Saturday, July 05, 2003

ELSEWHERE

Great! The upheaval in the European parliament caused by a Leftist slur on the Italian Prime Minister looks like it could make the EU parliament almost unworkable -- at least for a while. The EU-loving Leftists might have shot themselves in the foot. Let’s hope that P.M. Berlusconi does NOT apologize any further for his contemptuous retort!

Sounds good: “Australian and United States officials meeting in Brisbane next week will discuss an aggressive military operation to force down aircraft and board ships suspected of carrying prohibited weapons from North Korea, Iran, Syria and Libya

Australian workers get far more holidays than Americans do so Australia has a reputation as the “land of the long weekend”. But apparently the REAL holiday-holics are the Europeans!

Interesting: Australians in New York are something of an elite group!

About time! The British company bosses who caused a train to crash by their persistent negligence are to be prosecuted for manslaughter. Negligence leading to death is what manslaughter laws are all about. If only the negligence of government bodies were similarly prosecuted!

I don't blame them: Separatism is enjoying a resurgence in Newfoundland and Labrador. A royal commission on the province's future within Canada has helped feed that sentiment. The commission has handed its report to the provincial government and it's due to be made public on Wednesday. In the meantime, Dave Hopley of St. John's, has been selling about 200 of his 'Free Nfld.' T-shirts each month. 'It's a popular sentiment these days,' he says."

Affirmative action harms many blacks. It causes them to be devalued by all. This black professor says that because of affirmative action he feels compelled to post his test scores on the web.

John Pilger’s lies get tedious but this is a good demolition of his ridiculous attack on the USA for using non-radioactive uranium in their ammunition. Another thing the article could have mentioned is that non-radioactive uranium is actually used in medicine to SHIELD people from radiation.

”Why would custody of the Bryant children, who all involved agree are loved and well cared for at home, be transferred to DSS when no law has been broken? ... The bottom line is that the government would like to regulate this family. And my family. And your family."

“Gun control laws in major cities do nothing to keep 9mms and AK-47s away from male career criminals, but they are very effective in removing the .38 revolvers from the purses of career women in the subways”. Only a Leftist could fail to see that.

"The essence of being an American is not where you were born....." says The Misanthropyst on July 4th.

The Wicked one has a couple of postings on “diversity” at work in American High Schools (and an Irish joke too). Great stuff that diversity!

Because they are mostly Leftists, psychologists very much like an old Marxist theory which claims that it is conservatives who are authoritarian rather than Leftists. My academic posting today (See also here) is an article that I had published in 1976 which reports findings that comprehensively demolish that old Marxist theory. If psychology were a real science that should have caused psychologists to question the theory. It didn’t. Leftists care only about what sounds good to them. Evidence is an irrelevance.

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Friday, July 04, 2003

U.S. INDEPENDENCE DAY

As usual, Ronald Reagan said it best:

"Isn't our choice really not one of left or right, but of up or down? Down through the welfare state to statism, to more and more government largesse accompanied always by more government authority, less individual liberty, and ultimately, totalitarianism, always advanced as for our own good. The alternative is the dream conceived by our Founding Fathers, up to the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society. We don't celebrate dependence day on the Fourth of July. We celebrate Independence Day." --Ronald Reagan (1984)

Via The Federalist

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GENOCIDE IS LEFTIST

There is an interesting review by Prof. Antony Flew here of The Lost Literature of Socialism by historian George Watson. Excerpt:

Many of his findings are astonishing. Perhaps for readers today the most astonishing of all is that "In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels' article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or independent did anything of the kind." (The term "genocide" in Watson's usage is not confined to the extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but embraces also the liquidation of such other complete human categories as "enemies of the people" and "the Kulaks as a class.")


The book seems well worth reading but is not of course available online. An excellent earlier essay by Prof. Watson covering some of the same ground is however available here. He shows in it that even such revered figures in the history of socialism as G.B. Shaw and Beatrice Webb were vocally in favour of genocide.

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FASCISTS WERE ACTUALLY AMONG THE GOOD GUYS

The recent slanging match in the EU parliament between German socialists and Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi is a bit reminiscent of some events back in the 1930s. The Italian Prime Minister at that time -- Benito Mussolini -- derided another German socialist -- Adolf Hitler. The Left have always tried to persuade us that Mussolini and Hitler were two peas in a pod but that is far from the truth. Mussolini got pretty unprintable about Hitler at times and did NOT support Hitler’s genocide against the Jews. As it says here: “Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives — far more than Oskar Schindler.” Let’s see that again: ITALIAN FASCISTS SAVED FAR MORE JEWISH LIVES THAN OSKAR SCHINDLER. Isn’t there a lot that the Left never mention?

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ELSEWHERE

Black Racism: “Accusing General Powell, the US Secretary of State, of doing the bidding of his white masters, Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper, The Herald, branded him an “Uncle Tom” who was “despised by people of colour throughout the world”.

Tinpot Hitlers at work: "Two Northwest Airlines passengers praying aboard a flight bound for Boston were handcuffed by air marshals and questioned by state police when the plane landed at Logan International Airport yesterday. The pair were praying when they were cuffed, WBZ-TV reported. Authorities would not confirm if they were praying."

Well deserved: “An Oklahoma man, arrested on suspicion of beating his wife, faced a year in prison and a fine. But when he spat in an arresting officer's face, he got a life sentence instead”

There’s no doubt that the old system was ridiculous: “Such a workday is not unusual for young doctors, particularly surgical trainees like Regenbogen, who frequently work from 100 to 120 hours a week. But starting tomorrow, it will be against the rules."

Congress voted for a huge expansion of Medicare that enriches pharmaceutical companies, fleeces taxpayers with billions in new spending, and forces millions of seniors to accept inferior drug coverage. Conservatives might ask themselves whether this is what they had in mind when the party of 'limited government' gained control of the House, Senate, and White House."

The guardians of the Constitution have clearly become its destroyers: "When the Constitution says that no state may 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,' it apparently means that Michigan can discriminate in favor of African- Americans, Hispanics and Native-Americans who would like to enroll in the state's taxpayer-funded university. That's how the U.S. Supreme Court reads the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment -- with the evident approval of President Bush .... Translation: Under the guise of seeking a more 'diverse' educational climate, the Constitution may be treated as so much tissue paper."

How to increase unemployment in one easy lesson: "Santa Fe is a well known and fashionable New Mexico desert city and largely in the hands of a bunch of meddlesome lefties.... Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Santa Fe recently enacted an ordinance that mandates a minimum wage of $10 that every employer must pay. There is no opportunity to come to terms with potential employees -- the politicians have taken things over."

My academic posting here (or here) is very relevant to the old Leftist claim that they are non-racist. They have to hide the fact that Hitler was a socialist to make that claim but make it they do. What I show is that Leftist sympathizers in the community at large are no less racist than anybody else. What Leftist intellectuals and agitators say is not what ordinary Leftists say.

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Thursday, July 03, 2003

VIETNAM

Paul Sheehan has an opinion piece that opposes the usual interpretation of the Vietnam War. He says: “The US military campaign in Vietnam defeated the Vietcong and decimated the North Vietnamese army but lost the propaganda war... many conscripts from North Vietnam were chewed up by the conflict - more than 1 million communist soldiers were killed.... In the broader sweep of history, the US crushed Vietnam as a regional power. Since 1975, the US has become the world's dominant superpower while Vietnam has become a political, military and economic backwater”

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THE “WESTPHALIA” DOCTRINE

I have just posted here a historically well-informed email from a moderate Leftist in support of the Iraq war. He refers to the treaty of Westphalia of 1648 in which various European States recognized one-another’s sovereignty not on any legal or moral grounds but simply because, like Mt Everest, they were there. Before the Iraq war, many Leftists referred to this dubious old doctrine to defend Saddam. They argued that because he was there he should be left alone. Fortunately, the successful U.S. invasion of Iraq would seem now to have knocked that notion on the head for good. A good point that the writer makes is that for Britain and the British Commonwealth both World War I and World War II were also pre-emptive wars. They declared war on Germany rather than the other way around. And he thinks that the pre-emptive attack on Iraq was equally well-justified.

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ELSEWHERE

That pesky global warming! “Moscow saw its coldest June in 62 years this year, with the average temperature ringing in at a chilly 13 degrees Celsius, a top meteorologist said Monday”

Asking Leftists to give up their public spending habit is like asking a drug addict to give up his drugs: “California officially went broke on Tuesday after failing to pass its annual budget.... While a host of other US states also stagger under the weight of burgeoning deficits ... California's case is by far the most dramatic with... a budget deficit larger than those of all other US states combined”

Fascinating: “A French company is ready to launch a device that lets television viewers watch any channel on earth, and may open another front in the battle over digital copyright. Nexedi SARL's "TV Brick" effectively turns the internet into the world's longest antenna lead.”

Serves them right: A local authority took an unfortunate company to court over some Greenie scare and got a damages settlement of $400,000. But it cost the authority $800,000 in legal fees!

Another sensible editorial in USA Today -- this time about mandatory sentencing for crime.
That constant hunger for attention at any price: "Around 30 people have staged a naked protest against GM food. The protesters spelled out 'no GM' with their bodies in a meadow at Forest Row, East Sussex .... Organiser Mike Grenville said he hoped it would send a message to the Government of people's concern, particularly over commercial planting of GM crops."

Hasn’t the USA done enough already?: "Pressure built Monday on the United States to contribute to a peacekeeping force in Liberia, with West African leaders asking for 2,000 U.S. troops

It doesn’t pay to insult people: “French wine sales to the US, once French winemakers' most promising market and now one of their greatest competitors, are going down the drain... Because of the greater competition during a global glut, France turned 9.5 million litres of unsold beaujolais into industrial alcohol last year. There is so much on the market that some French table wine is now cheaper than expensive mineral water.”

It takes an Italian Prime Minister for a fiery response to insults! When a German socialist questioned his honesty, Berlusconi replied: “"Mr Schulz, I know there is in Italy a man producing a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I would like to suggest you for the role of Kapo. You'd be perfect." Italians don’t have good memories of German socialists.

Arlene Peck’s latest article is here. She points out how indifferent mainstream U.S. newspapers are to Jewish deaths while at the same time agonizing over Palestinian deaths. Pretty disgraceful.

China Hand has been blogging up a storm lately -- with some amusing stories from his trip to Manila.

There is a post on PC Watch showing that it is now a legal hazard to offer anybody free drinks!

I have recently exchanged emails with Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknoll Organization on the subject of priestly celibacy. He has an interesting defence of it. I have posted the emails here

I put up a link yesterday to my academic article “Towards a more pragmatic penal system”. After it was originally published in a Criminology journal some years ago, it attracted a number of critical comments from other academics. My published reply to those comments is here (or here). The reply gives a shorter and simplified version of my original argument about how imprisonment should be used if we are to prevent crime.

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Wednesday, July 02, 2003

HITLER A MONSTER?

There is a review here of the recently-released film “Max” -- which is a portrayal of the early life of Adolf Hitler as a frustrated artist. The review makes a great point of saying how Hitler must be portrayed as a monster -- as something apart from ordinary humanity. That he was a horrible character is obvious but this talk of him being a monster apart from normal humanity is bunkum. He was a fairly normal hate-filled socialist in most ways -- very little different from other mass-murdering socialists like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all their lesser “revolutionary” brethren around the world. And whatever else one might say about socialists, they ARE (regrettably) a part of normal humanity. Envy, hate and murder are all too human and mass-murder is common throughout human history. So this endeavour to portray Hitler as something apart is just more Leftist deception -- deception designed to camouflage the fact that he was in his day a fairly conventional Leftist. Even his nationalism and antisemitism were in his day common among Leftists (see here or here). Only his persuasiveness set him apart and millions of ordinary Germans idolized him. He was a political con-man and there are still plenty of con-men of all sorts around. If anybody really thinks that Hitler was a monster it is only because they do not WANT to understand what he really was.

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ORWELL IN CONTEXT

An Australian reader writes:

“It is interesting to contrast the left's desire to kick Orwell for reporting what he believed to be 38 "crypto-communists and fellow travelers" to the Foreign Office months before his 1950 death with how they seem intent on whitewashing members of the traitorous "Cambridge Four" spy-ring. The Four may have been responsible for hundreds of deaths, but are now being lauded as slightly misguided anti-Fascist idealists. Everybody seems to have forgotten that Stalin was still very much in charge in Russia in 1950. So it was bad for Orwell to betray Stalinists to the West but good for the “Cambridge Four” to betray the West to Stalin?? But of course the Leftists don't want to acknowledge that Stalin was at least as bad as Hitler.

Even the usual and rather bogus Leftist smear of "McCarthyism" is anachronistic. Joe McCarthy's career peaked 1954, less than a year after Stalin's death. And Orwell's reports were made within a year of the first Soviet atomic test, an achievement that is now known to have been made easier and faster due to extensive Soviet spying. So Soviet spying really was a problem. And Orwell, unlike Senator McCarthy, had long standing and intimate knowledge of Communist-front tactics from his career as a socialist activist and anti-Franco volunteer. It is certainly possible that Orwell may have made some mistakes in his list but how would the left today treat someone with (say) inside knowledge of a Nazi spy ring in 1939? Would they still counsel silence in deference to the civil liberties of the suspects?

One of the best retrospectives of Orwell's career comes (surprisingly) from Robert Manne. Manne is a former editor of the Rightist Quadrant who, despite involvement with anti-Communism in the 1960s has recently swapped alliegiances for the left in opposition to 'economic rationalism' and conservative government attempts to reform the welfare state.”

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MY ACADEMIC POSTINGS

I have just put up a paper here (or here) that gives the detailed results of a survey of what South African whites thought of blacks during the Apartheid era. They generally thought well of blacks. I doubt that they would hold the same opinions today given the fact that they are all now frantic to get out of the country.

There is also a link here to a rather popular paper of mine: “Towards a more pragmatic penal system” in which I argue that protecting the community should always be the first goal of any criminal justice system and that no other goal should interfere with that (PDF file).

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ELSEWHERE

An interesting article here on the current state of the Iraqi economy. It seems that essentially ALL Iraqis are looters. They had started looting even before U.S. forces took over.

Good to see that GWB is pushing for school vouchers. It might help get more kids out of the grip of the NEA and its drumbeat of Leftist propaganda.

More on those good old, unbiased, fair-minded teachers: In House and Senate races, 'we may find some right-wing Republicans that we can take out,' said Randall J. Moody, the NEA's federal policy manager, at workshops to outline the group's political strategy."

The British government is in a turmoil over fox hunting again. The refusal to compromise on the part of most of the British Labour MPs could be good news -- meaning that there will end up being no ban of any sort! Tony Blair did not vote for the outright ban and when the Lords again reject it, he is likely simply to take no action to override the veto by the Lords.

The Wicked one has another instance of the old truth that minorities themselves are often intolerant.

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Tuesday, July 01, 2003

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

I have just put up here a further volley in the battle to free England from domination by the Scots and the Welsh by giving England its own parliament (which Scotland and Wales already have).

To be a bit frivolous about it, one could say that there is in fact a way in which the present situation is normal in English history. Those pesky Scots and Welsh were after all responsible for both the Tudors and the Stuarts -- and as well as the Scots and Welsh at the top there have been the Norman Plantagenets and the German Hanoverians. The English have hardly ever had a look-in at ruling their own country. And don't forget those enormously influential consorts -- the Dutch King Billy and Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha. So if the English have survived all that in reasonably good shape, perhaps they will survive the present Celtic domination in reasonable shape too! Seriously, however, since 1649 it is parliaments that have mattered in England and the present parliament at Westminster would be very different without its big contingent of almost uniformly Leftist Scottish and Welsh members.

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SHOULD THERE BE MORE BASTARDS?

Chris Brand looks at the biology of it and writes:

"Bastardy may have been a rather good idea in the past, when more of it was done by highly successful men: see here; (Begins: "The failure of successful men to have plenty of bastard children is one problem the West is up against today. In the past, English kings on average sired more bastards than they had legitimate offspring. In Sweden of 1850, fully 50% of births were to unmarried women. Today, however, Western men are letting breeding with adolescent girls be done largely by spotty and drunken youths of distinctly mediocre IQ.").

Since 25% of American women now stay childless -- doubtless the brighter ones even if their brains have been addled by feminism -- we should perhaps arrange for girls to get pregnant by rich and bright men before they go to college -- for the attractiveness and viability of age-gapped partnerships, see here

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ELSEWHERE

Intellectual antisemitism: "An Oxford University professor is facing disciplinary action after rejecting an Israeli student's application to work with him because he had a "huge problem" with his country's "abuses on the Palestinians""

The champion of Chappaquiddick sure has a neat turn of phrase: "I'm not sure where Arnold [Schwarzenegger] gets his political instincts. People often say that for Kennedys, it's in the water."--Sen. Ted Kennedy, quoted by the Associated Press, June 27

The British Tories really HAVE lost the plot. Instead of applauding Campbell's attack on the Leftist bias in the BBC, they are attacking him!

Encouraging: "China called Monday for a Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons and urged a diplomatic settlement to the North Korean nuclear crisis."

Surprise! The Left Coast goes soft on Leftist thugs "The district attorney's on-again, off-again pursuit of charges against protesters who shut down the city as the war in Iraq began is off again. Prosecutors decided Friday to drop cases against 407 people charged with traffic violations for blocking city streets during the first days of fighting. Police in riot gear arrested 2,300 demonstrators who brought San Francisco to a standstill. Prosecutors still plan to pursue charges against 20 people allegedly involved in acts of misdemeanor violence or vandalism, Assistant District Attorney Mike Menesini said."

"In just five years, a demographic tidal wave will begin that will forever alter the federal government. The large baby boom generation will start retiring and cause the costs of Social Security and Medicare to explode. Unfortunately, Congress seems blissfully unaware of the coming crisis as it works to create another elderly entitlement in the form of a $400 billion Medicare prescription drug benefit."

Globalization, multinationals and poverty: The figures show the anti-globos are wrong. "Evidence supplied by the World Bank and United Nations strongly suggests that multinational corporations are a key factor in the large improvement in welfare that has occurred in developing countries over the last forty years...."

Spiked-Online says the risk of vehicle accident by mobile phone distracted drivers is exaggerated.

Surprise! Lesbianism is often hormonal: “Doctors there noticed a "staggering" number of lesbian women, who, on investigation, were found to be suffering either from polycystic ovary syndrome, or a less serious but related condition ... polycystic ovarian syndrome... is linked to an excess of male sex hormones in the bloodstream.”

The Wicked one has some "funny but true" stories about announcements on aircraft

In my latest academic posting here (or here) I try to disabuse my Leftist psychology colleagues of their simplistic notions about economic achievement. They think that poor nations are poor simply because the people there are not ambitious enough! I show that it is in fact affluent populations who are relatively unambitious. People in poorer countries are in general VERY motivated to better themselves materially.

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Monday, June 30, 2003

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THE LEFT'S "THIRD WAY" IS A VERY OLD IDEA

Some interesting thoughts from an expert on the history of Fascism: "Every now and again, as I wander about town, my mind drifts from Mussolini and Fascism, the subject in hand, to another matter: Tony Blair and New Labour. Odd, but I cannot help noticing that Blair and Mussolini have rather a lot in common. I am not saying that Blair has consciously copied Mussolini. But Blair, probably without even realising it, does seem to have imbibed quite a few things from the Duce. ... For a start, Blair extols the virtues of the Third Way, which was the phrase coined by the Fascists, no less, to describe their alternative to capitalism and communism..... Indeed, despite all the uncanny similarities between the two leaders, there are, of course many differences, not the least of which is that Blair is in many ways more right-wing. Mussolini, for example, founded Italy's welfare state. Presumably, most people would agree that such a move was fairly left-wing. Blair, on the other hand, is doing his best not just to hack away at the welfare state but also at workplace rights"

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ROMAN CATHOLIC ABSURDITIES

The Vatican says that it is not going to change its rule of priestly celibacy. They might have to rethink soon or they will find themselves with no priests to be celibate about. In the Australian State of Queensland -- population about 2 million -- there will be only ONE new priest ordained this year. And the average age of existing priests is over 60. But maybe the RC church does not really need priests. Given the Roman devotion to "miraculous" apparitions, perhaps a stain on the wall would do just as well.

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ILLEGAL FISHING

Australia has a big illegal fishing problem to its North. The Indonesians have fished out their own waters so their fishermen are continually intruding into Australian waters to fish there. The Australian navy does catch them and tow their boats into Broome harbour at times but this email just passed on to me says that such measures are no deterrent:

We had talked to the crew of HMAS Arunta when it brought another Indonesian boat in. They said they just about knew most of the Indonesians by name because the fishermen didn't really mind being caught - they got good food and were paid $5 a day in temporary detention until the Broome magistrate found them guilty and they were flown home at our expense. $5 a day was more than they earned in a month as fishermen, and made them relatively rich when they got back to their kampongs, especially if the magistrate had lots of business on his hands and they had to stay in detention a while. And they were taught English to boot! A real ticket to a better life. The boss lost the boat, of course, unless he/she paid compensation (which was hardly ever, because they were not very sophisticated boats - most were just burnt). Some of the fishermen had been caught eight times!


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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby is scathing about the “benefits” of race-based admissions to universities.

Apparently there are some people in the Church of England and in Anglican churches worldwide who still accept the authority of the Bible. So the “gay bishop” controversy looks like splitting them off from other Anglicans. In a typical Anglican way it will not be a formal schism, but it seems that parishes will soon start choosing which bishop they acknowledge rather than accept the one given to them. The “primate” of the new faith-based faction looks like being the Archbishop of Sydney. Sydney is a very big and prosperous Anglican diocese with lots of committed young people in its churches and seminary.

There is a rather sad story here by an idealistic Leftist from South Africa who has recently returned there after many years in England teaching at Oxford University. He seems to have decided to stay in Africa now but from the tale he tells about how everything is collapsing there and how everyone who can (black and white) is leaving, he is one hell of a masochist. The only good thing he can find about the place is the scenery. Even the initial presence of a large white minority seems to have done nothing to prevent South Africa from following the other countries of Africa rapidly downhill. Clearly, anti-racism has converted the whole of Africa from a reasonably well-run place into a deadly shambles.

"Exploiting junk science is great for re-election campaign coffers. Thus, one of Sen. Hillary Clinton's first major crusades after she took office was to whip up public health hysteria on Long Island, where some activists have blamed slightly elevated breast cancer rates on everything from pesticides to power lines to planes. ... Red Queen Hillary and her courtiers' expert conclusions notwithstanding, _there is no shred of legitimate scientific evidence connecting breast cancer on Long Island to chemicals or other environmental causes."

A win against hysteria at last: "A federal appeals court told the Tennessee Valley Authority that for now it's 'free to ignore' Environmental Protection Agency orders to clean up pollution at several of its coal-burning power plants. The decision from a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta came in a test case challenging an initiative by the Clinton administration and states to reduce smokestack emissions from aging coal-fired power plants."

The Left think George Orwell must have gone ga ga when he handed a list of Communist sympathizers to the British authorities! I would have said that he was backing his anti-Communist words up with deeds.

A REAL Feminazi: Rwanda's genocide was planned by a feminist

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Sunday, June 29, 2003

ENGLISH LIBERTIES IN HISTORY

Much of English history is to a large degree also the history of modern-day Americans and Australians so I think there is a lot of interest in this historical vignette showing that the English attitude to civil liberties and the power of the State has always been different:

Background: We all know how Elizabeth I was famous for her tolerance in religious and other matters. Her statement that she did not want to make a "window into men's souls" is best known in that connection but she also at one stage reproached that great bureaucrat and religious tyrant, King Philip II of Spain, by asking him -- as any modern-day libertarian might have -- "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?" She also respected Parliament and when Parliament was getting heated about the sales taxes of the day (government-granted monopolies), she abolished most of them -- making probably the first big tax cut in English history.

When she died, however, she was succeded not by an English king but by the Stuart King of Scotland, James I. And note that the attitude of the Scottish Stuarts towards the relationship between the individual and the State differed from traditional English views from the very outset. Note this report of an incident on the initial journey to London of James I:

He ordered a pickpocket to be hanged straight away without trial. The prudish English were too dainty for 'Jedburgh justice', which hanged Border robbers out of hand. They muttered tiresome objections about their Common Law, and Sir John Harington, that privileged wag, proclaimed loudly: 'If the new King hangs a man before he is tried, will he then try a man before he has offended?'


(Quoted from p. 172 of That Great Lucifer: A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh by Margaret Irwin [Bungay, Suffolk: Reprint Society, 1960])

So the fact that the son of James I (Charles I) eventually got into such trouble with Parliament that they beheaded him was more than a personal mistake. It reflected a deep culture clash between English individualism and the much more tyrannical rule that was accepted as normal by others. Not much has changed since.

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A NEW FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT DAWNING?

An interesting post from Chris Brand:

WATCH OUT WEASELS! France saw the rise and rise of beautiful neo-rightist, political science student Sabine Herold, 21. Fed up with union domination of France and the paralyzing strikes of June, Sabine, a real babe (long eyelashes, light blue mascara), aimed to roll back the state, rein in the unions, cut welfare dependency and to claim the freedom to work as well the freedom to homosexualize, take drugs and work in the prostitution industry. Altogether her bag sounded rather like that of the late neoliberal Pim Fortuyn (see above) in Holland, and, hinting at her attitude to mass dullard immigration, she certainly supported the Anglo-American Crusade against towelhead fanatics and Madman Insane in Iraq. Of rightist Monsieur Le Pen, she had bravely denied that he was a “fascist” -- “Ca ne sert à rien de gueuler que Le Pen est un fasciste. Il ne l'est pas. C’est son programme liberticide qui est dangereux”. Miss Herold had been nicknamed “the Joan d'Arc of the liberals” by “Le Figaro” and, by the London Times “Mademoiselle Thatcher”. She was “Rédactrice en chef” of the Paris-based free-market association “Liberté j'écris ton nom”. On June 15 she addressed a crowd of 200,000 fans in Paris. She favoured Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek and classic English liberalism. She was attending the prestigious Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris and had links to the liberal organization, Centre for a New Europe.


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ELSEWHERE

Australia’s token antigun laws. A .38 sixgun is still legal! “The states will ban a range of small handguns, handguns with a calibre above .38 and those with a magazine capacity exceeding 10 rounds.”

We all know that there are some morons in the world but how did this guy get to be an air-traffic controller? Frightening. “A Swiss air traffic controller jokingly put an "al-Qaeda" label on a French helicopter that strayed into restricted air space during the Group of Eight summit, nearly leading to a shooting down of it by the French air force.”

There is a good article in the WSJ about the implications of the recent U. Mich. affirmative action decision by the U.S. Supreme court. It says that American institutions know that blacks can never be equal in achievement so also know that they need racial preferences to look good. It also explains anti-Americanism as a “holier than thou” attitude.

I think they are pretty right about this: “The Dept. of Defense ... just announced the launch of a new advertising campaign that links military values with success in life. The military believes the values soldiers learn through military service to be a key to success in civilian life as well. The primary goal of the ads? To encourage adults to to advocate military service to the young people in their lives."

Disturbing: "Even without a prescription drug benefit, the cost of Medicare will double as a percentage of GDP by 2040. The program's unfounded liabilities are more than $13.3 trillion, dwarfing even Social Security's massive debt. ... a more courageous or sensible Congress might have tried to reform this deeply troubled program and bring some restraint to its escalating costs. Instead, Congress decided that what Medicare really needed was a brand new entitlement estimated to cost at least $400 billion over the next 10 years ..."

The Wicked one has an email from a U.S. medical specialist about the incredible red-tape being generated by subsidized prescription drugs.

My latest academic posting: “AUTHORITARIANISM AND ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION IN INDIA” can be found here or here. I find that the Indians are a submissive but ambitious lot.

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Saturday, June 28, 2003

LEFTIST FEAR OF FOOD

The attention-seeking never stops: "Hundreds of protesters descended on [Sacramento's] streets Sunday as agriculture officials from around the world prepared for a meeting where U.S. officials will pitch advances in genetically engineered agriculture. Chanting, banging drums and carrying signs that read 'We Don't Want to Eat Their Corporate Creations,' protesters swarmed the streets around the state Capitol and nearby conference center."

'Feed the needy, not the greedy!' read one placard hoisted near where agricultural ministers from hundreds of countries are meeting to consider the benefits of genetically enhanced crops. 'Beat Back the Corporate Attack!' demonstrators chanted. 'Entire populations are being put at risk simply for corporate economic benefit,' one protestor told the San Francisco Chronicle. Lost in the haze of anti-corporate hysteria is what the Sacramento conferees are actually doing."

Big food is the nouveau public health epidemic that has been targeted with phasers set on demonize. It began with the fast-food lawsuits. Fat people claimed the food was too cheap so they bought too much. And that restaurant operators should be made to pay for this manipulation."

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GREENIE SCARES BECOME UNGLUED

A big Greenie scare from a while back said that sperm-counts were dropping all over the world because of pesticide use. It turns out that sperm-counts are NOT dropping and that normal pesticide use does not influence sperm-count anyway.

Wow! New Scientist doesn’t seem to be able to work out whether global temperatures are rising or falling but they are sure it is our fault anyway.

The sun needs to sign “Kyoto” too: “Recently, Professor Richard Wilson published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Geophysical Research Letters where he reported the results of his studies on the amount of solar energy that our sun has been producing over the last 24 years. During this time period, the amount of energy the sun is producing has increased by 0.05% every 10 years."

The old fluoride scare: "If you thought that a loony obsession with malevolent forces spiking our drinking water was limited to fictional characters from 'Dr. Strangelove' ... think again. Such characters are very real, and they belong to the extreme environmentalist movement. National Review reports that the same crowd who brought you the entirely unfounded hysteria over Alar on apples and falsely accused biotech corn of mass- murdering monarch butterflies is now warning of a deadly substance that nameless, faceless government officials are purposely putting in your tap water: fluoride."

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ELSEWHERE

There is a good article here on what a dangerous fraud the “diversity” idea is. The version of it made into law by the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t mean what an unsuspecting person might think it does.

We believe in freedom of association -- it's implicit in the First Amendment, in fact -- but that freedom entails not only the right to associate with those willing to associate with us but the right not to associate -- the right to discriminate, on any ground, good or bad, or no ground at all".

Contrary to first world middle class leftist dogma, the people of the third world are big fans of globalisation. Now why would that be? Simple. Because they know from experience that it makes them better off, not worse off -- contrary to what the lying Leftists of the West say.

Great news: Spam just doesn't sell. I must say I could throttle anybody who buys something advertised in spam. If people stop buying it will go away.

Not very libertarian but I sympathize: "France may pass a new law to ban Muslim veils and other religious symbols in public schools and buildings”

Good show: Officials last week agreed to pay $1.35 million to settle a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of some 700 women illegally strip- searched after their arrest. .... It didn't matter if the women had been arrested for a major felony or for a minor offense. A murder suspect was searched, as were women arrested for underage drinking or shoplifting."

Tom Wolfe wrote an essay at the turn of the century three years ago about the triumph of America and the failure of its Leftist intellectuals that makes interesting reading. He concludes that American intellectuals do not actually want change. They just want to talk about it.

The Wicked one has some more of those exceptionally funny courtroom transcripts.

In my academic posting here (and here) I report evidence which demolishes a stupid Leftist claim that Leftists are “life-loving” and conservatives are “death loving”.

China Hand has some pictures of the graceful new buildings that have just gone up in his part of China.

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Friday, June 27, 2003

LOTS OF GOOD STUFF

Great! Australia’s Foreign Minister has pissed all over the United Nations (metaphorically). He said that the U.N. was "ineffective and unfocused" and that Australia’s foreign policy will increasingly rely on "coalitions of the willing" like the one that waged war in Iraq.

There is good coverage here of the lies and hypocrisy that went into securing the moderately favourable verdict for the University of Michigan in the recent affirmative action case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

There is a short dialogue here with a rather wise correspondent who DEFENDS affirmative action as cheap pacification.

About time: “Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s press chief, yesterday accused the BBC of pursuing a secret agenda against the government and demanded an apology for its "biased" Iraq coverage.”

There is a good article in Brookes News about why the unemployed deserve better treatment from the Government -- i.e. the unemployed deserved to be compensated by the rest because the market is rigged against them. Conservatives could use that argument to really confuse the Leftists!

Philip Adams, child murderers and paedophilia. “Paedophilia is a nasty activity that means the sexual abuse of children. This is something that every ordinary person understands and, with the exception of child molesters, vigorously condemns. But it takes a rancid socialist like Philip Adams to accuse companies who produce goods and advertising that target the youth market of "corporate paedophilia"

There is a good short summary here of the Radical feminist worldview and their notion that there is a "Gender War" going on which women must win against men. It is pretty fevered stuff. Totally devoid of realism or rationality.

Paul Johnson says that the USA is an empire but he makes clear that his usage of that word is not the usual one today. He gives an interesting coverage of how the meaning of the word has changed over time.

Why do Jews rarely become farmers? According to Slate's economics writer it's because they are generally well-educated and so know better. I myself always describe farmers as "rural gamblers".
I am getting a strange new respect for USA Today. Note for instance this straight talk: "The financial problems racking many state governments this year have less to do with the weak national economy than with the ability of governors and legislators to manage money wisely. That is the key finding of a USA TODAY analysis of how the 50 states spend, tax and balance their budgets -- or don't. The National Governors Association says states are suffering their worst economic crisis since World War II. But for many states, the analysis shows, the fault is largely their own."

A good joke from Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance: "Q: What do you get if you cross a mafioso with a deconstructionist post- modernist philosopher? A: A man who makes you an offer you can't understand."

There is a good short book review here of a book by an expert on Italian Fascism. He shows that Fascism and Nazism modelled their methods on Lenin and Stalin and that the Fascist idea of adding nationalism to socialism was later taken up by Stalin and Mao -- so that in the end Fascism and Communism were two very similar Leftist sects -- something that I have also argued. The idea that Nazism was Rightist is thus an old Soviet lie that Left-leaning intellectuals in the West have perpetuated in flagrant denial of historical reality.

Environmental Colonialism: "Saving" Africa from Africans: "Under the banner of saving the African environment, Africans in the last half century have been subjected to colonialism from an overlooked source: the conservation movement. Local populations have been displaced and impoverished in order to create national parks and to serve other conservation objectives"

Powerful help for Israel: "Fundamentalist Christians have launched a nationwide billboard and bumper sticker campaign, opposing President Bush's plan for peace in the Middle East that calls for a Palestinian state with permanent borders by 2005. Some 100 billboards in major American cities, including five in Memphis [TN] alone, cite Genesis 35:11-12: 'And the Lord said to Jacob "Unto thy offspring will I give this land!"' Beneath the Bible verse, the billboards say, 'Pray that President Bush Honors God's Covenant with Israel.'"

Chris Brand has a big excerpt from the confession of a lesbian gone straight which concludes: “There’s a quiet ex-lesbian minority of ‘hasbians’ out there, having a gay old time with men after years of sapphistry”. It sounds like lesbians are pretty nasty to one-another.

The Wicked one has a sad story about a very small business being persecuted by local bureaucrats.

My academic posting here (or here) looks at possible effects of climate on political attitudes. It was hypothesized that people from the warmer climate of the Australian State of Queensland would be more conservative than people from the cooler climate of New South Wales. It was found that Queenslanders WERE more conservative on social and moral issues but were not more conservative on economic issues. An expanded treatment of the same subject can be found here.

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Thursday, June 26, 2003

INDEPENDENT SCHOOL FUNDING

The Australian alternative to vouchers is already well-established: "Federal funding of non-government schools is on a runaway trajectory but the Howard Government has no plans to rein in the cost, estimated to hit $5.4 billion by 2006. With enrolments in non-government schools growing - and a new religious school opening every six weeks in NSW - federal budget estimates of the funding have blown out by $150 million. "We have no intention of putting some sort of a cap on it," the Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, said. "This is a society that values and believes in supporting parents in their choice of education." This year, the scheme will pay $4.37 billion to 2650 schools - more than federal spending on universities - while two years ago the budget put the bill at $4.22 billion."

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ELSEWHERE

As a courageous black woman says: "By vigorously defending racial preferences in the name of diversity and refusing to challenge racial double standards, our national and state leaders have fostered hostilities among and between different racial and ethnic groups.... How long can a nation as diverse as America sustain racial and ethnic preferences without fueling increased racial and ethnic conflict? How long can the American people be satisfied with public policies that give advantages to the offspring of new immigrants over the needs of Americans with deep roots in this nation?"

Another story here about the disgusting “humanitarians” of the United Nations -- this time they are pretending that North Korean refugees don’t exist. The whole sorry lot of them should be kicked out of New York at least.

A good comment from one of my U.S. readers: "The GOP "tax breaks" and "prescription drug" plans are nothing short of something to take away ALL liberal issues from the Democrats - and essentially castrate them. The only problem is who is paying the bills."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual conspectus of the blogosphere.

Realism at last: “Israel is too strong to defeat and the Palestinians have no choice but to live with the Jewish state in peace, a senior Hamas official said in an extraordinary departure from the militant group's implacable enmity towards Israel.”

Wayne Lusvardi has a review here of a crap anti-democratic book that a surprising range of people seem to agree with. Wayne writes: “The author of the book is getting quite a bit of attention in the U.S. in TV and print media. Even many libertarian websites (i.e., LewRockwell.com, vonMisesInstitute.com) have been duped by the book. I'm a sociologist by training and can spot a Neo-Marxist quickly. Globalization is a very contentious issue and the political Left is very aggressive in selling their socialist solution by calling it something other than it is.”

Hey! I really like this: “The US House of Representatives has voted to award British Prime Minister Tony Blair the Congressional Gold Medal, the country's highest civilian honour, for his steadfast support of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Mr Blair becomes the second British leader to receive the award, following in the footsteps of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill”

Clever! Beats sending troops: “The United States has offered Zimbabwe "generous assistance" in exchange for its ruling ZANU-PF party ousting President Robert Mugabe and agreeing to hold free elections.”

About time: “THE United States and the European Union today agreed to start landmark talks this year on liberalising the trans-Atlantic air market. The "open skies" talks, which have been held up for several years, could radically change relations between European and American airlines.”

ANIMAL activists have threatened to do their utmost to stop shooters culling 6,500 kangaroos at the Puckapunyal army base in central Victoria. There are untold millions of the b***s in Australia and they are a tremendous pest to graziers (ranchers) because they eat what the sheep and cattle also eat. There are so many kangaroos in Australia that you even see them hopping around the suburbs of Brisbane at times -- and Brisbane is a city of 1 million people.

A recent posting from Chris Brand: “RACE IS KEY VARIABLE IN CRIME: Engaging Human BioDiversity President Steve Sailer pulled together US Department of Justice figures showing that Blacks are 9.1 times as likely to commit crimes as are Whites. Apparently, race has now overtaken even sex as a predictor of criminality (and that’s without allowing for the fact that much female criminality consists of civil and unpunishable cheating on men).”

China Hand replies to allegations about China’s “sweatshops”. As an experienced industrial engineer who has toured many Chinese factories he is in an ideal position to do so. He says that many Chinese factories are in fact better than some Western ones he remembers.

The Wicked one has a set of hilarious quotations that should be enough to make a libertarian out of anyone.

My academic posting here (or here) looks at psychopathic tendencies in the normal population and concludes that psychopaths may have got a bad rap.

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Wednesday, June 25, 2003


ENGLAND IS NOT RULED BY THE ENGLISH

Very few people outside the UK are probably aware of the anomaly that Prime Minister Blair and most of his senior ministers are in fact Scotsmen or Welshmen. So England is not being ruled by the English. A second anomaly is that Scotland and Wales have parliaments of their own in addition to their representatives in the UK parliament but England does not. So Scotsmen and Welshmen control England plus their own countries while Englishmen have no say over Wales, Scotland OR England! And to add insult to injury, the present UK government is even proposing constitutional changes that would almost certainly be rejected by the English if they were given the chance to vote on it all via a referendum. So a lot of the long-suffering English are getting pretty fed-up with all that. I reproduce here an email from one of them that gives more detail of how anomalous the situation has become.

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CONTROVERSIAL GENES

Paul Gottfried makes the interesting aside in his book MULTICULTURALISM AND THE POLITICS OF GUILT that the scientific case for racially based differences in intelligence is much stronger than the case that homosexuality is genetic. Yet the first hypothesis is controversial and hotly disputed, but the much weaker hypothesis is paraded as fact and treated as an 'article of faith' by a large section of society and virtually all the media.

The gay gene theory (criticised here) does now seem to be widely accepted as THE explanation for homosexual behaviour. I don't have a dog in that fight but must note that NONE of the research in fact finds that there is a one-to-one relationship between genetic makeup and homosexuality. I have no doubt that there is a genetic predisposition to it in some cases but in ALL cases there need to be other infuences as well for homosexual behaviour to result.

This article notes how widespread homosexuality is in the RC priesthood and also notes some of the other influences that give rise to homosexuality.

A less controversial gene: Scientists say some people are born shy. Not only that, researchers from Harvard Medical School say most people don't outgrow their natural inhibitions. 'Now we're suggesting that same link continues through life,' says Carl Schwartz, an assistant professor of psychiatry. In a study published in the journal, 'Science', Dr. Schwartz and his colleague, Jerome Kagan, say MRI brain scans show shy adults react to new faces differently than their less inhibited peers.

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IQ RESEARCH

A recent post from Chris Brand:

"Any hopes that the June 1-published Pergamon Festschrift (PDF!) for Arthur Jensen would make waves were dashed as the publisher failed to establish any significant presence for the book on the Internet, let alone anywhere else. This failure had been predicted by some in view of Pergamon's owner, Elsevier, having moved in 2002 to close down Praeger -- the only house to have been publishing London School mat‚riel since 1996. Better cheer came from the University of Missouri-Columbia, where postgraduate Alexander Beaujean had set up a nice website with pictures of Galton, Spearman, Burt, Eysenck and Jensen and gave plenty of news of his own work and reviews on topics such as mental speed (which he reports from meta-analysis to have a heritability of around .40 -- quite high given the unreliability of many mental speed tasks as conventionally administered by researchers)."

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ELSEWHERE

A rare victory for free speech in these politically correct times: "The city violated the First Amendment rights of two firefighters and a police officer when it fired them for riding on a parade float in blackface in 1998, a judge ruled Tuesday. U.S. District Judge John E. Sprizzo said the government "may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because a segment of society finds it offensive."

The poor dears: “There's no guarantee of safety for Canadian soldiers who start patrolling the troubled streets of Kabul next month”

A U.S. Marine on leave in Australia after the Iraq war saved a life: “A US Marine who intervened in a vicious brawl outside a northern Sydney nightclub may have saved a man's life, police said today”

Surprise, surprise: Germany’s socialist government sure has made a mess of the German economy.

A critical report on Australia's peak Aboriginal body (ATSIC) has called it a "corrupt shambles" that would not be tolerated if it were run by whites. Is not the continued tolerance of this an example of Leftist racism? The poor blacks are too childlike to live up to adult white standards?

China Hand notes a mature and tolerant response to "insult" from the People's Daily in Beijing which is a refreshing change from the paranoia and hysteria of the past.

The Wicked one has a good example of why democracy is a good thing.

In my academic posting here (or here) I show that the main things psychologists are interested in are personal adjustment, personal ambition and cynicism. One wonders what those interests reflect about psychologists themselves. Certainly it my impression that they are in general ambitious, cynical and prone to presenting childish games as "research".

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Tuesday, June 24, 2003


U. MICH. AND THE U.S. SUPREME COURT

Since everyone else will be blogging on this I won’t say much but I find this reasoning pretty incredible:

Justice O'Connor declared that the Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." ... "Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized,"


WHAT educational benefit flows from having a racially diverse student body? No-one has ever shown any net benefit to my knowledge -- though there is plenty of evidence that it leads to dumbing down.

OF COURSE all racial groups should participate in the life of the nation but who said that blacks need favouritism before they can participate? Sounds like old-fashioned racism to me.

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THE LIBYAN RETHINK

It was notable how quiet Libya’s Gaddafi went after Ronald Reagan had him bombed: A modern equivalent of the old “whiff of grapeshot” effect. The man who once hosted Arafat has now not only agreed to pay compensation to the Lockerbie victims his terrorist underlings attacked but after Iraq he now does not want even to be known as an Arab!

“Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan 'Supreme Guide', plans to announce his withdrawal from the Arab League sometime in August. The Libyan 'Popular Assembly' has just passed a bill to drop the word 'Arab' from the country's official name. After next September, Libya will describe itself as 'The African Republic of Libya'.”


What Reagan started, GWB has finished. Destroying two aggressive Islamic regimes (in Afghanistan and Iraq) has had the intended effect of putting big psychological pressure on other Islamic regimes that have a history of supporting terrorism.

And guess what? Now that Israel seems to be getting pretty good at blowing up their leaders, even the ultra-intransigent Hamas suddenly seems very interested in a cease-fire. Funny that!

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THAT GOOD OL' GENEROUS U.S. CONGRESS

There is a stereotype-busting article here about the new prescription drug plan for the elderly that looks like being enacted in the U.S.A. soon. The scheme will benefit ALL older peoople -- not just the impoverished elderly and the article points out that the elderly have far more assets than the working families who will be paying for the program via their taxes. So the whole scheme is grossly unjust.

"It is wrong to increase refundable child tax credits to families with no income tax liability. It's not a question of being stingy; many are genuinely concerned about the growth of a nontaxpaying class that potentially can vote subsidies for itself under the guise of tax reduction." But this article shows that such credits were a GOP idea in the first place.

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ELSEWHERE

Thought-provoking: One of my English correspondents has recently spent a couple of months in Indonesia and mentioned with approval the dusky maidens there. I commented that dusky Islamic maidens were probably pretty dangerous. His reply was: “Indonesia seems as much Islamic as the UK is Christian. There are more Islamic nutters in the UK than there seem to be there!”

“The appointment of a gay bishop does not violate the Church of England's current teaching”, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said Monday. Well, I guess we all knew that the C of E long ago ceased teaching the New Testament.

He! He! “Belgium is to amend war crimes laws used to target George Bush and the commander of American forces in Iraq, General Tommy Franks” Those pissant Belgians soon folded under a bit of pressure.

Although IVF conception was invented in Britain, it seems that there are incredible and rather offensive bureaucratic requirements before you are allowed assisted reproduction in Britain today. In Australia, if you can afford it, you have it.

How ridiculous that people have to go to these lengths to have a child: "Eight more British families are to sidestep U.K. law by following the example of a couple who travelled to America to use selective embryo screening to create a so-called 'designer baby' to help save the life of their first child."

The younger brother of the Battleship Potemkin (post of 19th) has found a small round in his aging revolutionary magazine and fired it off with great jollity. He notes with satisfaction that the Left sometimes oppose some taxes (only if they are put forward by conservatives, of course) while taking no account of the fact that they still do their best to increase taxation overall.

Eleanor Spreitzer says that if our kids are eating unhealthy food it is not the fault of McDonalds but the fault of high taxes that force mothers to go out to work and so to be unable to prepare proper home-cooked meals.

The Wicked one has a most instructive fable about modern-day Canada.

My academic post here (or here) reports on the popular notion that love of animals goes with love of people. Survey evidence showed no relationship.

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Monday, June 23, 2003


MORE ON THE HISTORY OF IMMIGRATION POLICY

A reader writes:

Reciprocity and immigration: A possible basis for a bold new "non-discriminatory" immigration policy?? This VDARE article takes a half satirical swipe at immigration thinking based on wonderful big ideas. What could be more 'fair' and 'natural' than the great principle of 'reciprocity'? Do unto others as they do unto you.

The article also makes some points about Japanese immigration policies in the 1930s. Historians still ascribe Japan's path to war in 1942 as being "propelled" by the restrictive immigration policies of countries like the US and Australia. Sure.

It reminds me of a comment by historian Geoffrey Blainey in his SHORTER HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA talking about the adoption of the "White Australia Policy" in the late 19th century. "The White Australia Policy was far from unique. Canada, the United States and New Zealand - three other democratic nations which faced an inrush of Chinese - had built there own walls against Asian immigration by the 1880s. China and Japan usually gave no welcome to foreigners; and it was much safer to be a Chinese living in Australia than an Australian in China. Late in the century six Australian missionaries, young women and men of compassion, were murdered in various episodes in China. When the Emperor of China sent commissioners to other lands in 1887 to see whether Chinese residents were ill-treated, he was informed that Chinese living in Java and the Philippines were treated rather worse than those living in Australia."

The old White Australia policy (ended by conservative governments in the 1960s) stupidly denied Australia the benefit of hard working non-European immigrants. It was short sighted and harmed our economic interests, a bit like our 1960s tariff wall. In it's day it was seen as protecting what were internationally advanced working conditions. The trade unions believed the coolie labour system, common across the Empire could get a toehold here. It had the support of the "social progressives" too. They used the White Australia policy to end an indentured black labour system then operating in North Queensland: Racism and reform in one package, neither wholly right or wholly wrong, it was certainly nothing later generations need apologise for. The article also has some fun pointing out features of Mexico's immigration policies here.

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ELSEWHERE

Who said that conservatives can't have fun? Though I must admit that British Conservative politicians do seem to like having their fun in unusual ways.

I have just posted here an article about Saudi Arabia that gives a vivid picture of what a disgusting place it is. Excerpt about their religious police: "Last year, when a girls' school caught fire, they stopped the fire brigade entering the blazing building in case the girls were not fully covered. As a result, 15 burned to death."

I have just posted here part of a report about the "peace" activist who makes a practice of invading U.S. airbases and damaging aircraft. His own mother cannot not understand why he does what he does but it is not hard to work out if you look at the results of his actions. Does he do anything to prevent war? No. Does he get heaps of personal publicity? Yes. So he is just another attention seeker -- and has been since he was in High School, it appears. Typical Leftist motivations, in other words. In our present terrorist age, however, he probably does the U.S. Airforce a great favour by making clear to them in a relatively harmless way how laughable their security is.

A good summary of the state of affairs in Zimbabwe here. You would think Tony Blair could spare a few troops to get rid of the obscene Mugabe, but Mugabe IS black, I suppose. Blacks can do anything without being pulled into line, of course. But even the French send in their troops to sort out their ex-colonies.

And elsewhere in Africa apes are disappearing and it's not global warming or industrialism that is doing it. Old fashioned hunting by Africans is to blame. How odd that the Greenies are not condemning Africans as the chief threat to an endangered species!

There is some good in everyone, they say: The French not only allow genetically modified crops to be grown but jail those who attack them.

There has just been a big conference in Boston which was 'intended to encourage and support litigation against the food industry'. The usual suspects -- lawyers and activists who use junk-science in an attempt to erode consumer freedom and turn food companies into their newest cash cow -- were on hand."

So it can happen: The Philippine government welcomed a public rejection of terrorism by Muslim rebels, saying it could lead to a resumption of peace talks.

Smallpox vaccination has been going on since 1796 (Yes. 1796, not 1976) and yet we get this self-important nonsense: "The next phase of the smallpox vaccination program should be put on hold while health authorities investigate possible severe side effects, a CDC advisory panel recommended Thursday."

"'If you keep a gun in your home,' a University of Pennsylvania press release said last week, 'you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound, according to research published in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.' ... Frightening results for people who own guns, or who are thinking of buying them. Frightening but, it turns out, meaningless -- another example of how unsound social science is being used in public-policy debates."

The Wicked one explains why a "young man" got shot in the head in South Africa.

In my academic posting here (or here) I point out that not to have a death penalty for serious crime is undemocratic.

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Sunday, June 22, 2003

STOPPING THE LITIGATION MANIA

And so she should: "A gun distributor wants the widow of a slain middle school teacher to pay its defense costs from last year's five-week trial. The Valor Corp.says it is entitled to recover legal costs, including attorneys' fees, because Pam Grunow lost her lawsuit accusing the Broward County company of being responsible for her husband's death. Valor sold the .25-caliber handgun that Lake Worth Middle School student Nathaniel Brazill used to kill Barry Grunow on the last day of school in 2000." And Brazill stole the gun, let it be noted. How was the gunmaker responsible for that? If these evil lawsuits that blame everyone but the wrongdoer are to be stopped, the people bringing such suits have to be made to bear the costs of their actions.

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SOME OF THE LATEST FROM Brookes News

Clinton in treason's shadow. Seeing as Hillary Clinton's book has decided to mock history in an attempt to clear a path to the White House, I think it behoves us to once again draw attention to the enormous damage her husband wilfully did to America's national security.
President Lula and the "untouchability" of communist Cuba. How nice, Brazil's President Lula and the rest of his charming socialists gang up with Castro against his victims and those who demand liberty for Cuba.
Bush and America’s political civil war. The ruckus over the 2000 election at least had the beneficial effect of revealing the enormous ideological rift that has been developing for more than thirty years in America.
Philip Adams' socialist hypocrisy. By keeping Adams shocking record on communist aggression and tyranny in mind when reading his current diatribes against Bush and his sneering references to WMDs one can see where he is coming from. Not only that, one can also see why he never refers to Saddam's crimes, the mass torture, the mass graves, even one filled with children..

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Russia’s President Putin is about to discover that no-one can do pomp and circumstance like the British. His getting such a grand welcome on his visit to London underscores what an asset to Britain the monarchy is. The disagreements between Putin and Prime Minister Blair are well-known but Russia is still a very important country whose friendship with the West must be fostered. And the monarchy helps with that by giving great honour to Russia despite minor differences at the political level.

The story of this unfortunate woman is as good an example as any of the disgraceful arrogance of government intervention in people’s private lives. We no longer allow government intervention in the private lives of homosexuals. Why do we allow it in the private lives of infertile couples? No child could be more wanted than one conceived through the great difficulties and uncertainties of IVF.

The FDA is up to its usual nonsense -- this time warning people that the long-lasting anti-impotence drug Cialis is “risky”. Yet it has been readily available on prescription in Australia and New Zealand for some time. Are American bodies so much frailer than Australian ones? All the FDA are interested in is protecting their own vast bureaucratic empire.

V.D. Hanson has an interesting review of a recent book about Napoleon that looks at why the murderous Corsican dictator is still widely admired -- even by his chief victims (the French). Excerpt: “Indeed Napoleon's enduring resonance in some parts of contemporary Western society tells us as much about ourselves as it does the self-proclaimed emperor. Johnson's matter-of-fact chronicle of executions, grotesque battle losses, betrayal, and outright lying—stripped of Napoleonic fluff and bluster—reflects deeply-rooted Anglo skepticism about messianic killers, as the principled careers of Englishmen like Edmund Burke, the Duke of Wellington, Winston Churchill, and most recently Tony Blair attest. In contrast, for the insecure, megalomaniac, and duplicitous, Napoleonic power holds an eternal appeal.”

The previous French government to the present one was not too hot either: “French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin stated that he was "proud" of the presence of communists in his government and shocked by a comparison to the Nazis.”

Thomas Sowell has an excellent short review of the work of Eric Hoffer. Excerpt: “People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding," Hoffer said. "When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business." “ He also has a good explanation of the “Limousine Liberal” phenomenon.

O to have such small concerns: "A Norwegian family of four is facing eviction for painting their front door green. Tor Ole Eriksen's colour choice has put him at odds with his local homeowners' association in Kristiansand. The Brattbakken homeowners' association allows doors to be painted only blue, red, gold or white."

I have received another email from a reader about the famously anti-Australian Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mohammad Mahathir -- which I have posted here. The email makes the point that Australia is more respected in Asia if we stick to our own traditions instead of pandering to theirs.

China Hand has some reflections about a modern Chinese film Shower. Excerpt: “The film is full of nostalgia for the old ways put pessimistic about their ability to survive”.

The Wicked one has some pretty appalling examples of perverted justice in California and New York.

In my academic posting here (or here), I look at whether whether there is a distinctive Protestant ethic in Australia today. In five surveys I found no differences between Protestants and Catholics but I did find differences between believers and unbelievers. These days it is the atheists and agnostics who are hard driving and ambitious.

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