Brookes News Update

The US economy: past and present: Although President Bush's capital gains taxes contributed significantly to the current boom the economic consequences of the Fed's loose monetary policies have still let loose economic forces whose gloomy outcome is as inevitable as night and day
Socialist economist screws up on free trade and Keynesian policies: John Quiggin, a socialist and a professor of economics is at it again. Once again he is presenting Keynesian fallacies as undisputed economic truths that governments need to implement as economic policy. In support of this view he gave a thoroughly distorted interpretation of nineteenth century booms. It's time he went back to school
The ABC is so ideologically depraved that it is beyond salvation: If Windschuttle, Albrechtsen, Gallagher, Skala, Brunton and the rest of the crowd think they can somehow successfully challenge the ABC's foul political ethos they need look no further than Koval whose mephitic presence is proof positive that the organisation is beyond salvation
Google's thought police censor exposes of Islamofascists: While Google's thought police cooperate with the Beijing regime and Islamofascist sympathizers the Baltimore County Muslim Council revealed the true face of Muslim tolerance by demanding that the Baltimore County school system remove the Jewish holidays from the 2006-07 school calendar
Why Islam is in a shambles: Islam is in a shambles, long past fixing itself, much less ruling the rest of the world. Muslims who consider themselves peaceful should take the fateful step and join the free and emancipated family of humanity. There is no going back. Barbarism is in our past
Democrats hypocritical on marriage: Traditional marriage is, in fact, America's best hope for keeping our society secure, our neighborhoods at peace, and our children safe from harm. Without marriage, we might as well put away the American flag and replace it with the white flag of surrender
Israel says "Never Again!": Jews were deported from Gaza. Thousands of Jews were uprooted. Again! All communities were destroyed, again! Viable and successful businesses were ruined

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ELSEWHERE

Reliapundit has been pointing out for years that the Fannie Mae scandal is similar to but bigger than Enron -- a point that is now being taken up elsewhere. How come the Fannie Mae scandal is hardly ever condemned and that none of the fraudsters have gone to jail? The fact that they were all prominent Democrats would not be relevant would it?

More lies from the Communist News Network: They claim that repeal of a compulsory helment law for motorcycle riders in Florida caused a big leap in deaths among riders. David Friedman points out that their own figures show the exact opposite.

The 16th century megadeaths among the Aztecs and other central Americans have always been blamed on diseases such as smallpox brought with them to the Americas by the white conquistadores. It now seems, however, that the deaths were caused by a native virus such as a hantavirus -- a virus that became more virulent because of a severe drought. Don't expect to read that in the media, though. White men must be blamed for everything.



Rather finally gets the boot: "The American broadcaster Dan Rather has left CBS News in a bitter departure after his 44 years as reporter, anchor and the face of the network was clouded by a reporting scandal over President George Bush's military record... Rather said his departure on Tuesday came after "a protracted struggle" with CBS executives who, he said, had "not lived up to their obligation to allow me to do substantive work there" since he stepped down as anchor in March last year... Some said the departure of Rather, whose reputation was tarnished in 2004 by a subsequently discredited report on Mr Bush's military record, was an unceremonious end. "You never expect someone who's been the face of the network for so long to just be given an office which is essentially a closet, and then not to be given air time and then to have it leaked to the press that he's being booted," the New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta said. "It's jarring.""

The lying NYT again: "In Wednesday's "Israeli Attack Kills 3 Gaza Children," filed from Jerusalem, reporter Ian Fisher makes the now-discredited claim that an Israeli airstrike killed a family of seven Palestinians on a Gaza beach.... Perhaps Fisher should have picked up a copy of Monday's Jerusalem Post, which discussed how those vaunted "human rights officials" (from no less a body than Human Rights Watch itself) are backtracking from their initial assertions of Israeli blame: "On Monday, the Human Rights Watch, while sticking to its demand for the establishment of an independent inquiry into a blast on a Gaza beach 10 days ago that killed seven Palestinian civilians, conceded for the first time since the incident that it could not contradict the [Israeli Defense Force's] exonerating findings."

Disgusting self-publicist: "A descendant of England's first slave trader knelt in chains in front of a crowd of 25,000 Africans this month and asked forgiveness for his ancestor's actions. Andrew Hawkins, 37, a youth worker from Liskeard, Cornwall, offered his apologies during an ethnic festival in the former West African British colony of The Gambia, as a gesture of reconciliation between Europeans and Africans. He was forgiven by Isatou Njie Saidy, Vice-President of the country, which remains a Commonwealth member and is now a popular tourist destination."

More confirmation of a very old finding: "There is clear evidence that men perform better at spatial tasks and women outpace men on tests of verbal usage and perceptual speed, according to research conducted by Wendy Johnson, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Minnesota, and Thomas Bouchard, director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. The findings, which will be published in the journal Intelligence, indicate that there is little difference in how the genders fare as far as general intelligence, however. But since engineering positions are overwhelmingly filled by men, this further supports the theory that spatial abilities are key to success in the field".

Different laws for Democrat politicians: "Mayor John M. Fabrizi admitted Tuesday he had abused cocaine while in office and said he wanted to apologize "to all the people of the city" but had no plans to resign. The admission followed the inadvertent release of an FBI document in which an alleged drug dealer claimed an associate had a videotape of the mayor using cocaine. In a tearful speech to about 200 city employees and residents in City Council chambers Tuesday, Fabrizi said he had not used drugs in 18 months and had sought help for a drug addiction that he had hoped to handle privately".

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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BELGIAN STATE GUILTY OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES

It is attacking the "Brussels Journal" editor via his children

In a Report published today by the Libertarian Alliance, the Belgian Government is accused of systematic human rights abuses similar in nature and extent to those in a post-Soviet republic. Journalists and homeschoolers are not safe in Belgium. The Report - The Belgian State versus Home Schooling: The Persecution of Dr Alexandra Colen and Dr Paul Belien - by Professor John Kersey, is published by The Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties policy institute based in London. Professor Kersey finds:

* That Dr Paul Belien, Editor of The Brussels Journal, has faced official and semi-official intimidation over an article he published in favour of the right to self-defence;

* That Dr Belien and his wife, Dr Alexandra Colen (who is a Member of the Belgian Parliament), face a systematic attack on their right to educate their children at home.

Commenting on the Report, Dr Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance, says: "For a journalist, there can be few rights more fundamental than to freedom of speech. For parents, there can be no right more fundamental than of being able to bring up their children in what they consider the right values. We should all be shocked that these rights have been systematically violated in a country that is a member state of the European Union and of the Council of Europe - and that not long ago passed laws allowing citizens of other Western countries such as Israel to be put on trial for alleged offences committed outside Belgium.

"In other European Union member states, we should be particularly concerned. If homeschooling can be made illegal in Belgium, it can be made illegal in any other state. In Britain at the moment, parents have an absolute right to homseschool their children. The precedents set in the Belien and other cases may be applied here.

"As Director of the Libertarian Alliance, I have today written to the Belgian Prime Minister and to the Human Rights Commissioners of the European Union and of the Council of Europe. We require an assurance that the persecution of the Belien family will be at once ended. "We encourage all others people who may be concerned about this denial of fundamental human rights to use the names and addresses supplied in the Report and to write letters of their own.

[Two email addresses: Frank Vandenbroucke Minister of Education in the Flemish Government: here and the inspector-general at the ministry, Kristien Arnouts: here (I think the latter is female)]

Source

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ELSEWHERE

The Gaza beach explosion of over a week ago in which members of an Arab family died was widely attributed to Israeli shelling. There is an investigative report from a German newspaper here which suggests that the whole story is another "Pallywood" episode -- a Palestinian fake.

Nutty Episcopalians forget that the Bible was entirely written by Jews: "The 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church today passed a resolution essentially condemning the Bible as an "anti-Jewish" document. Not only does the resolution aim to address perceptions of anti-Jewish prejudice in the Bible and Episcopal liturgy, but it suggests that such prejudice is actually "expressed in...Christian Scriptures and liturgical texts." Originated in the Committee on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music, Resolution C001 directs the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to "collect and develop materials to assist members of the Church to address anti-Jewish prejudice expressed in and stirred by portions of Christian scriptures and liturgical texts, with suggestions for preaching, congregational education, and lectionary use, and to report to the 76th General Convention." Both houses of the Episcopal Church Convention passed the resolution, including a 68 percent approval in the House of Deputies on Thursday.

Presbyterians have second thoughts about anti-Israel bias: "The 2004 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly mandate to "initiate a process of phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel" is poised to be erased, following the action of a committee of General Assembly on June 17. The plan will not become official until the whole General Assembly considers it later this week, but the news from the committee is good. It seems unlikely that divestment would occur-unless the situation in the Middle East or in the denomination were to change radically".

The Lords come to the rescue again: "The House of Lords yesterday defied the Commons by insisting that, to combat election fraud, everybody should sign their name and give their date of birth before they are given a vote. For the second time in a fortnight, ministers failed to persuade peers to drop demands for tough new measures designed to defeat vote rigging. The Government has agreed to force everyone seeking a postal vote to provide their signature and date of birth. Peers want the reform extended to voting in person".

The genetics of aggression: "Some men are predisposed to more belligerent and macho behaviour than others because of the presence of an aggression gene, researchers in America suggest. A study of more than 500 European men has shown that a tendency to be intemperate and confrontational may be linked to the presence of one of two genes involved in the activity of the neurotransmitter serotonin. The research, by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested that people who had a "low-activity" MAOA (monoamine oxidase A) gene were more prone to violence."



How awful for the arrogant French elite! "But even as protesters sought to cast McDonald's as the embodiment of all that is wrong with fast food and American culture, the French never stopped eating its hamburgers. Indeed, for all the attacks on the company, McDonald's operating profit in France last year was second only to that of McDonald's in the United States."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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MORE ON THE U.N.

United Nations deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown has a singular view of what constitutes international diplomacy. He said in a speech recently that the American public is ignorant of the importance and effectiveness of the UN because of the U.S. government's tolerance of "too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping." .... In fact, during its six decades, the overall record of the United Nations has been so rife with failure, corruption and incompetence -- to say nothing of poor judgment, rudeness and condescension, as exemplified by Mr. Malloch Brown -- that it deserves to be disdained.

The organization's best known interventions -- attempts to attain and maintain peace -- too often have been exercises in lowest-common-denominator diplomacy that progresses at a glacial pace; and its essays into public health and environmental protection are frequently disastrous failures. The UN's leaders and programs consistently lack an appreciation for the relationship between wealth creation and public and environmental health. Mr. Malloch Brown's boss, Secretary General Kofi Annan, has expressed the hope that concern for "intellectual property" will not "get into the way" of producing and distributing drugs for a potential avian-flu pandemic. In other words, companies that make drugs and vaccines should abandon their intellectual property at Mr. Annan's whim.

Even if the recent incidents of corruption, dishonesty and profiteering -- exemplified by the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal and its coverup, sexual abuse of refugees by UN officials and peacekeepers, the botched investigation of the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri, and procurement scams -- are anomalies, it is hard to explain away the anti-social outcomes of business as usual.

Nothing the UN has inflicted on innovation is worse than its record on biotechnology applied to agriculture and food production. At the UN's Task Force on Biotech Foods (which operates under the auspices of something called the Codex Alimentarius Commission, itself a creature of the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization), only gene-spliced products are addressed, a scope that has been condemned by experts repeatedly as unscientific and indefensible. The work of the task force prevents the wider diffusion of a superior technology for agriculture and food production and is directly detrimental to farmers, consumers, academic researchers and industry worldwide. It will exacerbate malnutrition and starvation in the developing world....

The UN's assault on innovation and wealth creation demands a counter-attack. The United States and other like-minded nations can provide the firepower by withholding funds and participation from UN agencies and programs that are corrupt or incompetent. Better still, they should cease paying any dues at all until the entire organization undergoes fundamental and genuine reform.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing article here pointing out how anti-American New Zealanders are. The article really has no explanation for the phenomenon. But the explanation is simple. New Zealanders hate Australians too. Because of their past and present socialism, New Zealand is much poorer than Australia and their more capable young people often migrate to Australia for the higher wages. New Zealanders hate that. It has given them a national inferiority complex -- manifested by hating anyone who is more successful than they are. And as the world's most powerful nation, America is hated most of all. New Zealanders as a whole -- with honourable individual exceptions -- are just infantile, that's all.

Stupid politically correct British police again: "A man with an IQ of just 69 is believed to be the trigger behind the bungled terror raid in Forest Gate, East London. Ex-waiter Mohammed Abu Bakr Mansha, 22, was a childhood pal of the two brothers arrested in the dawn swoop by police two weeks ago. In January he was jailed for six years for terror offences - and even described in court as an "utter incompetent". Soon afterwards, friends of brothers Abul Kahar, 23, and Abul Koyair, 20, visited him at top-security Belmarsh, South-East London. And, the Sunday Mirror has learned, that meeting sparked a surveillance operation on the men by the security services. (HT Spy blog)

British borders wide open: "Ministers were accused yesterday of leaving Britain's borders wide open to drug smugglers, criminal gangs and terrorists because too few customs officers operate at ports and airports. The Government's anti- terror watchdog criticised a new method of border control that has left some of the busiest airports unmanned in a switch to mobile patrols. Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, said that customs officers were "too thinly spread" and was supported by police chiefs voicing private concerns that ports of entry were left unprotected."

Leftist Episcopalians too queer for some: "The Anglican Church descended into "ecclesiastical anarchy" last night as American traditionalists refused to accept the authority of a woman and asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead them instead. Liberals celebrated the election of Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church while the traditionalist Fort Worth Diocese appealed to Dr Rowan Williams for "alternative primatial oversight". The appeal, being mulled over at Lambeth Palace, is expected to be the first of several. It represents the first formal step towards a schism that evangelicals say began with the consecration of the openly gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003."

Woman Slain Because She Was White: "The trial of a man accused of murder as a hate crime continues Tuesday in White Plains, N.Y. Phillip Grant, who is black, is charged with murdering a woman in the Galleria shopping mall because she was white. Concetta Russo-Carriero, 56, was stabbed to death at lunchtime June 29 in the parking garage of the mall as she walked to her car, just a block from the courthouse. In opening arguments Monday, Assistant District Attorney Timothy Ward said the victim was targeted by Grant, who was planning a murder motivated by "hatred of white people." Defense attorney Eugene Traynor said in his opening statement that police had arrested the wrong man. He told jurors that Grant, a convicted rapist, was never positively identified by a witness.... The murder charge against Grant became a hate-crime charge after he told police he killed the woman because she was white. "All I knew was she had blond hair and blue eyes and she had to die," he said in a videotaped statement that was played at a pretrial hearing. "If I'd have had a gun today, there'd be a lot of dead white people on the streets of White Plains."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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The Utter Dysfunction of the United Nations

A report written by "a concerned group of current and former UN employees" and emailed from IO Watch.

Recently Mark Malloch Brown, deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, said that "Middle America" did not know how the US is constructively engaged with the UN because of UN detractors and too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping over too many years. Friends, the UN deserves to be bashed and bashed hard. Please allow us to give you a glimpse into how the United Nations is run:

Hirings and promotions routinely violate UN rules (and are illegal under most national laws) and revolve around patronage and whom one knows rather than professional qualifications. Poorly performing managers are simply moved into different management slots while others are placed in senior positions solely because of their nationality, or because of favors owed to them by their supervisors or colleagues.

Salaries for UN employees are free of taxes and come with six weeks vacation, 11 holidays, 10 sick days that are often used as vacation, plus 4 weeks of "home leave", rental and housing grants to supplement an already generous salary (we all make an average of $7,000-$10,000 a month tax free), a pension at 8% of salary times years of service that can be cashed out tax free at any time, and educational subsidies for children of UN employees. Many also participate in an "alternative work schedule" in which they get every other Friday off. But don't even try to apply. Your application will not be acknowledged nor will you ever get invited for a job interview. You must know someone to work at the UN (or worse, sleep with them).

Several of us have advanced degrees in management and have been trained to manage large public organizations, yet we are blocked from advancing by bureaucrats in their 50s with no management training, education, or experience - only sitting in their chairs because they are friends with someone in a higher position. We threaten them because they know they are there based only on their connections.

And there is a profound lack of accountability within the UN regarding budget and resource allocation, resulting in loss of millions upon millions each year through skimming, graft and corruption. Simple procurement that would normally take five minutes using modern technology systems takes 2-3 months in the UN. And many United Nations Development Program country offices pay "local experts" outrageously high sums of money for products of dubious quality. Such contracts would never be made by other international aid agencies such as USAID that have much stronger internal controls and oversight.

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

Seeing I am a monarchist, I am delighted by the following



LONDON: British soldiers in bearskin hats marched before Queen Elizabeth II and military jets saluted her with a flypast over Buckingham Palace on Saturday during a second round of 80th birthday celebrations. And for the first time in the Queen's reign, troops assembled in the palace forecourt gave the feu de joie (fire of joy), a traditional military salute consisting of a series of volleys of shots interspersed with snatches of the national anthem. Thousands of well-wishers -- many waving small Union Jack flags -- yelled "happy birthday" to the Queen, who waved back with a white-gloved hand. Elizabeth, wearing a deep purple coat and hat, rode down the Mall near the palace in an ivory carriage, built for Queen Victoria in 1842, for a morning of pageantry at the Horseguards Parade ground in central London. Mounted members of the Household Cavalry wearing golden armour rode before her. Later, 49 aircraft -- led by Spitfires, Hurricanes and a Lancaster bomber commemorating the World War II Battle of Britain -- flew by as she and her family watched from a balcony at the palace. The Trooping of the Colour parade marks the Queen's official birthday every June. She was born on April 21, but the official, outdoor celebration comes two months later, when the chance of warm weather is better."

There have been a lot of comments on the net about the vast waste of taxpayer funds that were handed out by FEMA for disaster relief in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The L.A. Times commented that "FEMA did mismanage Katrina relief, but it's wrong to blame victims for spending -- the usual Leftist idea that "victims" are a privileged class above all criticism. Jeff Jacoby, however, has a more responsible view and argues that government charity is intrinsically wasteful and that such charity should always be funnelled through private organizations if it is to be given at all.

The Iranian danger: "New evidence is emerging that Iran has built several secret uranium enrichment plants in defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency and its nuclear inspection efforts. The evidence comes to NewsMax from Western diplomats and a former Iranian intelligence officer. One of the secret plants, located some 20 kilometers to the northeast of Tehran near the Lashgarak dam, houses a clandestine centrifuge uranium enrichment plant, where Iran is making nuclear weapons material, according to an Iranian intelligence officer who has defected to the West."

Postmodern Canada: "Leger Marketing conducted a telephone poll of 1,508 Canadian adults between April 17 and April 23. The poll results, with a margin of error of ~2.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, have found that an alarming 11% of Canadians do not consider pedophilia immoral. The question was in no way slanted. Respondents were asked: "Do you consider the following behaviour as immoral?" and to "pedophilia" 81% responded 'yes', 11% 'no', and 8% did not know or refused to respond.

Legal ethics: "Before I went to law school I thought of law in the United States as a concrete, reliable source of rules derived from the Constitution and based on principles of right and wrong. To get at the law, all you had to do was blow back the atmospheric heavens and there it sat in all of its glory. Law school changed all of that; especially when it came to ethics".

Australian baby bonus working: "When Courtney Fox entered the world just after midnight on July 1, 2004, the last thing on her mother's mind was that she had just qualified for $3000. Born at 12.01am, after a natural labour lasting about 24 hours, Courtney probably made her parents, Amanda Fox and James Laker, the first to qualify for the Government's baby bonus. But many other parents appeared to have an eye on the money. It has now emerged that there were more births on July 1, 2004, than on any other day in the past 30 years. And with the baby bonus slated to rise a further $1000, to $4000, from this July 1, experts are tipping another birth bonanza. Professors Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, who have been analysing birth figures, believe the introduction of the last baby bonus changed behaviour and the same thing is likely this time. "An additional $1000 is not the same as the first $3000, but it is still not trivial," Professor Gans said yesterday. "The hospitals weren't prepared for it last time. In three weeks' time it will be occurring again."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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9.9 Million Illegals to Get Amnesty. 1 in 4 Would Be Fraudulent Under Senate Bill

Press release from CIS

Based on the experience of the 1986 amnesty, we expect that nearly 9.9 million illegal aliens will receive amnesty under the recently passed Senate Hagel-Martinez bill. That is, they will legalize and can apply for permanent residence and citizenship. As in 1986, we also expect that one-fourth, or 2.6 million, will receive amnesty fraudulently. The bill will also allow an estimated 4.5 million family members of illegal aliens currently living abroad to join their legalized relatives for a total of 14.4 million beneficiaries.

The new report, "Amnesty Under Hagel-Martinez: An Estimate of How Many Will Legalize if S.2611 Becomes Law," by the Center's Director of Research, Steven A. Camarota, is on line here. Among the findings:

* Based on the 1986 amnesty, we estimate that slightly over 70 percent, or 7.4 million, of the 10.2 million illegals eligible for the three amnesties in Hagel-Martinez will come forward and receive amnesty legitimately. That is, they will gain legal status allowing them to live and work in the United States and eventually apply for permanent residence and citizenship.

* We also estimate that, as in 1986, there will be one fraudulent amnesty for every three legitimate ones (2.6 million) for a total of 9.9 million amnesty beneficiaries.

* In addition to the amnesty beneficiaries, the bill will allow an estimated 4.5 million family members currently living abroad to join their newly legalized relatives for a total of 14.4 million people who will benefit from the bill's amnesty provisions.

* Our assumption that 70 percent of illegals who will come forward, as in 1986, is conservative because, unlike the last legalization, illegals now know that amnesties are real and not a ruse by the government to deport them. Moreover, increased border enforcement has made illegal crossing more difficult, making legalization a more attractive option.

* Our estimate of 2.6 million fraudulent amnesties, based on 1986, is also conservative because the false document industry is now more developed. Moreover, the immigration bureaucracy already has a severe fraud problem, according to the Government Accountability Office. As its workload mushrooms with amnesty, fraud will become even more difficult to detect.

* Of the 14.4 million illegals and their family members who will receive amnesty, we estimate that 13.5 million will eventually become permanent residents, which means they can stay as long as they wish and apply for citizenship. Deaths and out-migration account for the balance of the 14. 4 million.

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ELSEWHERE

Exposing the myth of Third World aid "The United Nations' Millennium Project to fight poverty argues strenuously that corrupt government in the Third World is not a major cause of poverty. Whether this is true is a growing debate in the aid industry. Drawing on the Polity IV research project on democracy, Easterly says there is actually a significant correlation between democracy and long-term growth, and that "poor countries grow faster than rich countries if they have good government". Why then do Planners deny this? Because their big plans rely on the co-operation of Third World governments, and would not be feasible if those governments are dysfunctional.

Australian killer doctor: "A doctor will stand trial next month for manslaughter after she allegedly induced an abortion on a woman who was 22 weeks pregnant. In a landmark case, Sydney doctor Suman Sood, 56, is charged with the manslaughter of a male fetus who died about four hours after he was born... Her 20-year-old patient was about 22 weeks pregnant at the time of the incident in May 2002. Dr Sood, a former owner of the private abortion clinic Australian Women's Health at Fairfield in Sydney's west, allegedly gave the woman a pre-abortion pill and sent her home. The mother gave birth to the baby boy on a toilet the following day. Ambulance officers retrieved the baby and later realised it was alive and struggling to breathe. It died a few hours later."

Dalrymple on Islam: "In his new book, Islamic Imperialism: A History, Professor Efraim Karsh does not mince words about Mohammed's early and (to all those who do not accept the divinity of his inspiration) unscrupulous resort to robbery and violence, or about Islam's militaristic aspects, or about the link between Islamic tradition and the current wave of fundamentalist violence in the world. The originality of Karsh's interpretation is its underlying assumption that Islam was, from the very beginning, a pretext for personal and dynastic political ambition, from the razzias against the Meccan caravans and the expulsion of Jewish tribes from Medina, to the siege of Vienna a millennium later in 1529, and Hamas today. Contrary to its universalistic pretensions, Karsh argues, Islam has never succeeded in eliminating political power struggles within the Muslim world, where, on the contrary, such struggles have always been murderous."

Dr. Babu Suseelan, a Professor of Clinical Psychology in Pennsylvania, on Islam: "Jihadi terrorism is as old as Islam. Jihad war, death and destruction have followed in the wake of Islam for hundreds of years. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain, Persia, India and several societies have experienced the deadly Islamic conquest. Now Jihadi terrorism has propelled to dangerous proportions and is a major threat to public health and world peace. Jihadi terrorists are said to have the unique ability to perpetuate their deadly terrorism wreaking havoc in every city in the world. It's destructive impact on the economy, public health and public safety is widespread, and on the increase.

U.K.: Secret report brands Muslim police corrupt : "A secret high-level Metropolitan police report has concluded that Muslim officers are more likely to become corrupt than white officers because of their cultural and family backgrounds. The document, which has been seen by the Guardian, has caused outrage among ethnic minorities within the force, who have labelled it racist and proof that there is a gulf in understanding between the police force and the wider Muslim community. The document was written as an attempt to investigate why complaints of misconduct and corruption against Asian officers are 10 times higher than against their white colleagues. The main conclusions of the study, commissioned by the Directorate of Professional Standards and written by an Asian detective chief inspector, stated: "Asian officers and in particular Pakistani Muslim officers are under greater pressure from the family, the extended family ... and their community against that of their white colleagues to engage in activity that might lead to misconduct or criminality."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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THE LATEST UP ON ICJS

Summary report on Human Rights Watch
The seductive beat of the militant, Islamic drum
Summary of IDF investigation of incident on the Gaza beach
About the ABC's "expert" on Israeli munitions
Uncertainty shrouds Gaza beach tragedy
As Islamists Grow Confident, It's Time for the West To Stand
Come to Londonistan, our refuge for poor misunderstood Islam
Press Releases re ABC on Terror
Memo to EU by Nick Cohen
Islam and Western Democracies by Cardinal George Pell
Gaza journalists get threats over Hamas coverage
Why war comes when no one wants it
Euston, you don't have lift-off
At last our lefties see the light, by Christopher Hitchens
Hamas can't even fake moderation
Euston Manifesto
Ex-Spanish premier calls on NATO to add Israel as member
Harper urged to block UN appointment
Wolves in sheep's clothing on extremist Islam mission
Hamas in charge
Visa row on links to terror
B'nai Brith Press Release

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ELSEWHERE

Great! Two rogue unions to be busted: "Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn. Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman's Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation?s most modern highway straight into the heart of America. The Mexican trucks will cross border in FAST lanes, checked only electronically by the new 'SENTRI' system. The first customs stop will be a Mexican customs office in Kansas City, their new Smart Port complex, a facility being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers in Kansas City. As incredible as this plan may seem to some readers, the first Trans-Texas Corridor segment of the NAFTA Super Highway is ready to begin construction next year".

Illegal immigrant sweep nabs criminals: "San Diego County led the nation in arrests during a recent series of sweeps of illegal immigrants designed to pick up criminals, fugitives and gang members. But most of those arrested weren't original targets of the operation. During the two-week effort - dubbed "Operation Return to Sender" - agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local police arrested 2,179 people in more than 30 states. Of those, 402 were arrested in San Diego County, including 164 with criminal backgrounds, officials said."

Crooked black congressman whines: "The following is a statement made by Congressman William Jefferson responding to the House Democratic vote to suspend him from the House Ways and Means committee: "Tonight, a motion to suspend me, temporarily, from my position on the House Ways and Means Committee passed in the Democratic Caucus. I stand firm in my position that this move is unprecedented, unfair in process and most importantly, it unjustly punishes my constituents."

Feds were accomplices to Enron crooks: "Federal prosecutors have successfully prosecuted Enron CEOs Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay for what the grand jury's indictment described as 'a wide-ranging scheme to deceive the investing public . about the true performance of Enron's businesses.' While Skilling, Lay, Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, and other Enron 'conspirators' have also been found guilty of fraud charges, one key accomplice has gotten a pass: federal and state government."

Hang on to your printed books: "It is safe to surmise that, once most books -- particularly the out of print and difficult to find ones -- have been digitized, most libraries, under the pressure of lack of space and low personnel budgets, will end up by getting rid of most printed books of which digitized versions are available. As I mentioned before, Google's goal is to eventually digitize all books. Given Google's passion for censorship, and ALA's irregular application of its policies (ALA is only against censors they don't like), book censorship may become a common thing."

Brazilians rejecting "liberation" Catholicism: "About 3 million evangelical Protestants staged a huge rally Thursday in the heart of Brazil's biggest city, demonstrating their growing influence in the world's largest Roman Catholic country. Crowding next to sound trucks blasting religious music, marchers wore T-shirts in the green and yellow colors of Brazil's flag advertising their annual "March for Jesus." The hymn-singing evangelicals walked to skyscraper-lined Agenda Palest, Brazil's version of Wall Street"

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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 I LEFT THE LEFT"

Excerpt from an article by Seth Swirsky

What made me leave the Left for good and embrace the Right were their respective reactions to 9/11. While The New York Times doubted that we could succeed in Afghanistan because the Soviets in the '80s hadn't, George W. Bush went directly after the Taliban and Al Qaeda and crushed them in short order. Although many on the Left claim to have backed the President's actions, the self-doubt leading up to it, crystallized my view of the Left as weak and terminally lacking in confidence.

I supported President Bush's hard line against the father of modern terrorism, Yasir Arafat, remembering that Bush's predecessor hosted Arafat at the White House 13 times, more often than any other world leader. I applauded Bush's unequivocal support for Israel, which every day faced (and faces) suicide attacks against its people. But I was most disappointed with liberal Jews who don't understand that their very existence is rooted in Israel's existence and that George W. Bush has been the best friend that Israel has ever had. But because they are less Jewish than they are liberal, they didn't reward Bush with their vote in 2004.

Finally, I supported President Bush's decision to oust Saddam and make possible the only democracy (other than Israel) in this crucial region of the Middle East. Post 9/11, we had to figure out a way to lessen the chances of more 9/11s. Democracy is a weapon in that war. If people are free to build businesses, buy homes, send their children to schools, pursue upward mobility, live their lives without fear, read newspapers of every opinion, vote for their leaders, resolve differences with debate and not bombs, they will have no reason to want to harm us.

In response, the Left offered bumper-sticker-type arguments like, Bush lied and thousands died. But Bush never lied. He, like Clinton and Gore and Kerry and the U.N. and the British and French and Israeli intelligence services affirmed that Saddam's WMD were a vital threat - a threat, that post- 9/11, could not stand. An overwhelming number of Democrats voted for the war - but now the Left says they were "scared" into their votes by Bush. What does it say about Democrats if the "dummy" they think Bush is can scare them so easily?......

And so, as any reader of this article can well understand, it became impossible for me to relate to the modern Democrat Party which has tacked way too far to the left and is dominated by elites that don't like or trust the real people that make up most of the country.

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Brookes News Update

Australian economy: Is falling unemployment signalling recession?: Paradoxical as this might sound our falling rate of unemployment could be a symptom of an emerging recession. Although this phenomenon directly challenges orthodox economic teachings it does have empirical support and an economic theory to explain it
Why rising oil prices will not fuel US inflation: It is a commonly held among the public and economists that rising oil prices are inflationary. They are not. That the man in the street believes this is to be expected - that professional economists adhere to it is an intellectual disgrace
Greg Combet attacks labour market reform while Liberal Party officials do nothing: Greg Combet is Secretary of the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions) and the curse of the unemployed. Fortunately for Liberal Party's incompetent hacks there are those among us who are able and willing to undertake the necessary task of dealing with union propaganda
Is the US military returning to Vietnam?: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with Vietnam's Defense Minister Pham Van Tra and Prime Minister Phan Van Khai in Hanoi. It was noted that a US Navy ship will soon be visiting a Vietnamese port for the fourth time in four years
Taxes for dummies: The first lesson of capitalism is that the more capital available to support growing the economy the better; the better off everyone is, both rich and poor and everybody in between. The more money that is available the more economic activity will be generated
The world according to Dean: or Howard Dean backs Democracy for America: The tendentiously named Democracy for America is being supported by Howard Dean. The last thing this self-righteous organization believes in is those fundamental values that form the building blocks of American democracy

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ELSEWHERE

Is It Low Prices or High Prices that Are Bad for Us?: "It seems like it was only a few weeks ago that opinion makers were obsessing about Wal-Mart's negative impact on the United States. Wal-Mart's offense? Low prices! Then the drum-beat stopped. This coincided with concern about rising gasoline prices. Low prices, high prices -- its all the same, and it's all bad, as far as our pundits, professors, and preachers are concerned."

Hurricane Aid: The usual vast government waste and inefficiency: ""Of about $6 billion in emergency aid intended for Gulf hurricane victims -- including those infamous $2,000 debit cards, as well as emergency housing and other payments -- an estimated $1 billion was lost to fraud, according to a devastating audit released yesterday by the U.S. General Accounting Office."

Government "security" again: "The Department of Homeland Security allowed a man to enter its headquarters last week using a fake Matricula Consular card as identification, despite federal rules that say the Mexican-issued card is not valid ID at government buildings. Bruce DeCell, a retired New York City police officer, used his phony card -- which lists his place of birth as "Tijuana, B.C." and his address as "123 Fraud Blvd." on an incorrectly spelled "Staton Island, N.Y." -- to enter the building Wednesday for a meeting with DHS officials. Mr. DeCell said he has had the card for four years and has used it again and again to board airliners and enter government buildings, without being turned down once. But he said he was surprised that DHS, the agency in charge of determining secure IDs, accepted it. "Obviously, it's not working," Mr. DeCell said."

Chris Brand has been blogging up a storm again. Excerpt: " The Health section of the New York Times (15 vi, Amy Harmon) carried for its NYTwit readers a virtual admission that America’s version of Pravda had been duping them for a generation. Apparently, labs all over the USA (e.g. at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle) were finding and believing in substantial genetic control of risk-taking, obesity, cigarette smoking, dieting, aggression, accident-proneness, life expectancy, dancing ability, sex drive, attention deficit disorder, Nobel laureateship and alcoholism – though the dread topic of intelligence was not directly mentioned."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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Liberalism on the Couch: In search of root causes

(Excerpt from Mark Goldblatt)

The first factor I'd suggest in the causal chain that leads liberals to their politics is abject failure. People who are frustrated by their lot in life are often drawn to liberal ideas because modern liberalism's contempt for the free market jibes with their efforts to rationalize their disappointments. This thought was driven home for me last year at the Small Press Book Fair in Manhattan. As you climb the stairwell at the Small Press Center on West 44th Street, moving from small presses on the first floor, to even smaller presses on the balcony level, and then to presses-that-exist-only-to-publish-the-press-founder's-screed upstairs, you move progressively leftwards. Talk to any author on the upper floors, and he'll swear that he's been driven to self-publish because he refused to sell out. He wouldn't compromise his message for the sake of wealth and success, unlike fill-in-the-name-of-a-popular-writer. Corporate capitalism beats down the true visionary, he'll tell you, and he's no company hack. What greater proof of his bona fides than the fact that no mainstream publisher was interested in his work?

But of course the majority of liberals are not abject failures. On the contrary, many have attained a considerable measure of social status and financial clout, which calls to mind another reason liberals become liberals-guilt. Guilt-induced liberalism is most common among the more successful members of historically marginalized and currently struggling groups like blacks and Hispanics, or among members of historically marginalized and currently prospering groups like women and Jews. The trappings of achievement-prestigious job titles, comfortable homes, swollen bank accounts-are a kind of inverse torment for such people, an ongoing crisis of authenticity, a sign of the dissolution of their identity within the marginalized group. They feel compelled, therefore, to demonstrate that their sympathies still reside with the underclass. The cartoonish version of this response is found in hip hop-where ostentatiously thuggish rappers ride around in stretch limos, dripping jewelry and sipping champagne, all the while swearing their allegiance to "the street." The more insidious version is found in humanities classrooms-where ostentatiously underdressed professors browbeat their students with the message that good fortune in America carries with it the perpetuation of injustice and the tacit acceptance of oppression.

After failure and guilt, a third obvious cause of the liberal worldview is sin. There is, of course, nothing inherently sinful about the politics of liberalism. But in its modern incarnation, liberalism not only takes to heart the Enlightenment values of tolerance and skepticism, it hoists them aloft as intellectual torches and bears them forward in search of the dreaded Frankenstein Monster of moral judgment. Modern liberals deplore moral judgment-except in their collective outrage at conservatives-because they've decided, in their own lives, to abandon the doctrinal elements of Judeo-Christian morality in favor of an ethic whose guiding principle is, in the words of noted Shakespearean dunderhead Polonius, "To thine own self be true." Hence, the liberal mantra, I'm not religious, but I consider myself a spiritual person. Roughly, this translates into: I don't want to give up on an afterlife, but I don't want to be judged by the stuff I'm doing. Liberals, therefore, seethe with resentment towards public displays of traditional faith out of fear such faith carries with it an implicit condemnation of their personal choices....

Which leads to the final, and perhaps overriding, cause of modern liberalism-genuine compassion.... Intelligent people are often drawn to dumb ideas because the dumb ideas speak to their hearts rather than to their heads. The roster of world-class intellectuals who failed to recognize the evils of Communism in the last century is a testament to human frailty, not human imbecility. Tyranny, like charity, begins with compassion; this lesson is utterly lost on liberals, for whom compassion is an absolute good. So it's important to remember that the prime justification of liberalism, at least in the minds of liberals, is almost always fairness. They feel unfairness in their bones. It upsets them. That's how they know they're compassionate. It is the misguided pursuit of fairness that, in the final analysis, drives the majority of liberals to liberalism. It's a pursuit at which they cannot fail, since it's never-ending; it's a pursuit that alleviates their guilt, since it re-connects them with their roots; it's a pursuit that cleanses their individual sins, since its goal is the common weal. The pursuit of fairness is itself a kind of therapy. Liberals are entitled to it, however ill conceived the enterprise.

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ELSEWHERE



The man with the hat: It has become something of a matter for hilarity in the blogosphere that John Kerry has a hat. In case you missed the reason why, there is a succinct account of the matter here

Death tax: "If you've followed the death tax debate, you know that few issues raise liberal blood pressure more. Liberal journalists in particular are around the bend: How in the world can the public support repealing a tax that most Americans will never pay? Good question, so let us try to answer. Americans favor repealing the death tax not because they think it will help them directly. They're more principled than that. Two-thirds of the public wants to repeal it because they think taxing a lifetime of thrift due to the accident of death is unfair, and even immoral. They also understand that the really rich won't pay the tax anyway because they hire lawyers to avoid it. For proof that they're right, they need only watch the current debate. The superrich or their kin-such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett-are some of the loudest voices opposing repeal. Yet they are able to shelter their own vast wealth by creating foundations or via other crafty estate planning. Edward McCaffery, an estate tax expert at USC Law School, argues that 'if breaking up large concentrations of wealth is the intention of the death tax, then it is a miserable failure.' Do the Kennedys or Rockefellers look any poorer from the existence of a tax first created in 1917? The real people who pay the levy are the thrifty middle class and entrepreneurs who've built up a modest nest egg or business and are hit by a 46% tax rate when they die. Americans want family businesses, ranches, farms and other assets to be passed from one generation to the next. Yet the U.S. has one of the highest death tax rates in the world."

Moronic attack on Gitmo: "The Times runs an op-ed headlined "Detainees in Despair" written by someone who has been released from Gitmo. It contains this line: "I made the mistake of listening to my older brother and going to Afghanistan on what I thought was a dream vacation." Somehow, he acknowledges, he ended up in an al-Qaeda training camp. Don't you hate when that happens? You consult your travel agent, you read your Fodor's and the Times travel section and you think you're on your way to Club Med Kandahar but instead of playing tennis and windsurfing you end up firing Kalashnikovs and assembling I.E.D.s. It could happen to anyone."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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THE SENATE IMMIGRATION BILL JUST PASSED:

The media have reported on the sections that grant illegal residents amnesty (aka path to legalization or earned citizenship). But the media have censored out of their news reports the sections that are 10 to 20 times more costly and far more dishonest than playing games with the word amnesty. In large print, the 795-page bill announces its "temporary guest worker" plan. Those words are lies because the fine print in the bill converts these workers, who are given H-2C visas, into permanent residents with the right to become citizens after five years.

The plan will start by importing 200,000 H-2C workers in the first year. The H-2Cers can immediately bring in their family members on H-4 visas, without any numeric limits and without being required to have a physical, and they will also get permanent legal residence and citizenship. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill would import 7.8 million immigrants, and convert another 11 million current immigrants, legal and illegal, into U.S. citizens over the next decade. The Heritage Foundation estimates that 66 million new citizens will be added to the current population over the next 20 years. The number would accelerate as the racket called family chain migration allows more new residents to bring in more and more relatives.

The bill gives these temporary workers some preferential rights that U.S. workers do not have. These new temporary workers can't be fired from their jobs except for "just cause," they must be paid the prevailing wage, and they can't be arrested for other civil immigration offenses if they are stopped for traffic violations.

The bill assures the preference of in-state college tuition (something that is denied to U.S. citizens in 49 states), and certain types of college financial assistance will be available to illegals at the state's option. As minorities, they might even get affirmative action preferences in jobs, government contracts, and college admissions. After the so-called temporary workers and their spouses become citizens, they can bring in their parents as permanent residents on the path to citizenship. Although the parents have never paid into Social Security, they will be eligible for Supplemental Security Income benefits, and in 46 states they will be eligible for full Medicaid benefits after five years. Siblings and adult children (and their families) will be given preference in future admissions.

The demographics of the so-called temporary workers are expected to be similar to those of the illegal immigrants already in our country. More than half will be high school dropouts, they will work low-paid jobs that require payment of little or no income tax, they are 50 percent more likely to receive taxpayer-funded government benefits than natural-born households, and they have a 42 percent rate of out-of-wedlock births (all of whom, of course, will be granted automatic U.S. citizenship).

Estimates of the cost to the taxpayers of this gargantuan expansion of the welfare state are at least $50 billion a year over the long term. U.S. taxpayers will pay for entitlements to these tens of millions of low-income families, including Medicaid, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Earned Income Tax Credit (cash handouts of up to $4,400 a year to low-wage households), public schooling and lunches, the WIC program, food stamps, public housing, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

University Committee Recommends Firing Ward Churchill for Repeated Misconduct: "A University of Colorado committee recommended on Tuesday firing a professor who called some of the World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns," citing repeated research misconduct. The panel's recommendation now goes to university officials for a final decision. Ward Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies, denied the allegations. He has vowed to fight his dismissal with a lawsuit."

Multiculti breeds Jihadism: "multiculturalism in many ways breeds Islamic radicalism among deracinated "born-again" Muslims in the West. It foments the climate of grievance and honors the quest for radical authenticity. Indeed, jihadism imports any number of Marxist and anti-colonial bugaboos into its worldview and then spits them back out at the West. "This militant evolution is happening, in situ, on our territory. It partakes henceforth of the internal history of the West," Roy observed. The 9/11 hijackers were Westernized, educated and cosmopolitan. Nearly all of the alleged Canadian plotters were raised in Canada and attended Canadian public schools. They were indeed homegrown."

Another "security" bungle: "Federal air marshals say their guns are loaded with bullets capable of running through more than one person, metal doors and thick glass -- too much firepower for an airplane. "Not only is the person getting shot in danger, but everyone on the plane is because of the distance it travels," said one air marshal who testified in a recently completed House Judiciary Committee investigation of policies marshals deemed dangerous."

More heritability: "Children inherit their taste for meat and fish but when it comes to vegetables and desserts it is more nurture than nature, a study shows. Scientists who compared the food preferences of identical and fraternal twins found that some tastes are inherited while others are acquired. "This is the first study to include significant numbers of protein foods and the first to show a high heritability for these," Professor Jane Wardle of the charity Cancer Research UK said. Mothers of 103 pairs of four and five-year-old identical twins and 111 pairs of non-identical twins were given lists of 77 foods in different categories and told to rate how much their children liked them."

Socialist wisdom from 1936: "Assuming that the increase in wealth production and population continue at the present compound rates, it seems likely that in the course of two or three decades, the U.S.S.R. will have become the wealthiest country in the world, and at the same time the community enjoying the greatest aggregate of individual freedom."



Airbus in trouble: "European aircraft maker Airbus has delayed its A380 super jumbo program another seven months, throwing the fleet plans of Qantas and 12 other airlines in disarray."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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HAPPINESS

I have been thinking and reading about happiness ever since I came across the work of Michael Argyle on the subject in the 1970s. And I think I can finally summarize the facts about it very simply.

It seems that happiness is to a quite extraordinary degree a trait rather than a state. In other words, we are born happy, unhappy or somewhere in-between. There are a lot of people who are always miserable (most Leftists, for instance) and some who are always sunny in mood no matter what. Even when we find that some classes of people (e.g. married people) are happier than others, it seems likely that it is more a case of happier people tending to marry rather than marriage making you happy.

That is of course rather counter-intuitive. We can all think of events that have made us happy or unhappy so we assume that it is events (or at least external things) that are responsible for our degree of happiness. But it is not so. The events only ever have a transitory effect. We soon settle back to how we were before. The most striking evidence of that is that people who have accidents that leave them paraplegic or quadriplegic (i.e. with very limited use of their limbs) do not sink into irretrievable depths of despair but in fact report after a year or so that they are roughly as happy after their accident as they were before their accident.

So policies aimed at making people happy are pissing into the wind. They are trying to alter what basically cannot be much altered. So in a democracy, political policies have to be aimed at what people WANT, not at what will make them happy -- because nothing can do that.

Which is very pesky for the Left. They have recently discovered the happiness research literature and it has perked them up greatly. "If money will not make you happy, then there's no problem with us taking it off you", has been their hopeful cry. By the same reasoning one might argue that if losing your legs does not make you lastingly unhappy, then there is no harm cutting everybody's legs off either.

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ELSEWHERE

Hamas Murders Children in Palestine, Blames Israel: "An Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer has confirmed that the explosion that killed eight Palestinians on Friday, was caused by a stockpile of Hamas explosives. "Shortly after we stopped defensive firing at Hamas rocket launch pads which were deployed behind Palestinian human shields, members of Hamas scrambled to fire more rockets at our positions," said Col. M. "We have eyes on every meter of Gaza, from the sky, from the ground and from the sea. One of their rocket tripods collapsed inadvertently setting off an explosion of a stockpile of Qassam rockets. The Palestinians killed their own children. And this was not the first time." Hamas terrorists fired rockets and mortar bombs from a crowded Gaza beach at southern Israel. Some of the rockets fell near the Israel city of Ashkelon. Some 17 rockets were fired between Saturday and Sunday morning. A man at a school in the Israel town of Sderot was wounded, Israel officials said. Israel Maj.-Gen. Yoav Galant said today that the Israel Defense Forces has additional evidence that it wasn't Israel artillery that hit the beach in Gaza. Galant, who commands Israel's southern command, said Israel stopped firing 15 minutes before the explosion. It's all on secure videotape from both sides of the conflict". (*HT Jihad Watch)

Lots of sarcasm from Larry Kudlow: "So the estate tax cut went down in the Senate, to the cheers of class warriors everywhere.... Our rich people don't need another tax break. No, they need higher taxes. And they should be vilified, too. That's right: America should attack rich people. In fact, we must abolish wealth, which is a tremendous drag on our economy. It's high time that we made the rich poor. As for all the xenophobes who want to deport the illegal immigrants who toil in this economy, may I respectfully suggest that their generals (i.e., Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Tom Tancredo) consider expanding their dragnet? Let's deport rich people, too! These rich people are bad for America. We don't need their ingenuity, their entrepreneurship, or their capital investment. In the name of egalitarian socialism, the only thing we need from them is more tax dollars. We now tax their incomes as salary, corporate profits, dividends, capital gains, and at death. But we must do better. Perhaps we can tax them when they contribute to charities, or the building of a new church or synagogue, or a symphony orchestra, or a small-town cultural center; or when they create another college; or when they finance private scholarships for inner-city educations. But we can't stop there. Let's criminalize the entire class of successful American entrepreneurs."

Ban the falafel?: "Recent news reports from the Iraqi capital indicate radical Islamists are launching a campaign to prohibit the sale of ... falafel. Yes, you heard right, falafel. While this is the sort of news you might expect to hear from a late-night stand-up comedian on television, sadly, this is not a joke, and a number of falafel vendors who failed to heed the warnings have paid with their lives. Several vendors of the popular deep-fried chickpea sandwich were told they had just two weeks to change their profession or face death. And indeed, several vendors where shot and killed simply for selling falafel sandwiches. The logic offered by the religious zealots -- if there is any -- in imposing this inane diktat on the people is that there were no falafels in the time of the Prophet Muhammad."

The answer to panic about America's debt: "The second mistake was pointed out, as best I recall from my high school researches, by Daniel Webster c. 1832. Then as now, there were vocal worries about foreigners owning too much of America. Webster pointed out that foreign investment meant, not that they had our stuff, but that we had their money. If push came to shove, if foreign governments tried to pressure the U.S. by threatening to withdraw their citizens' investments, we could keep it-refuse to pay back the debt. Their capital, after all, in the form of canals and the first railroads, was immovably located under our jurisidiction."

MSM: Terrorists now "security forces": "Palestinian security forces were on high alert Monday after Palestinian Authority and Hamas security forces clashed in Rafah, resulting in two deaths. Hamas forces also fired shots at a government building in Rafah. In response, Fatah supporters set fire to a building used by the Hamas-led government in Ramallah" (*HT Reliapundit)

Leftist Rabbi wants libertarian marriage for homosexuals: "Marriage ought to be taken out of the state's hands entirely. Let people be wed in the private realm with no official legal sanction. Then, religious communities that oppose gay marriage will not sanction them, and those like mine that sanction the practice will conduct it. Rather than issuing marriage certificates or divorces, the state would simply enforce civil unions as contracts between consenting adults and enforce laws imposing obligations on people who bring children into the world." (*HT Liberty & Power)

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND PREFERS POLITICS TO RELIGION

Peter Hitchens responds to episcopal pronouncements on poverty and the Leftist solutions the bishops put forward

"Here's what we should really be worrying about: the dismal conditions of the British 'poor' are often the result of their moral and educational deprivation, and of the collapse of order - not lack of money. Teenage single mothers, with no real experience of child rearing or housekeeping, struggle to provide for their children because they do not know how, not because they do not have enough money. Their lives are often made worse by the moral squalor resulting from the collapse of stable family life.

The moral conditions on the worst housing estates, conditions which lead to women being battered and children being abused, also create a tyranny of crime and drugs. These circumstances make it incredibly hard to raise a happy and well-behaved next generation. Appalling schools, where illiteracy is normal and chaos tolerated, reinforce the dismal message. Some of the worst-placed are old people, who have worked hard all their lives, who hate debt, and now find that their tiny pensions barely stretch to pay for food and heating - and who have been abandoned by their families to a chilly solitude.

So, if you were a Bishop, what would you be worried about? Would you get involved in an essentially political argument about income gaps and taxation? Would you make headline-catching criticisms of vulgar wealth? Would you put your name to yet another dreary politically correct tract, to join all the other standard-issue, half-baked leftist whingeing that has got us more or less where we are?

Or would you address the moral collapse of our society which is so very much more important, and which is actually so much more your business?"

More here

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ELSEWHERE

The task at hand: "Americans see the Republican Party's leadership as untrustworthy, which is a reputation it has earned. The challenge for conservatives is to convince American voters that Republican and conservative are not synonyms. Conservatives have to remind the country that the principles Republicans claimed to uphold but abandoned once in office still offer the best approach to governing the country. Conservatives need an aggressive campaign to hold Republicans accountable for their apostasy and remind America that conservatism's Jeffersonian [sic] principles remain an untried and viable alternative to the programs the two main parties are offering."

Tax cuts as government curb: "Sitting in a pleasant cafe on a sunny spring day, my Italian friend arrives and says, 'Richard we have had a wonderful month here in Italy because we have had no government.' He referred to the fact that between the defeat of the last government at the polls and formation of the new government, no new initiative to tax, misspend the taxpayers' money or new major regulation had been possible. People intuitively know that when governments are capable of activity, most often the citizens' pocketbooks and liberties are at risk."

Model hypocrites: "You can bet that almost anytime a politician attempts to raise your taxes or pushes for a big, new government spending program, the justification is at least partially based on the results of some mathematical model. Al Gore, and many others endorsing the global warming rage, tell us the climate models show government must do something about global warming before we are all cooked (or at least lightly tanned). Having spent three decades around model builders and reading their studies, I have concluded it is infinitely easier to obtain government funding to build a mathematical model likely to show the need for more government activity and spending rather than less."

The Swedish "success": "Almost a quarter of the population of working age does not have a job to go to in the morning, and polls show a dramatic lack of trust in the welfare system and its rules.... Our ancestors worked even when they were sick. Today, we are "off sick" even when we feel fine"

Windfall profits tax on oil companies a loser for citizens and the economy: "Congress may prove unable to resist passing a windfall profits tax before voters go to the polls this fall. If so, we'll experience the full meaning of H.L. Mencken's adage that democracy is that form of government in which the people get exactly what they want, good and hard. What they won't get, however, is nearly as much money out of such a tax as they probably think. A windfall profits tax targeted at earnings far beyond the U.S. industrial average would return zero revenue to the Treasury because windfall profits in the oil sector are figments of the imagination. While the raw earnings figures sound big, they are unexceptional when we take into account the size of those companies. Divide profits by sales, for instance, and you'll find that in the fourth quarter of 2005 (the last quarter for which data are available), profit margins were 6.8 percent at British Petroleum, 7 percent at ConocoPhilips, 7.1 percent at Shell, 7.7 percent at Chevron, and 10.7 percent at ExxonMobil. The 20 largest investor-owned oil companies earned a collective 8.8 cents on every dollar of sales for that quarter."

The annual foreign aid rip-off: "This week, Congress will vote to send more than 20 billion of your hard-earned dollars overseas, when it passes the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill for 2007. Our annual foreign aid bill is one of the most egregious abuses of the taxpayer I can imagine. Not only is it an unconstitutional burden on America's working families, but this yearly attempt to buy friends and influence foreign governments is counterproductive and actually results in less goodwill toward the United States overseas. Why is foreign aid so bad? Isn't it our obligation to help those less fortunate? What is not mentioned by proponents of foreign aid is that it very seldom gets to those who need it most. Foreign aid is the transfer of US dollars from the treasury of the United States to the governments of foreign countries. It is money that goes to help foreign elites, who in turn spend much of it on contracts with US corporations. This means US tax dollars ultimately go to well-connected US corporations operating overseas.



There is an amusing cartoon video here in the form of a "Mexican Tourism" advertisement.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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