WAL-MART TAKES THE LEAD IN DEFENDING BUSINESS FROM LEGAL PARASITES

Give Wal-Mart Stores credit for one thing--the company certainly doesn't scare easily. The world's dominant retailer has been facing a tidal wave of negativity--from community activists trying to keep its stores out of their neighborhoods, to local governments mandating that Wal-Mart supply workers with health insurance, to opportunistic lawyers trying to strike it rich by bringing on endless lawsuits. Critics--many of whom are as financially motivated as Wal-Mart is--are accusing the company of everything from discriminating against women, to mistreating illegal aliens, to denying overtime pay. Thousands of customers who slip and fall in a store aisle are also trying to reach into the company's deep pockets....

Management experts say the company's strategy of confronting the charges head-on while not wavering from its low-price business model is the most effective formula over the long haul. "When you're just about the largest company in the world, it's tough to breathe without offending someone," said Kathryn Harrigan, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Indeed, suing Wal-Mart is now a cottage industry, with some 5,000 lawsuits filed against the company each year. After one of Wal-Mart's 1.2 million employees gets to work at 9 A.M., three lawsuits will be filed against the company by the time he or she takes a 10:30 A.M. coffee break. By lunchtime, the count is up to six. By the time the employee heads home at 5 P.M., no fewer than 17 people or groups have brought a complaint in court. The same pattern will repeat itself tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

The message is clear. To some, the American dream is no longer just about being successful, it's about not being too successful. Or it's about being successful enough for others to leech off of you.

The company is generally loath to settle all but the smallest suits, opting instead to take on plaintiffs' complaints while hammering home its message of "Everyday Low Prices" to the public. The more serious class-action complaints, each of which can potentially result in hundreds of millions of dollars in liability, are complaints the company has decided it won't take lying down.

Larry McQuillan, a director at the Pacific Resource Institute, a free-market think tank, said fighting the lawsuits makes the most long-term sense, based on building momentum for tort reform, and because winning some of these cases would deter more organizations from filing suits. The trial bar's strategy against corporate America up to now has been to file a suit, depress the stock price and bring the company to the table to get a settlement out of it, he said. "Wal-Mart has been a leader in not bowing to those pressures, unlike many companies that are afraid of bad publicity and want to settle," McQuillan said. "If you don't defend yourself early on, and be persistent, you will be steamrolled."

More here

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NEW OZ BLOG

I am a bit embarrassed to be reporting this but I have started yet another blog -- a blog devoted solely to Australian politics. There are of course already heaps of excellent Australian conservative blogs. You will find a list of just some of them towards the bottom of my blogroll. So the purpose of my new blog is very limited. I just want to put up there what in my view is the most interesting or striking bit of news or commentary to come out of Australia that I have encountered that day. Sometimes, I will also mention the item here on this blog -- if it seems likely to have international interest -- but on other occasions I will not.

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ELSEWHERE

Hot air from Chirac: "French President Jacques Chirac said today the riots that have rocked France revealed an identity crisis to which the country would respond with firmness and justice. "This is a crisis of meaning, a crisis of reference points, a crisis of identity," Mr Chirac said in a televised address to the nation. "We will respond with firmness and justice. "These events are the sign of a deep malaise. Some people started fires in their own neighbourhoods, burned the cars of their neighbours, their friends, attacked their schools and sports centres." .... "Children, teenagers need values, points of reference. Parental authority is key. Families must take their full responsibilities." "Those who refuse to do so should be punished, according to the law. Those who are facing serous difficulties should, on the other hand, be actively supported.""

Thomas Sowell explains how both high Muslim unemployment in France and high black unemployment in the USA are the result of do-gooder labor legislation: "Many people are blaming the riots in France on the high unemployment rate among young Muslim men living in the ghettoes around Paris and elsewhere. Some are blaming both the unemployment and the ghettoization on discrimination by the French. Plausible as these explanations may sound, they ignore economics, among other things. Let us go back a few generations in the United States. We need not speculate about racial discrimination because it was openly spelled out in laws in the Southern states, where most blacks lived, and was not unknown in the North. Yet in the late 1940s, the unemployment rate among young black men was not only far lower than it is today but was not very different from unemployment rates among young whites the same ages..."

Blogger Mary K. Ham on the transition from NASCAR reporter to political reporter: "Some folks ask me what the transition was like from NASCAR reporter to political reporter. It's easy. In one, you try to explain to your readers the significance of grown-ups getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to go around in circles indefinitely, always turning left. In the other, you get to interview racecar drivers."

A good summary here of the methods used by the media generally and public broadcasters in particular to inject covert Leftist bias into their coverage of events. I am pleased to note that Senator Santoro from my home State of Queensland is doing his best to expose the biases at Australia's major public broadcaster.

Dick McDonald has just given a good fisking to the latest moan from Jimmy Carter.

China Hand has just put up a couple of big new posts about life in China and the rocketing modernization now going on there. [NOTE: As people in China cannot access blogspot sites, I have put up mirror sites for "China Hand" here and here that should be accessible in China]

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.

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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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MORE ON THE NON-EXISTENT "PRINCIPLES" OF THE LEFT

I mentioned last month the book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweizer but I think a few more details about what it says are in order:

"Staunch union supporter Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union. But the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop. The hypocrisy doesn't end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of Congress in recent election cycles. But the Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. But none of them are in a union, according to Schweizer, author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty" and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other periodicals. The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is - that's right, a non-union shop.

Ralph Nader is another liberal who claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights. But when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on the office door.

Self-described socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as "the most vile institution on the face of the earth" and lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich. But Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon over the last 40 years, and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.

Air America radio host Al Franken says conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action. But fewer than 1 percent of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-American.

Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters. But he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family's fortune from the IRS. One Kennedy family trust wasn't even set up in the U.S., but in Fiji. Another family member, environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr., has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources. But he receives an annual check from the family's large holdings in the oil industry.

Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessity of unions to protect a "living wage." But she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada, where she can pay less than American union wages.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have spoken in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill vetoed a bill seeking to end it. But the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die. Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, including having abortions without parental notification. But she barred 13-year-old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO.

Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates. But he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

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ELSEWHERE

Old news to psychometricians: "Smarter children may enjoy longer lives, the results of a new study suggest. The study, which followed elderly adults deemed gifted by childhood IQ tests, found that the higher their early IQs were, the longer they lived -- up to a point, at least. The survival advantage began to plateau after a childhood IQ of 163, an intelligence level few people reach. Dr. Laurie T. Martin and Laura D. Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health report these findings in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Though the reasons for the link between IQ and longevity are not clear, it does not appear to be merely a reflection of income and social position. As children, the participants were from affluent families and most were white. Yet childhood IQ was still a factor in their lifespan. Similarly, in an earlier study of Americans with more varied childhood IQs and family incomes, Martin found that IQ was related to health problems independently of socioeconomics. This, she told Reuters Health, suggests that IQ affects longevity among lower-income people as well. As research has already linked IQ to mortality, the current study, according to Martin, was in part an attempt to see how far the IQ-health advantage extends. The researchers expected there to be a cutoff at which a high IQ no longer brought any extra health benefits." [High IQ is just one aspect of general physical good function. The brain is just another part of the body]

Unca Dave is in good form. He has put up a detailed argument to justify his view that those who oppose the Iraq war are "treasonous vermin".

Our friends, the Saudis: "The government of Saudi Arabia is distributing books and pamphlets across the United States in an effort to recruit American Muslims to an international struggle against Christians and Jews, the director of a religious freedom organization told the Senate Judiciary Committee Nov. 8. In one instance, a booklet distributed by the Saudi Embassy in Washington offers instructions on how to "build a wall of resentment" between Muslims and infidels, said Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom. Among the book's directives: "Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel," Shea quoted during a committee hearing."

Wal-Mart helps the poor: "Wal-Mart, by revolutionizing bulk purchasing, logistics and inventory, and thereby enabling lower prices on a huge array of goods, which pushed everyone else to follow their lead, has probably done more to improve the standard of living for Americans over the last several decade than any other institution. That is to say, Wal-Mart has directly and indirectly contributed to an increase in real wages for almost all consumers. The media is almost totally blind to this fact."

Ted Baiamonte points out that the problems of France run a lot deeper than rioting Muslims.

Wow! Keith Burgess Jackson is now putting up post after carefully-reasoned post about the thuggish Brian Leiter. Neutralizing Leiter would certainly be a great service to American scholarship.

As readers will no doubt have observed, I am more inclined to put up pictures now that I am on cable. So I have recently added a few pictures to my internet biography as well.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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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MYTHS ABOUT VIETNAM

Since I was in the Australian Army during the Vietnam war and volunteered for service in Vietnam, I take some interest in righting the misconceptions that prevail about that war. Just some excerpts below from a very wide-ranging article.

"Burkett looked into the apparently high suicide rate among Vietnam veterans and found it was not even remotely true. "Vietnam veterans have one of the lowest suicide rates in America. The two years after the war there was a slightly elevated rate that was only modestly higher then our peers who never went into the military. It fell off dramatically after that," he said.

Widespread Vietnam Veteran homelessness is another myth. "Back, around the late 70's Teddy Kennedy had a $10 million government grant to have a building in Boston for all the homeless Vietnam veterans. Several of guys gave testimonies about how they ended up on the street after Vietnam, but I got the military records of those individuals and virtually none of them were Vietnam veterans," he said. Burkett said other investigations have shown that very few "homeless veterans" were in the military.

Another myth he dispelled was the incarceration rate of Vietnam veterans. The prisons are not full of criminal veterans, Burkett said. "I went to the bureau of prisons and got the statistics, the demographics. At the time there were 1 million men in prison. 55% of those in prison are black, only 10.5% Vietnam Veterans are black. 80% of the incarcerated do not have a high school degree. As I mentioned 90% of Vietnam Veterans do have a high school degree. You can't get in the military with a felony conviction and 80% of the incarcerated have a felony conviction as a youth offender. About 75% came from broken homes, but about 80% of Vietnam Veterans came from a 2-parent home," he said.....

Burkett said drug rates were also low among Vietnam veterans, partly due to surprise inspections. "You could buy marijuana very easily; they literally sold it in bags on the street. But when you're living in a bay with 40 guys and you may be going into combat, I can guarantee if you're doing drugs-marijuana or otherwise-the 39 other guys are going to report it because they're not going into combat with some pot-head," he said....

Burkett said race was another politically incorrect myth he tackled. At the time of the Vietnam War, 13.5% of the draft pool was black yet only 12.5% among this group were drafted. Because of less access to medical care and lower educational rates, blacks failed the physical and aptitude exams at a higher rate than whites. "Nobody's ever telling the real story of the black man in Vietnam. They are always focusing on "The black man; the victim". They weren't victims; they were patriotic Americans. 75 percent of the blacks that served in Vietnam were volunteers-exactly the same rate as whites. Twenty won the Medal of Honor, 100 won the Distinguished Service Cross and dozens upon dozens won the airforce cross and the Navy Cross. "Nobody knows that about 300 went on to become admirals or generals in the armed services of America," he said.

Burkett also refuted the idea that it was only the poor or middle class who served and died in Vietnam. Contrary to an explosive story that said rich kids stayed home, Burkett said high per-capita income communities like Beverly Hills, and Grosse Pointe, Mich. actually had significantly higher casualty rates than the norm...."

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ELSEWHERE

Fun! Keith Burgess Jackson is still socking it to Brian Leiter with a new post titled "Leiter's Nietzschean Descent into Madness". Keith's consistent use of cool logic to pull apart what Leiter says seems to have got the abusive old blowhard a bit worried at least.

Riesman on Nazism: "My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.... When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei - in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party - Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism? Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed".

I thought I might make a brief mention of a book that has just recently come out in English called The Fabricated Luther. The book refutes the weird Leftist claim that Luther was responsible for the rise of Nazism! Since Hitler was a Catholic and had his main base of support in Germany's Catholic South, that always was a lulu but it is good to see the full story about Nazism and Lutheranism set out. The modern-day Left will blame Nazism on everything except what it should really be blamed on: Socialism.

End federal flood insurance: "Federal flood insurance transfers wealth from lower income earners to the more affluent, encourages people to build homes where they should not be built, and promotes disasters such as the one in New Orleans. Congress should not use our money in this way. One way to prevent future disasters such as New Orleans is to have fewer people living in flood plains. But federal policy takes the opposite approach - it pays people to live in flood prone areas through federally funded flood insurance. This has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to date, and the policy is made even worse by the fact that it transfers wealth from taxpayers who don't own property, to those who do. It is a form of welfare for the more affluent and politically powerful"

San Francisco irresponsibility: "Lost in the shuffle of post-election analysis this week was news that San Francisco voters approved a military recruiting ban on high school and college campuses.... In so doing, voters showed an astonishing disregard for the give and take of citizenship, and a deep disrespect for American military personnel. Such rash actions arise from a post-Vietnam anti-war activism that is no longer content with objecting to war on principled grounds, and is instead determined to eliminate the military all together. It is deliciously ironic then, that so many of these activists reside on the West Coast, a nice target for, and well within the range of, North Korean nuclear missiles. Who would the good people of San Francisco call upon for defense - the fire department? Or what happens when Islamic extremists take down the Golden Gate Bridge, who would hand down justice - the local library staff?"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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 Manifesto of Lies

A small excerpt from an excellent expose by David Limbaugh

The following is a non-exhaustive sampling of certain important precepts one must believe, pretend to believe, or advocate in order to be in the Democratic leadership fraternity, that bizarre cadre of partisan creatures dedicated to destroying President Bush personally as an alternative to devising a coherent, politically viable policy agenda:

Nazi and Communist propagandists were on to something in teaching that if you repeat a lie -- even an outrageous one -- often enough people will begin to believe it.

This principle holds true even if you are guilty of precisely the same thing as those you accuse (talking up Saddam's WMDs) and your complicity is conclusively demonstrated on audiotape and videotape.

When your obvious duplicity in this affair is illuminated by reference to the uncontroverted fact that when you made similar claims about Saddam's WMDs you had access to the same intelligence as the administration, you simply say the president pressured the intelligence community to doctor the data.

When this specious assertion is contradicted by unequivocal findings of bipartisan investigative commissions, you simply demand, with righteous indignation, more investigations.

In the meantime, you also charge that President Bush cherry-picked certain intelligence and deliberately relied on other discredited intelligence in order to bolster his case for war against Iraq. And you do that knowing that it is you who are retrospectively cherry-picking the evidence and presenting it as irrefutable proof that Bush lied.

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ELSEWHERE

Lying about lies: Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed. What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact"

There is a rather amazing article here (hat tip to Infinitely Prolonged) about the large number of men who lie about being military veterans or lie about what they did whilst in the military -- John Kerry and Jimmy Massey being particularly obnoxious examples of the latter. I myself do on relevant occasions mention that I was a Sergeant in the Austalian Army during the Vietnam war but you will find a copy of my certificate of discharge included in my internet biography so anyone can check up on me any day. I have of course blotted out my signature from the online copy. If anyone thinks I am going to put my signature online they can think again.

The genetics of race mentioned in the NYT!: "In a finding that is likely to sharpen discussion about the merits of race-based medicine, an Icelandic company says it has detected a version of a gene that raises the risk of heart attack in African-Americans by more than 250 percent. The company, DeCode Genetics, first found the variant gene among Icelanders and then looked for it in three American populations, in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta. Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent. The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics".

No hope for Germany: "Germany's two major political parties on Friday sealed an agreement to govern the country together under Angela Merkel, who would become the country's first female chancellor. But after six weeks of grueling negotiations, which exposed fissures on both sides and necessitated deep compromises, the new government faced a murky future, shorn of the reformist zeal that many here believed is necessary to fix Germany's stagnant economy and stem its soaring unemployment.... Mrs. Merkel has had to set aside many of her proposals for overhauling Germany's economy, including a simpler tax regimen; reform of health care and pensions; and a more flexible labor market. The Social Democrats objected to Mrs. Merkel's proposals to curb unions and to make it easier to dismiss workers. Plans to restructure the medical and pension systems were also either watered down or deferred. And the Social Democrats succeeded in nudging up the tax rate for people with high salaries."

If you have not yet read or heard GWB's excellent Veteran's Day speech, it is here. There is too much good stuff in it to attempt an excerpt.

Les Bates on the basic idea of Leftism: "It is to replace the society of social and economic consent that we live in with the social and economic primacy of the parasites over the productive"

China Hand has just put up an interesting post on China's linguistic muddle. One excerpt: "Riding the No.78 bus through the outskirts of Suzhou this morning I saw a big red banner urging on all the importance of speaking in putonghua, the so-called "common language" of China... In English is it known as Mandarin - or the language of the court officials. But in Hong Kong when they speak of Chinese - they mean Cantonese. When they mean the Beijing dialect they say mandarin or putonghua... The Beijing dialect is the standard the model for putonghua although it is a very formal version of Beijing dialect which is just as unintelligible as any other dialect to a Mandarin-only speaker". [NOTE: As people in China cannot access blogspot sites, I have put up mirror sites for "China Hand" here and here that should be accessible in China]

Blog Herald says there are now over 100 million blogs. A bit hard to believe. If you want to back up your blog, these utilities might come in handy. I do daily manual backups myself. It only takes me a couple of minutes.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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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DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE GOP

Bidinotto has a point: One excerpt: "Not a damned thing distinguishes the Republicans from the Democrats anymore...not a damned thing. "No Child Left Behind" in essence, and unconstitutionally, federalized education. The GOP-engineered federal prescription drug subsidy program for seniors was another huge and costly step toward total socialized medicine. The Administration's response to recent natural disasters -- here and abroad -- establishes the premise of federalizing all local emergencies globally, and reducing the U.S. military into becoming the logistics wing of the International Red Cross".

The Anchoress has got pretty disillusioned with the GOP too: "If your plan was to make people so disgusted with your cowardice, your disorganization and your political tone-deafness that they either stop contributing to the RNC, or they decide to just sit out the next election (because what’s the point), or they decide to vote out every stinking one of you in the next elections, because you freaking well deserve ouster for literally doing nothing constructive and squandering your majority…well…you have succeeded spectacularly! Beyond your wildest imaginings, I am sure. I can’t think of a single reason to vote to re-elect a any one of you".

The Plantation Right: "I write editorials for a conservative editorial page. After my newspaper editorialized that U.S. House Republicans should replace Majority Leader Tom DeLay with someone more concerned with ideology than partisanship, we were deluged with letters from angry Republicans. Almost all of the letters made the same argument: No real conservative would oppose Tom DeLay because of all the good he has done the GOP. Of course, 'Republican' and 'conservative' are not synonyms. Until more conservatives make clear that they understand this distinction, they are in for continued abuse from the Republican leadership."

The House of Reps backdown over drilling for oil in less than 1% of Alaska really got to me but there is an informative comment here on just how it happened.

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Brookes News Update

Why Al Gore could have been America's last gasp? : In Al Gore we did not see the triumph of American liberalism but of nihilism springing from the corpse of liberalism
Are Liberal Party blue bloods sinking the Government's workplace reforms?: Looks like the Hugh Morgan, Michael Kroger and John Calvert-Jones' axis has contributed significantly to the Government's labour market reform stuff up. But what can one expect from the 'Blueblood Society'
Business Council of Australia's quack cure for recessions: The Business Council of Australia has demonstrated a shocking ignorance of economic history and the real nature of the so-called boom-bust cycle
Who hates America in the Arab and Muslim world, and why: Arab journalist tells all on Anti-Americanism and hate in the Arab world. This is something that most Western journalists would never dream of doing
Black group calls on Democrats to stop using racial slurs against black Republicans: Racist Democrats vilify black Republican candidate
Why government was never the source of money: According to a popular view, which originated from Plato and Aristotle, people accept money because of government decree. Not so
Hollywood can't even spell "Israel": Palestinians are perpetrating on their own people with a fervour that increases in savagery each day, because they can't get over the fence and kill Jews so easily
What should we expect from Bernanke now that he is the Fed's chairman?: Why Bernanke'a policy of stabilizing prices will generate a boom-bust situation

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ELSEWHERE

A mindless bigot speaks. Brian Leiter calls Texans mindless bigots because they prefer a traditional definition of marriage. But since he gives no reasoning for his assertion, who is the mindless bigot? Both Keith Burgess-Jackson and Right Reason have given the poisonous old bigot more attention than he deserves -- and I guess I am too.

Blunt talk from a senior Australian conservative: "Federal Treasurer Peter Costello has again urged Islamic extremists to leave Australia, saying there is no point in living in a country with a system of government they oppose. "There are some things Australia stands for, has always stood for, always will stand for, which will never change," he told A Current Affair. "We will never be an Islamic state. We will never observe Sharia law ... We will always be a democracy. "To people who say `well, we've come to this country and we would like to turn it into something it isn't, I say you must understand that will never occur". Mr Costello said rather than try to change Australia, they should leave it".

An interesting research finding: "This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that government plays an unambiguously positive role for individuals' quality of life, and public choice theory, that was developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement and regulation, thereby harming voters' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a leftwing median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but only in countries where the state sector is already small."

The authoritarian Left at work again: "Massachusetts politicians last week rose to new heights of holier-than-thou arrogance. House members on Thursday-just three days after the 80-page bill was introduced-voted overwhelmingly to tax businesses that do not provide health insurance for their employees, and to require all residents who can afford it to buy health insurance... No doubt, buying health insurance is a good idea. But so is buying a car with a five-star safety rating, brushing after meals and not running with scissors. And yet government lets people decide whether to do these things... If the state can order people to buy health insurance, then where does that authority stop? Why can't it order people to exercise a half-hour a day, quit smoking, and floss regularly?"

Various people have mentioned it but in case you have not seen it, the disastrous way French "unfair dismissal" laws have made Muslims almost unemployable in France is summarized here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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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SORRY! JUST FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE:

I imagine that regular readers here have by now seen enough of 1930s Nazi propaganda to be thoroughly persuaded of how Leftist it was. But there is one last poster that I think really rams the point home so I reproduce it below. The picture below is in fact a blow-up of an election banner that appeared in a larger photo that I presented on 12th. October.



It reads: "Mit Adolf Hitler "Ja" fuer Gleichberechtigung und Frieden" -- which translates as "With Adolf Hitler "Yes" for equal rights and peace" -- the same old standby slogans that the Left trot out to this day, of course.

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I do occasionally get derisive emails from unwary Leftists who don't expect the sort of effective response that they get from me. One of the most amusing such Leftists lately has been Steve Getto (gettos@fdn.uq.edu.au) -- apparently an academic or student from my Alma Mater (the University of Queensland) in my home town of Brisbane. He initially emailed me to express great scorn for my demonstration that Nazism was Leftist. I gave him more to think about than he expected, however, and he has been in continual backdown mode since. His most recent email to me was most amusing. He was trying to defuse the trenchant criticisms of the Left by George Orwell and this is what he wrote: "Oh hehe ... so does this mean you are sincerely interested in a fairer and more equitable society? Gimme a break. Orwell *was* deeply incensed at the behaviour of elements of the Left, yes. And some of your criticisms of socialists and socialism are valid. But Orwell never gave up on the idea of the basic principles of socialism. Some socialists have no right to quote Orwell, agreed. But right wing champions of capitalism like you have even less. How about replacing the Orwell references to a more suitable one like Andrew Bolt. Trying to glorify your crap with literary citations is absurd and offensive to people's intellect. Ugh. Intellectual fascism. Give me Nazism any day. At least they had the guts to admit they were scumbags. Yours to the strains of the Internationale (by way of waving a red rag to the bull)". [Talk about being condemned out of your own mouth! He denies that Nazism was Leftist and then, as a Leftist, expresses a liking for it! What a laugh.] Update: In a subsequent email Getto described himself as being of a "general revolutionary Marxist political persuasion". How unsurprising!

There is a good post here on how the moral degeneracy of the French (and the French Left in particular) has got them into their present pickle.

There is a huge debunking here of this attention-seeker: "For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq. In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians... Massey was discharged in December 2003, shortly after returning from Iraq due to depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome." The media of course lapped it all up without doing any checks on the truth of his stories at all

Socialist envy thriving in Britain: "Having a nice view or living next door to a golf course are going to cost householders more in council tax under Labour plans. Taxpayers are set to be charged hundreds of pounds extra a year if they are in a conservation area, next to an open space, have a swimming pool or tennis court or enjoy full or partial views of the sea, hills, mountains, lakes or rivers. Extra charges are also expected to be levied on homes with more bedrooms than average, conservatories, large patios or gardens, roof terraces or balconies. Homes in "gated communities" will also face higher bills. Official documents show that ministers are going to extraordinary lengths to build a detailed database of properties across England, with the intention of placing them in a higher council tax band.... A whole range of details - from "equestrian facilities" to patio size - will be tabulated. No fewer than 10 "value-significant codes" detail a range of possible views that a property can offer".

Socialist stupidity in Scotland: "Last month must have seen an especially potent full moon, because several Scottish economic bigwigs started behaving distinctly out of character. First, Sir John Ward, the chairman of Scottish Enterprise, declared that, according to his agency's own calculations, the post-devolution public sector now accounted for no less than 55 per cent of the Scottish economy. Ward was rightly scathing of this development. In booming Ireland, the figure is around 34 per cent. He went further and claimed that in certain areas of Scotland three-quarters of the local economy is dominated by public spending."

Anti-Americanism is now the Left's only real ideology: "After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the Left everywhere stopped offering options for governance or serious theories about development and equity and sought refuge in protest. The enemies of globalization explain their ideas by stoning McDonald's to smithereens. Anticapitalists hurl pies at the president of the International Monetary Fund. Anti-Americanism has turned into ideology. The communists have exchanged Das Kapital for T-shirts with the image of Che Guevara and choruses of brief (and badly rhymed) slogans. The Left today is nothing but circus and street violence. But that strategy, along with the corruption and follies of many governments, has burrowed deeply, especially in Latin America, where a growing number of citizens despise democracy as a method to organize coexistence and reject the market economy as a way to create and assign wealth".

Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort". Officer's Club thinks some of the pro-Jihadi American Left have gone so far as to be guilty of treason by that definition.

China Hand has a new post up about how personal helpfulness overcomes bureacracy in Chinese banking.

Ovi Magazine is out again with its usual broad coverage of interesting topics.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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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LA BELLE FRANCE

What is really happening in France: "It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularised welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The "youths" do not blame the French, they despise them. Most observers in the mainstream media (MSM) provide an occidentocentric analysis of the facts. They depict the "youths" as outsiders who want to be brought into Western society and have the same rights as the natives of Old Europe. The MSM believe that the "youths" are being treated unjustly because they are not a functioning part of Western society. They claim that, in spite of positive discrimination, subsidies, public services, schools, and all the provisions that have been made for immigrants over the years, access has been denied them. This is the marxist rhetoric of the West that has been predominant in the media and the chattering classes since the 1960s. But it does not fit the facts of the situation in Europe today... Those media that tell us that the rioting "youths" want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs..... the insurgents are viewing the politicians and the pundits with contempt and amusement. If there is "anger" of a kind, it is no more than infuriation at the, from their point of view, arrogant presumption of the French politicians that Muslims would even consider adopting, let alone abiding by rules that the French have set".

Eurabian fights: "The banlieues are not equivalent to American inner cities. This is not a replay of 'the fire next time.' The outcome will not be the kind of affirmative action that brought black stockbrokers to Wall Street and black actors to starring roles in TV commercials and sitcoms. What we are seeing is a jihad-style insurgency waged against a country that has fervently fostered the Eurabian fusion project."

Even the socialists are begining to stir: "Yesterday, Michel Pajon, the mayor of Noisy-le-Grand near Paris, asked for the French army to intervene and stop the violence which is taking over France. The mayor - a Socialist - went on French radio to say that what is happening in his country is absolutely appalling"

A different view: "Most commentators see the recent riots in Paris (and, it now seems, throughout much of the rest of the country) as evidence of France's failure to assimilate immigrants into the body politic. But perhaps it is just the opposite, that the riots, in fact, signify that these immigrants have assimilated French culture and politics. I don't mean to be flip, but to a great extent and perhaps more than any developed nation, the history of France has been written in the streets. My quick and dirty recall of French history suggests that many of its most pivotal moments (both good and bad) have resulted from popular uprising."

It had to happpen: Some people on Daily Kos are saying that GWB is to blame for the riots in France! (Hat Tip to Pubcrawler)

Maybe the French should ask their Swiss neighbours about how to run an immigration policy. You can read here how hard it is to become a Swiss. They actually require immigrants to INTEGRATE into Swiss society! Of course pro-immigration lobbyists will say Swiss style regulations will 'harm' the economy and undermine global integration, yet Swiss per capita income is greater than most of their West European neighbours and their unemployment rate is approximately half.

Stating the now obvious: "In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the US media became preoccupied with a key question: "Why do they hate us so much?" A fair-minded people, the Americans believed there must be a good, rational explanation why 19 educated, economically comfortable young men would ram planes into buildings, killing themselves along with thousands of innocents. Among the many reasons proffered, one that appeared frequently - and drew concern in Jerusalem - was that it was all due to US support for Israel. If the US would only toe a more pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian line, this argument ran, then the Arab and Muslim masses wouldn't hate it so. The events in Paris over the last 12 days have confirmed the vacuity of this argument. Since the mid-1960s, France has consistently been among the most pro-Arab countries in western Europe".

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ELSEWHERE

Looks like Californians have voted to keep their gerrymandered Democrat legislature. Not so surprising in kooky California, I suppose.

Another Leftist myth exploded: "Middle-class youths, not the poor, are providing the bulk of wartime recruits to the armed forces, according to a new study by a conservative think tank. The Heritage Foundation research paper found that a higher percentage of middle-class and upper-middle-class families have been providing enlistees for the war on Islamic militants since the September 11 attacks on the United States. Researchers matched the ZIP codes of recruits over the past five years with federal government estimates of household incomes in those neighborhoods. Contrary to complaints from some liberal lawmakers and pundits, the data show that the poor are not shouldering the bulk of the military's need for new soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines".

Louisiana cash goes to the dogs, cows and goats : "Louisiana will spend $45 million on sports and livestock facilities and other new projects in spite of a looming deficit, frustrating some officials who say the frivolity reinforces the state's history of political patronage. 'We're in Washington with our hands out asking for $2 billion plus, and rather than holding on to the money to see what the needs are, they're spending it on local projects financing goat shows and lawn-mower races,' says state Sen. Robert Barham, Oak Ridge Republican. Supporters of the $4 million Morehouse Parish Equine Center say it will give a much-needed boost to the economy. Jimmy Christmas, center chairman, says it will be used for horse, cow, dog, goat and art shows; rodeos; auctions; crawfish festivals; lawn-mower races; religious functions; an animal shelter; and a community center."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a huge range of reading.

I have just put up here a detailed comment from a reader about how Australia's public broadcasters foster Islamic unrest.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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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SPARE THE ROD AND SPOIL THE CHILD?

(I am sure many people reading this will think that I should be talking about the Paris situation at the moment rather than hardy perennial questions such as the one above but everybody else seems to be talking about Paris so maybe some readers need a break from that at the moment. If you want a really down-to-earth discussion of the present French situation, try Fred Reed. I have also just put up a predictably outspoken comment from Chris Brand about the French situation. And the role of France's rigid socialistic economic system in creating their present problems is touched on here. I wonder if the French realize how much they are being laughed at by the "cowboys" from the other side of the Atlantic at the moment?)

I did myself have a very permissive upbringing and, as a libertarian, I always supported my son in whatever he wanted to do. Though I would not of course have supported him if he had wished to do anything destructive. But Christians are often taught that a more directive style of parenting is appropriate. Barring children from watching TV or certain parts of TV is, for instance, common. My son was and is a "Simpsons" devotee so I was delighted for him to watch as much of all that political incorrectness as he wished.

Now I am not going to pontificate on exactly what is the right child-rearing style. The genetics research tells us that what we do makes very little difference anyway. What I DO want to do is to make it known to parents who favour a stricter approach that attacks on such approaches are very poorly founded. Leftists are of course great advocates of "there is no such thing as right and wrong" and Leftist psychologists have been claiming for decades that a permissive approach founded on such thinking is far and away better for your child's psychological health. Such claims are rubbish and I want to examine just one example of the "research" supporting such claims in order to show what a crock the whole research tradition concerned is. Below is the centrepiece of one such set of findings, from "Self-Reported Narcissism and Perceived Parental Permissiveness and Authoritarianism" by Ramsey, Watson, Biderman and Reeves and reported in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, Volume: 157. Issue: 2 of 1996. Page Numbers: 227ff.

"A negative relationship appeared between the OMNI and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale ( r = -.18, p <.001), and the OMNI correlated directly with the PAQ maternal measure of permissiveness ( r = .18, p < .001), with the PAQ paternal measure of permissiveness ( r = .11, p < .05), but not with the combined ( r = .04, p < .15) measure of permissiveness. All three authoritarianism scales were associated with greater tendencies toward narcissism: PAQ maternal authoritarianism ( r = .11, p < .05), PAQ paternal authoritarianism ( r = .14, p < .01), and the combined index ( r = .16, p < .01). No significant linkages appeared between the OMNI and any measure of authoritativeness ( r s = -.07 to .05, p s < .15). When the data for men and women were examined separately, no significant gender differences appeared in the OMNI correlations with self-esteem or with any parenting style. The coefficient alpha for the OMNI was .66"

So the study purports to show that "authoritarian" parents produce Narcissistic children -- which would indeed be a matter of concern if it were true. But the study is hilariously flawed. The data for it were obtained by handing out a bunch of questionnaires to 370 Introductory Psychology students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga! Their report of how their parents treated them is accepted unquestioningly and data derived from a non-sample of Chattanooga students is assumed to tell us something about humanity in general!

The great advantage of such "research" from the point of view of the psychologist is that students are pretty alert to what the psychologist expects and tend to give him the answers he hopes for. But on this occasion even that did not work out. Look at the correlations reported. They average around .15, which is effectively zero. The correlations are "significant" in a statistical sense but that is simply a reflection of the large sample size. Even if we take the correlations seriously, they are telling us that there is only around a 2% overlap between the upbringing and the personality variables -- which means that knowing about the upbringing of the child gives you virtually no power to predict how the child will turn out. What a lot of nonsense it all is! I will back Solomon (Proverbs 13:24; 29:15) as a better guide to child-rearing than that any day.

As a Parthian shot, it might also be noted the the measure of Narcissism (OMNI) used by the researchers showed very poor internal consistency (alpha of .66) and also showed virtually no correlation with another measure of what should have been largely the same concept -- the widely-used Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale. So whether their measure of Narcissism did in fact measure Narcissism seems dubious. Try not to laugh!

Update

A reader has emailed me to make the interesting point that narcissism is intrinsically anti-authoritarian -- so anti-authority attitudes of themselves could taken as an indicator of narcissism. The email: "A narcissist will ALWAYS consider any 'authority' figure to be an 'authoritarian'. Part of the definition of narcissism is responding to anyone expressing any 'outside' [of their views] opinions with rage (they see any other opinion as repressive). It makes them 'feel' to not be in control / important.... ie, the fact that they have this response defines them as narcissists..."

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A nice bit of sarcasm: "If France has these kinds of systemic problems with its Muslim population, then it is time to partition France. It's time for an independent Muslim state to be created. After all, isn't that what France and other European nations have determined is the proper solution for Israel? These are not just riots. This is an intifada - just like the one begun in 2000 within and around Israel. France and other countries, including the United States, have demanded that Israel meet those attacks with land concessions to the rioters and suicide bombers. That is the only viable, long-term solution, they say. They claim this violence will never cease until those oppressed by Israel are granted an independent, autonomous state of their own. Why should the solution be any different in France? The global jihad has come home to Paris. Let's see if French officials impose upon their own population the same solution they demand upon the population of the Jewish state. After all, isn't the key to addressing the concerns of the jihadists to appease them?"

For once Wonkette says something that really is amusing: "It's day 12 of the French riots but I still haven't heard anyone say how it's Bush's fault yet. Is the Left so apathetic about France they cannot cite a simple connection to the White House? .."

The evidence keeps piling up: "Nature beats nurture in determining how successful a child will be at school and university. Inherited intelligence accounts for 75 per cent of educational attainment while home environment is responsible for the rest, according to a new study. The research, published in the Royal Economic Society's Economic Journal, contradicts claims that upper or middle-class parents "buy" their children's success. The study looked at more than 15,000 children, almost 600 of whom had been adopted." [See also here for a more extensive summary and here for the full original paper ]

Just note this typically Leftist but still astounding bit of arrogance from a man who very nearly became President of the United States: "Kerry concluded by giving the students a little lesson in politics. "All politics is a reaction to felt needs. You need to get people to feel the need. Our job is to make sure the right felt need is taken into consideration."" [So Leftists adjudicate on which are the "right" needs! Stalin lives!]

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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 VIEW FROM THE AUSTRALIAN LEFT

In my view, both the excerpt below from an article by a prominent Leftist Australian politician and the bipartisan legislation he is referring to show the Australian Left to be much more decent, realistic and responsible than American "liberals" will ever be -- sadly for the whole world

"We are seeing at the moment a strange state of affairs in Australian public life, in which the politicians and the people are in broad agreement both on the nature of the terrorist threat and on what ought to be done about it, while a large slice of the intellectual class is in furious disagreement. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, after Bali I and Bali II, after Madrid and London, most Australian politicians accept that the terrorist threat to Western society in general, and Australia specifically, is real and dangerous. That's why six Labor premiers [State governors] have worked co-operatively with a Liberal Party prime minister to come up with a balanced package of anti-terrorism legislation, one that will give our governments the necessary powers to protect Australia against terrorism, while preserving to the maximum extent the rights and freedoms that make Australia worth defending.

In working co-operatively to defeat terrorism, Australian politicians are doing what the Australian people want us to do. Every opinion poll shows that the Australian people expect us to do what is necessary, within the framework of our democratic system, to stop those who are planning to commit terrorist attacks as well as those who recruit, finance, organise or incite others to do so.

You would never know this from listening to some ABC [public broadcaster] commentary or reading some broadsheet commentators. In the world of Alan Ramsey and Phillip Adams and Michael Leunig, all the world's troubles an the fault of the Western democracies, or a witches' brew of Zionists and neo-conservatives; terrorism is a myth or a trick by George Bush and Tony Blair to divert our attention while they seize the world's oil. This strange disconnect between the people and the intellectual elite is dangerous and damaging.

My view is that Australia is at war - at war with a new form of totalitarian ideology as evil as the fascist and communist forms that the democracies fought during the 20th century. It is a not a war Australia sought, nor a war that we can escape by feeding others to the crocodiles in the hope that they will eat us last.... This week in Canberra, despite all the shouting, we saw a mature democracy at work. When the national interest is at stake, the parties work together to achieve an outcome that both protects Australia from terrorism and protects the safety of Australians".

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ELSEWHERE

The Iranian Mein Kampf: "Eighty years ago, Adolf Hitler published an autobiography-cum-manifesto. Its title translates as "My Struggle." In it, Hitler talked of his desire for revenge against France, the German nation's need to control more land, and the means by which his National Socialist Party could gain power. It also included, of course, a clear indication of his genocidal intentions against the Jews. Last week, Iran's president echoed those themes. He talked about his "struggle" - the word translate into both Arabic and Persian as "jihad" -- his desire for revenge against America and the West, the Islamic nation's need to control more land, and the means by which his Militant Islamist movement could gain global power. He also included his genocidal intention to wipe Israel "off the map." Of course, there are differences between Hitler in 1925 and Ahmadinejad in 2005. Perhaps the biggest is this: When Hitler made his threats he was an obscure politician whom hardly anyone took seriously. By contrast, Ahmadinejad is the president of a large and wealthy nation that operates terrorist organizations and is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. Had Hitler's threatening words inspired serious action then, millions of people - Jews, Gypsies, Czechoslovaks, Americans, British, Russians and others - would not have been slaughtered in the 20th Century."

A good post here about Leftist bias in the French media coverage of the Paris riots.

There is a good fisking by a blunt Dutchman here of the creepy way the American Leftist media are covering the Paris riots. Excerpt: "Somehow these revolting youngsters started to think that it was normal to want it all and to want it now without sweating for it. They drop out of school in masses but nevertheless demand the welfare state to fulfill their dreams, whatever they may be. They look down at going to work as baggage handlers or asparagus diggers, and they feel they have the right to do the same things and own the same things as the kids in the better neighborhoods – the state should give it them. They have a natural right, they apparently believe, not to be neglected, not to be overlooked, not to be abandoned, not to be counted out. They think it is the state’s obligation to prevent them from being bored, from being poor and uneducated".

Mark Steyn on French folly: "Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February. Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.'' ''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois."

There is a rather witty commentary here on an utterly stupid anti-Israel book (The Question of Zion). Excerpt: "Rose claims that an important part of Zionism's psychopathology is its inability to criticize itself. And yet because she has little firsthand knowledge of the country, and even less of its language, she draws her critique from an impressive array of leftist Israeli critics, academics, peace activists, conscientious objectors, post-Zionists, and non-Zionists both past (Scholem, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon) and present (Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Uri Avnery, Amos Elon, David Grossman, Baruch Kimmerling), each of whom she quotes denouncing Zionism. She thereby implicitly--and, as it happens, accurately--gives the impression of an extremely lively tradition of Israeli self-criticism".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

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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MORE SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA FROM THE 1930s

Below is a picture of an original Nazi propaganda poster ("Flaggenspruch" or "flag motto") that was often publicly displayed during World War 2. An original copy is presently being advertised for sale on eBay. Its basic message is that help for the poor is not charity but something which the poor have a right to -- which is of course a common Leftist claim to this day.



The heading ("Opferwilligkeit") translates as: "Willingness for self-sacrifice" and the rest translates as: "Social works deserve no gratitude because they are not graciousness but the restoration of rights". The source of the quotation is blacked out in accordance with the rather ludicrous eBay rules but it is a quotation from Mein Kampf (around page 23 or 24 in most editions). I give the full context for the quote below (from the Manheim translation). I also give the full German original of the sentence from which the quote is taken as I think the Manheim translation is a bit clumsy. Hitler spoke a very colloquial "people's German" which it is very hard to translate so as to give exactly the same impact as the original.

"I do not know which is more terrible: inattention to social misery such as we see every day among the majority of those who have been favored by fortune or who have risen by their own efforts, or else the snobbish, or at times tactless and obtrusive, condescension of certain women of fashion in skirts or in trousers, who ' feel for the people.' In any event, these gentry sin far more than their minds, devoid of all instinct, are capable of realizing. Consequently, and much to their own amazement, the result of their social 'efforts' is always nil, frequently, in fact, an indignant rebuff, though this, of course, is passed off as a proof of the people's ingratitude.

Such minds are most reluctant to realize that social endeavor has nothing in common with this sort of thing; that above all it can raise no claim to gratitude, since its function is not to distribute favors but to restore rights. [In German: "Dass eine soziale Taetigkeit damit gar nichts zu tun hat, vor allem auf Dank ueberhaupt keinen Anspruch erheben darf, da sie ja nicht Gnaden verteilen, sondern Rechte herstellen soll, leuchtet einer solchen Art von Koepfen nur ungern ein"]."

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ELSEWHERE

I probably should make a brief comment on the latest furore about male/female differences in IQ. I have not read either the original Irwing & Lynn paper nor the attack on it by Blinkhorn but Blinkhorn seems mightily confused from what I see reported. He seems to think that the undoubted fact mentioned by Irwing & Lynn to the effect that there are far more very bright men than women means that women ON AVERAGE are less bright. That is nonsense. There are also lots more very dumb men than there are very dumb women so the male/female average is the same. For a fuller explanation, see my previous posts on the matter here and here

Conor Friedersdorf argues that France has failed to assimilate its Muslim immigrants because the French Welfare State gives them no incentive to assimilate.

Decent Italians: "Ten to 15 thousand epople took to the streets of Rome last night to demonstrate against Iran's open threat to exterminate Israel. While not a massive number, it is 10 to 15 thousand more people than have taken to the streets of Paris or London in the same cause."

A good comment here on the lies that Wal-Mart haters resort to. One excerpt: "In the closing minutes of the new documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," triumphant activists proudly point to vacant lots in their various communities. Their message: They were going to build a Wal-Mart here, but we stopped it. Vacant lots. What a victory. And what a perfect symbol of what's wrong not just with the anti-Wal-Mart ideologues, but the whole anti-development, anti-globalization, anti-everything left. "High Cost," which opens today in New York City and Los Angeles, is only a documentary in the most generous sense. It's more propaganda"

Banagor looks at the strange selectivity Leftists show in what causes they agitate for and conclodes that it is only really stupid people that they side with.

Global capitalism: Curing oppression and poverty: "Although leftist agitators continue to protest global capitalism, they overlook the key points in the debate. Capitalism has been instituted on three continents -- in western Europe, North America, and Asia. These nations -- England, France, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, and the others -- are among the world's wealthiest countries with per capita incomes in the range of at least $20,000-$30,000 annually. Additionally, even the prosperity of a so-called 'socialist' country like Sweden is based on significant elements of capitalism, including Volvo, Saab, and Ericsson, as well as countless private small shops."

The futility of non-stop relief: "No one can accept the idea of trying to fill a bottomless hole -- that people in these parts of the world will forever need to be taken care of, that they simply will never cope on their own. And this is quite rational -- if someone requires emergency support, to be helped back on his or her feet, after which a productive life will be resumed, helping makes sense. But if help simply goes to be consumed, after which more help is required, on and on and on, this is intolerable. At some point, no matter how much is given, it will reach an end and, once again, thousands will perish."

Ivar Berg long ago showed statistically that most education is pretty useless and not worth the money people spend on it. It looks like nothing has changed. This report ranks American States according to how well-educated their kids are -- with Vermont at the top and Arizona at the bottom. Yet, as Harry Hutton points out, Arizona is economically dynamic -- last year their economy grew by 7.1%, the second highest in the nation.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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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)

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