THE PSYCHOLOGIST : An Australian news roundup

An Australian news roundup

Cheaper Chinese cars coming

Chinese car-makers could be flooding the Australian market with hatchbacks costing less than $10,000 within two years using Australia as a testbed before taking on the rest of the world. As Australia and China continue to discuss a free trade agreement, Chinese manufacturers are working on improved versions of cars now selling in China for as little as $5500. That is less than half the price of the cheapest new car on the Australian market, Holden's $12,990 Barina model.

Improvements to Chinese models -- including power steering, which is not included as standard on Chinese cars -- together with shipping and marketing costs, would push the price in Australia to around $10,000.

The threat of cheap Chinese cars has added to the fears of the Australian automotive industry which is lobbying the Government for extra protection before any FTA is signed. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stressed his eagerness to fast-track free trade agreement negotiations during his visit to Australia, which ended on Tuesday.

More here

A portrait of an unusually prominent Australian

Is she thinking of home in Australia or bracing herself for her next appointment as a busy Danish princess? Princess Mary gazes out the window of a Danish palace in her new official portrait, caught in a moment of reflection on her own extraordinary journey from modern Hobart girl to being the stylish new face of one of the world's oldest royal families.

On the wall behind her is a painting of Hobart's Constitution Dock, a touch of creative licence by Australian painter Ralph Heimans, meant to symbolise her Tasmanian background....

The portrait shows the former Mary Donaldson in a classically elegant Danish-designed outfit. The setting for the portrait is the nearby Fredensborg Palace, Mary and Crown Prince Frederick's home.

More here

I personally think it is garbage as portraiture. It is a scene, not a portrait. But what would I know? My favourite painter is Namatjira -- which immediately consigns me to the depths of contempt among Australia's arty-farties -- even though they normally swoon about Aboriginal art! Work that one out!

At long last: Australia recognizes the only solution to substandard foreign doctors from India and elsewhere

The Commonwealth Government is to spend $250 million to train more doctors and nurses over the next four years. Prime Minister John Howard said today that extra funding will pay for 400 new medical school places a year, with some starting in 2007 and the full 400 in 2008. Mr Howard said 120 places would go a new medical school at Deakin University in Victoria with Monash University's new Gippsland branch receiving 40 additional places. The remaining 240 places will be distributed among all the states and territories, including Victoria.

Mr Howard told the Victorian Liberal Party's state council he expected the state governments to match the funding and pay for the training of new nurses, care assistants and Aboriginal health workers. "I make this announcement today so that universities can prepare to introduce these places without delay," Mr Howard said.

Source

LOL: Prominent NSW politician marries a dancer

I guess he is not marrying her for her conversation

Now we know why Frank Sartor has been spending so much time at the theatre. An inveterate first-nighter of late, the Planning Minister is about to marry a former dancer, Monique Flannery, 35, who spent five years dancing flamenco, and before that, classical ballet, in her home town of Orange. Frank, 54, was married to magistrate Judith Fleming. Their children, Oliver and Jack, will be among the 50 or so guests at tomorrow's wedding at St Mark's Church, Darling Point. The former dean of St Andrews Cathedral, Boak Jobbins, will officiate. Flannery, who has a new marketing job at the Accor hotel group, is sporting a sparkler from Cerrone jewellers and plans to wear an ivory wedding dress designed by Leanne Hamilton, though not of the puffball kind.

More here

(For more postings from me, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

An Australian news roundup

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