MORE BLACK EYES FOR THE GREENIES

Fake food scares: "In this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, organic-farming cheerleader Michael Pollan declared: 'For several years now, an alternative, postindustrial food chain has been taking shape, its growth fueled by one 'food scare' after another: Alar, G.M.O.'s [sic], rBGH, E. coli 0157:H7; now B.S.E.' This, for Pollan, is a good thing. Never mind that the Alar scare, which devastated apple farmers, was an utter fabrication staged to raise money for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Forget that biotech crops pose zero risk to human health, that milk from cows given the 'recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone' is indistinguishable from conventional milk, that Americans are more likely to get E. coli food poisoning from eating organic produce, and that -- as Pollan himself admits -- the risk of getting mad cow disease 'may be vanishingly small.'"

UK to approve commercial growth of GM crops: "The Government will next month approve the commercial growing of genetically modified (GM) crops in Britain for the first time. But ministers will impose strict conditions on the cultivation of GM maize and ban commercial GM sugar beet and oilseed rape after trials showed that they could be more damaging to the environment than conventional crops ....."

A long but very comprehensive debunking of the "multiple frauds" behind the "Kyoto" greenhouse treaty here

Geologist David Demming questions "hottest year ever recorded" claims: "the borehole data also showed that present-day climatic conditions are in fact colder than average when compared to climatic conditions that prevailed over the 10,000-year-long rise of human civilization... The geological evidence demonstrating that 20th-century warming is nothing unusual has been ignored"

Demming also says that 'The Petroleum Age is just beginning": "For more than 80 years, geological estimates of the world's endowment of oil have risen faster than humanity can pump it out of the ground. In 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the total amount of oil remaining in the world amounted to only 20 billion barrels. By the year 2000, the estimate had grown to 3,000 billion barrels. "

And physicist Tom Gold says oil is not a fossil fuel anyway and that there are still vast amounts of it to be discovered beneath the earth. Hydrocarbons (the principal components of crude oil) have been observed throughout the universe -- including on planet Jupiter -- so clearly are far too common to be explained as the product of living organisms.

Gold has an excellent if rather depressing article on fashions in science here

A good comment from a reader about Greenie predictions: "I'm always amazed that people who have no idea what the weather will be in 24 hours, can somehow figure out what will happen in 24 years, or 24 decades. I heard that Mount Rainier is starting to rumble. When that blows, imagine what will happen to the atmosphere (not to mentions Seattle)"

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ELSEWHERE

The cricket was on in my home town of Brisbane yesterday -- a one-day international match. I could hear the roars of the crowd at the "Gabba" cricket-ground from where I sit writing this. India beat Australia by a whisker -- which no doubt caused great joy in India. The vast majority of the world's cricket fanatics are Indians.

Leftist hypocrisy goes back a long way. They believe in nothing other than their own brilliance. This is just one extract from a history of the Soviet propaganda apparatus: "If Americans in the adversary culture understood that the oppression of blacks was the society's great institutionalized crime, Stalinism would take the highest of high ground on the "Negro question." No matter that Stalin ruled a country where a significant part of the population languished in slave labor camps. If the English adversary culture saw philistinism and middle-class repression as the enemy, Stalinism would embrace iconoclastic taste and sexual liberty as nobody else did; the Bohemianism and flamboyant homosexuality of Guy Burgess were an indispensable part of his slick Stalinism and central to his place in Bloomsbury. No matter that Soviet sexual policy and taste were intolerant to a degree that made Colonel Blimp look liberated."

And not much has changed: "Nothing can be more obvious than that the current Democratic leadership considers actual principle a laughable electoral weakness. ... Democrats consider strength to be the skillful capture of swing votes via the tactically precise execution of a fuzzy policy of standing for nothing at all, as in the case of Bill Clinton."

The German media are even using mistranslation to put the USA in a bad light in Iraq.

Some breath left in American conservatism: "National leaders of six conservative organizations yesterday broke with the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, accusing them of spending like "drunken sailors," and had some strong words for President Bush as well"

That's government for you: "Australian civil servants have been warned they could face disciplinary action if they hold lunch meetings between noon and 2pm. An Education Department circular to all staff implies lunch meetings are permissible -- as long they're not at lunchtime. The bizarre edict is one of six changes to hospitality expenditure policy."

Left wing feminists were happy to criticise the Bush/Blair campaign against Saddam Hussein but they have had no such concerns about rushing into Iraq to export their own brand of feminism. Hypocrites? Carpet baggers? The real imperialists?

Irshad Manji has been called Osama Bin Laden's worst nightmare.

Seen on a billboard outside a church"Dear God, Please help me live up to the image that my dog has of me"

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Political extremists of both Left and Right have always loved their conspiracy theories but such theories now seem to be going mainstream. Frank Furedi -- one of the few psychologists I have respect for -- has a good article on why so many people now believe in conspiracy theories -- about the death of Princess Diana and JFK, about the 9/11 events and much else besides. As he says:

"The public's scepticism towards the official version of events surrounding Diana's death is the result of a profound sense of distrust in conventional authority. We live in an age of rumours where official facts often carry little more authority than an internet site devoted to alien abduction".

Under Leftist and Greenie influence, people have been told so many lies that public skepticism about government statements is warmly to be welcomed in my view. As a libertarian, I can only hope that it carries over into skepticism about the worth of government in general.

Gerard Henderson also has a good article on conspiracy theories -- though his evidence for thinking that Australians are less affected by them is pretty dated.

But Germany would now seem to be the world headquarters for conspiracy theorists. Modern-day realities seem to be too much altogether for Germans.

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ELSEWHERE

My mention yesterday of the demand for legal polygamy brought this response from one reader: "Polygamy is already "legal"! Back in the late 70s, this guy I worked with practiced polygamy. I heard he had personal checks with 3 names - his, and his two "wives". And the house was also "shared". If there is no marriage involved, any number of "partners" is legal. And mobility is easy - when you get tired or want to make a new arrangement, you do it. So what the hell do these people demanding "legal polygamy" want? More restrictions on their "relationship" - divorce courts, etc?" And most married men seem to have “girlfriends” at some stage too. The polygamist is just more upfront about it.

The American Left seem to have slowed down their tirade to the effect that GWB is intent on establishing an American "empire" but if there is any doubt that the American presence abroad is nothing like the empires of the past, Herbert London sets the record straight. He shows it is not even like the British Empire.

A reader noted this article on changing standards in modern society. It shows that in the US military, obesity is punished but deserters can go free -- so my reader asks: "Does this mean that they treat desserters tougher than deserters?". Very droll.

There is a fun story here about an engineer's encounter with "postmodern" literary criticism. He says that figuring out what it is all about is "a mind stretching departure from debugging C code" -- and any programmer knows how hard that can be. After studying it, he concludes: "The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all". Personally, I regard that as a charitable judgment.

What fun! "Two words in the modern French vocabulary are almost invariably spoken here with an air of disgust: mondialisation (globalization) and McDonaldisation (no translation necessary). Tomorrow, in what some would see as the next step toward American homogenization and a gastronomic faux pas, Starbucks Coffee Company opens its first retail store in the heart of the City of Light."

On anti-Americanism: "A large part of the European left spent a large part of the 20th century hating the United States not because it had economic inequality or Jim Crow but because it did not have show trials, labor camps and the other appurtenances of "actually existing socialism." ". But, aside from that, it all boils down to jealousy. And, childish though it is, jealousy is all too common.

Are GWB and some libertarians trying to model U.S. immigration policy on the policy of Saudi Arabia? "So, the president's proposal would create a permanent guestworker class, millions strong, but lacking any realistic timetable for becoming Americans".

Pat Buchanan has some tough words criticising Bush's amnesty for illegals: "Consider what the president is saying with his amnesty. He is telling us that he cannot or will not do his constitutional duty to defend the states from invasion. He is saying that he simply cannot or will not protect our borders or enforce our immigration laws. He is saying he will no longer send illegal aliens back"

Wow! I had no idea that it was this difficult to get a prescription filled in America. If you go to a pharmacist in Australia in the morning and something is out of stock, they get it for you by that afternoon. In my experience that even applies to prescriptions requiring special authorization.

PID debunks the Leftist myths surrounding late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Whether or not Saddam had WMD's, he had some extremely advanced military equipment -- as this article shows (with 3 photos). No wonder the Russians opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They were sending Saddam their best stuff and now the U.S. has it!

The Wicked one has an interesting quiz about age.

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GREENIE CORNER

A good summary of Bjorn Lomborg's findings (PDF): "Professor Lomborg does believe that global warming is taking place. However, he says: "The cure is worse than the ailment. Let's not focus on phantom problems at the expense of real problems." All the Kyoto treaty on global warming would achieve is to postpone warming for six years, he argues. For a bill of $4 trillion, a 2 degree rise in temperature would arrive in 2106 instead of 2100."

In contrast, a recent BBC "Horizon" program presents a variety of scientific data showing that Britain is headed for a new ice age!!! -- possibly with 20 years. Ahh!! How lovely to have such scientific certainty about these things. It is certainly true geologically that we are living at the end of a warm interglacial period so I have always said that we might one day need all the global warming we can get. Geology is not a very precise clock, however, so whether the next ice age will start in 20 years or in 1,000 years time, nobody can say -- though the start does already seem to be overdue. When it does start, however, Canada will rapidly cease to exist. Canada should be laughing the Kyoto treaty to death, not supporting it.

Don't mention the Sun! "The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes of have material burst out from our star's surface and streamed into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth."

The air gets cleaner, while environmental politics gets dirtier "The way the administration's environmental critics tell it, you can't see your hand in front of your face anymore because of all the pollution Bush has allowed his big business buddies to emit. That's certainly the theme of every green activist group, Democratic presidential hopeful, and far too many environmental journalists. But there is one big problem with this scenario -- it's the exact opposite of reality, according to a 2003 report by the Environmental Protection Agency."

Disease doesn't have much to do with climate change one way or the other: "Every year, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation, 150,000 people succumb to the effects of global warming... But what about all the elderly and infirm people who would have died had this winter been as cold as those frequently experienced in Europe during the 19th century? Strangely, these non-deaths do not appear to feature in the World Health Organisation's one-sided ledger"

Alarmism sells papers: "It seems that virtually every news organ in the English language has carried the story of new scientific claims published in Nature magazine that by 2050 over a million species will be doomed to extinction owing to the effects of global warming. Yet few of them realized how flimsy the story actually is."

John Daly also takes apart recent claims of greenhouse species extinction.

And another article that says the mass extinction is more like a mass exaggeration

Carbon dioxide is beneficial, not harmful: "The results of this impressive study of real-world agricultural operations in a significantly CO2-enriched atmosphere -- which is the only environmental change we can be confident will occur in the foreseeable future -- bodes well indeed for the financial well-being of Western Australian wheat farmers and the land that supports them."

The green machine "Twenty EU member and accession states labour under a cadre of panels collectively known as the European Environmental Advisory Council (EEAC). Styling itself as a body 'to provide independent, scientifically based advice on the environment and sustainable development,' this so-called 'network' is actually a series of organisations funded by the European Commission to lobby for their interests locally."

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby asks the obvious next question in the homosexual marriage debate -- Is lawful polygamy next? "Three adults who want to live together as a husband and two wives asked a federal court this week to strike down Utah's ban on polygamy as a violation of their constitutional rights". Why a guy would feel the need for a government certificate to say he sticks his penis up some other guy's behind rather escapes me but as a libertarian I think all marriage should be a matter of civil contract anyway.

To put it plainly: "Now the Democrats and their reactionary academic gurus are peddling the notion that what will make people rich is, once again, raiding the wealth of those who are already rich. More taxation, they scream, not more production and free trade. These pathetic people are counting on voters to be motivated not from an honest desire to become prosperous -- one that would incline a person to work harder, to invest wisely, and to save prudently. No, they hope that voters are motivated from rank envy, the desire to bring down those who have it better than they do. And to fuel this envy good and hard, these vile politicians are preaching class warfare and zero-sum political economy."

Homeschoolers vs. Big Brother: "New Jersey's child welfare system, like most state child welfare systems, is a corrupt and deadly mess. Children are lost in the shuffle, shipped to abusive foster homes, returned to rapists and child molesters, and left to die in closets while paperwork piles up. So whom does the government decide to punish for the bureaucracy's abysmal failure to protect these innocents? Homeschoolers. And what does the government think will solve its ills? More power and paperwork."

The Spectator has a satirical piece lampooning Cherie Blair's advice to the Vatican after a recent state visit. It also says that Mrs Blair is just the latest incarnation of one of a common English character: "Mrs Blair is in a noble tradition among British women. She knows what is good for us. ...Mrs Blair's generation must espouse what the age most values. This seems to be two, on the face of it, incompatible things: diversity and equality".

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Unemployment and the tyranny of aggregates It was sad state of affairs when in late 2001 economic news from the US surprised and contradicted our economic commentators. For sometime I had been predicting a significant rise in unemployment as America's recession unfolded. So what happened?
Bush, Beijing and al Qaeda By striking hard and swiftly against terrorists, by imposing on them and their paymasters a terrible price, Bush not only sent a vitally important message to other terrorists and their potential supporters but also to Beijing's generals. For this the world should be immensely grateful.
Why increased consumption hampered America's economic recovery Greenspan's policy of trying to promote increased consumption hindered economic recovery in America. Concentrating on consumption at the expense of production is a recipe for prolonging recessions.
The media, Iraq and the traitor Burchett Even though the Soviet Empire collapsed some years ago many of our so-called journalists still refuse to call those Westerners who worked for the murderous KGB traitors.
Addressing the causes of terrorism: A cry from the Quisling Left There is a cry from the Quislings and fifth columnists among us that we must not only address terrorism, but to also "address the causes of terrorism". I shall address it right now.
Hillary Clinton's acceptable level of homicide To Hillary Clinton and her progressive friends more dead blacks and Hispanics was a small price to pay to fulfil her ambition to become the country's first female president.

Details here

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HOW AWFUL THAT CONSERVATIVES ARE HAPPIER!

The Tugboat is getting all churned up at the moment over the well-established fact that conservatives are happier than Leftists. He first fusses over whether the differences in a recent Gallup poll are statistically significant -- apparently unaware that statistical significance is just a way of allowing for small sample size and, as such, irrelevant to large public opinion polls -- unless very small subsections of them are being examined separately. His post was too long and rambling for me to read right through but he appears to be convinced that conservatives are only happier because they are more self-deluded! I guess that, as a Leftist, he has to believe that.

No doubt some study of 30 American college students somewhere has shown that happy people are more self-deluded. American college students are very obliging about giving their Leftist psychology professors what they want. I have critiqued such studies too often to want to do it again. The phenomenon even has a name. It is called The Rosenthal Effect.

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ELSEWHERE

The Democrats seem to be back on the socialized medficine trail -- but they don't have to look further than New York to see where it leads. One of my medical correspondents comments: "And most doctors simply don't want to practice in NY State because of this nonsense - so the State subsidizes medical education (I don't know where these doctors end up, but I can tell you that several Anesthesia Residents we fired from our (Backward Southern) institution were immediately hired in NY (Progressive, Enlightened) because they were short on doctors)"

Bin Laden losing: "The United States' global 'war on terrorism' has clearly entered a new phase. Regardless of how one feels about the US-led war in Iraq, the results of that war, and especially the increased capability that US forces have shown in fighting terrorism, capturing Saddam Hussein and gaining valuable intelligence thereby, have had a decisive effect.

FrontPage seems to be taking the phenomenon of white nationalism seriously. Confronted by whites arguing for "group rights" in the same way that minority advocates do, some multicuturalists now seem to have re-discovered the benefits of colour blind integrationism.

Virginia Postrel has an excellent summary article on the free-market and other ideas of Friedrich Hayek and the way his ideas took decades to be recognized for the great insights that they are.

This article about evangelical Christianity in America rings true. The author sees it as being anything but fanatical and a long way from the Protestant dogmatism of the past.

The lowdown on the "condom in my soup" case.

An Australian atomic physicist has put links to "PC Watch" and "Dissecting Leftism" on his home page -- and I do get a few hits off it. Should be more of it!

Donald Luskin has a lot of good jokes up at the moment. I particularly liked the one about GWB and the Pope.

A government commuter railroad kills: "NSW State Rail has knowingly operated defective trains since 1988, according to a report that blames the authority for the Waterfall rail disaster that killed seven people last January."

China Hand has just posted on his other site yet another attempt to drum sense into people about the folly of "protecting" jobs. GWB's recent steel tariff fiasco shows that this ailment of the brain can afflict even those who are supposed to be in favour of free trade. China Hand is also addressing a committed conservative -- his brother -- and uses the example of Australia's large-scale abandonment of protectionism to show how beneficial that is.

The Wicked one has lots of funnies up.

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SOME SIMPLE ECONOMICS

Leftists still haven't learned basic economic lessons even when delivered by one of their own. This biographical piece outlines some uncommon economic sense on minimum wages and government intervention in agriculture delivered by socialist economist Gunnar Myrdal.

New jobs for old: "It is in destroying jobs that the economy improves and makes it possible for the standard of living of all Americans to increase. This constant churning means that even a "stagnant" American job market is extremely dynamic, and that the ranks of the unemployed are not necessarily the dispossessed of the earth, as Democrats tend to portray them."

"An inevitable consequence of socialism is the division of society into two groups; those who are consuming government 'services' and those who are paying for them. As the waning and collapse of socialist countries around the globe has clearly demonstrated, those who consume eventually overwhelm those who provide. ... Every entitlement program the government ever instituted has or soon will metastasize into an open ended endowment that politicians can incrementally expand to buy votes; 'vote for me and we'll take care of you, too.' The best illustration of this point is the history of Social Security."

Too logical for his own good: "Early in our marriage, 40-some years ago, Mrs. Williams would return from shopping complaining about the unreasonable prices. Having aired her complaints, she'd then ask me to unload her car laden with purchases. After the unloading, I'd ask her: 'I thought you said the prices were unreasonable. Why did you buy them? Are you unreasonable? Only an unreasonable person would pay unreasonable prices.' The discussion always headed downhill after such an observation."

Indian economist Jagdish Baghwati has come out swinging in favour of globalization. He gives the facts and figures to show what an enormous influence it is in reducing Third-world poverty. "During the three decades that Bhagwati's India was a relatively closed economy, for example, the economy grew at 4 percent a year, and the poverty rate hovered around 55 percent. But in the two decades since it opened its economy to foreign trade and investment, economic growth averaged five percent; by 2000, the poverty rate had fallen to 26 percent. China's experience was similar: with liberalization came spectacular growth, and poverty declined from 28 to 9 percent between 1978 and 1998."

Californian stupidity is very bad for business: "Robert Peritz is no jingoist, despite how he sounds at times ... Neither is the ex-New Yorker ... some storming anti-government extremist -- despite his rants against politicians and bureaucrats: 'There is too much big government and a lot of bad policy right here in this state. The politicians and bureaucrats are making and passing regulations that are actually running businesses out of town. We need less government intrusion into our lives.' Peritz, in truth, is an inherently humble guy who knows what's what. He's clear that in business, as in life, if you do good things, good things will come back to you."

Facts don't matter to some, apparently: "Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon professor .. argues that cities that attract gays, bohemians, and ethnic minorities are the new economic powerhouses because they are also the places where creative workers_the kind who start and staff innovative, fast-growing companies_want to live... [BUT] Far from being economic powerhouses, a number of the cities the professor identifies as creative-age winners have chronically underperformed the American economy..."

An important reminder about free trade: "Before getting into the heart of the matter, let us remind ourselves of a basic but important fact: Tariffs are taxes. No matter how sophisticated the argument, when someone opposes free trade, what that really means is that he favors the placement of taxes (or similar restrictions) on consumers."

Unemployment: "Chronic unemployment is only and can only be caused by one thing. That is the resistance of the unemployed worker to accept employment at a rate or in an area that reflects his current market value. Remember as long as any human desire remains unfilled there is work that can be done. This means there is always work."

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ELSEWHERE

Boondoggle opens: Australia's billion dollar railroad to nowhere. Australia has a history of huge government spending on uneconomic projects -- the Snowy and Ord river schemes being the most notable predecessors of the present nonsense of spending over a billion dollars to service a town of only 80,000 people.

Those awful religious people! There's an interesting study in the October 2003 issue of Policy Review on "Religious Faith and Charitable Giving". The study was of 30,000 religious and non-religious people. It found that religious people give to charity and volunteer themselves SIGNIFICANTY more than non-religious people. The study measures people of the same socio-economic and educational class. Also, religious people give to non-religious affiliated charities more often than non-religious people do.

This article from TCS shows that George Soros is like many people who are very good at one specialization -- totally ignorant of the real world outside that specialty.

More Leftist lies about American "imperialism" exposed in Front Page.

At least the Spanish have got cojones: "Muslim author of book advocating wife-beating jailed"

David's Medienkritik has an amusing picture of Germany's Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder (look at his feet).

Chris Brand has a further posting on the latest attack on free speech in Britain -- the sacking of a TV presenter who once made disparaging remarks about Muslims.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again as your contents-page of the blogosphere for the last week

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SELECTED GOVERNMENTAL IDIOCY

Government idiocy at its finest: "Last year Sandy Meadows, who supervises the floral department at an Albertson's supermarket in Baton Rouge, was filling in at another Albertson's store that had lost its florist when she was visited by an inspector from the Louisiana Horticulture Commission. He told her she'd have to throw out the seven arrangements she had produced that morning if she wanted to avoid a $250 citation for practicing floristry without a license. Louisiana appears to be the only state in the nation that treats unlicensed florists making unauthorized arrangements as a public menace.

And this idiocy is nearly as bad: ""Is the war on terrorism over? Have we stopped drug trafficking? Has corruption in corporate America ended? We must have cured these problems. Why else would federal officials spend their time prosecuting people for importing lobster tails in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes?

But 40 years of trying has not made this one work: "In his State of the Union address forty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an 'unconditional war on poverty in America.' Since then, the federal government has created vast new bureaucracies and raised taxes to a staggering level not seen since World War Two. L.B.J. helped create welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), Medicare, Head Start, the Job Corps, and Medicaid. Worst of all, most of L.B.J.'s War on Poverty was a failure."

The British contribution: "The Government has announced it is to scrap an obscure law after shop staff refused to serve a police officer a sausage roll. Constable Dougie Brown was on duty in the village of Nettleham, near Lincoln, last month when he tried to buy the snack in his local Co-op store. It turned out that the staff had acted according to the letter of the law which bans the sale of 'any liquor or refreshment' to an on-duty policeman without the permission of a senior officer."

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ELSEWHERE

Safire in the NYT has joined the chorus in concluding that the Iraq invasion has been of enormous strategic benefit to the USA and to world peace. And even a German newspaper has condescended to notice positive developments in Iraq.

Keith Burgess-Jackson says that feminists have lied to women in saying that they "can have it all" -- and he once had feminist views himself. I myself have been fortunate in knowing lots of women who are very happy to be female but I do blame feminism in part for raising women's expectations to unrealistic levels and thus making them postpone childbearing until it is too late. Two of my four ex-wives have had no children -- despite both being very good and capable women.

The current City Journal has a couple of rather pessimistic articles: George Will thinks it will be a long haul before Iraq becomes democratic and James Q. Wilson thinks that terrorists will be with us for a long time yet.

Putin's "authoritarian liberalism" may be better for Russia than corrupted democracy. We cannot expect them to leap in one bound from centuries of oppression to where we are now: "For all its dictatorial tendencies, the contemporary Russian state clearly exhibits some restraint. It does not seek to intervene in every aspect of its citizens' lives, and Russia is a country where people can and do criticise the government without being molested. In many respects the government of Vladimir Putin is probably the most benign in Russian history. Like the Whites, Putin is no liberal democrat, but his promotion of state interests may well be the best hope for liberal democracy in Russia."

Slavery is alive and well in the Islamic world: "From the Niger River to Sudan slavery continues to be practiced and justified in the name of the Koran"

Now that soot has been shown to have global warming potential, the Greenies are trying to blame soot on Diesel engines used in the West and are ignoring the huge output of soot from poorer countries. A reader who has been overseas recently writes: "I crossed from Romania to Bulgaria, two extremely poor, poor countries, the living conditions were about 12thC in the country, Romania especially. The Danube was anything but blue & huge power plants belching out smoke & SOOT! It certainly did away with any romantic notions one may have had".

A good report about current health panics on "Spiked" -- problems which the do-gooders of course blame on everything modern: More people are getting cancer! How Awful! But is it? It's mainly because people are living longer and older people are more prone to cancer. British sperm counts are dropping! How awful! Will the British die out? Hardly, it was only men with fertility problems who had lower counts and counts vary widely anyhow.

Not all actors and actresses are imbecilic Leftists. See at the bottom of this article for some very sensible comments by John Rhys-Davies, the actor who played "Gimli" (the dwarf) in 'Lord of the Rings'

PP McGuinness has an interesting review of a humorous film about the old Communist East Germany. He knows something of it from personal experience. He concludes: "Everybody has had hankerings after the creation of a new society, a vision, the ongoing progressive march forwards - but the reality is that carrying such hankerings beyond youth leads not to utopia but to dystopia".

A big collection of LEFTIST race-hatred here.

Yesterday I mentioned in passing an economist (Gittins) who thinks that "money does not buy happiness" is a reason to stop giving people more of what they want. There is a reply to Gittins here

Heh! Heh! I am in a minority again: "Blogs are currently the province of the young, with 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30".

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HAPPINESS

George Will has a good review of a recent Gregg Easterbrook book on happiness. The basic point, of course, is that making a lot of money does not necessarily bring happiness. Anybody who reads anything about the lives of filmstars would have known that at least 50 years ago but economists and Leftists seem to have discovered it only recently and are using it as a weapon to say that we should stop trying to give people what they want -- in good authoritarian style. Nicolae Ceausescu, Joseph Stalin and Marshall Tito would approve.

But I had a post last year that traces unhappiness to Leftist values and it is certainly clear that conservatives are in fact happier.

So some things DO generally make a difference to your happiness -- and HOW you spend your money is a factor: "Money can buy happiness and the best investment advice may be as simple as the sports shoe slogan: just do it. That's the conclusion drawn by researchers who set out to identify what sort of spending made people happiest"

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ELSEWHERE

An editorial in "USA Today" backs U.S. intervention in Iraq as having improved world peace and safety and rejects Leftist claims that it has been "destabilizing" etc.

In the latest City Journal, Heather MacDonald shows that some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet cops cannot use the most obvious tool to catch them: their immigration status. Reasons: fear of offending powerful immigrant lobbies

A reader comments on "global warming": "Last year, there were no roses in Montreal in June - the winter had been the worst in many years. Apparently, more of the same this year."

An encouraging article here about moderate Islam in Turkey. Very different from the Arab world. Turks are an entirely different race from the Arabs of course and until roughly a century ago held most of the Arab world in subjection.

I have said little so far about the latest GWB illegal immigration "solution" because it does seem very complex. I am however almost sure that bureaucratic incompetence will transform it into a virtual "open-door" policy. Jeff Jacoby, however, seems to have some sensible comments on the matter and his stress on putting life back into "e pluribus unum" (i.e. the policy of assimilation) I heartily agree with. Australia has successfully assimilated a huge immigrant intake and America can do the same if the Leftist "all cutures are equal" dogma is defied.

The lost Left: "An examination of the plans that former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) and the rest of the nine dwarfs have proposed reveals just how sharply leftward the Democratic Party has tilted in recent years. Every one of the major contenders wants to raise taxes, wants to re-regulate key industries, militantly opposes private accounts for Social Security, supports the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, and would seek a much higher minimum wage. Most would create a Hillary Health Care- type plan for the nation"

About time: "People are turning increasingly to alternatives such as the Internet for news about the presidential campaign, shifting away from traditional outlets such as the nightly network news and newspapers, a poll found"

Dave Huber has a good post on the nonsense that passes for modern educational theory -- and which is all too often being imposed on our kids nowadays. I myself have taught High School under both systems -- "student directed" and "traditional" and there is no doubt which delivers students who know their subject.

The poor old Sikhs seem to have fallen foul of French anti-religious laws. For a Sikh not to wear a turban is to abandon his faith so I hope they are given an exemption -- as they so often are elsewhere. I have known Sikhs since my early youth and think they are exceptionally good citizens wherever they live.

"KOALA contraception was being considered as a way to curb population blow-outs among the marsupials in Victoria". But the Greenies still oppose any development in areas that Koalas inhabit, of course.

The Far-Leftist MoveOn.org has been goosestepping backwards with its on-again off-again hate- speech about GWB being a "Nazi".

It looks like mad cow disease has become a hobbyhorse for some pretty mad people (if a disease can be a hobbyhorse). See here

Michael Darby has put up another big selection of postings. Some of his headlines:
Yet another "bank" scam
Cathy Buckle: Deepening Disaster in Zimbabwe
French Corruption
"Beyond the Razor Wire" - the truth about asylum-seekers
Seventy-two Dark-Eyed Virgins still taught as reward for Shahada (Death for Allah)
Democracy & the Enemies of Freedom
Tough Times For Terrorists
Public Broadcasting Service, Recruiting for Islam
Prepared for war and peace on Earth
Tax Reform for the New Century

The Wicked one has an Australian elaboration of an old joke about the FBI etc.

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WINDSCHUTTLE THE REALIST

Keith Windschuttle has a good review of a book about the "Noble Savage" myth that has for so long been so popular on the Left. I noted here on 4th how ludicrous is the image of primitive societies as wonderful and peaceful and non-violent. There is also a post at Marginal Revolution showing that in primitive societies an average of about 30% of all male deaths are caused by warfare! Peaceful indeed! The post also shows that deaths from warfare in the US and Europe are the tiniest fraction of that.

Windschuttle has also of course come under continuing attack for his revelations about how Australian history has been misreported by Leftist historians. His latest "salvo in reply" pulls no punches (If a salvo can pull punches). See here.

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ELSEWHERE

Whoopee! "Australia has abandoned a major international measure aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that it is unlikely to come into effect and creates no incentive for industry to reduce such emissions"

Record Cold Freezes Northeastern States. That pesky global warming again!

An understandable wish: "An American Airlines commuter flight was diverted after a passenger passed a note to the crew demanding to be taken to Australia"

Those good old generous taxpayers again: "FORKLIFT drivers, nurses, engineers, teachers, clerks, information technology workers and architects are among the 292 "displaced" public servants costing taxpayers more than $17 million a year. They each earn an average of $61,000 a year despite having no official duties".

Those impartial librarians: "Ann Sparanese, a member of the governing Council of the American Library Association, has written a letter to the Voice criticizing my columns about Fidel Castro's prison sentences of 20 and more years for 75 Cuban dissenters, including 10 independent librarians. ... At an upcoming midwinter meeting in San Diego, from January 9 to 14, the ALA plans to decide whether it will indeed live up to its principles and finally support the locked-up independent librarians in Cuba. It has refused so far."

Unbelievable. Airline pilots still not armed: "They fly by the Capitol, but the bureaucrats won't trust pilots with guns.... "

"If American democracy is finally done in, the perpetrators will unlikely be Hitlerian figures whose strutting authoritarianism is plain to see, but a collection of well-meaning, schoolmarm-like activists who aim to restrict our freedoms for our own supposed good.

Worth remembering: GWB won the presidency without a majority of the popular vote but so did JFK. No Democrat outrage about that, though!

More conservative than GWB? "In his first speech to California's Legislature, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday touted March ballot measures aimed at solving the state's budget problems and demanded an overhaul of worker compensation laws to cut employers' costs and create more jobs. Schwarzenegger warned that painful spending cuts are coming as he outlined his agenda for 2004 in the annual 'state of the state' speech in Sacramento."

I guess I know why this is: Under US Army rule, Baghdad has a lower per capita murder rate than most US big cities. That reminds me of something else: I believe that whilst Australian troops were in Vietnam in the 60's they had a lower death-rate there than they did whilst back in Australia. One of my Army friends of that time was a case in point. He came back from Vietnam safe and sound only to die in a car accident in Australia. I am still saddened by the loss of Lt. Michael Joseph James Gillespie ("Mick") but it was drunk-driving that killed him, not the Viet Cong. I cannot imagine how his family must have felt at the loss of such a splendid young man in his prime of life. I hope their faith helped them.

Sowell: The BBC confuses neutrality with objectivity: "Objectivity refers to an honest seeking of the truth, whatever that truth may turn out to be and regardless of what its implications might be. Neutrality refers to a preconceived "balance," which subordinates the truth to this preconception". Sowell gives as an example historian Robert Conquest who objectively reported the famines and other horrors of the Soviet era -- but who was constantly accused by the Left of "bias" because of it. But we all now know that Conquest was right.

I have just put up a lot of Chris Brand's recent posts here. He has a big coverage of the cancellation by the BBC of a popular TV show because the presenter once made anti-Arab remarks. And the Arabs are gloating about it too.

Arlene Peck notes that millions of illegal Hispanic immigrants are now to be welcomed into the USA and hopes that a few million Palestinians can come too. She is sure they would be happier in the USA than in Israel.

The Wicked one has recent posts on diet fraud and sexual abstinence!

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GREENIE CORNER

A nasty dilemma for the Greenies: "an MIT study says a global tripling of nuclear power generation could avoid nearly 2 billion tonnes of carbon emissions annually".

Why Greenies like to forget that water vapor is a "greenhouse gas" "Just how much of the "Greenhouse Effect" is caused by human activity? It is about 0.28%, if water vapor is taken into account-- about 5.53%, if not. This point is so crucial to the debate over global warming that how water vapor is or isn't factored into an analysis of Earth's greenhouse gases makes the difference between describing a significant human contribution to the greenhouse effect, or a negligible one. Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect"

The Latest "Kyoto" nonsense, aid to Saudi Arabia: "Delegates said that Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, wanted promises of aid if Kyoto spurs a shift to renewable energies like tidal, solar or wind energy at the expense of fossil fuels"

GM crops becoming accepted: "The debate over Genetically Modified Organisms usually focuses on their safety. However, as study after scientific study continues to find that no unique or inherent risks arise from biotechnology, people will slowly but increasingly come to accept GM foods. Earlier this month, for example, the European Food Safety Authority announced that a particular variety of GM maize was perfectly safe for human consumption."

Unshakable Greenie religion: "Alarming predictions of mass extinctions due to future global warming, forthcoming in this week's edition of the journal Nature, represent yet another salvo in the ideological battle to frighten the public into believing in a future of catastrophic climate change. ... 'Not only are the conclusions outlandish, but the theory upon which the entire article rests has been itself thoroughly disproved,' said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Iain Murray."

Crackpot Radio: "It is one thing to lean left politically. It is quite another to look the other way in the face of out-and-out lies, fraud, and misinformation in the arena of environmental science. The other day, I listened as my local National Public Radio (NPR) station gave a complete pass to a crackpot telling everyone in the listening audience that wind, waves, photovoltaic cells, and solar energy could easily replace fossil fuel."

A few days ago I noted with approval Randall Parker's comments on soot as a cause of global warming and had a laugh at how inconvenient it is for Greenies that it is mostly poor countries that produce lots of soot. A reader confirms that: "In 1988, at least, I would have classified Hungary as third-world. I happened to be there on a smallish economic visit. The low technology that they were using at the time made breathing the Pest air a challenge; the Buda air was better, since it sits on a bluff overlooking the Danube (Donau) .... Ditto for Bangkok, at least in the mid to late '60s. I suppose that most Asian cities are still that way". I commented jokingly in my post that Randall might end up wearing cement shoes for speaking so much truth and I am sad to say that there was an element of truth in that. Randall has emailed me to say that he has at times got hate-mail and abuse as a result of his attempts at objectivity.

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ELSEWHERE

"Former US president Bill Clinton said in October during a visit to Portugal that he was convinced Iraq had weapons of mass destruction up until the fall of Saddam Hussein, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said". Portuguese blogger Valete Fratres (post of 9th) gives a selection of quotes from what Clinton said as President that back up the story. So if Bush lied, Clinton lied too!

Maybe I am easily amused but this comment about General Wesley Clark in Opinion Journal made me laugh: "Clark, who has never run for office and has spent virtually his entire adult life in the military, has had far less contact with women than have most politicians (to say nothing of Bill Clinton)...."

Bernard Chapin is a good man. He has just "interviewed" me (via email) for Men's News Daily.

An excellent article about Rush Limbaugh's painkiller problems and the relentless media attack on him. One excerpt: "About the criminal probes, Limbaugh attorney Roy Black asks rhetorically, "Of all of the . . . millions of people who've become addicted to painkillers, some very well-known people, have you ever seen search warrants served on their doctor's offices? Have you ever watched people on television leafing through records, calling out the names of their doctors and a list of medications they were using? Has anyone ever seen that before? The first person is Rush Limbaugh. And you have to ask yourself, why is that?"

Good to see a glimmering of sense entering the discussion of the African AIDS "epidemic". I have always pointed out (e.g. here) that in Africa almost any serious disease is automatically attributed to AIDS. It seems that the official wisdom is beginning to agree. With just a little more care about their statistics, they have reduced the number of cases in Kenya from 3 million to 1 million, for instance. But what's a couple of million people between friends?

Wow! The famous Tuskegee experiment of the 1930s which left syphilitic blacks untreated is now routinely held up as an example of wicked racist deeds. BUT, someone who has looked behind the hype reports: "I also learned that the study emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and wellbeing of the African-American population" Those racist liberals! And it was only blacks who appeared to have got over the disease who were left untreated anyway.

The "Carnegie" study that strongly criticises the Iraq policies of the Bush administration has got a lot of press. The authors are presented as "experts" and "researchers". In fact, two of the authors worked for Clinton. The third author, Joseph Cirincione, has proven himself to be a hardline Bush-hater and a foe of the "neo-conservatives". David Kaspar has the details.

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THE DEMOCRATS ARE RELIGION-HATERS: WHY?

A reader has pointed me to a good background article on how polarized along religious lines American politics have become. We all know that there is a strong affinity in America between real Christians and the Republicans but the article also points out the survey evidence showing that the Democrats generally (and Democrat convention delegates in particular) are equally (and fervently) anti-religion [unless the religion is Islam, of course]. It also shows that the Leftist media consistently downplay the anti-religious nature of the Democrats. Just some excerpts:

"ANES results indicate that anti-fundamentalism appears disproportionately among secularists, the highly educated, particularly those living in big cities, and persons who strongly favor legalized abortion and gay rights, oppose prayer in schools, and who, ironically, "strongly agree" that one should be tolerant of persons whose moral standards are different from one's own .... over a quarter of Clinton's white supporters in 1992 said that they intensely disliked Christian fundamentalists... despite the reams of data documenting the alignment of secularists with the Democratic party and the countermovement of religious traditionalists into the Republican party, the media, particularly network news, has tended to emphasize only the latter phenomenon... What viewers do not hear about is the secularist vote, which has gone two to one in the Democratic direction in the past three presidential elections"

Why the Leftist media downplay the religion-hating among Democrats is a really easy question to answer: Religion is an almost universal human experience and atheists are never more than a small minority in any national population. Most people have SOME religious beliefs. So being totally and vocally anti-religion would be a big vote-loser.

But are Democrats really anti-religion? Are they not just anti-fundamentalist? The simple answer to that it that it is the fundamentalists who really are religious. To call your average Episcopalian religious would be a joke and even Catholicism is only a shadow of what it once was. But, aside from that, the article does give a lot of survey data showing that the influential core of the Democrats really are anti-religious in general. They are far more rejecting of religion than the American population at large. So why?

It is no mystery at all, really. Leftists are against ANYTHING that is "established" in the society they inhabit. They are always against the status quo, whatever that might be -- and America is a very religious country. To Leftists religion is a big, complacent target that they itch to tear down -- just as the Soviet Communists once did. Modern Leftism is just an attempt to achieve communist goals by stealth and attacking religion is an integral part of that. Leftists cannot stand any creed but their own -- with their own superior wisdom being the core of that creed.

It may be worth noting that Left/Right politics in Australia are NOT religiously polarized. Why? Because Australia is one of the world's most irreligious countries so religion is not a target big enough for the Left to aim at. By American rules, Australia should also therefore be frantically Leftist. It is anything but. It is also one of the world's most conservative countries with a government that is arguably more conservative than America's. It is less wishy-washy on free trade; It has STOPPED illegal immigration and -- despite Australia having had its own "9/11" in Bali -- has no special security legislation that threatens civil liberties. There have also been no notable expansions of the Australian welfare State for many years. And it is one of the few countries that DID help out in the invasion of Iraq.

So the U.S. situation is clearly the result of U.S. Leftists attacking Christianity out of their hatred of ordinary Americans. American Christians have been driven into the Republican party because only there do they find respect for themselves and their liberties.

After my post yesterday about Christianity and holiness, I received what I regard as a true Christian response from Father Mike Walsh of the Catholic Maryknoll Society. He emailed me: "God, I'm sure, doesn't mind your atheism. And neither do I. Keep up the good fight, and as to the whited sepulchres, keep giving it to them good and hard"

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ELSEWHERE

Democrat hypocrisy over tax: "Nowhere is this more striking than in the sudden scrambling of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, who has advocated repealing all of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, including those for the middle class. Now, under heavy fire from his rivals, Dr. Dean is preparing a new tax plan that is widely expected to offer tax relief for the middle class"

More amazing hypocrisy: Free trade was supported by the Democrats as recently as Clinton -- but not now. They have no principles or guiding philosophy whatever -- but I guess the support many of them gave to a Fascist dictator (Saddam) showed us that for once and for all.

There is a very good article here on the worldwide upsurge of antisemitism in recent years.

Suzanne Fields has some examples of moronic intellectual-speak. Here's one: "Dr. Rowan Williams, who as the archbishop of Canterbury heads the established Anglican Church, demands that America show not righteous anger but sympathy for the men who murdered 3,000 of us on Sept. 11. We must recognize that these mass murderers who crashed into the Twin Towers "have serious moral goals" that Americans merely fail to appreciate. Since we can't judge what's in our best and moral interests, he says, we must let the United Nations do it for us"

Damian Thompson of the "Telegraph" says only stupid white men would believe Michael Moore

A good Winston Churchill saying: "We contend for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."

An interesting blog from an American soldier serving in Iraq.

The Wicked one is back on the funnies -- with a list of top morons for 2003

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OF CHRISTIANITY AND HOLINESS

Regular readers of this blog will be well-aware that I often write on matters to do with the churches. I even had a well received article in Front Page Magazine some time back that looked at why many mainstream churches are now Leftist. And readers will also have noted how derisively I speak of "liberal" Christians. I imagine however that some readers would want to ask what right an atheist (which I am) has to to pontificate on such matters. The simple answer is that it is my remote fundamentalist past still speaking. I still have great sympathy for my former fundamentalist brothers in arms despite no longer being one of them. And I share their view of what a "real" Christian is. All that aside, however, I do think that there is an important rational distinction to be made between those on the one hand who sincerely believe that Christ is their saviour and do their humble best to follow his teachings and those on the other hand who have no real convictions but simply use the churches for social, political or even financial purposes. And I will continue to refer to the former as "real" Christians and the rest as "pretend" Christians, "impostors" and "hypocrites" -- or, as Christ called the equivalent people in his day: "whited sepulchres" (Matthew 23:27): "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye are like unto whited sepulchres which indeed appear beautiful outward but are within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness". I will never be able to better that description.

I should, I guess, make clear that it is pretend belief, not unbelief or unorthodox belief that I am condemning. I have met holy people of all faiths and no faith -- from the Greek Orthodox Church to Jehovah's Witnesses. And in my view the holiest person I know is a geriatric nurse who works in a nursing home. When her lonelier patients finally become so ill that they are sent to hospital she goes of her own accord and in her own time to visit them in hospital. Such good-heartedness leaves me awestruck. She is, as it happens, a complete atheist who says that her strong Methodist background was never anything but a burden. She also is a habitual voter for the A.L.P. -- Australia's major Leftist party -- but like many supporters of that party (including its present Federal leader) she has strong conservative views on many subjects -- in her case including a complete derision for anything to do with governments.

And what I think all of that goes to show is the one thing Leftists hate to admit -- that life is far too complex to be reduced to their simple rules, formulas, slogans and theories.

And Ann Coulter has a very amusing article on the hypocrisy about religion of the current Democrat Presidential hopefuls. Some excerpts: "When they were fund-raising, the Democratic candidates for president all claimed to be Jewish.... To ease Democrats into the Jesus thing, the Democratic Leadership Council is holding briefings for Democratic candidates teaching them how to talk about religion. The participants were warned that millions of Americans worship a supreme being whose name is not Bill Clinton... The only Democrats who go to church regularly are the ones who plan to run for president someday and are preparing in advance to fake a belief in God... "

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