THE PSYCHOLOGIST : An Australian news roundup

An Australian news roundup

Sydney: Muslim shooting again

Police have charged two men over a shooting outside a western Sydney home last night. The two men were arrested after a man was shot outside a house in Prairiewood, sparking a large scale police hunt in nearby Edensor Park. Police said a 26-year-old Prairiewood man was shot in the back of the knee outside the house in Eccles Place around 9pm. Police quickly established road blocks around Dransfield Road and stopped local residents from entering the vicinity. A car, believed to be a Toyota Camry, backed out of a driveway around 9.30 and police, with guns drawn, arrested the two men inside. A handgun was also seized from a car parked nearby, police said.

The men - a 19-year-old Bonnyrigg Heights man and a 28-year-old West Hoxton man - were charged with shoot with intent to murder and shoot with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm and are due to appear in Fairfield local court today. Police are not commenting on the motive behind the shooting, except to say it is in the hands of the Middle Eastern gang squad. The Prairiewood man is currently in a stable condition at Liverpool hospital

Source

Hooters to try again in Australia

The American Hooters chain will make a second attempt to crack the Australian market when it opens two of its restaurants in Sydney later this year. The restaurant and bar, better known for its skimpily dressed waitresses than its burgers, will open in Parramatta in July and Cronulla in December. There are also plans to expand to the Gold Coast and two other Sydney locations in 2007.

While there are more than 400 locations world-wide, a previous attempt to open in Australia in 1997 was far from successful. The short-lived entity was located in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Five Dock, with now-disgraced HIH businessman Rodney Adler among its investors.

A Hooters spokeswoman today said no-one involved in the previous attempt was involved in the latest Australian launch. She said the new management team had chosen locations where it was hoped the restaurant would be more successful. The sports-themed bars and restaurants feature waitresses wearing singlets and running shorts - a uniform Hooters says has not changed in more than 20 years.

Source

South Australian wind farms shelved

Millions of dollars worth of Mid North wind farm projects are being shelved because the Australian Government is holding off boosting renewable energy targets. Only one proposal is likely to break ground by the end of the year and that's because it has its own "built-in" consumer, having been optioned by Australian Gas and Light. Other wind farms have not been so lucky and have suspended construction until Canberra's politicians extend the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target scheme.

The targets, set by the Federal Government, call for energy suppliers to source two percent of their power from renewable sources. This target has, however, just about been met leaving wind farm companies with no inducement to continue with their projects as they cannot guarantee the sale of their energy. An $180 million wind farm at Waterloo which would have produced enough power to supply, for example, the Clare and Gilbert Valleys regional demand about 90 per cent of the time and which would have employed anywhere between 50-100 people during the construction of the 39 wind turbines, has been suspended. "We would like to revisit the project in the future and have asked the Clare and Gilbert Valleys Council for a 12 month planning approval extension," Tasmanian company Roaring 40s public relations and communications manager Josh Bradshaw said.

He said the industry was lobbying the Federal Government for an extension to the MRET scheme to a minimum of five percent. "We will continue to lobby and a delegation of major wind energy companies travelled to Canberra this month and spoke with the Prime Minister's office to highlight some of the concerns we have. "And while there were no firm commitments they did acknowledge the investment problems we are facing," Mr Bradshaw said. A proposal by Wind Prospect for a 170MW wind farm of 85 turbines in the Barunga and Hummocks Ranges, west of Snowtown, which would have supplied the energy needs for more than 132,000 average homes, has also stalled....

More here

A dangerous bureaucracy

It can't ensure privacy even when it tries

Bureaucrats have given estranged spouses the private contact details of their former partners in a series of security blunders an internal report warned could have led to people being murdered. In at least two cases, terrified mothers and their children were relocated at taxpayers' expense for their own safety as a result of the unauthorised release of information by Child Support Agency staff. An internal audit commissioned by the CSA found 405 privacy breaches within the last nine months - 69 of those involving sensitive information being given to ex-spouses, according to the report obtained by The Australian under Freedom of Information laws. CSA general manager Matt Miller yesterday described the privacy breaches as "unacceptable" for a government body with the most "sensitive private information".

The report commissioned by Mr Miller warned "an analysis of breach and incident statistics shows that the system is not locked down in privacy terms". Consultants Aulich and Co found such failures left the CSA open to "potential identity theft, people gaining contact details (to) find and harm former partners and inappropriate accessing of details of prominent identities". "CSA staff deliberately or accidentally releasing information to inappropriate persons such as former partners (is) an action which leads to clients suffering mental, social or even physical harm, including murder." "An analysis of the privacy breaches show that there are still discernible examples of privacy breaches and this may indicate that there are other breaches not yet brought to light." .....

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(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, 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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