it plans to sell all its United States operations, presumably including the Port of Miami facility it has run for years without any problem, to an American-controlled company within the next six months. Longshoremen union members will continue to handle packages at America's ports, no matter who owns the facilities. Oddly, none of these same members of Congress have called for inspecting the disturbing history of these unions. At least three aspects of Longshoremen history suggest that these union members at our ports might pose a risk to national security. They have been associated with organized crime, specifically the Mafia. They have a history of anti-American radical politics and have committed acts of violence. But the Longshoremen have been shielded from scrutiny by their high-placed political allies - including Hillary Clinton"

Official Canadian thugs: "A Nova Scotia couple facing an $800 municipal bill for refusing to shovel the snow from their sidewalk have paid half that amount to save their home from being sold by town officials. John and Rona McQuillan of Guysborough have refused to shovel the 20 metres of sidewalk in front of their house since the municipality introduced a snow-clearing bylaw five years ago. The municipality told the couple they would have to pay at least $400 by Friday or face losing their home in a tax sale -- a demand the McQuillans called blackmail. ... 'It gives people four hours after the end of a snowfall to clear their snow, and an awful lot of the people work outside of Guysborough,' said McQuillan. 'It was a bad bylaw and we took on the job of objecting to it.'"

Direct from Iraq: "General John P. Abizaid, commander, United States Central Command, puts out an annual statement on the posture of the United States Central Command. The 2006 posture statement that discusses various topics on the Global War on Terrorism is now out. Some of the topics include "Nature of the Enemy", "Situation Overview in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa", "Other Regional Partnerships" and "Iran and Syria."

Palestinian parasites to feel cuts: "If Israel withholds revenues from a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and donor countries reduce aid, the Palestinians would be thrown into a deep depression, with personal incomes dropping 30 per cent this year alone. A new World Bank study says the Palestinian economy would shrink by 27 per cent in 2006 - a one-year contraction that compares to the 1930s Depression. Unemployment would nearly double, to 39.6 per cent, and two-thirds of the population would be living below the poverty level."

The useless TSA again: "Security screeners at 21 airports across the United States failed to detect materials that could be used to make bombs in recent tests by government agents, US legislators said overnight. "The fact that government investigators were able to pass through TSA's (Transportation Security Administration) screening at 21 major airports with bomb-making material is frightening," representative Bennie Thompson, a member of the Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. "It's like the story of the Trojan Horse," he added. "TSA has spent so much time telling people to take off their shoes and belts, that they have missed the bomb-making materials." The tests were conducted last year by the General Accountability Office (GAO), the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security at the request of US Representative John Mica, a Republican".

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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SOME OF THE ARTICLES CURRENTLY UP ON "THINK ISRAEL"

FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE "DISENGAGEMENT" -- A STATUS REPORT by Dror Vanunu

ORTHODOX AND ISRAELI: WHEN THE TWO DON'T MIX by Avraham Shmuel Lewin

THE IDF: AN UNCOMFORTABLE ANALYSIS by Moshe Feiglin

THE FICTITIOUS 'THIRD WAY' by Caroline Glick

WHERE OLMERT LEADS, ISRAEL MUSTN'T FOLLOW by Caroline Glick

THE RISE OF HAMAS AND THE DECLINE OF ISRAELI DETERMINATION by Steven Plaut

AL-QAEDA INFILTRATION OF GAZA: A POST-DISENGAGEMENT ASSESSMENT by David Keyes

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, THE NAZIS AND AL-QA'IDA by John Loftus

WILL THE NEXT GENERATION OF (ARAB) PALESTINIANS MAKE PEACE WITH ISRAEL? by Justus Reid Weiner and Michael Sussman

JERUSALEM: A PREFERRED TARGET FOR PALESTINIAN TERRORISM IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS by Dr. Reuven Ehrlich

"PRAGMATIC HAMAS" - NOT VERY LIKELY by Gerald M. Steinberg

THE MYTH OF A MODERATE HAMAS by Barry Rubin

THE SOLUTION TO TERRORISM by Yoram Ettinger

ISRAELI VICTORY WITHIN GRASP by Richard H. Shulman

THE NEW MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM: Exploring Novel Avenues of Hatred by Raphael Israeli

THE SABEEL CENTER'S ONE-STATE AGENDA by Dexter Van Zile

THE PHANTOM ARAB MODERATE by Shmuel Katz

THE PERILS OF ISLAMIC OBSCURANTISM by Babu Suseelan

PEACE CRIMINALS by Jack Berger

HOW TO RECOGNIZE UNFAIR REPORTING ABOUT ISRAEL by Lee Green

THE LION THAT ROARS FOR PEACE by Kate Wright

THE LAMENTABLE CASE OF JOAN SCOTT by Phyllis Chesler, Judith S. Jacobson and Richard Landes

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ELSEWHERE

The BBC has just given a reasonably fair account of the controversy over the "racist" views of Frank Ellis, a lecturer at Leeds University. I was amused at this sentence, though: "The Students' Union claim Dr Ellis has breeched requirements for staff to promote equality and want him sacked.. Is the BBC telling us that Dr Ellis has put trousers on certain requirements? I suspect that they meant to write "breached" but did not know how to spell it. Homophones are deadly for people who rely on spellcheckers. One would have thought that the BBC had some fully literate proofreaders on staff, though. The BBC definitely "ain't what it used to be".

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on his usual themes, including some comments on the Frank Ellis affair.

I have just put up a story on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE that is a REAL black eye for the Left. Conservatives everywhere should be talking about it.

Blogger.com is still having a lot of service outages. Keith Burgess Jackson's blog about Brian Leiter is one of those affected. The site has been down for over a day, now, I think. Keith is fed up and is going off blogspot. His new anti-Leiter site is here.

Google are getting worse all the time. They have just declared that a conservative Christian site is "hate speech". The site concerned has a copy of their letter up. I do myself excerpt content from that site from time to time and I have never seen any "hate speech" on it. Like a lot of Christian sites, it is passionately anti-abortion but if that is hate-speech, a huge slice of America is equally guilty. I suspect that it is their criticism of homosexuality that has got them into trouble. But if that is so, the Bible is hate-speech! See, for example Romans 1: 22-32, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and 1 Corinthians 6: 9-19.

Saddam lied. People died: "As thousands of captured Iraqi documents are translated, it becomes clearer why all the world's intelligence services were misled about Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A decade of UN WMD inspections did indeed destroy Saddam's WMD arsenal. But Saddam believed that he could not outright say he did not have any WMD. He believed that Iran would come after him if they believed Iraq did not have WMD. During the 1990s, the Iraqi armed forces gradually fell apart because of the UN sanctions. So Saddam needed something to make Iraq look stronger than it actually was. But why didn't the truth get out of Iraq? That's because many senior Iraqi officials believed Saddam's deception. To contradict Saddam could get you killed"

I have just put up a new recipe for Hungarian Liptauer cheese spread on my recipe blog. Highly recommended. Recipe blog mirror 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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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ACCESS PROBLEMS

There have been quite a few problems accessing sites lately. With some blogspot blogs you get this notice: "Blog under maintenance. This blog is temporarily not viewable. Please try again after some time. For more information, click here". And when you click "here" you are told that the maintenance is complete!! Another problem with blogspot blogs is that you occasionally get the message: "You are not authorized to view this page". And you can also get a general "Site down" message.

A fix that works most of the time is simply to try again or to hit the refresh button. Hitting Ctrl+F5 (cache bypass) also sometimes helps.

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Brookes News Update

How the Fed's price rule triggers recessions: The thought that there is a connection between the manipulation of rates and the so-called boom-and-bust cycle is rarely given any consideration in the US media
The Commonwealth Games is a looming financial disaster for the Bracks' Government: The economics of state-sponsored sports, including the Commonwealth games and sports stadiums, are complete rubbish. Meanwhile, the Victorian Liberal Party finds itself unable to challenge Bracks' reckless spending program
Bush is a victim of America's political civil war: The Bush presidency has revealed the enormous ideological rift that has been developing for more than forty years in America, and yet the vast majority of Americans are still not fully aware of it
Bracks' energy policies are pricing families out of the housing market: Bracks' greenie policies are pricing thousands of families out of the housing market. (Similar policies have had the same disastrous effects in California). So why isn't the Liberal Party attacking him?
Catholic thinking backs labour market reform -- but the Liberal Party doesn't know it: It's time the Liberal Party learned that despite the chatter of leftwing clergymen Christian doctrine actually supports free labour markets
Simon Crean's Gosplan mentality: Crean is still wedded to the discredited and dangerous idea of industry policy
America is waking up to the Islamic menace: It's taken a few years, countless deaths and immeasurable suffering, but mainstream America finally seems to be waking up to the Islamic menace

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ELSEWHERE



A North Korean Musical! "As far as musicals go, seeing people break into song on subjects such as starvation and public executions in North Korea may be one of the most unlikely concepts for stage entertainment in several years. Producers held a preview in Seoul yesterday of the musical called Yoduk Story that features goose-stepping North Korean soldiers and deprived prisoners wondering if they can survive into the next day. The musical is about a North Korean woman's fall from a dancing revolutionary hero to a tortured inmate along with her family at Yoduk prison camp, where she bears a guard's child, and learns to forgive her brutal captors. The production is meant to be an irony-free look at life in a North Korean prison camp that could change the way the North is depicted in South Korean entertainment. Songs in the musical include You are just like germs and All I want is rice. The producers hope audiences can find beauty in the misery of life in the prison camps."

Equality for men sought: "Who controls human conception ... and when should that control be asserted? That's really the bottom-line question surrounding the abortion issue, and nothing makes that any clearer than the recent filing of a lawsuit by the National Center for Men, 'on behalf of a man's right to make reproductive choice to decline fatherhood in the event of an unintended pregnancy.' The case is a Michigan dispute, involving one Matt Dubay and his court-ordered levy for child support, for a child he had never intended to father; since he had been informed by his now ex-girlfriend that she was physically incapable of conceiving, he had not taken further precautions against such an event occurring. They even have a pet name for the case: 'Roe v. Wade for Men,' and they're asking the court to grant 'equal protection' for a man's right to decide about fatherhood. The specific issue has more to do with later (and long-term) liability for child support for unintended offspring, in the event the man in question had neither intended to impregnate his partner, nor had expected she was able to conceive (and thus failed to avail himself or her of precautionary devices)."

No free speech for churches? "The IRS wants to strike the fear of God into priests, ministers and rabbis who venture too far into politics and activism. In a Feb. 24 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson announced that nearly three-quarters of the 82 churches and charities that the IRS investigated recently for alleged political and electoral improprieties turned out, in the IRS' view, to be violators. Among the 'offenses': Allowing candidates to speak on church premises, preachers delivering remarks from the pulpit interpreted to endorse candidates and the posting of Web links to the Web sites of candidates for office. Interest is boiling over in Ohio: There, two ministers are accused of getting too close to Ken Blackwell, the Republican secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate, as well as letting their preaching get too political (the reverends deny the charges). At issue is whether the IRS should more actively sanction or even revoke the tax-exempt status of churches and charities it believes have gone too far."

Shelby Steele on the black problem: "By accepting the idea that government is somehow going to take over the responsibility that only we can take, we relinquished authority over ourselves. We became child-like, and our families began to fall to pieces. Welfare-which promised a subsistence living for the rest of your days for doing absolutely nothing-provided a perfect incentive to not get married, yet still have babies. Then the babies will be state wards, and their babies, and so forth. The incentive is just to stay in that rut. And so the goodwill of America finally did do to us what slavery and segregation failed to do. It destroyed our family, destroyed our character, and now black America is in a struggle. We struggle to stand up like men and women and take charge of our lives, and become competitive with other people in the modern world. If we don't do this, we'll always be behind. But if we do take charge of our own lives, we'll be men among men." [HT Peg Kaplan]

There is an excellent (and sarcastic) response here to the many Leftist critics of America's armed forces.

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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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LEFTIST ATTACK?

Dick McDonald reports that he has been blocked by blogger.com from posting on his blog. Apparently they think it is a spam blog.

I am going to log on there myself now to see if I can help but I am posting this in case I too get hit in some way as a result of doing so. Remember: my mirror sites will remain active!

Update

OK. I have just checked and below is what appears when you try to post on Dick's blog:

"This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts.

Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what's going on and how to get your blog unlocked."

I have sent in an unblocking request and blogger.com say that such requests are normally heeded within 24 hours. So I am pretty sure Dick will be back to normal soon.

The total blocking of Dick's blog was very aggressive, though. Normally, they respond to a suspected spamblog simply by putting up a "copy the letters" task -- which should stop any auto-spamming.

I suspect that the aggressive response means that lots of Leftists have been flagging Dick's blog as a spam blog.

THE "CLEVER" ERNEST PARTRIDGE

Ernest Partridge is employed as a philosopher by an American university but he seems to be more in the mould of a French philosopher -- in that his aim seems to be cleverness and paradox rather than clarifying anything. He says that he is a "progressive" but says that progressivism is conservative. Those who would normally be described as conservatives in modern politics he terms "regressives".

I am not really sure it is worth commenting on such superficial cleverness. The last amusing practitioners of it in the English-speaking world were people like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw about a century ago. Derrida and his ilk of course have provided similar entertainment to the French in much more recent times but that is probably little more than a comment on the way French intellectual life is stuck in the past -- in the Marxist past, in particular.

As a boring old Anglo-Saxon philosopher, however, I aim to clarify things as far as I can so I will mention just a few points about the Partridge claims that might help to put them into perspective. With that boring attention to detail that charaterizes most Anglo-Saxon philosophers, I will just look at Partridge's definition of what he believes in:

""Progressivism" is essentially the "liberalism" of most of the twentieth century, as promulgated by both Roosevelts, by the Kennedy Brothers, and by many Republicans, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Jacob Javits and Earl Warren. "Progressivism," to put it simply, is "liberalism""

At first blush, that is a fairly unremarkable statement but on closer examination it betrays either Partridge's typically Leftist ignorance of history or a rather surprising admission of Fascist inclinations. Let us for a start have a look at the two Roosevelts whom Partridge puts first in his list of admirables. Let us start with a quote from a Fascist to give us some context:

"If we are to go forward we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because, without such discipline, no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good".

Now that's mainstream Fascism, isn't it? Totally submerging the individual into an army that works only for the common good rather than individual good. The trouble is that it was not in fact a speech made by Mussolini or his ilk. It is an excerpt from the First Inaugural Address of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Hegel on, Leftism has gone under many names and many disguises but the basic desire to reduce people to an antlike status remains.

And we DO remember FDR's infatuation with Mussolini and his ideas, don't we? It was after all FDR who referred to Musso as "That admirable Italian gentleman". And we surely DO remember how in 1939, a German ocean liner, the SS St. Louis, with 1,000 Jewish refugees aboard, got so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami -- but FDR would not let them land. They returned to Germany to be exterminated by Hitler. So much for FDR. A strange man to admire.

What of the other Roosevelt -- TR, founder of the "Progressive" party and a man who of course, "entirely" agreed that as a race negroes are "altogether inferior to the whites."

No doubt TR's putting his trust in battleships is admired by Partridge and TR's view that war was needed to "cleanse" the national spirit would also be assented to by Partridge. And, of course, sending troops to take over foreign countries would also be warmly approved of by Partridge. TR certainly did that, as the slightest knowledge of American history would tell you.

What I have just said is of course only the quickest indication of what the 20th century Progressivism that Partridge so admires was all about. There is much more detail here.

Clearly, however, Partridge is either a Fascist or an ignoramus. In either case he is certainly an intellectual lightweight -- which fits in with the generally low intelligence that goes with Leftist attitudes.

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ELSEWHERE

We read here that the DNC is pushing Hillary Clinton as their POTUS candidate for 2008. Good. There is a summary here of Hillary's past which rather boggles the mind. So if she DOES become the Donk candidate for the Presidency in 2008, her past should undo her.

Liberty Corner has really got the message that it is the Left of politics who have most in common with the Fascists of history. Just the fact that FDR was an open admirer of Mussolini would make most reasonable people think if they knew of it.

The enviers can rest. The rich blow it anyway: "Whenever Rodney Zeeb gives talks on financial planning, he asks his audiences if they know the perils that arise when heirs are ill-prepared for an inheritance. Each time, nearly all heads nod, and hands shoot up: Yes, yes. 'Almost everybody knows a family or has seen a case where the money hurt somebody in the family, or the kids or grandchildren blew it all,' says Mr. Zeeb, an attorney and coauthor of 'Beating the Midas Curse,' a reference to the destructive relationships with money that splinter some families. So widespread is the problem, that 6 out of 10 affluent families will lose the family fortune by the end of the second generation, Zeeb says. And 9 out of 10 will have depleted the family wealth by the end of the third generation."

There is an article here showing that for most of its history Iran (Persia) has been good for the Jews. It is only the mad mullahs who are the problem.

Grumpy old Sod has this excellent piece of wisdom: "Australian Politics is a new, highly articulate and well-organised blog which highlights the ridiculous, the unfair and the plain dishonest in modern Australia". He deserves a link for that!

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or 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 the West will attack Iran

Excerpt from an interesting article from last January that now seems to be not far from coming true

Why did French President Jacques Chirac last week threaten to use non-conventional - that is, nuclear - weapons against terrorist states? And why did Iran announce that it would shift foreign-exchange reserves out of European banks (although it has since retracted this warning)? The answer lies in the nature of Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventional military means.

Iran's oil exports will shrink to zero in 20 years, just at the demographic inflection point when the costs of maintaining an aged population will crush its state finances, as I reported in Demographics and Iran's imperial design (September 13, 2005). Just outside Iran's present frontiers lie the oil resources of Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and not far away are the oil concentrations of eastern Saudi Arabia. Its neighbors are quite as alarmed as Washington about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and privately quite happy for Washington to wipe out this capability.

It is remarkable how quickly an international consensus has emerged for the eventual use of force against Iran. Chirac's indirect reference to the French nuclear capability was a warning to Tehran. Mohamed ElBaradei, whose Nobel Peace Prize last year was awarded to rap the knuckles of the United States, told Newsweek that in the extreme case, force might be required to stop Iran's acquiring a nuclear capability. German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that the military option could not be abandoned, although diplomatic efforts should be tried first. Bild, Germany's largest-circulation daily, ran Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad's picture next to Adolf Hitler's, with the headline, "Will Iran plunge the world into the abyss?"

The same Europeans who excoriated the United States for invading Iraq with insufficient proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction already have signed on to a military campaign against Iran, in advance of Iran's gaining WMD....

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ELSEWHERE



A good email from a reader about the Leftist mythology surrounding Tasmania: "In one of the latest Lonely Planet books "The cities book : a journey through the best cities in the world" there are a few pages of pictures of Hobart and a fact page. Which of the following list under Weaknesses stands out to you?: 1). Relatively expensive if good accommodation; 2). Aesthetically challenged Federation Concert Hall; 3). Tasmanian wine (more expensive than mainland wine); 4). Aboriginal massacres by the colonists. Yes, apparently tourists visiting 21st century Hobart will have to tread carefully to avoid the piles of Aboriginal bodies littering the streets. The Left just can't help themselves in reflexively accusing Australia of massacre and genocide even in the middle of a travel book".

What a disgusting racist statement!: "A complaint has been made to race relations investigators after Newcastle was described as "hideously white". The remark was made at a conference by Neil Murphy, a Government official who is working on secondment at Newcastle City Council. At the same conference, the city council's assistant chief executive, Paul Rubinstein, described the Tyne & Wear area as one of the "whitest" in the North".

Taranto on the NYT: "Tom Fox, a member of the anti-American Christian Peacekeeper Teams, has been murdered by terrorists in Iraq who held him hostage for more than three months, the New York Times reported on Saturday. On Sunday, the paper carried a follow-up report that Fox "had apparently been tortured by his captors before being shot multiple times in the head and dumped on a trash heap next to a railway line in western Baghdad." The story of Fox's death ran on page A8; the story of his torture, on page A10. So what made the Times' front page on Saturday? Yet another story about Abu Ghraib".

Taranto also has the latest installment of frothing at the mouth by the world's greatest sore loser -- Al Gore.

British justice for once: "Plans to give housewives without children the right to the basic state pension have been thrown out by ministers - but women who give up work to bring up children or care for elderly relatives will be entitled to the full state pension under new government plans.... John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has decided to stick with a pension based on contributions. However, in a radical reworking of the scheme, the Government will pay the contributions of women who sacrifice years of work to bring up children or care for sick relatives." [Why should women who have spent neither time nor money on bringing up children be entitled to support from other people's children?]

A smart Dutch initiative: "Two men kissing in a park and a topless female bather are featured in a film that will be shown to would-be immigrants to The Netherlands. The reactions of applicants will be examined to see whether they are able to accept the country's liberal attitudes. From Wednesday, the DVD -- which also shows the often crime-ridden ghettos where poorer immigrants might end up living -- will form part of an entrance test, in Dutch, covering the language and culture of Holland. Those sitting the test will be expected to know which country Crown Princess Maxima comes from (Argentina) and whether hitting women and female circumcision are permitted.... The new test -- the first of its kind in the world -- marks another step in the transformation of Holland from one of Europe's most liberal countries to the one cracking down hardest on immigration. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, known as Iron Rita, has introduced compulsory integration classes, higher age limits for marriage to people from abroad and the removal of residency permits if immigrants commit petty crimes. She has also talked of banning the burka. Applicants will sit the exam at one of 138 embassies around the world. They will answer 15 minutes of questions and those who pass the first stage will have to complete two "citizenship" tests over five years and swear a pledge of allegiance to Holland and its constitution."

The prologue to Craig Winn's book "Prophet of Doom, Terrorist Dogma, In Muhammad's Own Words" is now up on Spelled Sideways. "Winn uses the most respected Islamic sources, the Qur'an, the Hadith of al-Bukhari, the Biography of Ibn Ishaq, and the History of al-Tabari to link Islam's beginnings directly to the terror the world is experiencing today." In the book Winn "shines a bright and revealing light on Islam, Judaism, Christianity, political correctness, profiling, intelligence gathering, politics, martyrdom, the peace process, and the media's fear of the truth."

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). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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Islam as a good religion for dummies

As far as I know this analysis is completely unoriginal but I feel it needs to be more widely known

IQ tests suggest that Arabs are dumb. And despite vast propaganda to the contrary, their (lack of) intellectual achievements bears that out. See here.

So why have they succeeded in imposing their brutal religion on over a billion people? That is pretty good.

Randall Parker has often pointed out the answer to that. It is because of polygamy. Under polygamy, the rich and smart guys get all the women and leave lots of young Muslim men with no female access. So what do they do with their energies? -- energies that were designed to cope with the large task of caring for a family?

They go to war. They throw their lives away. Suicide bombers are a vivid example of that but reckless aggression as troops in an army fulfils a similar function.

So polygamy makes big numbers of young Muslim males careless of their lives. And that did historically make them fearsome opponents of more traditionally motivated men. Their armies won for a long time because the individuals in those armies fought with such careless aggression and reckless abandon.

So polygamy produced virtual military robots -- destructive of the robots but effective. And most effective BECAUSE of the limited intelligence of those involved. Smarter young men would have found other ways of using their lives.

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