Saddam's WMD: Why is the U.S. intelligence community holding back?

Excerpt from here. One of the writers is the chairman of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence! Even he is getting the mushroom treatment (kept in the dark and fed bulls**t)

On Wednesday, at our request, the director of national intelligence declassified six "key points" from a National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) report on the recovery of chemical munitions in Iraq. The summary was only a small snapshot of the entire report, but even so, it brings new information to the American people. "Since 2003," the summary states, "Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent," which remains "hazardous and potentially lethal." So there are WMDs in Iraq, and they could kill Americans there or all over the world.

This latest information should not be new. It should have been brought to public attention by officials in the intelligence community. Instead, it had to be pried out of them. Mr. Santorum wrote to John DeFreitas, commanding general, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, on April 12, asking to see the report. He wrote, "I am informed that there may well be many more stores of WMDs throughout Iraq," and added, "the people of Pennsylvania and Members of Congress would benefit from reviewing this report." He asked that the "NGIC work with the appropriate entities" to declassify as much of the information as possible. The senator received no response.

In practice, then, the intelligence community decides what the American public and its elected officials can know and when they will learn it. Sometimes those decisions are made by top officials, while on other occasions they are made by unnamed bureaucrats with friends in the media. People who leak the existence of sensitive intelligence programs like the terrorist surveillance program or financial tracking programs to either damage the administration or help al Qaeda, or perhaps both, are using the release or withholding of documents to advance their political desires, even as they accuse others of manipulating intelligence. We believe that the decisions of when and what Americans can know about issues of national security should not be made by unelected, unnamed and unaccountable people.

Some officials in the intelligence community withheld the document we requested on WMDs, and somebody is resisting our request to declassify the entire document while briefing journalists in a tendentious manner. We will continue to ask for declassification of this document and the hundreds of thousands of other Saddam-produced documents, and we will also insist on periodic updates on discoveries in Iraq.

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I pointed out many years ago that Leftist leaders are narcissistic (in love with themselves). It is interesting, therefore that a recent psychological study has shown that narcissists are much more likely to start wars. It fits therefore that Hitler and the Soviets were both Leftists and that The American Presidents of the 20th century who dragged the USA into extensive foreign wars (TR, Wilson, FDR and Kennedy) were all Democrats or "Progressives". American isolationism means that the American people are reluctant to support a war unless America is attacked -- which is why GWB moved only after the 9/11 attack and why FDR had to provoke a Japanese attack by way of cutting off their oil supply.

There is an article in Human Events that says Buffett should NOT have given his fortune to charity: "Our country is full of people that have been ruined by charity -- the mandated charity of government welfare".

Muslim hostility: "Britain stands out as a paradoxical country. Non-Muslims there have strikingly more favorable views of Islam and Muslims than elsewhere in the West; for example, only 32% of the British sample view Muslims as violent, significantly less than their counterparts in France (41%), Germany (52%), or Spain (60%). In the Muhammad cartoon dispute, Britons showed more sympathy for the Muslim outlook than did other Europeans. More broadly, Britons blame Muslims less for the poor state of Western-Muslim relations. But British Muslims return the favor with the most malign anti-Western attitudes found in Europe. Many more of them regard Westerners as violent, greedy, immoral, and arrogant than do their counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain. In addition, whether asked about their attitudes toward Jews, responsibility for September 11, or the place of women in Western societies, their views are notably more extreme. The situation in Britain reflects the "Londonistan" phenomenon, whereby Britons preemptively cringe and Muslims respond to this weakness with aggression."

Foolish judgments: "Several years ago, when Jesse Jackson was running for president, I heard someone say that if he weren't black, he wouldn't be criticized so harshly. The irreverent reply was that if he weren't black, he wouldn't be taken seriously as a candidate. If Noam Chomsky were not a famous linguist, nobody would care a whit about his moral or political opinions. That people do care shows only that they are committing a fallacy -- that of transferring authority from a realm in which he is expert (linguistics) to one in which he is not (political morality)."

Prosecute the NYT: "Citing national security concerns, Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called on U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales yesterday to begin a criminal investigation of The New York Times for publishing a report on a secret government program begun after Sept. 11 to monitor banking transactions for terrorist links. The Seaford Republican, who last year said members of the news media should "be shot" for their coverage after government sources exposed the identity of a covert CIA agent, said the newspaper likely violated the Espionage Act of 1917 and at least one other federal law that regulates the disclosure of classified information."



Archbishop puts the Bible first: "The Archbishop of Canterbury has signalled the break-up of the worldwide Anglican Church by threatening to exclude the liberal wing. Anglican Churches in the United States and Canada are at the greatest risk of schism but there is speculation that those in Scotland, New Zealand and other liberal provinces could also be involved in a dispute over gay ordinations. Dr Rowan Williams said yesterday that all Churches would be asked to sign a covenant stating that they believed in the defining biblical standards of Anglican doctrine. The move will be welcomed by the rapidly growing conservative Churches in Africa and Asia but opposed by many of those in the West."

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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Defending Christians

Excerpts from an interview with Patrick Hynes, author of "In Defense of the Religious Right"

Q: Quite a few people and even some bestselling books are saying the GOP is the party of theocracy. Any truth in this?

Hynes: None at all. Conservative Christians within the GOP don't agree on their theology, so to say they are trying to establish a theocracy is an ignorant smear.

Q: During your research, did you come across genuine American theocrats equivalent to the Iranian mullahs?

Hynes: No. The claim that conservative Christians in America are akin to the Iranian mullahs is an update to a similar smear that surfaced after September 11th - back then, the Religious Right was likened almost daily to the Taliban. This much is true: no matter the point in history, liberal pundits and extremist politicians will compare conservative Christians in America to whichever Islamo-fascist regime threatens to kill innocent Americans.

Q: How much impact will the Religious Right have in this November's midterm election? How much in '08?

Hynes: It is too soon to tell whether the Religious Right will engage the 2006 election with the same fervor it engaged the 2004 election or if conservative Christians-demoralized by the ineffectiveness of the Republican majority in Washington-will say home. Social issues or, if you prefer, "moral values" issues generally play a greater role in our public dialogue during a campaign than during the congressional session. They will so again this year and that fact will motivate many Christians to vote. If it motivates them as powerfully as in the past, their voice will dominate the public dialogue again this election year. If not, Republicans will probably lose their majority.

Q: Some media conservatives seem actually uncomfortable with the Religious Right. Why?

Hynes: Conservatives have their elites, too. And, of course, there are different kinds of conservatives. But those who dismiss the Religious Right do so out of ignorance, I believe. These folks generally operate under old, worn out stereotypes and believe polite society would be embarrassed if Christians were to represent the public face of conservatism. This mind set is the mirror image of the "conservative Christians = Iranian mullahs" strain of liberalism. There is this idea, held by elites on both sides, that conservative Christians hurt the GOP as much as they help it. This is demonstrably untrue, as my book shows.

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More Leftist projection. One of Australia's leading Leftist whiners, Phillip Adams, has just accused Prime Minister Howard of being a "hater". Such an accusation aimed at the mild-mannered and humble John Howard is implausible on the face of it and Adams produces not a shred of proof for his accusation: not even one published word that Howard has uttered. The only "evidence" Adams seems to have for his accusation is that Howard does not usually appoint political opponents to top government jobs -- hardly a practice exclusive to Howard or to conservatives generally. By contrast, Mark Latham, Howard's Leftist opponent in the last election admitted openly what a hater he is. In the usual Leftist way, Adams is just seeing in conservatives what is in fact characteristic of the Left.

Chris Brand has just put up a new lot of posts and among them was a piece of news that rather pleased me. It was about the Flynn Effect -- the fact that average IQ scores rose throughout most of the 20th century. I speculated previously that the improvement has probably approached an asymptote (limit) by now and Chris draws our attention to a confirmation of that.

Canada buys gunless "warships": "Canada's defence minister Gordon O'Connor announced plans Monday to buy three new warships, the first in a series of military expenditures expected to top $15 billion ($18.2 billion). The three military supply ships will help "Canadian forces to fulfil their domestic maritime security priorities and to support Canada's foreign policy objectives," O'Connor said. "It is an important step in implementing the government's Canada first defence strategy ... at home and on the world stage," he said."

Cuba's bad medicine: "A scathing report on the health care system in Cuba has been smuggled out of the country and published on a Norwegian website. The report was written by distinguished Dr. Hilda Molina, formerly of the Cuban National Assembly, and it describes a system of apartheid where foreign medical tourists receive quality care that is denied to Cubans... Even with high priority, though, foreigners may actually have their health jeopardized by the system. They are frequently pressured to have unnecessary treatments or operations, often by doctors without prerequisite qualifications. Foreign patients are also forced into paying for overpriced and frequently unnecessary Cuban-made pharmaceuticals, many of indeterminate, sometimes even hazardous, value."

First homosexual divorce turns ugly: "A year after legalising gay marriage, Spain is now seeing its first gay divorce, complete with a custody fight over the couple's dogs. The claimant is asking for the right to stay in the marital home and to take custody of their pets. The suit added that his ex-partner would be granted visiting rights to see the animals, a report on the website of newspaper El Mundo said. Council officials said divorce proceedings were private and would only confirm that the unnamed men were married in a Madrid suburb last October, three months after Spain became the fourth country to legalise same-sex marriages. The claimant said in a petition that he had dedicated his life to the relationship, giving up a modelling career and abandoning his dog hairdressing business to follow his partner who had found work in France".

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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AUSTRALIA'S "NOBLE SAVAGES"

In their hatred of their own society, a persistent Leftist theme has been the myth of the "Noble savage" (Rousseau's term). Reality would have made "warlike" or "murderous" a better adjective than "noble" for most primitive people but Leftists are driven by their fantasies, not by reality.

Australia has a bunch of just the sort of folk Leftists idealize -- stone-age black people rudely wrenched into the wider world by the arrival of the British in 1788. And modern Australia has plenty of fantasy-driven Leftists too. So the fantasists concerned (notable among them being the late "Nugget" Coombes) managed some decades ago to reverse Australia's long-standing policy of assimilating the aborigines concerned into white society. The do-gooders managed to send about half of the blacks off to isolated and undeveloped places near their ancestral homelands where they could live in communal splendour according to their own ways and value systems. They were also of course given unconditional welfare so were not obliged to work. Big god Gubmint would look after them and supply all their needs. Nugget and all the other do-gooders went to bed every night after that basking in the warm glow of what a wonderfully kind and enlightened thing they had done.

But what did they expect the blacks to do? There was virtually nothing they could do in their isolated camps. They could certainly not get jobs there and with no need to hunt or plant they could not even gain the self-respect of supporting themselves and their families by their own efforts.

So they drank -- and any substance that could be abused they abused. They sank into a life not too different from some conceptions of hell. When they were not too stoned out of their brains for it, fistfights became a daily occurrence among them, black women were savagely beaten as a matter of routine and sexual abuse of children became so rife that you now have black toddlers with sexually transmitted diseases.

All that has now at long last gained the attention of the Australian media and there have been numerous articles about it in all the papers. And none of it was news to me or to the lady in my life. I grew up with a black's camp just down the other end of the street and the lady in my life has spent years working in isolated Aboriginal communities as a child-health nurse and general medical carer. Recently, however, I did put up on Australian Politics three articles from the papers about the situation in the aboriginal communities and in response to that I received an interesting email which I reproduce below.

"I'm following your posts concerning Aboriginal sexual abuse with interest. We lived and worked in a number of Aboriginal communities for years. As an RN working in remote clinics I found it endlessly frustrating to be surrounded by evidence of abuse yet unable to do any more than treat the effects. There was enormous pressure to not "make waves" or become involved in any way and it was made very plain that any RN who did so would be promptly removed from the community.

Evidence of STDs (or any other evidence of abuse) in young children was passed on to the Sexual Health Team (in the NT) and they were supposed to deal with it. To the best of my knowledge this information was never passed on the the police for follow-up action. I was never asked for further information but instead given repeated warnings not to become involved.

There's no discernible effort to bring the perpetrators of sexual abuse to justice, not at any level. The communities --through fear or complicity--maintain a wall of silence, the police have little or no information to enable them to act (even if they were prepared to, which I strongly doubt) and the Health Department had no effective program in place to identify at-risk kids and remove them from the community.

Interestingly, the lower the standard of accommodation for visiting health teams, the less likely we were to see them. The problem isn't fixable.

Sadly, I have to agree with the lady. I don't think the problem is fixable either. And I think most people who know the situation well would be inclined to agree. Paternalism would help alleviate the situation but the outraged screams of the Left at any such idea will probably make the political cost too high for the Australian government to do much in that direction. The "equality" mythology of the Left has effectively consigned the Aborigines to hell and that is where they will stay.

I have put up more reports on the topic today on Australian Politics

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An Update from the Minuteman Fence Project Manager (excerpt) : "Chris Simcox has kept his promise and volunteers have begun building the Minuteman Border Fence. Chris has asked me (Peter Kunz) to give you a quick update on the activities and planning for the current fence project and our next site that starts in July... First, let me say thanks to the brave ranchers who are stepping up to put their lives on the line to stop the illegal invasion. They live and work within spitting distance of the Mexican border every day. These brave men and women are working side by side with Minutemen in this war zone they call home, allowing us to secure America. Second, let's be clear. Not every single mile of the border or every ranch or rancher is the same. The full-on Israeli-style Security Fence is our primary design and first choice for construction. However, when circumstances dictate adjustment to a Border Fence with barbed wire and a vehicle barrier or another design to meet local requirements, we will make the necessary adaptations-and keep building. Our plan: Do the job until our government does its duty"

African aid fails again: "There is a huge gap between the declarations of the Gleneagles summiteers, the pleas of "Make Poverty History" demonstrators, and reality, according to a survey by The Times. While the awareness of the problem is greater, the aid flow has gone into reverse in some countries because donor nations have been "double-counting" the debt relief agreed. "What they did at Gleneagles was long on political symbolism and short on practical help," said Professor William Easterly, an expert on aid at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book, The White Man's Burden.... While the West must shoulder some responsibility for Africa's dire plight, last year's commitments to help the continent were based on a pledge from African leaders for good governance and transparency. Over the past year several African leaders have increased dictatorial powers while fresh allegations of huge corruption have emerged. Of the world's top ten failed states in the world in 2006, six are African."

Christians still 'swine' and Jews 'apes' in Saudi schools: "Saudi Arabia has been accused of continuing to foster religious hatred in its schools, despite its repeated assurances since the September 11 attacks that it would rewrite textbooks that refer to Jews as "apes" and Christians as "swine". The charges come after Freedom House, a non-partisan American research group which monitors civil rights worldwide, examined textbooks that it smuggled out of Saudi Arabia. The group found that despite promises of change from leading Saudi officials, including Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Turki al-Faisal, the ambassador to America, schoolbooks in the kingdom still promote hatred of those who do not practise its strict form of Wahhabi Islam."

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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Time for St. Andrew's Comeuppance?

Post excerpted from Ankle-biting Pundits

R. Andrew Newman has a piece in today's American Spectator that I hope will only be the first in a long series of indignant swipes at "excitable Andrew" Sullivan for his truly disgusting "Christianist" smear. "If you fail to subscribe sincerely and personally to the faith as interpreted by Andrew Sullivan, you’re a Christianist and you have no business in the public square," writes Newman. He is, of course, right

Let me be clear: The one time I met Andrew and the man he calls "his better half," I found them to be utterly pleasant guys; smart, convivial, and in the traditional sense of the term, gay. But his recently over-the-top rants about faith in public life are beyond the pale.

If you have not yet done so, I urge you to purchase a copy of In Defense of the Religious Right and consider well the eighth chapter, titled "I Scream, You Scream, but We Are the Mainstream." In it I lay out in painstaking detail how, "The Religious Right is very much in the middle of mainstream American opinion. While the culture wars in America often find talking heads from opposing points of view screaming at one another on cable talk shows, conservative Christians are increasingly speaking for Middle America, defending shared American values against extremism from the political Left."

And in the next chapter, titled "Onward, Secular Soldiers," I point out how every major battle in our culture wars has been launched by secular liberals, not by religious conservatives seeking to "impose their values on everyone else."

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You too can do it

Below are some of the abstracts from the academic journal Intelligence. Although the articles concerned do of course assume a considerable academic background in the subject, I am optimistic that many readers here would be able to get the drift of the articles concerned. If you find the few papers I have grabbed below to be interesting, log on and read the rest.

Exponential correlation of IQ and the wealth of nations: "Plots of mean IQ and per capita real Gross Domestic Product for groups of 81 and 185 nations, as collected by Lynn and Vanhanen, are best fitted by an exponential function of the form: GDP = a * 10b*(IQ), where a and b are empirical constants. Exponential fitting yields markedly higher correlation coefficients than either linear or quadratic. The implication of exponential fitting is that a given increment in IQ, anywhere along the IQ scale, results in a given percentage in GDP, rather than a given dollar increase as linear fitting would predict. As a rough rule of thumb, an increase of 10 points in mean IQ results in a doubling of the per capita GDP."

Testing the cross-racial generality of Spearman's hypothesis in two samples : "Spearman's hypothesis states that racial differences in IQ between Blacks (B) and Whites (W) are due primarily to differences in the g factor. This hypothesis is often confirmed, but it is less certain whether it generalizes to other races. We therefore tested its cross-racial generality by comparing American subjects of European descent (W) to American Hispanics (H) in two different databases. The first [Centers for Disease Control (1988). Health status of Vietnam veterans. Journal of the American Medical Association 259, 2701-2719; Centers for Disease Control (1989). Health status of Vietnam veterans: Vol IV. Psychological and neuropsychological evaluation. Atlanta, Georgia: Center for Environmental Health and Injury Control] contains 4462 middle-aged Armed Services Veterans males, and the second database (NLSY1979) holds 11,625 young male and female adults. Both samples are fairly representative of the general American population. Race differences in general intelligence g were calculated and vectors of test scores were correlated with the vectors of the tests' g loadings, following Jensen [Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g factor. Westport, CT: Praeger]. W scored about 0.8 S.D. above H. The racial difference on the tests correlated significantly with the g-loadings of the tests in the VES database, but less so in the NLSY database. We therefore conclude that the present study supports, but does not unequivocally verify, the cross-racial generality of the Spearman's hypothesis."

g and the measurement of Multiple Intelligences: A response to Gardner : "Specifically, Gardner questioned the construct validity of g, and suggested that the measures we used to test his theory were contaminated with verbal and logical demands. In this reply, we explain that the construct validity of g is well established, pointing out (a) that g is expressed in a wide variety of tasks (not all of which are "school-like" tasks), (b) that g predicts many important criterion variables (not only academic achievement), and (c) that g has a well-established biological basis. With regard to the measures used in our study, we point out that the verbal content of those tasks is unlikely to contribute to individual differences in task performance, and that the logical content of those tasks is consistent with Gardner's description of his intelligence domains.

On the high intelligence and cognitive achievements of Jews in Britain: "A number of studies in the United States have found that Jews obtain higher average IQs than white gentiles. This paper examines whether this is also the case in Britain. Three early studies are summarized that found that Jews in Britain have mean IQs in the range of 110-113. New data are presented for two nationally representative samples of 7-16 year olds in which Jews had mean IQs of 108.5 and 107.7. Taking all five studies into account, it is proposed that the best reading of the IQ of Jews in Britain is 110. It is proposed that the best reading of the IQ of Jews in the United States is 109.5. Data are presented for the numbers of Jewish Fellows of the Royal Society in relation to their proportion in the population. It is found that Jews were over-represented by a factor of 3.7 in the years 1901 through 1940 and by a factor of 7.6 in the years 1950 through 2003. Data are also presented for the numbers Jewish Nobel prize-winners in Britain and the United States for 1901 through 2003. It is shown that Jews are over-represented among Nobel prize-winners by a factor of 8.0 in Britain and 12.3 in the United States. It is proposed that the over-representation of Jews among Nobel prize-winners can be partly explained by the higher average Jewish IQ.

For slightly easier reading, Chris Brand has just done another installment of his news about IQ

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Illegal Immigrants Free To Go: "Local police said they intercepted 20 illegal Mexican immigrants, but were ordered by immigration officials to let them go free. Belmont County Sheriff Fred Thompson said his officers were instructed by federal immigration services to let all 20 illegal immigrants go free, and said his department has no choice but to follow the orders from immigration officials. Thompson said officers stopped a van at 3 a.m. Tuesday which was traveling the wrong direction on Interstate 470 in St. Clairsville. The officer discovered 20 illegal Mexican immigrants inside the van, including three who were previously deported. The officer immediately contacted immigration officials, who told him to let all 20 immigrants go".

Homosexual couple could not resist boys: "A gay foster couple were jailed yesterday for sexually abusing boys in their care. Ian Wathey, 41, was sentenced to five years and Craig Faunch, 32, to six years at Leeds Crown Court. They have been in a civil partnership for five weeks. The couple, from West Yorkshire, had denied the allegations at an earlier trial. Wakefield Metropolitan District Council approved Wathey and Faunch as foster carers three years ago but within months they were assaulting boys from troubled homes, the court was told. The two were found guilty of abusing four boys aged between 8 and 14".

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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CAR REPORT

I have been doing this blog since July 2002 and in all that time I cannot remember saying anything about the cars I drive -- which makes me a rather unusual male blogger, I think. So just to show that I am not totally weird, I think I will say a bit about that now as a Sunday reflection.

I have always been a demon driver. People who get into my car often emerge shaking. So I buy very small cars -- which enable me to flash through traffic down lanes that are not supposed to be there. I remember one occasion when I upset some guy in a big Ford without being aware of it and he decided to chase me to remonstrate with me. I was just driving in my normal way but it still stretched him to chase me. By the time he caught up with me he was too exhausted to say much to me. If I had been aware of him chasing me, he would never have caught up.

But the cars I drive are not powerful ones. Not at all ones that rev-heads like The Good Blair would approve of. My first car was a VW and those since have always been small and humble too. Though I did at one stage have a Mini K -- which was an Australian version of the Morris Mini Minor but with an 1100cc motor in it -- and did that thing go! There is NO car that is as much fun to drive as a Mini.

At the beginning of 2005, I had two cars -- a 1991 Ford Festiva (really a Korean-made Kia) and a 1995 Daihatsu Charade. The Festiva was as near as I had come to a Mini in terms of fun to drive. It was a real Go-Kart. But my son Joe was just starting university so I gave him the choice of which car he wanted to drive and he chose the Festiva. It was a VERY old car as small cars go, however, so at the beginning of this year the motor blew up and I reluctantly gave it away and gave Joe the Daihatsu instead.

I then bought a one-year-old ex-hire Toyota Echo off Hertz for myself. I had always thought that my Daihatsu was the easiest car to drive ever made but the Echo was even easier. If you see them being driven around the place they are almost always flying and that is because they are such a Swiss-watch of a car. They feel like a single thing to drive rather than a mechanical device.

But that was not enough. I have always wanted a really old car as well, and now that age has slowed me down I thought it was time. Vintage cars are of course wonderful but you virtually need to be a mechanic to keep them going so I have compromised on a veteran car -- and not such a veteran one at that. I have just bought a 1963 Humber Super Snipe off a family who had been driving it since new. It is a big old English car and, as such, bound to need lots of work to keep it going but I have a mechanic friend living just over the road so I think I can afford it! I remember that when they were new the Humbers were being advertised as being able to cruise on the open road at 100 mph but I am not going to try that. I am sure it would blow up if I tried it at this stage in its life.

The difference in handling of the two cars is of course enormous but I used to be a cab-driver many years ago so I am not bothered by big clumsy cars. The style of the Humber makes up for all else, in my view, particularly as the car has been very well-maintained and looks immaculate.

Collecting the Humber yesterday morning was rather fun. Everybody who heard about the impending purchase was enthusiastic and none more than an old friend who was born and bred in Coventry, England, where the Humber was built. The first car he ever drove was a Humber so he couldn't wait to see my Humber and came along with me to collect it. And my stepson Paul was equally enthusiastic. He and his wife drove us out to collect it and both were delighted by the car.

When we got the car home, we all had steak pies, teacake and tea on my verandah to celebrate.



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Wow! Mike Adams really socks it to his employers in his latest column: "North Carolina's most notorious bigots, racists and segregationists are no longer found within the leadership of the KKK. They are found within the leadership of the UNC system.... In fact, as of now, I am abolishing the requirement that my students conduct themselves in an honest and truthful manner. I want each one to have the character and integrity of a UNC administrator."

The movies misrepresent business: "Fundamentally these film-makers and lobbyists are anti-capitalist. They equate business activity with greed. They would probably be happier in a world where everyone worked in the public sector, and no one made any profits. We have seen this world, those of us who remember it. It was called communism and it reduced the human condition to squalor and servitude. The business corporation, by contrast, is one of the most benign institutions ever created by humankind. Men and women have banded together and risked some of their wealth to create new wealth. In the process they have generated employment, trade and opportunity. They have not usually done this by theft and trickery, but by offering people goods and services they will freely pay for. In doing so many of them have made themselves richer, but they have made humankind richer still. At the heart of this dislike of business is a complete misunderstanding of how it works. There is a primitive and naive view that one person can only get rich at someone else's expense, and that if a business is making money, someone else must be losing it. This "zero sum game" fallacy completely misses the point, which is that business activity creates wealth instead of just redistributing it."

Mohammed was a capitalist: "Is Islam compatible with modernity? This has become a hotly debated question in the past few decades... Most Islamists would reply to this question with a resounding "no!" Since they perceive Islam as an all-encompassing socio-political system, they regard capitalism as a rival and an enemy... However such radical rejections of the capitalist economy don't seem well-suited to the theological attitude and the historical experience of Islam towards business and profit-making. As a religion founded by a businessman -- Prophet Muhammad was a successful merchant for the greater part of his life -- and one that has cherished trade from its very beginning, Islam can in fact be very compatible with a capitalist economy supplemented by a set of moral values that emphasize the care for the poor and the needy. This interesting compatibility between Islam and capitalism has been studied extensively. A classic work on this theme is Maxime Rodinson's famed book, Islam and Capitalism (1966)."

Bipartisan effort to expose P.A. treatment of Christians: " Two congressional representatives are seeking their colleagues' support for a resolution condemning the alleged persecution of Christians by the Palestinian Authority. The "Dear Colleague" letter sent this week by Reps. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) said Christians around the world are at risk of losing access to the most ancient and holy Christian sites. "It's time for Congress, the president and the international community to address the systematic destruction of the oldest Christian community in the world," they wrote. "Since the Palestinian Authority gained control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the political, social and economic status of the Christian community has declined precipitously."

Pennsylvania city to crack down on illegal immigration: "With tensions rising and the Police Department and municipal budget stretched thin, Hazleton is about to embark on one of the toughest crackdowns on undocumented immigrants anywhere in the United States. Last week, the mayor of this former coal town introduced, and the City Council tentatively approved, a measure that would revoke the business licenses of companies that employ undocumented immigrants; impose $1,000 fines on landlords who rent to such immigrants; and make English the official language of the city. "Illegal immigrants are destroying the city," said Mayor Lou Barletta, a Republican. "I don't want them here, period." Barletta said he had no choice but to act after two undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic were charged last month with shooting and killing a 29-year-old man. Other recent incidents involving undocumented immigrants have rattled this city 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia, including the arrest of a 14-year-old boy for firing a gun at a playground"

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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Turning the Tables on Abusive Tort Lawyers

At long last, there's good news in the fight against "jackpot justice" tort claims and the nefarious law firms that file them. In courts and legislatures across the country, fraudulent lawsuits are being exposed, and the abusive tort lawyers that file them are finally getting a taste of their own medicine. Most notable is the recent indictment of Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman, the nation's most notorious class-action law firm. For four decades, Milberg Weiss has filed hundreds of dubious class-action lawsuits and wrung billions of dollars from terrified companies.

Now, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted Milberg Weiss and individual partners on multiple counts of conspiracy, racketeering, obstruction of justice, mail fraud, money laundering and filing false tax returns. For over twenty years, according to the U.S. Attorney, the firm brazenly paid kickbacks to repeat plaintiffs in order to serve as lead counsel in class-action lawsuits. Worse, according to prosecutors, the firm continued to do so while aware that it was under investigation.

Long-known for overzealously employing "professional plaintiffs" to extort settlements and jury awards from companies (for example, individual defendant Seymour Lazar served as plaintiff in no fewer than seventy lawsuits), Milberg Weiss stands accused of the very type of misconduct that it wantonly alleged against companies and even entire industries. An even greater irony is that Milberg Weiss faces the same "death sentence" suffered by companies like Arthur Andersen, one of its frequent past targets.

Those of us who have witnessed Milberg Weiss's abusive tactics through the years can be forgiven for taking delight in seeing the chickens finally coming home to roost. As former Milberg Weiss mastermind Bill Lerach once said, "the whole industry was a fraud," and, "so much fraud, so little time." In the case of abusive class-action law firms like Milberg Weiss, we couldn't agree more.

In similar fashion, rail company and frequent asbestos-lawsuit target CSX has turned the tables against the law firm of Peirce, Raimond & Coulter, which had filed literally thousands of asbestos claims against CSX and other companies. CSX discovered that plaintiffs in one of Peirce's lawsuits fraudulently substituted each other's x-rays in order to duplicate advantageous diagnoses. Accordingly, CSX sued the employees, who confessed and testified that they asked Peirce attorneys to dismiss the lawsuit, but that Peirce nevertheless proceeded with the case. On that basis, CSX sued the Peirce firm for fraud, misrepresentation, and negligence, the very types of claims that Peirce had alleged in thousands of lawsuits. CSX further claims that Peirce maintained the x-rays and knew about the false diagnoses, and that it repeatedly retained a physician whom a federal court accused of manufacturing false silicosis diagnoses.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Top banker condemns British legal system: "The Governor of the Bank of England last night delivered a ferocious attack on Britain's civil legal system, condemning it as a monopoly run mainly for lawyers' benefit and urging the Government to reform it. Mervyn King told City leaders at the Mansion House in London that the Bank's painful experience of the 13-year case brought against it over the collapse of Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) showed that the system of civil commercial law was gravely flawed. Denouncing the case and its 100 million pounds in legal costs as "the most expensive fishing expedition in history," Mr King said: "It matters that there are simple, clear and timely ways of resolving disputes. What the BCCI case revealed was a legal system incapable of guaranteeing that." ... He noted that the action against the Bank of England over its role in BCCI's 1991 collapse had set new trial records. "How can a case described by the trial judge himself as built `not even on sand but on air' take 13 years and over 100 million pounds in costs to come to a conclusion?" he asked".

Some job aptitudes inborn: "The researchers are finding that vocational interests are primarily the products of genetics and unique, or nonshared, environmental factors, with shared family experiences holding less sway. The research may indicate why some individuals are predisposed to careers in engineering. It might also explain the high occurrence of autism in the families of engineers. Wendy Johnson, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Minnesota, is in the vanguard of the research. She and her colleagues are using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to reveal the relative placement and volume of gray matter in the brain. They are also using the technique to determine to what degree the brain is influenced by genetic vs. environmental factors."

Fireworks Over Fireworks: "As we approach July 4 each year, the bureaucratic busybodies kick into high gear, warning us against a hallowed tradition and its immense fun. "Fireworks are a wonderful way to celebrate Independence Day," New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg admitted on June 8, "but it's critical that we leave it to the professionals. . . . In the hands of an untrained individual, fireworks can have deadly consequences." Apparently, John Adams's famous exhortation that untrained individuals celebrate the country's birthday with "Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other" cuts no ice with the mayor and his ilk. On this, as on so many matters, poor John's advice is far too radical for our safety-cap-and-security-camera age."



French wine going down the drain: "At least one in ten of Europe's vineyards must be dug up under radical European Commission proposals to help the embattled wine industry to fight back against increasingly tough competition from New World growers. The survival plan is designed to drain the infamous wine lake, to remove restrictive winemaking and labelling practices and to encourage the production and marketing of quality wines for which there is growing demand.... Currently, EU funds are used to store and distil the wine, turning it into ethanol for cars and factories."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 2004 Voter Theft Theory Debunked: "Cleveland's leading newspaper has checked out a new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claiming that Republicans "stole" the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, and concluded that Kennedy's story is "nonsense." ... But the Cleveland Plain Dealer - regarded as anything but a conservative newspaper - headlines a June 18 article: "Rest assured, we checked out Election 2004 thoroughly," and states: "There was no shortage of mistakes made in vote counting. There were voters who should have been registered but weren't, polling places with lines that were too long and without enough voting machines, and decisions from [Secretary of State Ken] Blackwell that appeared to be partisan. "All these mistakes and misjudgments took votes from both candidates, but probably more from Kerry. But they didn't add up to nearly enough votes to swing Ohio from Bush to Kerry. "The mistakes were bipartisan in nature and not a result of Republican chicanery." The Plain Dealer article by Ted Diadiun points to several instances when Kennedy "ignored" the facts"

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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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.

****************************

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)

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