Life in a "backwater"

Anne and I got into my 1963 Humber Super Snipe yesterday morning and motored down to the seaside for brunch. We took sandwiches with us and got takeaway coffee from a cafe close to our destination. When we got there, the park had a few people wandering around but the picnic shelter where we sat down was uninhabited. So we sat there in perfect peace and quiet and had our brunch looking out to sea across Moreton Bay. And there were no "minorities" to trouble us.



The English used to "motor" to salubrious places once too but from what I hear these days, all that they now do is crawl along in traffic jams. I encountered no traffic jams or holdups at all and we drove through some quite nice green countryside on the way -- so if any English person had been with us it would have seemed to them like a trip back in time.

We did stop at a liquor barn on the way to pick up some choice Tokay. The liquer Tokay that Australian vintners produce is lightyears ahead of the rough red that Hungarian vintners make out of the same grape. Australian liquer Muscat is remarkably good too -- so, if you are a drinker of fortified wines, scrap the Port and go for Australian Muscats and Tokays. It will be a definite step up.

Today is the first anniversary of Anne and I meeting so we are going to celebrate by going to the smorgasbord at the Hilton. The Brisbane Hilton does an impeccable smorgasbord with lots of seafood -- of which Australians are usually very fond. They seem to do the best Sydney rock oysters in town -- large and succulent. If you have never eaten raw Sydney rock oysters, you haven't lived. I know of no other oyster remotely as good.

It is so nice not to live in a "vibrant" place.

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

ELSEWHERE



Iran wins: "So, what now? Iran has defied the United Nations order to stop its most controversial nuclear work. It looks as if there will be a fudge by the European Union, dragging the US along behind. At yesterday's deadline, which was supposed to be the climax of this long-running stand-off, Europeans blinked first. Germany and Italy, in particular, have taken the view that more talks would be preferable to sanctions, even at the cost of blurring the force of the UN Security Council demand. That has played into the hands of Russia and China, who never much wanted sanctions. It has left the US, Britain, and France, who favoured an immediate move to sanctions, frustrated on the sidelines."



Australian PM unapologetic about the need for migrant assimilation: "Mr Howard sparked controversy yesterday by saying on talk-back radio a small group of Muslim migrants had refused to accept their adopted country's values and had not learned English. The Prime Minister said today he had no reason to apologise or water down those remarks. "There's a small section of the Islamic population which is unwilling to integrate," he said. "And I have said, generally, all migrants ... they have to integrate, and that means speaking English as quickly as possible, it means embracing Australian values and it also means making sure that no matter what the culture of the country from which they come might have been, Australia requires women to be treated fairly and equally and in the same fashion as men. "And if any migrants that come into this country have a different view, they better get rid of that view very quickly. "I don't retreat in any way from that."

Sweden no better for the poor: "In the USA the poor get 39% of the US median income and in Finland (and Sweden) the poor get 38% of the US median income. It's not worth quibbling over 1% so let's take it as read that the poor in America have exactly the same standard of living as the poor in Finland (and Sweden). Which is really a rather revealing number don't you think? All those punitive tax rates, all that redistribution, that blessed egalitarianism, the flatter distribution of income, leads to a change in the living standards of the poor of precisely ... nothing."

Albion's wayward children: "There is, to be sure, a very 'special relationship' that exists between England and America. Usually undefined, this relationship is essentially characterized by warm and collaborative ties between the two countries -- in the diplomatic, military, economic and political spheres. But there is also a deep cultural affinity between the two countries -- one that is, too often, left unexamined. Many people only see the linguistic expression of America's cultural bond with Britain -- the fact that we speak the same language. But there are 'fundamental customs and values that form the core of English-speaking cultures' according to a website inspired by The Anglosphere Challenge by James C. Bennett."

FEMA was the biggest disaster in New Orleans: "FEMA's failure was that it employed a command and control approach -- central planning -- as the basis for organizing relief activities. This compounded disaster with disaster, because the great weakness of central planning is its inability to respond quickly and adapt to changes and unforeseen circumstances. No centralized authority, no matter how well-intentioned its employees and well-functioning its internal operations, can overcome this problem. How could any one agency go about coordinating thousands of people with different needs with thousands of people who have supplies that could help them? FEMA's model required both the demands for relief and offers of supply to be communicated first to the agency for approval. Private individuals and local governments that attempted to bring in their own supplies quickly found that FEMA would not allow it."

Wal-Mart and Toddler economics: "Whether we handle WalMart and the attendant issues as intelligent adults, capable of reasoning, or we do so as whining three-year-olds with all the attendant knowledge of incentives, utopian wishes and economic consequences such a three-year-old might possess is, indeed, one of the important questions facing the country. At the heart of Klein's cluster of concerns is an entirely valid, even admirable, concern. He wishes the low paid to be paid more and to have better benefits to go with that higher pay. However, like a three-year-old, he's not quite capable of seeing what the consequences of such a wish would actually be."

Strange silence: "For the national media, higher gas prices at the pump are always deserving of banner headlines and sob stories about how tough it is for families to make ends meet. But reductions in gas prices are invariably a snoozer. So that's why the latest data on gasoline prices falling comfortably below $3.00 a gallon in most markets has been mostly ignored. AAA reported an average price of $2.84 -- which, in the wake of prices as high as $3.29 a gallon at many service stations, is a blessed relief. Lower gas prices act like an economy-wide tax cut"

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUMSFELD CALLS OUT THE DEMS

About time!

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has compared Bush Administration critics to those who sought to appease the Nazis before World War II, warning that the US is confronting "a new type of fascism". Mr Rumsfeld, speaking at an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, delivered some of his most explicit and extended attacks yet on the Administration's critics, provoking an angry response from Democrats who accused him of "campaigning on fear".

By comparing US foreign policy with World War II and the Cold War, Mr Rumsfeld sought to portray sceptics of the Bush foreign policy as being on the wrong side of history. Mr Rumsfeld again ridiculed US officials who, before World War II, wished to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. "I recount that history because, once again, we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism," he said. "But some seem not to have learned history's lessons. Can we truly afford to believe that, somehow or someway, vicious extremists could be appeased?"

His use of the word "appease" is seen as an attempt to associate critics of the Administration with the failed efforts of the British government to mollify Hitler in the 1930s.... Mr Rumsfeld aggressively defended the war in Iraq and his leadership of it.While he acknowledged the reality of debate in a free society, he attacked the media, saying reports have been manipulated by Iraqi insurgents or al-Qaeda terrorists. He suggested that negative news stories and criticism of the war sap the nation's will to fight in Iraq. "The struggle we are in is too important to have the luxury of returning to the 'blame America first' mentality," Mr Rumsfeld said.

More here. Taranto has more on the speech and the slippery Democrat reaction to it.

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

ELSEWHERE

Generation gap: "It turns out that NPR lefty Juan Williams' kid is a conservative. Sweet. He's running for the D.C. city council as a Republican. Where did Juan go wrong? Then again, with Juan's recent attack of common sense on the race issue, maybe the kid's influencing the dad."

Dumb Californians want to make their fuel even dearer: ""As Los Angeles motorist Jill Cantrell removes the pump nozzle from her Honda Civic gas tank, she spouts out two figures: '$56 for a gas tank for me and $78 billion in profits last year for the oil companies,' she says. 'I'm livid.' How many other Californians are angry about gasoline prices -- and ready for their state to take action -- will be clear this November, when voters decide whether to levy a new tax on oil companies that drill in California and use the money for in-state development of alternative fuels."

More UN corruption: "For years the United Nations tried to cover up perverted and outrageous behaviour by uniformed and civilian personnel who have served in East Timor since 1999. But as a new wave of more than 2000 UN-employed police and staff prepare to travel to the capital Dili, Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anybody to justice for crimes that included sexual abuse of children and bestiality. Dr Hasegawa declared that the UN's Integrated Mission in East Timor, which officially became operational on Monday, would enforce a "zero tolerance" policy towards sexual exploitation and abuse committed by uniformed and civilian UN personnel. He said several UN staff would be employed solely to enforce the policy, which will include briefings for all staff at which "they will be made aware of the consequences of any activity they may carry out that could blacken the authority of the United Nations".



Cynics mock stars' African charity: "Madonna feels responsible for the children of the world and has found herself a "big, big project" to help orphans in Malawi. Gwyneth Paltrow declares "I am African" in a new advertisement for a charity working in Africa. The continent has long been a favourite destination for celebrity campaigners, going back to 1954 when Danny Kaye became UNICEF's goodwill ambassador. U2's Bono and fellow Irish rocker Bob Geldof are Africa veterans, and more recently Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have brought Hollywood gloss to the continent. But the latest flood of stars searching for a good cause has prompted a collective groan in the press and among bloggers, as people question their methods and motives. "We are on the verge of farcical at this point," said Michael Wolff, columnist for Vanity Fair, when asked about Africa's popularity among famous performers. "This has become just a part of the public relations play book. Everybody has a PR person and every PR person says 'which country do you want to adopt?'."

Califonia tries to rein in irresponsible judges: "A bill concerning sentencing of dangerous juveniles authored by state Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, is headed to the governor for a final yea or nay, Ashburn's office announced Thursday. Senate Bill 1626, also known as "Dylan's Law," would discourage judges from giving "slap on the wrist" judgments to teenage rapists and other dangerous young offenders, Ashburn says, by requiring judges to formally explain their decisions when issuing lenient outcomes. Ashburn introduced the law in honor of Dylan Pardo of Bakersfield. Pardo was 14 in 2003 when she was drugged and raped by a 17-year-old who received almost no punishment. The Californian typically does not name victims of sexual assault but Pardo has chosen to talk about her case publicly. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has 30 days to sign the bill, veto it or take no action, in which case it would automatically become law".



Donkey police in South Africa: "Police in South Africa, which has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, have been told to ride donkeys or bicycles to crime scenes. The advice, offered by a smiling Charles Nqakula, the country's embattled Minister of Safety and Security, to a passing-out parade for new recruits, drew immediate criticism. Mr Nqakula was responding to complaints that because his force was undermanned and underequipped, officers were often slow to reach the scene of a crime. "If you don't have a car, ride a bicycle or a donkey," Mr Nqakula told the newly qualified officers at the weekend. His remarks came after an upsurge in armed attacks and concern that the country's criminals are better equipped than its police. "This is typical of the complacency of a government which is no longer accountable to any except its own," a spokesperson for the opposition Democratic Alliance said. The South African murder rate is second only to that of Colombia and reported rape cases rank among the highest in the world. Residents are 12 times more likely to be murdered in South Africa than in the United States and 50 times more likely than in Europe"

Arab Prince speaks out: "Arab leaders wasted billions of dollars to fund a war they can never win, a member of Jordan's royal family charges. "Arab leaders stole billions of dollars from the Arab people in order to spend them on weapons to fight Israel, which they can never defeat, instead of using the money for health and education purposes to aid their people," Jordanian Prince Hassan Bin Talal told an international conference in Kyoto, Japan, according to the Israeli Ynet news. Once in line for the Jordanian throne, Prince Hassan spoke to the world conference of the interfaith group "Religions for Peace," attacking Iran's nuclear development program and warning against nuclear armament, especially on Iran's part."

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

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

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

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

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

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

A VISITOR'S REPORT ON CUBA

Two years ago, I was given what quickly became an awful assignment. I was told to visit Cuba. Oh sure, like everybody I thought: dark rum, hot nights, fat cigars, the rumba. The reality was very different. Cuba was wretched. Every day the photographer and I encountered distressing scenes of women, children and ageing Cubans living in terrible poverty....

Elsewhere, we found barefoot children searching through rubbish bins for food. There is a large black population in Cuba - many of them are descendants of sugar-cane cutters - and there were many blacks among the beggars. Women with babies at the breast tugged at our clothes, begging for pennies. In the Western-style bars, beautiful Cuban girls hung off the arms of Western men.

We drove into the countryside and found people living with open sewers and dirt floors, with no food, no coffee, no rum, no pork, no music, none of the things a Cuban needs to thrive. Castro's revolution - free food, free education, free health care for all - was a sad, sorry joke. The classrooms were decrepit, the school books so old as to be useless. Store shelves were empty. It was a police state, too. Nobody would speak ill of Castro (if they did, it was quietly, with a pale, strained face and a furtive glance over the shoulder).

We visited the homes of dissidents and heard that librarians, poets and free-marketeers - good, friendly people - had been taken to prison, some of them sentenced to 20 years or more in a cell no larger than a toilet block, forced to walk around and around in circles, 400km from home in a nation where it's impossible to visit anybody unless you hitch a ride in the back of a creaking, humpbacked truck known as a "camel", made in eastern Europe and liable to break down in the Cuban heat.

It was a terrible shock because, like many people, I'd believed the hype about Cuba: that it was a socialist paradise; that Castro was a visionary leader; that the Cuban people were happy communists. In fact, Castro is a gutless dictator who has never been brave enough to hold a presidential election. Yet across the West he continues to be celebrated as some grand, visionary leader, instead of being derided as a lunatic on his last legs.

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

In the last week or so, there has been a lot of media hype about the latest "obesity" study -- which purports to show that fat kills you. In my usual pesky way however, I looked up the original academic journal article. The result is what I think is a pretty good slash and burn of the article concerned -- just up on FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC.

Illegal immigrant driver's license bill is back in California: "Legislation to allow illegal immigrants in California apply for driver's licenses was resurrected Monday in a weakened version that's contingent on federal funding. Senate Bill 1162 by Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, was approved by Democrats in the Assembly on a 42-34 vote, a week after Democrats derailed its precursor, fearing a voter backlash in November. The emotionally charged measure still requires confirmation by the state Senate, which passed an earlier version, SB 1160. It also faces a likely veto by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vetoed similar legislation last year. Unlike SB 1160, the amended legislation does not require state funding. It would be implemented only after the state receives funding from the federal Real ID Act of 2005, which requires every state to issue licenses that comply with a national standard. The law, passed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, allows states to provide driving-only licenses to illegal immigrants. But those licenses must have a distinguishing color or mark, a provision that Cedillo -- who has waged an unsuccessful eight-year battle to obtain licenses for illegal immigrants -- once resisted."

Hezbollah lost: "As the scale of the destruction in the Shiite south becomes more clear, the pro-Hezbollah euphoria (much of it created by Western media and beamed back to Lebanon through satellite TV) is evaporating. Reality is beginning to reassert its rights. And that could be good news for Lebanon as a nation. It is unlikely that Hezbollah will ever regain the position it has lost. The Lebanese from all sides of the political spectrum are united in their determination not to allow any armed group to continue acting as a state within the state."

Muslims make Muslims second-class citizens: "I’m with Rushdie and Amis as I read all the sympathetic coverage in the liberal press about the poor, puzzled Muslims who feel that they are being picked on in airports and flights. If the parents of the young men who are attracted to this murderous martyrdom have lost control of their sons, then they must shoulder part of the blame. If the Muslims who choose to live in our society, with all its so-called tempting freedoms, do not protest against those who wish to destroy it, then how can they expect our tolerance? Why are the moderates not, in their hundreds and thousands, standing outside those mosques that are known to preach hatred, shouting “Not in our name” down their megaphones or “One, two, three, four, no more terror anymore”?"

Piggybacking on terror in Britain: "Two days after British authorities broke up an alleged plot to blow up multiple aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean, the "moderate" Muslim establishment in Britain published an aggressive open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair. It suggested that Mr. Blair could better fight terrorism if he recognized that the current British government policy, especially on "the debacle of Iraq," provides "ammunition to extremists." The letter writers demanded that the prime minister change his foreign policy to "make us all safer." One prominent signatory, the Labour member of Parliament Sadiq Khan, added that Mr. Blair's reluctance to criticize Israel increased the pool of people whom terrorists can recruit. In other words, Islamists working within the system exploited the thwarted Islamist terror plot to pressure the British government to implement their joint wishes and reverse British policy in the Middle East. Lawful Islamists shamelessly leveraged the near death of thousands to forward their agenda.... "

We will MAKE you happy! "A new breed of permanently "cheerful" mouse is providing new hope for treatment of clinical depression, researchers say. The scientists studied a gene called TREK-1, which can affect the flow of a brain chemical called serotonin. This in turn influences mood, sleep and sexuality. By breeding mice without TREK-1, the re-searchers said they created a depression-resistant strain. ... Debonnel's team tested the newly bred mice using "behavioral, electrophysiological and biochemical measures known to gauge `depression' in animals," he said. "The results really surprised us. [They] acted as if they had been treated with antidepressants for at least three week-s." The research represents the first time depression has been eliminated by genetically modifying an organism, he added. "The discovery of a link between TREK-1 and depression could ultimately lead to the development of a new generation of antidepressant drugs."

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

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

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

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

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

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

More stupid anti-conservative psychology

The recent book by John Dean (of Watergate fame), called Conservatives Without Conscience has been a great hit on the Leftist blogs. There is for instance a huge and hugely self-satisfied comment string about it here. The comments there that amused me most were the ones by Leftists saying that they had not actually read the book but still thought it was great. Very Leftist. They KNOW what is right: Evidence is irrelevant.

The book says of course that conservatives are psychologically disturbed and "authoritarian" -- an ongoing leftist theme that goes all the way back to a 1950 book which had as its leading author the Marxist theoretican Theodor Wiesengrund (aka Adorno). The Adorno book was written at a time when most Leftists alive could remember themselves espousing doctrines similar to Hitler's (the prewar American Left was heavily into racism, antisemitism, eugenics, nationalism, homophobia etc.) so, nonsensical though it was, the book was eagerly seized on by the Left of the day as a way of attaching Nazism to conservatives rather than to themselves.

The book has long since been discredited (See e.g. here and here) and one of the most comprehensive demolitions of it was by a curious Canadian psychology professor known as "Bob" Altemeyer. Altemeyer (1981) pointed out in great and convincing detail that the research methods and research results available did not support the claims of the book but he still thought that the theory behind the book was pretty right. So he set out on his own large program of research to find support for at least some parts of the theory.

The central pillar of his research was a new inventory of attitudes -- attitudes which he claimed reflected "Right-wing authoritarianism" (RWA). In a quite hilarious piece of bathos, however, he concluded in one of his later books that: "Right wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party" (p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom). In other words, the people Altemeyer's questionnaire identified as "Right-wing authoritarians" were in fact as likely to vote for the Canadian Liberals or the U.S. Democrats as they were likely to vote for Conservatives or Republicans! His "Rightists" were, in other words, often Leftists!

Such a stupid body of work as Altemeyer's claims about conservatism would of course long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history if reason and logic were what motivated the Left but in fact Altemeyer's work is wildly popular among Leftist social scientists and social commentators -- and the John Dean book relies heavily on it. So if you ever do get around to looking at the Dean book, just remember that everything he says is just as likely to be true of Democrat supporters as GOP voters!

For those interested in a more comprehensive demolition of the Dean book, Peter Thomas has written one. See Liberals Without Logic.

References

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Altemeyer, R. (1988) Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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

Why the Leftist conspiracy theorists think the 9/11 events were "staged"

Excerpt from Ace of Spades

The writer of the current conspiracy book gives the game away several times. Here's a telling example:

Why had the FBI failed to put the record straight over the previous four-and-a-half years? One answer is that it suited the heroism legend to keep silent as the Pentagon banged the drum for war in Iraq.

"Heroism legend"? Again, assuming for the purposes of the argument that he's right -- how does this diminish the heroics of the Flight 93 Rebellion whatsoever? In his own mind it diminishes their courage, because he needs physical courage to be denigrated and exposed as futile. His entire worldview depends upon this.

For the rest of us, the planes crashed into the WTC, the Pentagon, and a field in Shaksville, Pensylvania. For the left, the planes crashed into their entire worldview, collapsing it as surely as the Twin Towers were collapsed.

And since then, they've made a determined and relentless effort to substitute in their own preferred narrative, in which the WTC was destroyed in a controlled demolition by the CIA, the Pentagon was simply blown up with an American missile or planted American bombs, and the first soldiers in the Greater War on Terror shouldn't even have bothered, because the Sidewinder missiles were on their way no matter what they did.

What links all these conspiracy theories? The unshakable belief that there is no enemy except the US Government (except, perhaps, for the Mossad), and that heroism, patriotism, and a physical defense of one's country and one's very own life is a doomed venture hardly worth the candle.

Admitting there is an external, implacable, and deadly threat to us strongly implies we need to fight it. But they've decided a priori that fighting is never the correct response.

Ergo, somewhere the syllogism must be flawed. They focus their attention on the premise-- that there is in fact a deadly external threat. That must be demonstrated as incorrect if their preferred conclusion -- pacifism at any price -- is to remain viable.

In their own minds they've rebulit the Towers so they were never destroyed that day, but they now stand on a foundation of magical thinking and a childish retreat into dreamworlds and fantasies.

For some, the choice between adapting one's worldview to the real world or adapting the real world to one's worldview is a fairly easy call.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialist planners at work

"More than 1 billion pounds has been wasted by the [U.K.] Government on transport projects that have been cancelled or delayed, leaving roads and railways struggling to cope with huge growth in traffic.... The Government has repeatedly claimed that rising costs have made new road links, tram networks and rail upgrades unaffordable. But official figures uncovered by the Conservatives reveal that more than 1 billion has already been spent since 2000 without providing any extra capacity.

The most expensive single scheme on the list of stalled projects is Crossrail, the plan for mainline rail tunnels under Central London to relieve congestion on the Central Line. It has cost 254 million since 2001 without an inch of tunnel being dug. The Government has yet to commit itself to fund the 16 billion project and officials privately admit that, even if it goes ahead, it may not be ready until 2020.

Almost 300 million has been spent preparing for tram schemes in Portsmouth, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester that have either been cancelled or greatly reduced in scope. In 2000 John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, promised 25 new tram lines by 2010. So far two have opened: in Nottingham and the London City Airport extension of the Docklands Light Railway. The Thameslink 2000 project to upgrade the north-south rail route across London was due to open six years ago but is unlikely to be ready for another decade.

More than 80 million has been spent on preparatory works at St Pancras, including tunnels that will be boarded up and a station that will remain half-empty. Another white elephant is Stratford International Station, in East London, which cost 210 million but might never be used by the Eurostar trains for which it was built."

More here

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

THE JUVENILE LEFT

Why the Canadian Left's new bad guy is Israel

At some point in his first or second year, the average undergraduate comes to a dreadful, shocking, thrilling, intoxicating realization: Everything I was taught to believe until now is a lie. We're not the good guys. We're the bad guys: the West, white people, my parents, whatever. Grasping this insight is the key to enlightenment, and enlightenment is the key to, among other things, pulling chicks. As time passes, most of us move on to a more balanced understanding of life...

The reflexive oppositionism of so much of the left, its instant identification with whoever or whatever is most hostile to the society of which it is a part, most closely resembles that of the undergraduate. It is a badge, a pose, a lifestyle, an arrangement of reality that is pleasing to believe, a reminder to the believer of the third eye of enlightenment that is his gift.

Yet in this country [Canada] it can take on a rather uglier form, insofar as the object of its loathing can be displaced onto another society, quite apart from our own. Until now, the locus of this disaffection was the United States. Lately, disturbingly, it has centred more and more on Israel. Anti-Americanism has mutated into something that might at best be called anti-Israelism, and at times looks alarmingly like anti-Semitism. Which brings us to the present wretched state of the Liberal party.

That the party's left wing has long been a hotbed of anti-Americanism is news to no one. Indeed, so entrenched was this attitude among certain sections of the ruling party that it resembled something of a state religion... ... perhaps there is a link between them: between the pseudo-neutrality that is one strain of recent Liberal foreign policy, and the anti-Americanism, shading into anti-Israelism, that is the other. An unwillingness to take sides was, of course, one of the ways in which we were supposed to distinguish ourselves from the Americans: They were warlike and ideological, we were peacekeeping ecumenicals.

But perhaps there was something else at work. A refusal to make moral judgments, to distinguish between the merely flawed and the truly evil, may in time lead to an inability to do so. Having gotten out of the habit of judgment, the muscles can atrophy: If "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," then it is all too easy to forget, not only who the terrorists are, but who are the freedom fighters. If anti-Semitism is the "socialism of fools," perhaps anti-Israelism is the pacifism of knaves.

(Excerpt via Damian Penny. Full article Here)

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

ELSEWHERE



Big business prefers the party of the status quo -- The Democrats: "Businesses do not desire free markets. Businesses desire profits. Sometimes free markets yield profits. Sometimes big government yields profits. Take private equity shops. Some of them may resist regulations or taxes on themselves, but taxes and regulations can--and do--drive privately-held companies to sell out... Also, if you are one of the biggest businesses in your industry, regulation could be a boon. Regulation and tax compliance add to overhead, which acts as a barrier to entry and disproportionately affects smaller businesses. Maybe you got big in the world of hedge funds thanks to relatively low regulation, but now it might profit you to pull the ladder up behind you. Free markets are dynamic. Industry leaders want the status quo.

China Hand has just done one of his rare postings -- giving a glimpse into life in modern China. Some good pics. Blogspot blogs are not viewable in China so there is also a China-readable backup of the blog here. There is also a small archive of his pics from China here or here

Wow! I think the weak-kneed British police who won't chase a motorcycle thief in case he falls off the bike could learn something from the Spanish police. Watch this video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

MELANIE MORGAN ON MEDIA DEFEATISM



In an article in the New York Observer, Carlson announced, "I'm getting more paleo every day" which surely pleases Carlson's bosses at MSNBC who target an audience ideologically opposite to that reached by the Fox News Channel... But, while Carlson will be doing the Tango on television, there will be "real men" enduring the blinding sandstorms in Iraq, trying to secure a peace that will allow a new Iraq to rise up from the ashes of Saddam Hussein's despotic regime. The men and women of the United States Armed Forces have made tremendous progress in Iraq, but Tucker Carlson and his ilk are largely ignorant of this or ignore such progress because it doesn't fit with their own agenda.

The foreign terrorist threat posed by al-Qaida sympathizers who poured into Iraq from Iran and Syria has largely been defeated. You hear almost nothing from the news media about the fact that al-Qaida in Iraq has been effectively destroyed by our military. The violence today is largely sectarian violence between competing religious and ethnic groups. The greatest need in Iraq today is to ensure that a sense of stability and security can allow this newly freed nation to chart a course for a peaceful future, free of sectarian violence.

Carlson sat silent and stunned, along with anti-war Democrat strategist Rich Masters, when I pointed out that the number of fatalities in Iraq had been dropping over the past several months. You see, both Carlson and Masters are creatures of that political-media world where truth is concocted out of do-gooder liberal ideology and facts are ignored...

The humanitarian efforts of U.S. troops are almost entirely ignored. Liberal journalists scoff at the daily reports by U.S. Central Command outlining our military's success in apprehending or killing terrorists and death squad leaders. These left-wing reporters seem hell-bent to rally the American public to oppose the mission in Iraq....

Increasingly, a number of conservative women such as myself, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and others have had to carry much of the load in rallying the American public to muster the fortitude to outwit and outlast the Islamic terrorists who are plotting to bring down the nations of the West.

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

Baghdad operation working: "Operation Together Forward, the Iraqi-led operation to reduce violence in Baghdad, is progressing well and improving the security situation around the Iraqi capital, a Joint Staff official said Aug. 23. Over the last five weeks, the number of incidents of sectarian violence in Baghdad has decreased steadily, Army Brig. Gen. Michael D. Barbero, deputy director of regional operations for the Joint Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference. This success is a direct result of the efforts and dedication of Iraqis, he said. “I attribute it to an Iraqi government that has committed itself to ending sectarian violence, and I attribute it to the capability of the Iraqi security forces,” Barbero said. “Two-thirds of the forces on the ground in Baghdad are Iraqi security forces. The feedback … from the population in the areas we’ve cleared are all very positive about removing the threat of this violence, the performance of the Iraqi security forces, and their confidence in the government.” As the operation progresses, Iraqi forces take more and more responsibility for areas and missions, Barbero said"

Britain freezes Muslim charity: "A charity at the centre of concerns over the funding of the alleged terrorist plot to attack trans-Atlantic aircraft has had its assets frozen. The Charity Commission is investigating the activities of Crescent Relief, which raised large sums from British Muslims for the humanitarian operation after the earthquake in Kashmir last October. The inquiry follows the revelation that one of the men arrested at High Wycombe, a town near London, in connection with the alleged plot was a fundraiser for the charity. It has also emerged that a co-founder of the charity was Abdul Rauf, from Birmingham, whose son Rashid is in custody in Pakistan, where the authorities claim that he is a "key figure" in the conspiracy".

Brits wanting out: "One in five Britons - nearly 10m adults - is considering leaving the country amid growing disillusionment over the failure of political parties to deliver tax cuts, according to a new poll. The extensive survey conducted by ICM, the polling company, shows that - contrary to the current approach of both Labour and the Tories - an overwhelming majority of voters do want to see cuts in income and inheritance tax. The results will raise alarm in both political camps, but particularly for David Cameron, who has yet to solidify the Conservatives' lead over Labour in the opinion polls. The Tory leader, who has ditched his party's long-standing commitment to tax cuts in favour of "economic stability", has maintained a solid lead over Labour since May in most of the polls, but is still well short of securing a majority. Today's poll shows that many people are highly disillusioned with the British political system"

Sick Leftist bitch: "How do you feel when you see a baby crying? Concerned? Troubled? Sympathetic? Well, how would you feel if you found out that the baby had been deliberately provoked to tears for the sake of "art". The photographer Jill Greenberg intended her images of sobbing babies to be a metaphorical commentary on what she sees as the evils of the Bush administration and the dangerous influence of the evangelical religious right. But soon after her series End Times was exhibited in LA, Greenberg had a rude awakening. Rather than seeing the metaphor, people accused her of abusing the children, one of whom is her own daughter. A furious campaign was launched against Greenberg, spearheaded by an internet blogger, Andrew Peterson, a San Francisco investment adviser who has four young children. His initial blog read: "Jill Greenberg is a sick woman who should be arrested and charged with child abuse." He went on: "She is taking babies, toddlers under three years old, stripping them of their clothes and then provoking them to various states of emotional distress, anger, rage, etc, so that she can then take photos of them this way to `illustrate her personal beliefs'. We should all be outraged by this horrible woman."

Reuters gets what Reuters deserves: "Two journalists working for Reuters were wounded overnight when their clearly-marked car was hit by an Israeli missile overnight in Gaza City. The correspondents were covering an Israeli military incursion, doctors and residents said. One of the Palestinian journalists, who worked for a local media organisation, was seriously wounded. A cameraman working for Reuters was knocked unconscious in the air strike, one of several in the area. The Israeli army said the vehicle was hit because it was acting suspiciously in an area of combat and had not been identified as belonging to the media."

Leftists love criminals: "Governors in Iowa and Virginia have unilaterally restored voting rights to many felons, while legislatures in Maryland and Nebraska have liberalized their laws. At the federal level, a bill supported by Sens. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, among others, would force states to allow felons no longer under sentence to vote. That bill is on hold, at least while the Democrats are out of power. But lawsuits in federal courts in Florida, Washington and New York have claimed that depriving felons of the franchise violates the Voting Rights Act."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brookes News Update

American economy and purchasing power v. Keynesianism: The lesson of history is that yesterday's economic wisdom is indeed correct in warning us of the dangers of pumping up consumption to escape recession. Unfortunately Keynesianism has so corrupted economic thought that this fundamental truth is openly sneered at
Why the world won't run out of oil: Tim Colebatch is an appalling economics commentator. His knowledge of how market operate is truly woeful. He evidently has now idea the world's oil reserves are expanding. In fact there are over 21 trillion barrels of oil that we know of
Islamic terrorists are taking my mascara - this means WAR!: For years I have been writing that there is a whole evil culture out there called 'Islam' which wants to kill everybody who is not them. Like a mantra, I've repeated over and over that Israel is the canary in the mine and these crazed maniacs don't give a diddly-squat about 'Land for Peace'
It is Islam, dummy: The life manual of Islam, the Quran, is a document of exclusion, hatred and violence that shapes the Muslims' thinking and behaving. This stone-age document is optimally suited for people of stunted development
Historians have absolved Fidel Castro: Castro's record is one of torture and mass murder. Under him Cuba's health care badly deteriorated: a nation with a formerly massive influx of European immigrants needs machine guns, water cannons and sharks to keep its people from fleeing, while half-starved Haitians a short 60 miles away turn up their noses at any thought of moving to Cuba
The plight of Lebanese Christians and Islamic terrorism: A Christian Lebanese speaks up for Israel and tells of the horrors of Islamofascism. Isn't it interesting how our media manage to ignore Lebanese Christians?
The Wall Street Journal's immigration fallacies and US wage rates: When it comes to the economics of immigration the Wall Street Journal can be remarkably obtuse in its drive for open borders. Not only is the Journal's economics shonky on this matter it also ignores what is happening in Dearborn. For most Americans one Dearborn is one too many

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

ELSEWHERE

There's a YouTube comedy video here about how you can help Al Gore save the planet. The video is the work of blogger The Poor B*stard.

Chris Brand has just done a big new lot of posts -- with his usual devotion to telling it like it is and damn the consequences

There is a big article in The Guardian (of all places) about how a British Leftist became disillusioned by the realities of the new black-ruled South Africa. He relates a lot of very unpleasant stories from first-hand experience of living for a few years in South Africa. Reality even gets through to Leftists sometimes.

The genetics for intelligence have been evolving rapidly: "The fastest evolving gene in the human genome is one linked to brain development, researchers say. A study of differences between the human and chimp genomes has identified a gene associated with neural growth in the cerebral cortex - the part of the brain involved in processing thoughts and learning - as having undergone "accelerated evolutionary change". Katherine Pollard and colleagues at the University of California Santa Cruz, US, suggest that the fast-changing gene may help explain the dramatic expansion of this part of the brain during the evolution of humans. They identified the rapidly evolving region of DNA - called human accelerated region 1 (HAR1) - after carrying out an extensive computational comparison between the genomes of humans, chimpanzees and other vertebrates."

Focus needed: "Unless we learn to see our enemies for who they are, we cannot hope to win this war. We've got to stop treating our own government as the enemy. We have to quit worrying about whether the rest of the world will love us when we take actions to protect ourselves. We have to give up the illusion that if we just retreat from the world or abandon Israel the Islamist fanatics will leave us alone."

The government is the one squeezing consumers: "Once again, a self-serving politician, in a shameless attempt to curry favor with potential voters, launched a deceitful attack on 'greedy oil companies' for increased gasoline prices. In her press release issued last month, Senator Hillary Clinton said: 'Consumers are getting squeezed at the same time that the oil companies are recording the largest profits in corporate history.' No Senator Clinton, you have it wrong -- government is the one squeezing consumers."



An amazing Argentine import: "This is a story about a barbecue. In the South Florida back yard of a friend who had invited me over for dinner, I saw a most unusual barbecue, but what I learned about it from its owner informed me about a lot more than barbecues. It hinted at the incredible power of freedom -- the freedom of people to trade with each other, over distances and across borders. A freedom that has always throughout my life and the life of everyone else alive today been throttled, bled, and interfered with by government, for government."

Tax cut revenue: "Many in the Washington establishment were shocked Aug. 17, when the Congressional Budget Office reported a surge of 'unanticipated tax receipts' that will sharply push down this year's deficit. Those who had been proclaiming the Bush tax rate cuts would result in a big reduction in tax revenues tried to hide their disappointment. It was tough being proved wrong again after having said the same thing when Ronald Reagan cut tax rates in the early 1980s."

The living Constitution's double standard: "You do see the irony here, don't you? A coalition of pressure groups -- Greenpeace, the ACLU, and a bunch of left-wing professors -- are arguing that the Constitution must be immutably inflexible, adamantine in the face of changing times. The fact that al Qaeda is using new technologies the Founders could never have imagined is irrelevant, say the absolutists. If the government can listen in on bin Laden's phone calls without a warrant, what's to keep them from listening to a phone call between me and my aunt Sally? Isn't this just a bit hard to take with a straight face from the ACLU, which finds powers not created by the Constitution every day and periodically declares such inanities as the idea that the Constitution forbids teachers from reading The Chronicles of Narnia in class lest the tykes' young minds be corrupted by hidden messages about Christianity?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

NYT MORE ANTI-ISRAEL THAN AL JAZEERA!

First some hypocrisy from the usual suspects that should surprise no-one:

Here are two stories about the Middle East conflict: Rights organizations accuse Israel of war crimes: "Amnesty International Wednesday published findings that point to an Israeli policy of deliberate destruction of Lebanese civilian infrastructure, which included war crimes, during the recent conflict".

and:

Annan deeply concerned about Israeli violations of ceasefire: "United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was in touch with top Israeli and Lebanese officials Saturday following an Israeli raid in eastern Lebanon which he warned endangers the fragile calm that has generally held in the region since Monday".

Neither story shows that the United Nations or Amnesty International concerned about the use of civilians as shields by the Hezbollah to rocket Israeli civilians. Or the murder of opponents of Hezbollah--or the refusal of Hezbollah to give it its weapons, as per the UN agreement. Again, more reason to believe that Annan and company are really fronting for the terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah--why pay any attention to these apologists for murders. World War II had Quisling, the War on Terrorism has Kofi Annan.

Via Steven Frank

But note the comment below from Taranto

The anti-Israel group Amnesty International has issued a report accusing the Jewish state of "war crimes." Blogger David Bernstein does a good job taking apart the report, noting, for example, that Amnesty International faults Israel for hitting military targets, such as bridges, roads, seaports and Beirut's international airport. This news report offers another important counterbalance:

"During the four week war Hezbollah fired 3,900 rockets at Israeli towns and cities with the aim of inflicting maximum civilian casualties. The Israeli government says that 44 Israeli civilians were killed in the bombardments and 1,400 wounded. AI has not issued a report accusing Hezbollah of war crimes.

The New York Times account, by contrast, quotes an Israeli official as rejecting the Amnesty International allegations, but it makes no mention of Hezbollah's unquestioned war crimes. In this sense, at least, the Times is more anti-Israel than the organization that produced the other news report-- which, by the way, is al-Jazeera.

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

FORGET THE WAR: THE U.S. LEFT IS NOW CAMPAIGNING AGAINST WAL-MART!



Leftist hatred of success completely overwhelms their thinking: ""Imagine a private group that pays billions in taxes, creates millions of jobs and sells things at ultra-low prices. Too good to be true? It's called Wal-Mart-and Democrats, for some reason, want to kill it off... This is all part of a recent trend among Democratic politicians using Wal-Mart as a foil to ingratiate themselves with middle-class voters. This may be good politics. We don't know. But those who participate in such Wal-Mart-bashing reveal themselves to be economic illiterates of the most dangerous sort... A study by economic consultant Global Insight found that, from 1985 to 2004, Wal-Mart slashed food-at-home prices by 9.1%, goods prices by 4.2% and overall consumer prices by 3.1%. If those cuts don't sound huge, consider that, all told, they saved mostly poor and middle-class consumers $263 billion-or $895 per person and $2,329 per household. By now, of course, it's become obvious that Democrats aren't so much anti-Wal-Mart as they are pro-organized labor... Yet despite unions' widely disseminated claims, the wages that Wal-Mart pays its employees are competitive. In 2004, Global Insight found that the average wage nationwide for jobs equivalent to Wal-Mart's was $8.46 an hour. Wal-Mart paid $9.17. Put bluntly, the war against Wal-Mart Stores is a war against the poor, and it's shocking to watch a major political party carry it out... A Zogby Poll...found that 85% of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers pulled the lever for President Bush in 2004, and that 88% of people who never shop there voted for John Kerry. Maybe the split in this country isn't so much red state versus blue, but Wal-Mart vs. non-Wal-Mart. And since 20% of Americans are Wal-Mart shoppers, Democrats might think twice before alienating them any more than they have so far."

Another reason why the Left hate a store that is good for the poor: "What is behind all the furor, and what exactly are Democratic candidates hoping to gain by jumping on the anti-Wal-Mart bandwagon? It's about unions, or the lack thereof, in Wal-Mart's employee ranks. A review of the major anti-Wal-Mart organizations campaigning against the company reveals that they are all union-funded".

Even the L.A. Times thinks it is absurd to campaign against Wal-Mart: "The gusto with which even moderate Democrats are bashing Wal-Mart is bound to backfire. Not only does it take the party back to the pre-Clinton era, when Democrats were perceived as reflexively anti-business, it manages to make Democrats seem like out-of-touch elitists to the millions of Americans who work and shop at Wal-Mart. One reason the Democrats may have a tin ear on this subject is demographic. Certainly most of the party's urban liberal activists are far removed from the Wal-Mart phenomenon. The retailer has thrived mainly in small towns and exurbs, which is one reason a Zogby poll found that three-quarters of weekly Wal-Mart shoppers voted for President Bush in 2004, and why 8 out of 10 people who have never shopped at Wal-Mart voted for John Kerry. Denouncing the retailer may make sense if the goal is to woo primary activists, but it's a disastrous way to reach out to the general electorate. Or to govern, for that matter."

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

ELSEWHERE

Mark Steyn on Iraq: "To begin something and be unable to stick with it to the finish is far more damaging to your reputation than if you'd never begun it in the first place. Nitwit Democrats think anything that can be passed off as a failure in Iraq will somehow diminish only Bush and the neocons. In reality -- a concept with which Democrats seem only dimly acquainted -- it would diminish the nation, and all but certainly end the American moment."

Profiling: "The fact remains that young Middle Eastern males have committed a disproportionate amount of violent terror attacks in recent years. Accordingly, it is simply a waste of resources to subject all airline passengers, from grandmothers to toddlers, to equal scrutiny, while refusing to spend more time investigating passengers who come from the group from which most terrorists spring nowadays."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where E. J. Dionne went wrong

I am reproducing this excellent post from Betsy Newmark in full below as I would be hard-pressed to put it better

E.J. Dionne just doesn't get it. He has a column today trying to explain why being a liberal today is now considered an insult - so insulting that liberals don't want to be called liberals, but progressives. You can sense the puzzlement in his cri de coeur: how can liberals be so much better than conservatives and the masses (those idiots!) not recognize their inherent moral superiority? He searches for the moment when liberals went from being the noble crusaders fighting for commendable goals to having to hide their ideology behind euphemisms. He first congratulates himself and other liberals on just being better.

At its best, liberalism is about the defense of the underdog, of minority rights, of social justice, of active but restrained government, of civil liberties, of openness and tolerance.

In their own defense, those who still admit to being liberals would argue that the very fact that they have stood up for minority rights -- including, heroically, for civil rights in the 1960s -- made them unpopular, sometimes with a majority of the country.

They also argue, correctly, that the demonization of their creed goes all the way back to those who opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt's program of reform at home and internationalism abroad. The reaction to FDR bred McCarthyism and the libelous charge that liberals were, at best, "squishy soft" on communism.

But liberalism has also become associated with elitism, arrogance and disdain for the values of average Americans. Think of the consumer preferences tossed at liberals from the right as epithets: brie, chablis (now updated to merlot), Volvos, lattes, vacations on Martha's Vineyard. Never mind that it's conservatives who want to eliminate inheritance taxes on those Vineyard mansions.

Gee, E.J., maybe it is all that self-satisfied superiority that did y'all in? See, the liberals are good and it's just those despicable conservatives who made them feel guilty. But they really, really are the better people. Why can't everyone realize that?

Dionne thinks he's figured out where it all went wrong. He traces it back to historians of the 1950s and 1960s like Richard Hofstadter who began examining groups like the Populists in psychological terms.

Many progressives and reformers, he argued, represented an old Anglo-Saxon middle class who suffered from "status anxiety" in reaction to the rise of a vulgar new business elite. Hofstadter analyzed the right wing of the 1950s and early 1960s in similar terms. Psychological disorientation and social displacement became more important than ideas or interests.

Now, Hofstadter was exciting precisely because he brilliantly revised accepted and sometimes pious views of what the populists and progressives were about. But there was something dismissive about Hofstadter's analysis that blinded liberals to the legitimate grievances of the populists, the progressives and, yes, the right wing.

The late Christopher Lasch, one of Hofstadter's students and an admiring critic, noted that by conducting "political criticism in psychiatric categories," Hofstadter and his intellectual allies excused themselves "from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation."

Lasch added archly: "Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds."

This was, I believe, a wrong turn for liberalism. It was a mistake to tear liberalism from its populist roots and to emphasize the irrational element of popular movements almost to the exclusion of their own self-understanding. FDR, whom Hofstadter admired, always understood the need to marry the urban (and urbane) forms of liberalism to the traditions of reform and popular protest.

So, according to Dionne's thesis, liberals lost the ability to argue because they were too dismissive of those with whom they disagreed as people with psychiatric problems. I suppose he's thinking of Hofstadter's famous essay about The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Here's the opening paragraph.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression "paranoid style" I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Hofstadter traces a strain in American history of groups from the anti-Masons, anti-Catholics, Populists, the anti-Communists of the 1950s, to the Goldwater supporters of his day of people who demonized their enemy. If you've never read Hofstadter's famous essay, it is eye-opening today, because his description is so apt of some people today, but not the conservatives whom Hofstadter was aiming at. Whom does this description of what Hofstadter says the paranoids believe of those whom they fear remind you of today?

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman-sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid's interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

Who are the groups out there today who think that their enemy is all powerful manipulating all events to further his malign aims? Have you ever read the rantings on Daily Kos? They're the ones with the paranoid style today as they attribute everything from Saddam's capture to the British terrorism plot as some Rovian conspiracy designed to take attention away from Republican attempts to destroy all liberty and amass more power and money for Haliburton.

So, Mr. Dionne, I find two problems with your thesis. First, it's not that liberals lost the power to argue about their superior qualities. It's that so much of the liberal proposed solutions had been tried and had been shown to have failed. Suddenly, liberals had to face arguments that weren't based on theory, but actual analysis of what had happened when liberal solutions had been put into practice. Actual data was available and it didn't favor liberal solutions to helping the poor, fighting crime, or improving education. So, all liberals were left with were their superior motives: they were just the better people and recognition of their desire to do well should be enough.

The second problem is that so many liberals have become the paranoids themselves. They've convinced themselves that they are the only ones who actually want to improve the world and thus, anyone who opposes them is not just wrong, but evil. So, for example, a conservative who opposes the liberals' command and control solutions to improving the environment doesn't simply have a different approach for the same goal, but actually opposes cleaner air and water. It's as if they think that conservatives don't breathe and so don't care about clean air. Or, if conservatives have a different approach for improving education, it must be because they oppose public education and somehow want poor kids to remain uneducated. As Thomas Sowell argued in The Vision of the Anointed, it never becomes a question of which policy is better, but whose motivation is more pure. And such arguments, while perhaps personally satisfying, are not all that persuasive especially when confronted with the evidence of the actual consequences of their own proposals.

Perhaps Dionne is so blinded by his sense of moral superiority that he can't see such weaknesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Covert Enemies

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can....

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours -- who's to say who is right? No ideas should be "privileged," especially those that have been the guiding forces in the development and improvement of Western civilization. Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse.

These are the ideas that have been transmitted over a long generation by the elites who run our universities and our schools, and who dominate our mainstream media. They teach an American history with the good parts left out and the bad parts emphasized... the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong.... In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

More here

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

ELSEWHERE

Is an academic father entitled to be pleased that he has an academic son? Well, I am. The recent doc below pleases me greatly therefore.



Fewer legal jobs (and more jobs for illegals) coming in California: ""More than 1 million Californians who earn the minimum wage will get a nearly 20% pay increase over the next year and a half, thanks to an agreement announced Monday between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic leaders in the Legislature. The hike, the first since early 2004, will lift the state minimum wage to $8 an hour from $6.75. Workers will get a 75-cent increase Jan. 1 and an additional 50 cents on Jan. 1, 2008."

Immigration Bill Carries Big Price Tag: "The Senate's embattled immigration bill would raise government spending by as much as $126 billion over the next decade, as the government begins paying out federal benefits to millions of new legal workers and cracks down on the border, a new Congressional Budget Office analysis concludes."

Odd bans: "Britain's main airport operator, BAA, has banned all cosmetics and liquids from passengers' hand luggage at the country's biggest airports, unless the items were bought at duty-free shops in the departure lounge. Under the new Department of Transport restrictions imposed at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and four other major airports from yesterday, all make-up - including items previously exempted such as lipstick, eyeliner and mascara - will be confiscated at security control. Travellers bound for the US will not be allowed to take liquids or cosmetics on board, regardless of where they were purchased. However, there remains concern that airport employees are able to evade this security and may be able to get contraband goods on to planes, which could include the types of raw materials required for the alleged bomb plot foiled by the August 10 arrests in Britain. One of the 23 people arrested, Amin Asmin Tariq, is an airline employee who has a 24-hour, all-areas pass at Heathrow airport".

Huge increase in migration to Britain: "More than a million foreigners have been given the right to settle in Britain since Labour came to power, after a sudden surge in numbers last year, according to figures published yesterday. Foreign settlement is three times the rate it was when Tony Blair entered Downing Street, and the number soared by almost 30 per cent last year... The number of migrants given settlement last year increased by 40,000 to a record figure of 179,120, compared with 58,700 in 1997. The figures do not include arrivals from the EU. More than 70 per cent of those given settlement rights were from Africa, Asia and the Indian sub-continent, with a further 20 per cent from North and South America and European states outside the European Economic Area. Sudden increases of people being granted settlement were recorded from a number of areas, including a rise of almost 100 per cent in citizens of Asian countries outside the Indian sub-continent, a 37 per cent rise in nationals from African countries and a 20 per cent increase in nationals from the Indian sub-continent. In contrast, there was a decline of 22 per cent in settlement by citizens from European countries and a 2 per cent drop in those from North and South America."

Walmart outperforms world bank in reducing world poverty: "Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month. With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005 (out of a total of $713 billion in manufacturing exports), Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year. There are estimates that 70 percent of Wal-Mart's products are made in China. One writer vividly suggests that "One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market." Even without considering the $263 billion in consumer savings that Wal-Mart provides for low-income Americans, or the millions lifted out of poverty by Wal-Mart in other developing nations, it is unlikely that there is any single organization on the planet that alleviates poverty so effectively for so many people. Moreover, insofar as China's rapid manufacturing growth has been associated with a decline in its status as a global arms dealer, Wal-Mart has also done more than its share in contributing to global peace."

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

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

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

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

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

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