THE MOHAMMED CARTOONS



I guess most readers have heard about Europe's cartoon uproar by now. Without much support from other governments, the Danish government has been defending the right to free speech in Denmark. That right is under attack because a Danish newspaper printed cartoons about Mohammed. As a result, Muslims have of course started putting pressure on Denmark -- including calls for a boycott of Danish goods and services (Since a major Danish export is ham and bacon, that has its amusing side). So it is encouraging that quite a few European newspapers have now defied Muslim hysteria and reprinted the cartoons. Even the BBC has broadcast glimpses of them. Maybe Europeans are finally getting fed up with the constant demands for special treatment by Muslims. An unusually feisty British reader writes:

"What is vastly more offensive than any cartoon could ever be, is:-

* The Personality Cult demanding special respect for a criminal thug, intolerant aggressive war-monger against peaceful people, inciter and practitioner of rape, piracy, pillage, slavery, nastiest-possible desecration of others' most sacred things, and of deceit. (All extensively documented as he died the Emperor of his warlord empire-on-earth.)

* The book he would have you know to be the flawless, unchangeable Last word of God, which just happens to be one of the nastiest and most stupid books ever written. Why would a real God be so obsessed with details of sex, warmongering and financial arrangements? And make so many glaring self-contradictions in the process?

* The Jihad Denial pretending away of the many millions of murders of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, etc, a still-ongoing global genocide directly inspired by the cult of that thug and his nasty book. That's the GENUINE Islam.

The Mohammedo-Fascists' preoccupation with not being offended stands in the most stupendous contrast to their own tradition of being maximally nasty about the most sacred things of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, etc: ... which started with Mohammed's own desecration of other peoples' sacred idols in Mecca. Why should such a thug be worthy of any special respect himself?

And, of course, BUY DANISH goods if you see them anywhere. There is an unusually sensible Muslim comment here. One of the cartoons concerned is reproduced above and they are all here -- where it rightly comments: "These cartoons are much less offensive than what is routinely printed in every American newspaper about presidents, presidential candidates, and other pols".

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A good comment from Dick McDonald: "Yesterday when I asked a Floridian guest to the RAID rally why he was blaming Republicans for running up the national debt and borrowing from China to pay for tax cuts for the rich and sticking our children with this enormous burden, he had no earthly idea what our external debt was. When I told him the debt was a mere $4.6 trillion in a country worth $120-180 Trillion, he breathed a sigh of relief. When I explained that we were only obligated to China for a mere $250 Billion out of the $4.6 Trillion, his leftist propaganda started to drain from his body. When I informed him that China with a 10% growth rate(which I doubt they can sustain for long) and a GDP of $1.6 Trillion will take many years to catch the US with a $12.5 Trillion GDP and a 4% growth rate, the leftist liquid drained from his eyes. Facts have a way of doing that. Too bad Americans live in a vacuum of myths written by scriptwriters at the NYT. Fill your quiver with facts and you will eventually decimate our enemy. It will take an effort."

More TSA stupidity: ""Margaret Jackson is the blond, bespectacled, fiftyish chairman of Qantas Airlines. She seems as Australian as kangaroos and koalas: cheerful, plucky, and no-nonsense. Only someone completely bonkers could suspect her of being an Islamic terrorist a la the 9/11 hijackers. Which means, of course, that the TSA did. A screener named Bill rifled Maggie's briefcase last year at Los Angeles International Airport. In it he found the sorts of papers you might expect an airline's CEO to carry, specifically, cross-sections and diagrams of an aircraft. Well. The nitwits who strive to protect us from deadly nail clippers and grandmothers in sandals came out swinging. According to Maggie, our man Bill asked her, 'Why have you got all of this?' She told him, 'I'm the chairman of an airline. I'm the chairman of Qantas.' And this black guy, who was, like, eight foot tall, said, 'But you're a woman'. Boy, nothing gets past the TSA these days."

Beware of ad hominem fallacies: "An opinion piece -- whether an individual op-ed or a column -- exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or opinion. Therefore, the strength of the argument is the key factor in determining the effectiveness of the piece. A sloppily constructed, poorly thought-out argument will convince no one -- while a tightly constructed, coherent, and well-written argument can sway minds. That is why opinion pieces are considered intellectual ammunition in the war of ideas. The only valid response to a persuasive argument is an equally persuasive argument towards a different conclusion. Yet the witch hunters' central argument has nothing to do with the virtues of the arguments presented by Bandow and others. Their argument is, essentially, that because the writer has not disclosed information about his income, he is essentially untrustworthy and his opinions should not be given the time of day. This argument is flawed enough to make it invalid. In logic, that's called a fallacy."

Praise be to tax competition!: "Tax competition occurs when a government uses its tax system to try to attract capital, business activity, or wealthy individuals from other countries. At its most obvious this could be a 'tax haven' with very low (or even zero) tax rates, but it could include more subtle provisions such as tax breaks for specific businesses relocating into a country. Game theory suggests that if the low-tax countries successfully attract international investment then other governments will respond, leading to a competitive spiral of tax reductions as they all compete for mobile capital."

Smarter Muslims don't like Islam?: "An increasing number of Muslims living in Norway have over the past few years chosen to send their children to private Christian schools, NRK reports. At the Christian Regnbuen school in Oslo, 20 out of a hundred students are Muslims. Other private schools in Oslo, like St Sunniva and Kristelig Gymnasium, also have many Muslim students. - I believe they feel that their faith is taken more seriously here, that Christian schools have greater respect and understanding for their faith than they find in public schools, says Dean Lars Bjoerge Holm at Kristelig Gymnasium to Dagsavisen".

Phrenology lives! There is a satirical graphic of a Leftist brain here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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A SMALL VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH IN BRITAIN

The prosecution of two British National Party men for hate speech has failed. The jury acquitted them on some charges and failed to agree on others. It seems that you may now say critical things about Islam in private conversations in Britain. It's not much and even that limited freedom is still under attack: The British government says it is going to try the men again on the charges that the jury could not agree about. There is a good comment on the case and the verdict at Majority Rights.

ANOTHER HISTORIC NAZI POSTER

This one would be from the March 5, 1933 election when Hitler had become Chancellor but Marshall Hindenburg was still President



Translated, the poster reads: "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"

Can you get a more Leftist slogan than that? Modern-day Leftists sometimes try to dismiss Hitler's socialism as something from his early days that he later outgrew. But when this poster was promulgated he was already Chancellor (Prime Minister) so it was far from early days. Once again we see what a barefaced lie it is when Leftists misrepresent Hitler as a Rightist. He campaigned and gained power as a democratic Leftist. The March 5, 1933 election was the last really democratic election prewar Germany had.

Another example of the easy transition from Fascism to modern Leftism: "Where have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s. The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation? Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals — de Man, Heidegger, Eliade — with its exposé of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as "the most distinguished figure" then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein".

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A reader writes: "Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain states that "All human lives ought to be equally valued". Meanwhile Allah's Last Testament is bursting full of vivid declarations of the utter worthlessness of the lives of unbelievers, and invocations to fight and slay them; and the military career of the Prophet was rich in examples of putting those principles into practice. Can I therefore take it as read that the MCB accepts that the Qur'an is not the word of God/Allah and that the Prophet's personal example is incompatible with the MCB's own conception of human rights? Or is the Prophet's well-documented approval of deceit involved here?

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts. Among his news is that the masterly essay by philosopher Neven Sesardic on fraudulent argument among philosophers is now available online. As Sesardic says, there is no topic on which philosophers of science go so conspicuously off the rails as the issue of racial differences in IQ. The philosophers concerned are positively Stalinist in the way they lie about the subject. But I guess there are other ways in which they like Stalin too. They essentially claim that the psychometricians ignore differences in environment, whereas psychometricians have always gone to great trouble to account for the role of the environment! Even my 1972 paper on the subject addressed that issue from the outset. The most surprising thing is that Sesardic did actually get his article published in an academic journal of philosophy. I guess truth still interests some philosophers. Update: I was delighted to receive an email from Neven Sesardic advising me that a revised and expanded version of his essay is now one chapter in his recent book Making Sense of Heritability.

Chris also notes that the book Affirmative Action Hoax now has a companion site here. Both book and site use impeccable science to expose the lie that blacks and whites have the same genetic potential. As the book shows, affirmative action is a huge fraud on whites.

Prager on the Hamas victory: "It is a sad day for humanity when a people choose to elect terrorists as their leaders. But for those of us who believe that clarity is the prerequisite to moral progress, the landslide victory of the terrorist organization Hamas in Palestine has a silver lining.... the Palestinian vote reveals the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace. It likewise reveals the falsity of the Left's belief that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population. That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality. Thanks to this election, the mask has been removed. When given the opportunity to express themselves, most Arabs and many Muslims elsewhere support terror and seek the annihilation of Israel. That is why the Hamas victory is such a defeat for the world's Left -- university professors, news media, socialist parties, the European Union, the United Nations, "peace" activists, editorial writers, and all other apologists for the Palestinians.... On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is".

Jonah Goldberg on the Hamas victory: "Today, various pragmatists, optimists and apologists for the Palestinians say they weren't voting for mass murder and terror, but for honest government and efficient social services. Fatah, the "party" of that terrorist carbuncle Yasser Arafat, was corrupt and incompetent while Hamas has successfully delivered much-needed social services. Hamas ran on "change and reform," proclaim the apologists, not terrorism. Fine, but that was equally true of the Nazis, who traded soup kitchens for indoctrination. Fascist movements have always gained popularity by delivering for the needy, the forgotten and the left out. They have always captured the imagination of the middle class by promising to reform the government, root out corruption, make the trains run on time. And fascist movements have always promised, as Hamas has, to bring about a moral and national restoration."

China Hand has just put up some new posts about Hainan, the big island off the China coast that, unlike Taiwan, remained under Communist control. The contrast with Taiwan is stark, even though Hainan has obvious potential. China Hand's site has been "hacked" in some way, however, so you would be best to load the mirror site.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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THE ARROGANCE OF YAHOO

I have long had an impression of Yahoo as an arrogant organization and I am now sure of it. I have had an account with them for some years which I made use of in a minor way. Now they have suddenly deleted it without explanation and for no apparent cause. I sent them an enquiry to find out why but such grand pooh-bahs as Yahoo don't talk to little people like me, of course. I think it should be a warning to others not to rely on their services. I had both an email address with them and a website there -- and both suddenly vanished without even a puff of smoke. It could happen to you too.

As it happens, only a very few people had the email address concerned and I was using the website mainly as a backup. The only thing I had in their webspace that was not available elsewhere was some humorous content. And I must say that their arrogance is rivalled only by their childishness. There are heaps of webhosts that offer "free" (advertiser supported) webspace and many of them are more generous in what they offer than Yahoo is. So what they gain from sending me elsewhere for no apparent reason would seem to be nil. People reading my stuff will now see other people's advertisers rather than Yahoo's advertisers. Clever! I of course always have everything backed up to disk before I post it and you can now see here what used to be on Yahoo. For more of the humorous content see also here. It will be interesting to see how the new host works out. But there are plenty of other hosts if that lot does not work out in some way.

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ELSEWHERE

Leftist ex-Congressman complains of bureaucracy: "During the time I served in Congress, constituents would often say that members of Congress should try to live under the laws they pass. I'm no longer a Congressman, and I have a typical horror story about trying to live under one of the laws passed by the current Congress. Congress this past spring added something called the "Real ID" bill to another piece of legislation... The "Real ID" bill set new national standards for obtaining a driver's license, something previously governed exclusively by state law. Thus, the Republican Congress created a vast new bureaucratic system... This summer, my wife and I applied for diver's licenses in Virginia. My application was granted but my wife's application was rejected even though she served 31 years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of Major General in April. My wife, Kathy, had obtained driver's licenses in numerous states during her various assignments for the military and had never been rejected. The Virginia DMV contacted the Social Security Administration to verify her social security number. Kathy and I were married seven years ago but she did not notify the Social Security Administration of her name change, so they could not verify her Social Security number under her married name. Thus, she was rejected for a driver's license even though the U.S. Army had issued her an ID card with both her married name and her social security number".

Don't forget the Gipper: ""Twenty-five years ago...Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communism... [O]ver this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the exception, for America-in stark contrast to the stagflationary 1970s. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need to be constantly relearned, lest we return to the errors that produced the 1970s... Where Republicans have most strayed from the Reagan vision has been on controlling federal spending. But most still adhere to his tax-cutting lessons, with a few prominent exceptions (notably Senator John McCain). They should all recall the Gipper's words in his inauguration speech 25 years ago: 'It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government'."

The Enron trial begins this week and "Enron" appears in any case to have become a perennial Leftist swear-word so this 2002 post is worth keeping in mind as a roundup of what that debacle actually shows. Excerpt: "Like other anti-free-market commentators, Krugman also spreads the false tale that Enron's chairman, Ken Lay, was a free-market disciple. This too is, well, baloney. Lay was a member of the group of extreme anti-capitalist ideologues known as the Union of Concerned Scientists. He was also a strong supporter of the Kyoto global-warming treaty. He supported this treaty (which the Bush administration refused to sign on to), because he wanted his company to profit from another Byzantine regulatory scheme concocted by the government"

Inequality in NYC: "New York still has its economic problems, to be sure. But "income inequality" isn't one of them. The liberal groups complain that, in the Big Apple, the richest 20 percent of residents have average incomes that are nine times those of the poorest families. If that ratio is the problem, one quick "solution" would be to drive out all those millionaires - that would cut the average income of the top 20 percent. Of course, it would also deprive the city and state of billions of tax dollars that pay for schools, hospitals, subways and other services. In other words, we're lucky to have all those wealthy people here. Let's try to keep them. Beyond having lots of very rich folks, New York's population is unusual in another way: Every year, 100,000 or so poor immigrants move here. They choose the tough challenge of a new life, knowing it's likely to be a better one. We could reduce the number of poor New Yorkers in these statistics by shutting our doors to these new Americans. But that would mean turning our backs on a proud history as a beacon for hopeful people all over the world"

Bring back segregation! "District 10 supervisor candidate Charlie Walker yesterday called for creation of a separate San Francisco school system for African Americans. Separating blacks from whites is necessary because current education of African Americans is not working, Walker told the Sentinel. "I am hoping seriously that we consider separating blacks from whites because it's not working," Walker reflected. "What good did it do us to demonstrate to get our freedom when we didn't get nothing out of it. "The women, the gays, the Asians, the Latinos - they got it and we're still sitting around here. In San Francisco alone, 42% of our people are unemployed."

For my Burns Night celebrations last month we had our clootie dumpling (clootie dumpling is a sort of plum pudding) in a slightly decadent way. To my knowledge most Scots just sprinkle sugar on it but I decided that a rum sauce would go nicely with it. And the sauce was such a great success that I doubt that anybody tasted the actual clootie dumpling! I have therefore put the recipe for the sauce up on my recipe blog. (Mirror site here).

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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REPUBLICANS ARE RACISTS! -- BUT

The latest "Republicans are racists" screech is here. This version of the screech is dressed up in the language of social psychology, however. I know that language very well. I have myself written many academic publications in it and have come to similar conclusions. When the screech ends ""We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting", the article is quite right. The correlation between expressions of conservative attitudes and expressions of racially negative attitudes does not always emerge but mostly it does.

For an intelligent person, WHY that happens is the interesting question, however. That the finding might arise because conservatives are more honest in saying what they really think or that it might arise because Leftists are more deluded (including self-deluded) is never to my knowledge examined. Instead, complicated Freudian explanations for the correlation are offered that fall apart when closely examined.

I have myself done umpteen surveys of what people say about their thinking (attitude surveys) and have come to the commonsense conclusion that "You can't trust 'em". People "put their best foot forward" when answering surveys and often do not say what they really think. Psychologists do have some ways of coping with that. They include in their surveys "lie scales" or "social desirability scales" -- sets of questions that try to detect how frank and honest the respondent is being. I myself routinely included such scales in my surveys. But the most common such scales -- the ones I used -- examine lying about one's behaviour and one cannot assume that lying about behaviour and lying about attitudes are the same. To do so assumes a generality that may not exist. I hate to state the obvious, but people may lie about one thing and not another. You can never tell.

And that people who do not in general lie might lie about particularly sensitive issues such as race should, I hope, be supremely obvious. And given the always tense relationship between Leftists and the truth (as evidenced by the long history of Leftists denying the evils of the Soviet empire) that the liars concerned might be mostly Leftists seems in only marginal need of proof.

So my final conclusion is that attitudes surveys are unreliable sources of information. I rely on behaviour. And when history's most infamous racist said this,

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

I think you can see why. The expressed attitudes associated with a given behaviour may vary greatly with time and place. Expecting a permanent link between one set of expressed attitudes and one set of behaviours is something that only a psychologist would be stupid enough to do. Which is why I study history these days instead of psychology.

The truth of what I have just said has however begun to seep into some psychological skulls and some do therefore make an effort to use brain scans rather than expressed attitudes as a source of information about what people think. The limitations of using such gross measurements of such finely articulated phenomena as brain processes should, I hope, be obvious to all but some of the findings so far have at least been amusing. Such procedures have on some occasions shown fanatical Leftists to be "prejudiced". How awful! I say more about such studies here.

The link I have just given does deal with the work of Banaji -- the main protagonist in the latest screech -- but I might perhaps make one additional observation. At best, Banaji's research technique shows who has bad feelings about blacks. And on her results many Leftists do but there is nonetheless a preponderance of Republicans. Again however, the interesting question to non-simplistic people is: WHY? There is an old saying that "a conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night" so perhaps the technique is detecting those who have had REASON to be negative about blacks. And that such people might vote for a party that panders less to blacks would surprise only a psychologist.

Leftist psychologists are very keen to point the finger at possible instances of "motivated social cognition" ("bias" to you and me) so Michelle Malkin's comment on the latest screech does a good job of lobbing that ball back into their court. Or to put Michelle's point in the language of academic psychology: One wonders what precautions were taken to avoid a Rosenthal effect. But of course who needs such precautions when you know the answer before you start?

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ELSEWHERE

There is an amusing news report from Sweden here. The article does not explicitly say so but apparently the Swedish police preferred the word of a Muslim doorman to the word of one of Sweden's most prominent Leftists. Make of that what you will. A possible case of the pot calling the kettle Afro-American, I think.

Marginal Revolution on Islam and modernity "In my view all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings compatible with modernity and all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings incompatible with modernity. Call it the completeness theorem. It's how religions adapt and evolve to modernity that is important. Religions are constantly changing, emphasizing certain features, downplaying others, creating new interpretations. Given enough time, I believe that any religion will evolve towards compatability with modernity because it's the memes that combine modernity and religion which will survive and prosper. The problem is that Christianity has had hundreds of years to adapt itself to modernity while Islam has had modernity thrust upon it. Fish don't walk overnight and neither do religions. Nevertheless there are Islamic leaders who, under the pressure of current events, see the direction in which Islam must move and who are actively encouraging evolution in that direction".

Tibor R. Machan on Roe and privacy: "One reason that Roe v. Wade is still with us is that legal scholars and jurists are arguing about the wrong issue. The question isn't whether the US Constitution contains any reference to a right to privacy. Let's assume it does. Let's assume that the Ninth Amendment, as argued in Griswold v. Connecticut and some other cases, implicitly refers to the right to privacy every human beings has. Why would this be relevant? Some might argue that if one has the right to privacy, a woman who has an abortion is doing something private, something no one else has the authority to regulate or ban. But this simply will not do. If a pregnant woman is carrying a child -- as pro-life folks call it, 'an unborn child' -- she has no authority to have a procedure that will kill this child. Wherever one locates a human being, inside the pregnant woman or in a crib or at some hotel, unless he has threatened to attack someone, no one is justified killing him. Only self-defense justifies killing another human being, period. ... Privacy, then, is really quite irrelevant to the debate surrounding Roe v. Wade. The relevant question to be answered is, 'Is the being to be killed in an abortion a human being or is it human only potentially?'"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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THE HOLY FATHER ON ISLAM

More on the discussions at Castelgandolfo



Some more detail is coming out about recent discussions by and with the Pope on the possibility of reform within Islam. This article has links to other articles discussing the debate the Pope's comments have kicked up. In sum the earlier brief note on this blog that the Pope seems to believe reform of Islam is not impossible, but nonetheless likely to be exceedingly difficult, (in other words, "don't hold your breath") would seem to hold. Interestingly this later Chiesa report indicates that if reform is to come it is likely to be from areas such as Turkey, Indonesia or from Western Muslims. The labelling of 'so called' Western countries is also interesting, ...is this a tacit acknowledgement that parts of Europe are no longer in the West? Eurabia? Key excerpt:

"The Holy Father is well-informed enough to know that there have existed and that there exist today, probably increasingly, other interpretations of the Qur'anic evidence with regard to a theology of revelation. These considered Muslim views and approaches do not (yet?), it would seem, inform the thinking and approach of a sizable Islamic movement or organisation - and we do not know what future problems lie ahead in this regard - but it does exist and is vividly discussed in many places, both in academia and beyond.

"An open debate on these matters does not yet seem to be possible within the Arab world but Turkish and Indonesian society grant relatively more room for airing and discussing such ideas, and the so-called Western countries offer even more space".

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ELSEWHERE

There are even big genetic racial differences in earwax! "It is not a subject scientists generally wax about. But a seven-page scientific paper published today is solely devoted to the genetics of earwax. Human earwax comes in two varieties -- wet and dry. According to the journal Nature Genetics, dry earwax is seen in up to 95 per cent of East Asians, but no more than 3 per cent of Europeans and Africans. The reason for the difference is a gene called ABCC11 which controls earwax-altering molecules. A 39-strong international team did the research. The role of earwax was unclear, said the scientists. "Insect trapping, self-cleaning and prevention of dryness of the external auditory canal are its plausible functions," they wrote. Armpit (axillary) odour was associated with wet-type earwax, raising the possibility that earwax might be involved in sexual attraction."

Crooked British cops: "Undercover detectives altered a surveillance log to avoid blame for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes in a bungled counter-terrorist operation, according to police watchdogs. The disclosure, in a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, puts fresh pressure on Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and his officers over the shooting.... Police sources say that the report, which is being studied by the Crown Prosecution Service, shows that a Special Branch logbook describing Mr de Menezes's last movements had been altered to hide that he had wrongly been identified as a suspect.... The IPCC team is said to have been alerted by a whistle-blower. A scientific technique for checking changes in documents showed the change that had been made. [All they are good at these days is political correctness]

Jeff Jacoby on the Hamas election win: "Western reactions to the outcome of the Palestinian election last week mostly came in two varieties: highly negative and decidedly undecided.... I think the sweeping Hamas victory is by far the best result that could have been hoped for. I say that not because Hamas is anything other than a blood-drenched terrorist group responsible for killing or maiming thousands of innocent victims, but because its lopsided win is an unambiguous reality check into the nature of Palestinian society. And if there is one thing that the West badly needs, it is more realism and less delusion about the Palestinians".

World Bank 'toadying to the corrupt': Sir Edward Clay, the outspoken former British envoy to Kenya, let rip at the World Bank yesterday for lending $120 million to President Kibaki's Government when it was embroiled in a massive corruption scandal. In a letter to Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank, Sir Edward accused the organisation of "toadying to a thoroughly corrupt administration" and said that last week's loan made a mockery of efforts to stamp out high-level looting.

William F. Buckley, Jr. on Bolivian President Morales: "Morales shapes his complaint in language similar to that which has been used by the father of the movement against socialism, Milton Friedman -- the language of free trade. Whose problem is it that many Americans use cocaine? And that they desire it intensely enough to give it a street price sufficient to support Bolivian producers at every level -- the agricultural workers, the refiners, and the exporters? The point is in part cynical, because Morales knows perfectly well that human weakness will always produce a demand for toxic substances, if they provide intense pleasures en route to devastation. But he is shrewd enough to pick up on the point of free trade -- even though it is a part of the neoliberalism he has otherwise denounced. What right does the United States government have to convert its concern for weak-minded Americans into a veto power on Bolivian agriculture?"

Interesting stories here and here about how capitalist Boeing has outsmarted the socialist European Airbus. One cost item not mentioned in Las Vegas Sun article is the various costs in deicing the A380 on the tarmac during snow and ice conditions in winter time. Although this is not a problem in warmer climes it is routine in the higher latitudes each winter and it is costly in time, materials, manpower and delays.

The horny-headed one has a great post on deceptive Leftist "statistics" about poverty. The poor are actually getting richer and the rich are getting poorer.

A little birdie tells me that the obnoxious Brian Leiter is feeling the heat of Keith Burgess-Jackson's Anti-Leiter blog. Keith seems to be feeling his oats so Leiter might be in for a long haul.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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AN ABORIGINAL SUNDAY

This post will encourage Leftists to shriek "racist" and "Nazi" at me but they regularly shriek that at GWB and heaps of other conservatives so I am going to disregard such shrieks as devalued currency.

I grew up with Aborigines (Australian native blacks) in my class at school and I have seen plenty of them since -- particularly as a landlord (Yes. I HAVE let rooms and houses to them. Racists do that, you know) -- so I think I know a bit about them. And if you are looking for "cultural" differences, Aborigines must be as different from people of Northern European ancestry as you can get. And the reason why is that they were isolated in Australia from other populations for up to 60,000 years (on some estimates). So they evolved separately. And they evolved to suit Australia as it originally was. And the abilities they evolved -- particularly a remarkable capacity for observing and remembering minute details of the landscape -- do in some ways leave the rest of us for dead. In other ways, however, they are badly lacking in what is needed to fit into modern Western society -- a strikingly poor ability to plan ahead being their most obvious handicap. They very much "live for the day".

One thing I have always envied them is their ability to relax. They can sit around under a tree all day happily doing exactly nothing. I, however, am one of those instinctively hard-driving people who is genetically from the far North of the world. And the fact that, in my retirement, I post daily to seven blogs of my own and contribute frequently to four group blogs is, I think, some testimony to that. It is as hard for me to sit back and do nothing as it is easy for Aborigines. But yesterday I managed it. Just as Aborigines often do, I spent the whole day sitting around and doing practically nothing other than some intermittent chatting. Anne accompanied me in this experience, of course. She is probably more full of beans than I am these days, however, so she caved in first and shot off to do something at about 7pm. She spent many years as a remote-area nurse working with (and getting on with) Aborigines so knows them even better than I do. So she knew all about the model I had in mind when I said we were having an Aborigine day. She enjoyed it but she couldn't keep it up! Genetics will out.

Update:

I receive a heap of supportive emails but, although every one is greatly appreciated, I reproduce on my blogs only the tiniest fraction of such mail. I seem to be having a spasm of reproducing emails today, however. I have just added emails as updates to posts on GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH so I think I will also reproduce an email relevant to the post above:

"Your observations are -- as usual -- spot on. My wife Pam also worked as a remote area nurse (N.T., Qld., Torres Straits) and we came to like Aborigines very much".

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ELSEWHERE

More scientific evidence of deep-lying racial differences: "A common genetic mutation may explain why Asian heart patients are less likely than others to get relief from chest pain when they take nitroglycerin, a new Chinese study finds. Fudan University researchers examined 111 coronary heart disease patients who were self-administering nitroglycerin under the tongue whenever they experienced an acute angina attacks. Eighty (72 percent) of the patients reported that they had pain relief within 10 minutes of taking the nitroglycerin, while the remainder of the patients experienced no pain relief. The researchers found that many of the patients who didn't respond to nitroglycerin had an inactive mutant form of the ALDH2 gene. This mutant version is called ALDH2*2. In order for nitroglycerin to be effective, a patient's body has to be able to convert the nitroglycerin into nitric oxide. This process requires ALDH2. It's estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of the Asian population has the ALDH2*2 mutation. This information needs to be considered when doctors recommend nitroglycerin for Asian patients, the study authors said".

An interesting thought: "I finally figured out why the angry left hates President Bush. Psychiatrists call it transference. President Clinton almost destroyed the Democratic Party while he was in the White House. We all remember the wasted years, the scandals and the Republicans sweeping to power in 1994. And, if not for Bill, Al Gore would have won in 2000. So the angry left really hates Bill Clinton. But, through a process called cognitive dissonance, they can't hate one of their own, so they have transferred the hate to President Bush. But they really don't believe it, do they? [The Left are past-masters of using psychological defence-mechanisms to shield themselves from reality so use of transference is not at all unlikely]

Calls to act on Soviet crimes: "Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Council of Europe became the first international body to consider the crimes against humanity that were committed by the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and other states. In a debate that relit the clash between Russia and Western European countries, the 43-nation council considered a report by a Swedish parliamentarian that also called on former communist states to teach the truth about their former regimes, erect memorials to the victims and create days of remembrance. A resolution, adopted by a simple majority, referred to "individual and collective assassinations, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportation, torture, slave labour and other forms of mass physical terror."

Tibor Machan: Limiting outsourcing is wrong and harmful : "If my kid has been mowing your lawn for $5 an hour and he has gotten used to this, when some other kid offers to mow it for $3 an hour, my kid will be upset. He will have been outbid! The alternative of putting the competitor and the customer in chains isn't acceptable. It's flat out morally wrong. The only thing my own kid can do is either find some other job where he can make his $5 an hour or lower his price and keep the job at $3 an hour or less. Now if I had given the mowing job to my child and got a better offer and took it, I could be faulted for my insensitivity as a parent. But most of us aren't related to those who work at the Big Three, so we do not owe them special considerations that trump commerce."

The Rising Cost of Complying with the Federal Income Tax: "In 2005, taxpayers will pay roughly $1.2 trillion in federal income taxes. But America's tax burden is more than just the amount of tax paid. It also includes the cost of complying with federal taxes, including tax planning, paperwork and other hassles caused by tax complexity.... In 2005 individuals, businesses and nonprofits will spend an estimated 6 billion hours complying with the federal income tax code, with an estimated compliance cost of over $265.1 billion. This amounts to imposing a 22-cent tax compliance surcharge for every dollar the income tax system collects. Projections show that by 2015 the compliance cost will grow to $482.7 billion".

There is a satirical article here called: "Sexual orientation is flexible, right?"

Mike Pechar has a great post on how the "caring" Leftists of San Francisco are doing their best to dump the "homeless" onto other cities. Leftist piety does not last long when it affects Leftist wallets.

I have just put up on Australian Politics the latest salvo in Australia's history wars -- where Australia's lying Leftist historians are being exposed for what they are. Warning: The site is not quite office-safe at the moment.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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DON'T GO WOBBLY ON IRAN

(Excerpt from Jeff Jacoby)

"It is not on the table. It is not on the agenda. I happen to think it is inconceivable." That was British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in September, telling the BBC what he thinks about the use of military force to prevent Iran's homicidal theocrats from acquiring nuclear weapons... Fortunately, not everyone is off in Cloud Cuckoo Land when it comes to dealing with Tehran. The acting prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, put his government's position bluntly: "Under no circumstances, and at no point," he said on Jan. 17, "can Israel allow anyone with these kinds of malicious designs against us [to] have control of weapons of destruction that can threaten our existence." As the Jewish state has good reason to know, dictators who publicly vow to commit mass murder generally mean what they say -- and are generally not deterred by threats of "diplomatic solutions."

Israel is widely assumed to be at work on plans to destroy Iran's nuclear program. Iranian rulers have repeatedly declared their intention to wipe Israel off the map, and Vice President Dick Cheney said publicly more than a year ago that Israel "might well decide to act first" and attack Iran's nuclear facilities in its own self-defense. But it isn't clear that Israel could pull off such an operation, which would be far more complex than its strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. Unlike Osirak, which was a stand-alone facility, Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed among dozens of sites. Many are hidden underground. "To attack them all with cruise missiles and fighter-bombers," notes The Economist, "would require an extended campaign and hundreds of sorties. Corridors would have to be cleared through Iran's air defenses and the Iranian air force destroyed." Israel could not hope to carry off such a sustained military effort against targets a thousand miles away. Which is why, if Iran's nuclear program is to be demolished by force, it will have to be done by the United States....

The Bush administration -- and, increasingly, leading Democrats -- have been speaking out with growing urgency about preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear threat. What is not stressed enough is that Iran is not just a potential menace -- it is a clear and present danger right now. The radical Islamists in Tehran bankroll the world's deadliest terrorists. They foment violence in Iraq. They lied for 18 years about their nuclear activities. They persecute democratic activists and oppress women. They declare that their goals are "a world without Zionism or America" and "the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization." It was they who began the war we are in -- the global conflict between Islamofascism and the West -- with their seizure of the US embassy in 1979. Fanatic, apocalyptic, totalitarian, the mullahs who rule Iran see their destiny as waging jihad and extending theocracy across the entire Middle East. Under no circumstances can such enemies be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons -- or to doubt that we will do what we must to make sure that they don't.

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ELSEWHERE

The irresponsible suits running Ford and GM might even lose dominance in that great American sport of auto racing: 'It was not a little jarring several years ago when NASCAR fans began arriving at racetracks in Toyota Tundra trucks and other vehicles built by foreign manufacturers. Now, Japanese automaker Toyota is preparing to leave the parking lot and drive into that bastion of American auto racing and culture -- NASCAR's Nextel Cup series. Not since the mid-1950s, when British-made Jaguars ran a handful of races in NASCAR's top series, has a foreign make competed in the Cup. From that time until 2000, when NASCAR allowed a Toyota-powered car in the now-defunct Goody's Dash Series, even the suggestion that a car or engine built by the Japanese, the Germans or any other non-Americans could eventually race in NASCAR kindled everything from heated debate to physical confrontation among the parochial and rabid fans of stock-car racing. Once Toyota ratcheted up to the Craftsman Truck Series in 2004, though, it became clear the next step was stock cars. It was announced earlier this week that a NASCAR edition of the Camry, the best-selling car in the United States in seven of the past eight years, will begin racing in 2007 in both of NASCAR's top stock-car series, the Cup and Busch".

Guess who favours voting rights for felons: "Democratic lawmakers, who have long pushed to restore voting rights to Maryland felons, say racial politics and election-year considerations make this the year they open the polls to every ex-convict. 'This law seriously disenfranchises a large number of African-Americans,' said Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat who is gathering sponsors for a voting-rights restoration bill she plans to submit. 'Their disenfranchisement impacts the power of African-Americans in this state,' said Mrs. Marriott, whose bill would give all felons the vote immediately upon release from prison."

MA: Romney may veto religious funds bill: "Governor Mitt Romney signaled yesterday that he is likely to oppose a bill requiring religious institutions to disclose their finances, creating a major hurdle for advocates of the legislation who must gain a veto-proof vote in the House to guarantee that it becomes law. The governor's comment caught supporters of the bill off guard, particularly since Romney had appeared to support the measure last August. Romney's comment also comes as supporters engage in a fierce political struggle on Beacon Hill over the legislation with the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and other religious denominations. Opponents say the measure violates religious freedoms and puts undue financial burdens on churches, particularly smaller denominations. Meeting with reporters in his office yesterday, Romney said the bill appears to be 'far more intrusive' than 'routine, regulatory interaction' and would place 'substantial burdens on religious organizations.'"

The Left still love traitors to America: "You would think, by now, with a half-century of scholarship behind us and a great deal of damning evidence on display, we would not have to be arguing about the guilt or innocence of various iconic figures of the late 1940s and 1950s: Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White or, perhaps most notoriously, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But the martyr status of such figures seems irresistible, even today, to a certain kind of sentimental leftist. They still remain symbols of some malevolent American quality--never mind the truth of what they actually did.... In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev noted that the Rosenbergs "vastly aided production of our A-bomb." Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh wrote a damning account of their activities in "The Rosenberg File" (1983). And the Rosenbergs' guilt was corroborated by the 1995 declassification of the Venona documents, thousands of decrypted KGB cables intercepted by the National Security Agency in the 1940s. The notion that anyone would today deny their fundamental complicity in Soviet subversion is extraordinary, almost comically so"

Italian restaurant supports the troops: "Tremoglie approached Finocchiaro about sending some of his pasta and sauce to Marine Corps Sgt. Brandon Rogers, and Finocchiaro was happy to oblige. According to Tremoglie, who has since sent two shipments of four pounds of pasta along with sauce, dried mushrooms and cookies, Finocchiario refused payment both times with a simple statement: "It's my honor to do it." Finocchiaro said the e-mails he received from Rogers showing his unit enjoying the pasta were the only payment he could ever want. "It was a touching moment to see them cooking on a stove in the middle of nowhere. Just to see the e-mail, that was a huge payback for us," Finocchiaro said. "I'm sure that they have some good food over there, but that was a moment that makes them feel like they're home."

An amusing screech here from an over-optimistic user of blogger.com. I feel no sympathy for him/her whatever. I myself put NOTHING online until I have saved it to disk.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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I GET RESULTS -- SORT OF

My goodness! My derisive comments about the vituperative Leftist "Tryworks" site have had a most unexpected result. I actually stimulated them to temporary politeness! What I said must have really hit home. I reproduce here an email I recently received from their "John Moredock" (a.k.a. Ward Churchill?). I reproduce it as an out-of-character curiosity, not because I accept any of the assertions in it. Being polite was obviously painful for them, however, as they shortly thereafter reproduced the missive concerned on their own site, accompanied by their usual vitriol.

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ELSEWHERE

Stupid Wal-Mart enviers defeated: "Eighteen months after the Chicago City Council torpedoed a South Side Wal-Mart, 24,500 Chicagoans applied for 325 jobs at a Wal-Mart opening Friday in south suburban Evergreen Park, one block outside the city limits. The new Wal-Mart at 2500 W. 95th is one block west of Western Avenue, the city boundary. Of 25,000 job applicants, all but 500 listed Chicago addresses, said John Bisio, regional manager of public affairs for Wal-Mart.... The Chicago alderman who tried to bring a Wal-Mart to the Chatham neighborhood was left gnashing his teeth. "I always tell people I'm not for Wal-Mart, but I am for that project coming into the city and to my ward. We can't beat them," said Ald. Howard Brookins Jr. (21st). "The same things they talk about Wal-Mart doing to Small Town U.S.A when they build on the outskirts of town is the same thing they have done to the City of Chicago without fanfare. Nobody distinguishes that if I cross Western Avenue at 95th Street, I am no longer in Chicago. For all practical purposes, Wal-Mart is in the city of Chicago without us receiving any benefit. You're going to see the parking lot filled with cars with Chicago city stickers." Eighteen months ago, Brookins negotiated with Wal-Mart for a store at 83rd and Stewart, former site of the Ryerson steel plant. His plan fell apart when other South Side aldermen failed to support his request for a zoning change."



Cuban coverup: "Czech supermodel Helena Houdova took a break from the catwalk to visit communist Cuba and was arrested for taking photographs in a slum. The former Miss Czech Republic 1999 runs a foundation in New York that supports disadvantaged children and wanted to see what she could do to help in Cuba. But on Monday, Cuban security police detained Houdova and her companion, Czech psychologist Mariana Kroftova, while they were taking photographs in the poor Havana area of Arroyo Naranjo. They were released 11 hours later after signing a let ter saying they would not engage in "counter-revolutionary" activities. "We were afraid," Houdova said. "We grew up under communism and know what it is like."

What does it mean to be a (Canadian) conservative? "In yesterday's Canadian election, the new Conservative Party swept into power for the first time since 1993. Paul Martin and the Liberals, it turns out, were unsuccessful in their campaign to demonize -- yet again -- Canadian conservatives. But what does it mean to be a Canadian conservative? Is it the same as being an American conservative? Do the same markers apply, such as one's stance on abortion or gay marriage, lower taxes, free trade and smaller government, a strong military and vigilant national defense? To a certain extent, yes.... But the problem with defining Canadian conservatism exclusively in the above terms is that it overlooks the fundamental issue plaguing Canada since the 1960s: the separation movement in the French-speaking province of Quebec. The traditional liberal response to Quebec separatism was a call for greater centralization of power. There is no better example of this than the fetishism of socialized medicine. More than a mere health care system, socialized medicine acts as a symbol of Canadian unity and food for identity-starved Canadians. Policy choices-socialized medicine or not-soon morph into the "Canadian values" espoused by the Liberal Party-to be contrasted with the "American" values of their political opponents, the Conservatives.... But Conservatives see this as a big mistake. Instead, the reason for Quebec's continued disaffection is federal meddling in its affairs, a sentiment shared to a lesser extent by other provinces, such as Alberta. The Conservative response is a policy of "open federalism."

The latest statistics on race in Britain: "The number of people in ethnic-minority groups is growing significantly as the white British population continues to decrease, government figures show. England's non-white population rose by more than half a million between 2001 and 2003 to 7.1 million, with the Chinese community growing at the fastest rate. Over the same period the white British population fell by 100,300 to 42.8 million, according to a report by the Office for National Statistics. The figures suggest an overall decline in ethnic segregation as non-white groups move into almost every area of the country. London continues to have the greatest concentration of non-white British ethnic groups, with 40.7 per cent of the capital's population in 2003 belonging to a non-white British group. But faster growth of the non-white British population in all areas outside London means that its share of the non-white population has fallen from 44.7 per cent to 42.5per cent.

England no longer a green and pleasant land: "Muggings and violent attacks on people soared by more than 10 per cent in the third quarter of last year as the police struggled to contain street crime, according to figures published yesterday. Street robbery is rising at its fastest since Tony Blair demanded action three years ago by the Home Office and police to tackle the issue. The increase in violent crime came as rising numbers of people expressed concern at the extent of antisocial behaviour, including public drunkenness and drug dealing in their neighbourhoods. Homicides of people under 16 rose by a quarter in the year to the end of September 2005". [No mention of the race or religion of the criminals, of course

WMDs moved to Syria: "The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed. The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun. "There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over." Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

"Closing a loophole": Washington-speak for squelching a bit of freedom overlooked by the regulators : "Outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is opposing a regulatory loophole that allows corporations to own banks, according to a media report Thursday.Greenspan's opposition, contained in a 12-page letter to Congress, thrusts him into the controversy over an attempt by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to use the loophole to establish a bank in Utah... Wal-Mart officials have said they don't plan to establish bank branches, but would use the Utah bank as a back-office processing center, handling debit-card, credit-card and electronic check-transfer payments by customers at its stores, according to The Journal. Wal-Mart estimates it could save money by bringing that work in-house, according to The Journal".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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Brookes News Update

Paul Krugman's economic shortcomings: Krugman spends his time at the 'New York Times' spewing anti-Republican bile and hatred while simultaneously spinning fantastic conspiracy theories reaching back 40 years. Methinks it's straitjacket time
The Australian dollar: anti-marketeer attacks deregulation - and gets it wrong: One shouldn't be too hard on Mr Feil considering that our so-called free marketeers are no better. If they are not prepared to recognise the significance of money supply why should anti-marketeers like Feil act differently?
Lefty journalist trashes Wal-Mart and slimes President Bush: Gawenda is reason enough to despise the media. As Washington correspondent for The Age this leftwing hack can always be counted on to paint a grim picture of America
Bracks' religious tolerance laws: Bracks' anti-free speech laws that favour Muslim bigots are coming under increasing pressure as more people realise the oppressive nature of these laws and their spiteful anti-Christian character
A Rupert Murdoch journalist smears President Bush's America: The smear-mongering David Nason just cannot contain himself. Overflowing with self-righteousness he maliciously portrayed a Republican judge as an out-and-out racist, As if he were a metaphor for Bush's America
Leftwing film reviewer drools over Clooney's anti-McCarthy agitprop: Tom Ryan, film and television critic for the Sunday Age Preview, is an example of that breed of lefty who just cannot conceal his political bigotry. Hence his sneers about terrorism and his support for Clooney's lying Goodnight, and Good Luck
Alito hearings bring out the worst in the pro-abortion crowd: It is high time that NARAL, the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood stop their lobbying campaigns for the Supreme Court. They are not concerned with the integrity of the Constitution

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ELSEWHERE

Several people have emailed me to suggest that the poisonous Leftist site, "Tryworks" (should that be "Tryhard"?) is in fact all written by the contemptible Ward Churchill himself under various pseudonyms. That a hate-filled Ward Churchill should write a hate-filled blog certainly sounds reasonable so if anyone is up-to-date with textual analysis techniques that could be an interesting line of enquiry. My own interest in Churchill is minimal, however. Jim Paine, John Rubery and the American Indian Movement do a pretty good job of keeping him pinned down.

An unusually sensible archbishop: "Tony Blair's Government was condemned yesterday by the Archbishop of York for passing too much legislation and risking debasement of the law as a result. The Most Rev John Sentamu, speaking after being sworn in to the House of Lords, made clear that he would be an active member of the Upper House... The Archbishop said: "What I feel very strongly about is when you make a lot of laws all the time, one has to be extremely careful they are not made in haste." He called for a study on exactly how many laws had been passed since Labour was elected in 1997. "I think there have been too many," he said. "The more laws you pass, the greater the insecurity you create in society." Dr Sentamu, who fled Uganda, his country of birth, and came to Britain when it became clear that his life was at risk from Amin's Government, continued: "Laws are good because they show us how we need to be governed. But the more laws you have got, the more the law becomes debased."

Revival for Germany? "Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, yesterday promised a free-market revolution in Europe's biggest and most troubled economy, dismantling the mass of regulations that have been built up over recent decades. She said that Germany must follow the economic policies of Britain... Using language almost identical to that used by Margaret Thatcher when she was the British Prime Minister, the centre-right leader mapped out a U-turn in her country's treasured social model, repeatedly emphasising that Germans must stop fearing the world, embrace freedom and learn to take responsibility for their own lives instead of looking to the State. She said that rules introduced by previous governments to protect workers were strangling initiative, and had led to "terrifyingly high unemployment". She declared that there would be a new type of "social market economy"."

Evil bureaucrats: ""On January 9th, 15 Cuban rafters plucked a few days earlier from the decrepit and unused Flagler Bridge in the Florida Keys were repatriated to their communist gulag homeland. The reason given by the US Government was that these migrants never achieved 'dry foot' status under the Wet Foot-Dry Foot policy. This decision was based on the fact that the bridge was no longer in use and did not connect to dry land, so it was considered 'wet.' This is just one more example of the bureaucratically sick twist of semantics going on In Washington DC. Wet Foot-Dry Foot is a presidential decree signed by former President Bill Clinton"

Another attack on the "Dark Ages" myth: "Only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry and astrology into astronomy, with thinkers moving beyond mere technology into true research. Stark rejects the century-old scenario of Max Weber that Protestantism undergirded capitalism. Stark maintains that the main elements were invented by Catholic monks and lay Italians, centuries before the Reformation. He also thinks it's high time to eradicate "an incredible lie that long disfigured our knowledge of history": the claim that between the fall of ancient Rome and the secular Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe suffered through so-called Dark Ages of "ignorance, superstition and misery." That's a "hoax," he says, that was invented by 18th-century intellectuals who hated religion and especially Roman Catholicism. In reality, he says, the centuries before Protestantism and modern secularism saw huge progress in technology, education and human betterment".

Slovakia's pension reforms: "Politicians in Europe and America who remain in denial about the huge black holes at the heart of their state pension systems should take a look at the remarkable reforms pushed through by Slovakia. That tiny Eastern European country, already famed for its flat tax, launched its pension reform on 1 January last year. Under Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda's new -system, Slovakia's 2.2m workers were given a choice: they could either remain fully reliant on the pay-as-you-go pension system or take a part of their social security contributions and invest it in personal retirement accounts managed by a number of different investment funds."

Thought of the day from Les Bates: "For all of the publically communistic posturings and moanings, John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose as their place of residence the most capitalist city in the most capitalist nation on Earth".

I have just put up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE no less than THREE articles looking at the causes and effects of the recent Maryland attack on Wal-Mart over its health insurance policies.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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AUSTRALIA DAY TODAY

Australia day is a national holiday. It commemorates the arrival in Australia of the first white settlers on 26 Jan., 1788. So I guess it is terribly politically incorrect these days. There is minimal criticism of it, however. My many relatives on my mother's side have for many years been celebrating it with a get-together over a BBQ. It is normally the one time of the year that we see one-another so it is nice to have that opportunity to keep in touch. There are usually about 20 of us. The children who were brought along by their parents many years ago still come -- now bringing their own children with them. And that of course is a great delight to us all.

My Burns Night last night was a great (if lowkey) success. The cockaleekie soup, haggis, tatties, neeps and clootie dumpling were all first class. Pipe music was played, the haggis was properly addressed and favourite Burns poems were read. We were all a bit too old to hit the Scotch whisky too heavily, though.

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ELSEWHERE

LOL. My passing mention of a certain poisonous Leftist site yesterday produced the predictable vituperative response. Pure abuse. Nothing to reply to there at all. But I think we can safely take it that their admission "And, Yes, It Is Hatred That Warms Our Heart" is a sincere one. I discuss the central role of hate in Leftist psychology at some length here.

Interesting thought from a reader: "Do you think some Dems and Libs are upset with Bush because they know he is doing what Clinton should have done? Clinton could have gone down as one of the greatest had he toppled the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but he is in danger of being forgotten, stuck between the Cold War and the War on Terror. IMO he screwed Gore (thank GOD). If he had attacked the Taliban, I think Gore would have walked in the Oval office. That event would have dispelled the notion that the Dems are weak on security. But Clinton's lack of action added to that notion. I think a small bit of what we are seeing is the Dems angry at what could have been".

Kay S. Hymowitz argues that America really is becoming two countries, one rich and one poor-but it's not because of any economic or racial injustice. It's because children born and raised in married, two-parent families are on average much more likely to succeed than children brought up by divorced or never-married mothers. Cultural renewal, not social services, is what's needed to promote prosperity for all-the American version of equality.

See here some details of discussions with the Pope on the difficulties of reconciling Islam and democracy. Two reports are available discussing the Pope's views on the issue. One view is seen as pessimistic and another optimistic. The pessimistic view is that reconciliation is nearly impossible and would require changes in Islam never seen before. The optimistic view is essentially the same.

Did the socialist and pro-Mussolini FDR save capitalism? You don't need to make any kind of fancy free market economic argument to disprove this nonsensical Leftist claim. David T. Beito uses simple historical reasoning, the calendar and a quick look at the election returns to torpedo this myth.

Prince of Wales helps to enhance Wal-Mart's image: "The world's biggest retail corporation, which is under fire from environmentalists, trade unions and community leaders, has enlisted an unlikely champion to try to improve its image. Lee Scott, the chief executive of Wal-Mart, which owns Asda, the second-biggest retailer in Britain, had a two-hour meeting with the Prince of Wales at Clarence House".

Iraq war not a big burden on the huge American economy: "Critics of the war in Iraq often complain about the "escalating cost of the war." Listening to them, you'd never know that the war is one of the least expensive in American history. Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University, has measured the cost of each major American war up through the first Gulf War. We took these costs and compared them to the cost of the Iraq war and found that the Iraq experience has consumed a smaller percentage of GDP (just 2 percent of one year's wealth creation) than every other American war except the first Gulf War (which measured just 1 percent of GDP).

I like it!: "Activists who want U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter to pay a personal price for ruling New London, Conn., could seize private property for a development project rallied Sunday in Souter's small hometown, arguing the town should take Souter's home to build a hotel.... He said the five Supreme Court justices who sided with the Connecticut city on the eminent domain controversy "shot a hole in the Constitution." He said opponents should organize nationwide and vote officials out of office if they push similar projects. Doug Schwartz, of New London, Conn., urged the crowd on. He said eminent domain problems have plagued the city for decades. Clements said he and volunteers gathered 188 signatures Saturday in support of having the town take Souter's home so the property could be turned into a hotel -- the "Hotel Lost Liberty"."

Why am I not weeping? "A civil-registered Dassault Falcon 20E VIP business jet operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) crashed on 9 January killing the crew and much of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Ground Forces"

Marc Morano, the journalist who blew the whistle on the fake "war hero" status of John Murtha, has got a lot of flak over his story. He has however had a chance to defend himself on CNN. Transcript here

Mike Jericho has a BIG post on bias at the BBC. I won't even try to excerpt it but it mainly concerns their pro-Muslim stance. Mike has obviously put a lot of work into it so I think it is worth a read.

The latest issue of Ovi Magazine is out with lots to browse through.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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